Word: pisar
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...writes International Lawyer Samuel Pisar in the introduction to the French version of his new book, Commerce and Coexistence. The book, which has also appeared in West Germany and the U.S., is a comprehensive if sometimes overly optimistic guide to the promises of East-West trade. Its publication could hardly have been better timed. The Soviet Union is in the midst of a shopping spree that may be unparalleled in history...
...American Lag. There is a feast ahead in East-West trade, says Pisar, and he has written his book for those who want to partake of it. A Pole by birth, a survivor of Auschwitz, and a U.S. citizen by a special act of Congress, Pisar was a staff member of the Senate Foreign Trade Committee and later worked for the Kennedy Administration's trade task force. He wrote the proposals on East-West trade that became part of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act. Today, at 41, he is a Paris-based attorney whose clients include Borg Warner...
...Pisar has served as counsel on many trade deals with the East, including the building of Pan Am's Intercontinental hotels in Bucharest and Budapest. He laments the fact that the U.S. lags far behind Western Europe and Japan in opening up trade with the East bloc. Until now, American corporations have been discouraged by the complexity of dealing with the Communists, as well as by criticism at home from stockholders and customers. The Soviets have sought to buy computers from IBM, but so far the company does not seem eager to do much business with them. Henry Ford...
Aimed at the Midriff. Pisar argues that increased economic contacts with the West will work important political changes on the Communist system. He rejects the old cold war tenet that trade with the East will enhance its military capacity; he points out that the Soviet Union has attained nuclear parity with the U.S. anyway. "What we sell them goes to their midriffs, not their biceps," says Pisar. "Trade will take the fuses out of their ideology." He believes that "increased trade helps the East to evolve into consumer societies, that a 'fat' Communist is a peaceful Communist...
While overstated, and in part naive as far as Russia is concerned, Pisar's thesis is more relevant to Yugoslavia, Poland and the other Eastern countries, where increased contacts are part of a reform that also entails a measure of political relaxation. A notable exception is Rumania, where President Nicolae Ceauşescu combines a liberal, Western-oriented trade policy with a repressive domestic atmosphere at home. By the same token, the Soviet Union may well be shopping abroad for technology simply because it wants to avoid political liberalization...