would threaten a trade war, with punitive tariffs imposed by some countries on
imports from certain other countries. The successor organization to GATT,
theWorld Trade Organizationhas already been the stage both forThird
WorldversusFirst Worldconflict, and for conflict between the USA and the
European bloc, the former regarding the EU as a prime example of the error of
non-free trade economics.
Freedom
Liberte ́(freedom) was, along with brotherhood (seefraternity) and equality,
one of the great rallying cries of the French Revolution, and it has been, in one
guise or another, an unarguable value of most societies ever since. Inevitably
there are dozens of versions of freedom as a supreme political virtue. At its most
basic, the demand for freedom is the claim that every human has the right to do
exactly what they want to do, at any time, provided only that they do not
infringe the equal right of every other individual to a similar freedom. There
are very few arguments positively to prove this doctrine, because, like equality,
it is usually taken as an obviousnatural right, the infringements of which
require justification.
There are three major aspects of freedom which have been politically
important. Historically the earliest has not been a notion of individual free-
dom, but of national freedom as endless nations have sought to throw off
foreign domination; even today the ‘wars of national liberation’ are still with
us, notably in Eastern Europe, and the idea of a ‘free people’ is still a vital coin
in political currency. This ideal, of course, says nothing at all about the political
and social ties to be found inside the liberated state. The second most
important strand historically has been the fight for individualistic, ‘legal’,
freedom, originally the demands of the rising economic bourgeoisie for equal
political rights and economiclaissez-faireagainst the feudal aristocracies.
This was the essential meaning ofliberte ́to the French revolutionaries. Devel-
oping from this has been the demand forcivil liberties, for specified basic
freedoms that are held to be essential to the chance for man as an individual and
for mankind generally to develop and progress. Hence come demands for
freedom of assembly, of association, of speech and of religious practice. Within
the inevitable limits of imperfection, the basic human freedoms of this sort are
available in Western democracies, although economic freedom is often held to
have been severely limited in the last few decades by the need for state
involvement in controlling the economy. The third broad current in discus-
sions of freedom has come fromsocialism. It is here held that freedom consists
not only in legal permission to do or be something, but in the possibility of so
doing. Thus, for example, some socialists would argue that we have very little
freedom of expression in modern democracies, because while there is no legal
Freedom