The history of the foreign assistance policy of European countries has received comparatively little attention from economic, political or diplomatic historians. There is a remarkable lack of archive-based historical studies of intergovernmental and intra-governmental discussions about the aims, methods and priorities of foreign aid and its compatibility with national interests and capabilities. This is the more surprising since the ‘aid question’ constituted the third major field of international relations during the Cold War, and was tightly interlinked with the fields of security, finance and economics. In short, the Europeans' positions on development policy in relation to themselves, the United States and the Third World and between themselves have yet to be analysed. The only significant analysis so far of the inducements offered by the West to the Third World is the book by David K. Fieldhouse, The West and the Third World.