Abstract
The international economic system is characterized by rapid and radical restructuring. The causes of change are located in one or several of the following factors: instability resulting out of a declining or changing US hegemony and the responses of US economic policies to change; conflict over distributing the costs imposed by surplus capacity in many industries; an innovation race among the major powers and cor porations ; and the emergence of a new international division of labour resulting out of economic nationalism and internationalization of production at one and the same time. In the process, nations have become more economically vulnerable, a fact experienced in particular by small and open economies like those of the Nordic countries. The author sets out the options of these countries for facing the challenges of increased vulnerability: seeking niche power, cooperating, playing on their democratic corporatism and welfare state policies as a means towards securing national support for economic policy, or improving their external organization. The hypothesis is presented that the latter — external organization — is a crucial factor inter alia because it addresses some inevitable choices that international development is highlighting: the tendency to deregulate financial markets and regulate trade; the drift from multi lateralism to bilateralism and protectionism in trade; and the reinforced international sedimentation process most visible in North-South relations but witnessed also within the South as well as within various countries (rising unemployment).
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