H-Diplo Article Review Forum 627 on “Special Issue: Toward a History of the New International Economic Order.” [6 July 2016]

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Article Review
No. 627
An H-Diplo Article Review Forum
6 July 2016

Article Review Editors:  Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse
Web and Production Editor: George Fujii
Commissioned for H-Diplo by Thomas Maddux

H-Diplo Forum on “Special Issue: Toward a History of the New International Economic Order.”  Humanity:  An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 6:1 (Spring 2015):  1-233.  http://humanityjournal.org/issue-6-1/

Reviewed by:
Alessandro Iandolo, London School of Economics and Political Science
Timothy Nunan, Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies

The New International Economic Order: A Reintroduction

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!
—William Wordsworth, 1805

I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it.
—H.P. Lovecraft, 1917

What, exactly, was the New International Economic Order (NIEO)? Promulgated as a United Nations declaration in 1974 (reprinted as the frontispiece to this special issue of Humanity), the NIEO was the most widely discussed transnational governance reform initiative of the 1970s. Its fundamental objective was to transform the governance of the global economy to redirect more of the benefits of transnational integration toward ‘‘the developing nations’’—thus completing the geopolitical process of decolonization and creating a democratic global order of truly sovereign states.

It was, in short, a proposal for a radically different future than the one we actually inhabit.

Viewed from our present conjuncture, the NIEO seems like an apparition, an improbable political creature that surfaced out of the economic and geopolitical dislocations and uncertainties of the early to mid-1970s, only to sink away again just as quickly. Appearing today as the figment of a now all but lost political imaginary, the NIEO sprang forth during a narrow and specific window of geopolitical opportunity, a ‘‘moment of disjunction and openness,’’ when wildly divergent political possibilities appeared suddenly plausible.^[2] What made the NIEO remarkable was not so much the content of its program as the fact that political and economic leaders throughout both the postcolonial world and the industrial core of the global economy took seriously the possibility—the former mainly with Wordsworthian hope, the latter often with Lovecraftian horror—that they might be witnessing the downfall of the centuries-long hegemony of what was coming to be known simply as ‘‘the north.’’ In contrast to the Thatcherite ‘‘There Is No Alternative’’ order that would soon emerge, the NIEO imagined and represented a dramatically ‘‘alternative’’ geopolitical future.^[3]

Although the idea of a NIEO reverberated through the halls of power from Washington and New York to Algiers and Dar es Salaam throughout the late 1970s, it faded from view during the 1980s, replaced by discussions of structural adjustment programs, the Washington consensus, and the ‘‘end of history.’’^[4] By the late 1990s, few (in the north, at least) would have disagreed with Jeffrey Cason’s hand-waving dismissal that the proposals of the NIEO could only be regarded as ‘‘quaint.’’^[5] Today, the NIEO is almost completely forgotten.

The South Demands

This special issue of Humanity is dedicated to disinterring the NIEO and its moment, to considering how diverse (and, often, contested) the proposals were that came together under the NIEO rubric in terms of origins, goals, and rhetoric. Focusing on different dimensions of the NIEO, our authors variously suggest that the NIEO was:

• a bid to empower the United Nations General Assembly as the legislative body for making binding international law
• a critique of legal formalism
• the genealogical starting point for ‘the right to development’
• an effort to create a global regulatory framework for transnational corporations
• an extension of the principle of sovereignty from the political to the economic realm
• an incrementalist approach to reforming global economic and political power arrangements
• an endeavor to redress historical grievances of newly independent states, thereby ‘completing’ decolonization
• a call for global redistribution—including financial, resource, and technology transfer—from rich to poor countries
• an attempt to universalize and globalize the principles of ‘embedded liberalism’
• the high noon of ‘Third Worldism’ and its vision of solidarity among the poorer nations
• a radical challenge to the historic hegemony of the North Atlantic industrial core
• a realistic program for global socialism
• a utopian political project, global and totalizing in its ambitions
• an alternative model for transnational economic integration—that is, of globalization
• a key catalyst (via backlash) for the formulation of the neoliberal paradigm in favor of limiting state power and augmenting private power

What this list makes clear is that the NIEO was not a single coherent entity; rather, it was more like a political brand holding together a set of loosely compatible agendas, which together formed something less than a coherent strategy. While everyone involved might have agreed that the goal of the NIEO was to improve the economic position of the global south in relation to the global north, there was no consensus about the ultimate political ends, much less about the best way to achieve those ends. This, as much as anything, helps to explain why the NIEO seemed unable to realize its proponents’ hopes. With this caveat in mind, it is nonetheless possible to distinguish three distinct but interconnected aspects to the NIEO: economic proposals, legal tactics, and political objectives.

The Economic Vision of the NIEO

At the core of the NIEO’s agenda was a series of interrelated proposals for reforms to the structure, governance, and norms of the global economy designed to improve the relative position of the so-called developing states. In particular, the NIEO Declaration called for: (a) an absolute right of states to control the extraction and marketing of their domestic natural resources; (b) the establishment and recognition of state- managed resource cartels to stabilize (and raise) commodity prices; (c) the regulation of transnational corporations; (d) no-strings-attached technology transfers from north to south; (e) the granting of preferential (nonreciprocal) trade preferences to countries in the south; and (f) the forgiveness of certain debts that states in the south owed to the north. Together, all these proposals amounted to an assertion of the ‘economic sovereignty’ of postcolonial states.

Although the point of origin for some of these demands can be traced back to the Mexican revolutionary constitution of 1917 or even earlier, the more proximate intellectual origins for these ideas derived from pioneering work in development economics by the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch, first as the head of the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) from the late 1940s and then as the founding secretary general at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) from the early 1960s.^[6]  Along with the German British economist Hans W. Singer, Prebisch postulated that, absent regulatory intervention, the terms of trade between primary (commodity) producers and manufacturers deteriorate over time. The Singer-Prebisch thesis not only offered a political critique of the subordinate economic position to which the imperial powers had historically consigned their colonies as primary producers; it also provided a clear path forward: international trade needed to be managed to prevent the deterioration of the terms of trade, and governments and corporations from the north had to be compelled to provide capital, technology, and expertise to enable the south to develop its own industrial base. The Singer-Prebisch thesis would not only form the cornerstone of dependency theory and later world systems theory; it also provided the underlying rationale for import- substitution industrialization strategies as well as the demands of the NIEO.^[7]  Indeed, under Prebisch’s leadership in the 1960s, UNCTAD became a prime site for the formulation and promotion of the NIEO’s various economic claims.^[8]

Examining the global economic context of the early 1970s is crucial for under- standing both the demands and reception of the NIEO. Particularly critical were the dissolution of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate regime around 1968-1973 and the Arab-led oil embargo and price spike of 1973.^[9] These events had many practical implications for the world economy; but as Hans Singer himself noted in 1978, their importance for the NIEO was as much psychological as material.^[10] On the one hand, the dissolution of the fixed-exchange rate system demonstrated that ostensibly unalterable structures underpinning the world economy could in fact shift abruptly. On the other hand, the success of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in raising and sustaining high oil prices not only offered the hope that solidarity among primary producers could succeed in upending the terms of global trade, it also quelled fears among many in the south concerning military or financial reprisals from the north. Together these events made the economic ambitions of the NIEO, which both before had seemed (and would soon again seem) utterly unrealistic, appear suddenly and shockingly conceivable. Even oil-importing countries in the south, for whom the oil price spike was ruinous materially, could find political hope from the situation. At a February 1975 meeting in Algiers devoted to drawing up an ‘‘action plan’’ for the NIEO, the G-77 nations pledged to raise their share of the world economy from 7 percent to 25 percent, with attendees from oil-producing countries promising to offer financial aid as long as the West also ‘‘did its part.’’^[11]  For NIEO proponents, goals once considered impossible now appeared within reach.

Even at this heady moment, however, the NIEO’s economic vision encompassed a strange set of tensions. On the one hand, it embraced markets, albeit of a controlled sort, to be governed by cartels managed by states. Contrary to some claims about the NIEO, the proposals were not antitrade or prefiguratively antiglobalization; rather, the NIEO envisaged an alternative order of global economic integration in which countries in the south could catch up with the economic achievements of the north, thus creating a material foundation for political equality between states in the north and south.^[12]  In other words, the NIEO represented a call for socialism among states, what Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere called ‘‘a trade union of the poor.’’^[13]  On the other hand, despite this interstate socialism, the NIEO remained studiously agnostic about the proper form of internal organization of national economies, being quite amenable to capitalism within states. This was in keeping with the principle of absolute respect for the economic sovereignty of nations, but it also lent credence to critics of the NIEO who asserted that its real agenda was to transfer resources ‘‘from the poor in rich countries to the rich in poor countries.’’^[14] For the NIEO, however, the unit of poverty was the state, not the individual.

The NIEO as an Intervention in International Law

Just as important as the NIEO’s economic objectives were the novel means it sought to implement its objectives through new mechanisms of international law. Rather than accepting international law as a neutral device, NIEO legal theorists claimed that existing international law, unsuited to promoting structural reform, was biased toward economic incumbents and needed recasting in order to favor developing nations. More narrowly, NIEO proponents argued that states in the south should not be bound by legal agreements made under an illegitimate transnational legal regime, particularly if those agreements had been concluded by pre-independence administrations or with private corporations. Just as the economic goal of the NIEO was to enable the self-sufficiency and self-determination of countries in the south, the legal strategy was similarly predicated on the bedrock assertion of the absolute sovereign equality of every nation.

Proponents of the NIEO, especially those at UNCTAD, sought to use the UN General Assembly, with its more plausible claims to represent world interests, as a forum for developing new international legal structures that would promote the agenda of the south. Choosing the General Assembly as a vehicle for transnational legal change made political sense given the evolving composition of that body. When the UN was founded in the mid-1940s, not only were ‘north’ and ‘south’ not yet operative concepts in the geopolitical imaginary but even the distinction between ‘‘industrialized’’ and ‘‘developing’’ countries (or economies) barely existed.^[15] Decolonization changed this rapidly, as the number of UN member states ballooned from the original 51 to 76 in 1955 and 110 by 1962—the large majority of which were ‘‘developing’’ states in the south.^[16] With the General Assembly operating under a one state–one vote principle, it seemed a fruitful site for legal claims-making that would benefit the south. At the second UNCTAD conference in 1968, 77 southern states had self-identified as a bloc, which came to be known as the Group of 77 (G-77). In principle, the G-77 was unified by its members’ shared subordinate position within the global economy. While the politics of the group would prove difficult to manage, they indubitably formed a voting majority within the General Assembly. Therefore, if the G-77 could at once enhance the power of the General Assembly and maintain political unity, all of them stood to gain in relation to the north.

The most important legal theorist for the NIEO was the Algerian jurist Mohammed Bedjaoui, who provided the most elaborate legal-theoretical articulation of how to accomplish the NIEO’s economic objectives. Bedjaoui criticized the existing formal structure of international law, which he claimed was organized to systematically favor former imperial powers, which in turn reflected and enabled the structural inequality of the global economy. Unlike legal localists, who argued that different communal situations necessitated different sorts of legal regimes, Bedjaoui advocated legal universalism. He argued, however, that the power dynamics embedded within the structure of international law required that certain key terms of international law be undone. For example, he rejected the notion that postcolonial and postrevolutionary states had to meet treaty and contractual obligations joined under previous regimes. In short, Bedjaoui presented Algeria’s own postindependence international legal positions toward France as a model for what an alternative global, transnational legal order might look like.^[17]

The central problem for NIEO jurists like Bedjaoui was how to assert the absolute national sovereignty of southern states without at the same time empowering northern states to ignore, in the name of their own national sovereignty, the supranational legal injunctions proposed by the NIEO.^[18] This tension within the legal doctrine of the NIEO mirrored the one in the economic sphere: claims of absolute economic sovereignty flew in the face of transnational economic interdependence. At the end of the day, NIEO success required leveling power disparities between states, but for that to happen, its legal strategy had to be embedded in a political strategy.

The NIEO as Political Project

As the foregoing suggests, the NIEO was more than just a set of technical economic-legal proposals; it was also an explicitly political initiative, an attempt to extend the realignment of international power that the process of decolonization had begun. At the level of political identity, the G-77 and the NIEO claimed to embody the idea that the ‘‘developing nations’’ formed a coherent political group, one whose common political identity rested on a shared history of resistance to colonialism and imperialism.^[19]  As such, the NIEO may be seen as a continuation of what Erez Manela has referred to as the ‘Wilsonian moment’ for the peoples of the south or of the ‘Bandung era’ which had opened with the Afro-Asian Conference in 1955, itself often characterized as the start of the Non-Aligned Movement.^[20]  The economic proposals of the NIEO and the legal ideas for their implementation were, in the end, merely instruments in the service of the political goal of creating true global democracy of equal (and equally) sovereign states, thereby completing the process of decolonization. In this sense, the NIEO represented arguably the most direct and sustained political challenge of the postcolonial era to the ongoing authority and legitimacy of the incumbent industrial powers.

Implicit in the NIEO Declaration was the assumption that a shared interest in rearranging global economic governance provided a sufficient basis for political solidarity. Sharp divisions existed within the G-77 about political tactics, however. For the more radically inclined proponents of the NIEO, the fulfillment of a new order meant rolling back Western power and augmenting the power of local elites who ruled in the name of their own peoples. Typical of this stance was Algerian president Houari Boumediene, who would emerge as perhaps the single most prominent political proponent of the NIEO. The site of a particularly vicious colonial war of independence, Algeria’s ultimate victory represented the promise and efficacy of simultaneous confrontation with the north across diplomatic, economic, political, and legal channels: for Boumediene there was a direct line from the Battle of Algiers to the NIEO.^[21]  Speaking of a ‘‘dialectic of domination and plundering on the one hand, and the dialectic of emancipation and recovery on the other,’’ he warned of an ‘‘uncontrollable conflagration’’ should the north refuse to cede ‘‘control and use of the fruits of resources belonging to the countries of the Third World.’’^[22]

Not all members of the G-77 coalition adopted such confrontational rhetoric, however. Others, such as Haile Selassie in Ethiopia or the leaders of Ghana after independence under Kwame Nkrumah, viewed the politics of the NIEO as a framework for achieving a more harmonious and mutually beneficial model of global economic and political integration. Yes, the NIEO’s aims might have been about redressing historical wrongs and challenging ongoing power inequities, but the goal was to forge a dialogue that would bind wounds. To reread all the speeches delivered on behalf of the NIEO is to be struck by the hopeful idea that the north could be reasoned into accepting the moral necessity of abandoning its privileged position in the geopolitical hierarchy.

In addition to the division over political tactics and rhetoric, the sheer economic diversity of the G-77 represented a political paradox. As mentioned earlier, a key source of inspiration to the NIEO was the sustained success of the OPEC oil embargo that had begun in the fall of 1973, less than a year before the NIEO Declaration in May 1974. OPEC’s success in altering the terms of trade of a key global commodity appeared to represent a model that might be extended to other commodities, and to geopolitics as a whole. But this was based on two critical misapprehensions. First, oil was not a commodity like any other: unlike copper or coffee, oil was the energetic foundation of the entire global economy, which meant that the north was necessarily going to adopt a unique strategy to address its production and marketing.^[23] Second, what few anticipated before the oil embargo began was that the success of the embargo would open an enormous fissure within the G-77 between oil importers, for whom the price spikes were an economic disaster, and oil producers, whose sudden windfalls made the idea of global redistribution much less attractive. The fact that the south would split over the material consequences of the very act that had brought them such collective political hope was hardly foreordained, however, and instead was exacerbated by a deliberate strategy embarked upon by certain leaders in the north.

The North Demurs

While NIEO proponents were pushing for a future of global sovereign equality, the leaders of the capitalist economies in Frankfurt, London, and New York were making other plans. Reactions in the north to the NIEO ranged from incremental accommodation (led by social democrats like Willy Brandt, Jan Tinbergen, Olaf Palme, Bruno Kreisky, and Jan Pronk), to Machiavellian inversion (led by conservative geopolitical realists like Henry Kissinger), to unrelenting and direct opposition (led by an emergent cadre of American neoconservatives like William Simon, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Irving Kristol, the last of whom characterized the NIEO as ‘‘mau-mauing’’ the north ^[24]).

For the governing powers of the north, the emergence of the NIEO reinforced the sense of global crisis that had been building for years across several fronts. Not only had the Bretton Woods financial order collapsed but rioting and domestic terrorism seemed to have become endemic in much of the north.^[25] Many leaders in the north felt they were facing a fundamental, multifaceted systemic revolt, characterized by some as a ‘‘crisis of governability.’’^[26] While for most leaders in the north the crisis was perceived as primarily domestic in nature, the linkages between the revolt of subalterns in their own home states and the revolt of global subalterns seemed linked.^[27] The fact that some domestic ‘‘radical’’ groups linked their political goals and language to the emergent language of transnational racial and economic emancipation did little to allay the concern.^[28]

Many leaders and intellectuals in the north saw the NIEO as an element in this wider systemic crisis, and their responses to the NIEO typically mirrored their respective reactions to domestic unrest. For example, the American political scientist Stephen Krasner, who would go on to serve as director of policy planning in the U.S. State Department under George W. Bush, claimed that the goal of the NIEO was to ‘‘capture the structure of international organizations created by the United States at the conclusion of World War II.’’^[29]  Krasner recommended simply saying ‘no.’ By contrast, former West German chancellor Willy Brandt took a much more conciliatory stance, which he realized by managing a two-year-long series of workshops around the world to discuss various elements of the NIEO proposal. The result of this listening tour would be the landmark North-South: A Program for Survival, a book whose mere existence testifies to the willingness of serious northern leaders to countenance the proposals of the NIEO.^[30] The most common reaction, however, was neither uncompromising naysaying nor sympathetic accommodation but rather playing for time and accentuating divisions among the members of the G-77.^[31]

In stalling any decisions that might empower the states of the south, the north was also reflecting an epochal shift in views of the efficacy and probity of government more generally. Partly as a result of various governments’ inability to overcome domestic crises, a deep cynicism was setting in about government, especially in the United States, where Ronald Reagan would be elected president in 1980 on a platform that declared that government was the problem rather than the solution. As James Buchanan put it, ‘‘romantic and illusory notions about the workings of governments and the behavior of persons who govern’’ were being ‘‘replaced by a set of notions that embody more skepticism about what governments can do.’’^[32] While the ‘public choice theory’ literature that purported to prove this point was mainly directed at exposing the corruptions and malfeasances of governments in the north, the rejection of the state as a positive force could not help but affect the way that the NIEO would be evaluated. Even those in the north sympathetic to the NIEO’s call for a more just global order were inclined to promote solutions at odds with southern leaders’ insistence that such an order could only be realized through the empowerment and affirmation of the sovereignty of the southern states.^[33] Whether it was religious charities like Oxfam that were attempting to provide food aid to famine-endangered communities, or the World Bank taking on ‘basic needs,’ or human rights organizations like Amnesty International trying to protect political dissidents, nowhere in the north was there much support for the NIEO’s ambition to rearrange global power or legal structures in favor of postcolonial states.^[34] Indeed, with hindsight it is apparent that what succeeded the NIEO was not more state power in the south but rather the emergence of new centers of private authority.^[35]

In the end, the dissipation of the NIEO’s energies took place as rapidly as its emergence. Already by 1977 it was clear to people like Nyerere that the north was unwilling to respond with any major concessions, and Boumediene’s untimely death in 1978 deprived the NIEO of its most forceful leader. Margaret Thatcher’s election as prime minister of Britain in 1979, as well as the economic downturn in the United States that same year created by Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker’s interest rate hike, meant that the political leadership of the major powers of the north was unified in its disdain for the NIEO, with only smaller industrialized countries like Austria and the Netherlands still expressing sympathy.^[36]  It was left to Reagan to deliver the final word at the Cancún Economic Summit in October 1981 that the United States would no longer discuss any changes to the global economic governance architecture, no matter the discord this generated.^[37] 

The final dagger would be the Latin American debt crisis in 1982: bailing out indebted southern states was not done in charity but conditionally dependent on structural adjustments designed explicitly to weaken the reach of the state.^[38] The result was a ‘lost decade’ in Latin America, and then another in Africa when the same policies were applied there.^[39] The new ‘post-historical’ consensus in favor of ‘free trade’ that consolidated by the late 1980s among mainstream economists in the north asserted that the proponents of the NIEO had been fundamentally misguided in their view of history and development.^[40] Political determinism gave way to technological determinism.^[41] ‘‘Hitherto existing politico-economic approaches or even the analytical approaches employed by these perspectives will not be able to find answers to the global problems,’’ explained one former supporter of the NIEO: ‘‘The coming technotronic age will give its own answers.’’^[42] In the end, all that was left of the NIEO were a few twitches, as of a phantom political limb, such as discussions concerning the regulation of transnational corporations, which themselves would die in early 1990s. It would seem the NIEO failed ignominiously.

[Ed. Note- Please refer to the PDF edition for Figure 1] Figure 1. The salience of ‘‘New International Economic Order’’ in language. Google Ngram for ‘‘New International Economic Order,’’ 1969–2000. Source: http://books.google.com/ngrams (accessed October 19, 2014).

Failure—or Unfailure?

The NIEO today is almost entirely forgotten, at least when referred to by its proper name (see fig. 1). Already in the early 1980s, the conventional wisdom among main- stream analysts in the Anglophone academy was that NIEO had always been doomed to failure.^[43]  The explanations for this inevitability were legion: the political solidarity of the Third World was bound to unravel; the logic of collective action meant that commodity cartels were destined to defection and failure; the attempt to use international law to rein in the sovereign prerogatives of powerful countries was fated to succumb to jurisdictional fragmentation and forum shopping; and the north was always going to have been willing and able to flex its vastly greater economic, political, and (if ultimately necessary) military might to restrain the rise of the south.^[44]

This Humanity special issue, dedicated to the NIEO, began as an effort to make sense of this paradox: how an entity that today has been nearly universally represented (insofar as it is represented at all) as an abject and inevitable failure had in its own moment seemed so entirely plausible to so many of both its proponents and enemies.^[45] Most of the essays published here were presented at a conference sponsored by New York University’s Remarque Institute in April–May 2014, where a lively exchange of views helped to clarify just how sprawling and contradictory the NIEO was, even at its zenith of optimism, forty years earlier. What emerged from the conversation was something of a surprise: despite the fact that there was broad consensus in the north that the NIEO failed, in important ways this is not quite right.

First, the matter of inevitability. As historians, we should always be wary of ascribing inevitability to outcomes that seemed deeply uncertain to the actors at the time.^[46] Were Daniel Patrick Moynihan and others in the Nixon and Ford administrations simply being alarmists when they declared that the United States must attack the NIEO frontally? Was the Brandt Commission merely a Machiavellian scheme to divert attention? In fact, as several essays in this dossier demonstrate, the failure of the NIEO was the result of a deliberate and concerted strategy on the part of leaders in the north, compounded by strategic choices on the part of the south.

Second, a key underlying economic objective of the NIEO, namely, to improve the south’s economic position in the global economy, has in fact been realized, albeit unevenly. Whereas the advanced economies produced 80 percent of global GDP at the time of the NIEO Declaration, by 2009 that share had fallen to 57 percent, while the leading economies of the south (now rebranded by mainstream economists in the north as ‘emerging markets’) had increased their share to nearly 40 percent of total world GDP.^[47] While it is true that the states of the south are no more economically sovereign than they were in the 1970s, this is arguably part of a larger trend whereby all states, including those of ‘advanced’ economies, have become more deeply integrated into, and thus dependent on, the overall world economy interconnected by global supply chains. While many have lamented the deindustrialization of the old industrial core states, the silver lining has been a huge growth in industrial jobs in poorer countries. And while it is true that it is mostly corporations based in rich countries that control these globalized supply chains, even this is changing rapidly.^[48]

Indeed, rather than see the NIEO as a failure, it might be more helpful to see it as an example of what Jennifer Wenzel has called ‘‘unfailure.’’^[49]  Unfailure refers to the paradox that many seemingly failed political and social movements, even though they did not realize their ambitions in their own moment, often live on as prophetic visions, available as an idiom for future generations to articulate their own hopes and dreams. In other words, although the historically specific institutional demands of the NIEO during the 1970s went unrealized, one can make a credible case that the undead spirit of the NIEO continues to haunt international   relations.

The unfailed afterlife of the NIEO is perhaps most evident today in global climate change negotiations. For many key poor countries, the north/south geographic imaginary that gave life to the NIEO remains the dominant framing of the question of climate justice.^[50]  Just as it was in the 1970s, the G-77 remains the south’s main organizing agent for collective climate bargaining with the north.^[51] In addition, in its negotiating positions with respect to climate change, the G-77 has pursued a line of economic reasoning that strongly echoes the NIEO Declaration, arguing that because the north bears a historic responsibility for producing the vast majority of anthropogenic greenhouse gases currently in the atmosphere, and the south still has a ‘right to development,’ any fair climate treaty should be ‘nonreciprocal,’ with binding responsibilities (in this case, concerning emissions reduction mandates) applying only the north. Likewise, just as it did in the 1970s, the G-77 insists that the north should transfer technology and provide aid as reparations for the damage caused by historic wrongs—now referring to historic greenhouse gas emissions. In sum, the NIEO’s unfailed political imaginary of a more just and egalitarian global order lives on in contemporary climate negotiations.^[52]

Historians, who for many years ignored the historiographic no man’s land between the charismatic upheavals of the 1960s and the world historical events of the 1980s, have come to recognize the 1970s as the foundry of our current world order.^[53] But crucial to understanding how that current order took shape is to appreciate the contingency of the events and decisions that took place in those years: key actors had highly divergent visions and hopes for the future and, had different choices been exercised, we might have gotten a strikingly different future. Embedded liberalism and planned modernization were in deep crisis but still deeply institutionalized in the West; communism was rotting from within in its Eastern European and Asian heartlands but remained a source of inspiration to many radicals elsewhere; and Third Worldism seemed to offer a dramatic break from centuries of North Atlantic domination of the world economy.

Beyond these major ideologies lurked others: environmentalists calling for re- ruralization, techno-utopians predicting undersea and extraterrestrial colonization, and wine-dark visions of various demographic apocalypses. The conditions making possible this pluralization of political imaginaries were historically specific: détente had terminated the binary geopolitical logic of the early Cold War; revolutions had overturned governments in more than fifty states in the previous two decades; the Vietnam War confirmed that small nations of the south could defeat even the deter- mined military might of a traditional great power; the collapse of the Bretton Woods exchange rate system had shown the tenuousness of existing global governance institutions; and OPEC showed that political solidarity among primary producers could drastically reshape global trade relations in favor of historically poor regions. From this cauldron of contingencies, among the least anticipated prospects was that corporate powers would assert control over the commanding heights of economies worldwide, with their casuists retroactively declaring that this had always already been the only real alternative.^[54] 

It is no coincidence that the idea to reconsider the history of NIEO first occurred to the editorial collective of Humanity in the wake of the 2007–2008 global financial crisis, as the ‘no alternative’ draperies of the post–Cold War decades seemed suddenly threadbare. Once-conceivable alternatives to our current global order are of more than passing interest to those who seek historical bases for alternative political economies.^[55] The political economy of antistatist, structurally adjusted, labor-disciplined, financialized globalization—though it produced much growth in the 1990s—has been increasingly questioned in the wake of the 2007–2008 global financial crisis. The secular stagnations (and worse) that have followed, in conjunction with amplifying economic inequalities, have made more urgent the need to identify alternatives to the ‘actually-existing’ world order that emerged in the wake of the NIEO. ^[56] Revisiting the NIEO is part of that process: a chance to revisit an abandoned road—not because it remains available but because seeing it as an unfailure helps denaturalize the inegalitarian global political economy which for three decades global authorities like the Economist magazine or the World Economic Forum have insisted is the only reasonably available historical possibility. Reappreciating the seriousness with which the NIEO was regarded in its time, not least by its fervent opponents, can help us to reopen the possibility space of contemporary geopolitics.

Participants:

Nils Gilman is the Associate Chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also received his B.A. and Ph.D. In History. He is the author of Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) as well as the coeditor of Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003) and Deviant Globalization: Black Market Economy in the 21st Century (New York: Continuum Books, 2011). Most recently he received the New York Times's Sydney Award (for socially conscious long-form journalism) for his essay “The Twin Insurgency,” which appeared in The American Interest in 2014.

Alessandro Iandolo is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of International History of the London School of Economics and Political Science. He gained his Ph.D. from the University of Oxford in 2011, and subsequently taught at Cardiff University and at the New Economic School in Moscow before joining the LSE in 2013. His publications include: “Imbalance of Power: the USSR and the Congo Crisis, 1960-61”, The Journal of Cold War Studies 16:2, 2014; “Unforgettable 1956? The PCI and the crisis of communism in Italy”, Contemporary European History 23:2, 2014; and “The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Model of Development in West Africa”, Cold War History 12:4, 2012. Alessandro is currently working on a history of Soviet development cooperation in Africa.

Timothy Nunan is an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and an Alexander-von-Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at the Zentralasien-Seminar of the Humboldt University zu Berlin. His book Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2016. He is currently working on a book-length project on rise and fall of socialism in Eurasia in the twentieth century, prospectively titled Eurasian Crossings: The Soviet Union, the Left, and “Eurasia” in the Twentieth Century. He is also the translator and editor of Writings on War by Carl Schmitt, published with Polity in 2011. He received his D.Phil. in History from the University of Oxford in 2013.

The historical profession has recently developed a seemingly inexhaustible interest in anything ‘inter-’ or ‘trans-national’ and ‘economic.’ It is therefore surprising that the New International Economic Order (NIEO), a fascinating initiative by a group of Third World countries to rebalance trade and improve aid in the mid-1970s, has so far escaped attention. A recent article by Vanessa Ogle in Humanity, and now a whole special issue of the same journal dedicated to the NIEO, are therefore welcome additions to a hopefully growing literature.^[57]

The Humanity special issue brings together fourteen leading historians, under Nils Gilman’s direction, to explore the NIEO initiative, its main actors, and its impact and legacy. The geographical scope is extensive. Some of the contributions focus on the more obvious NIEO animators, such as Algeria and Tanzania, whereas others tackle participation and/or reaction by Western state and non-sate actors alike, including the omnipresent U.S. foreign-policy establishment, but also the World Bank, European charities, feminist groups, and international lawyers. The assortment of issues treated is also varied, even though a trend is immediately evident – from women’s rights to drilling rights, and from company law to family law, legal aspects and legal thinking occupy a prominent place in the special issue, as it is to be expected given the remit of the host journal.

Taken individually, each article is extremely well researched, and all present compelling arguments. The authors went to great lengths to consult multiple sources and integrate them with a great deal of secondary literature. The special issue is especially good at showing the NIEO’s connections to earlier experiences and events–the 1955 Bandung and 1961 Belgrade conferences that established the Non-Aligned Movement, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD, created in 1964), and the 1973-74 OPEC oil embargo – and at tracing the intellectual parable of some of the key ideas and concepts that inspired the NIEO–sovereignty over natural resources, the right to development, and global interdependency.

As a collective endeavor, the special issue is perhaps less effective at drawing a complete picture of the NIEO and elaborating on its legacy. The exact mechanisms that the advocates of the NIEO proposed to improve trade terms for the Third World and to obtain more and better aid from the ‘developed’ countries receive relatively little attention.  One contributor tellingly refers to them as “the somewhat staid and boring sphere of international negotiations over trade and development” (94).^[58] These, however, were the NIEO’s core aims.

Looking at the variety and provenance of the sources used, the prevalence of the West stands out. With very few exceptions, there are no documents retrieved from archives in the Third World. Many contributors rely heavily on archives of international organizations such as the UN and OPEC, which allows them to explore the point of view of many NIEO protagonists, but the majority of primary sources still come from repositories in London; Washington, DC; New York; and Paris - as well as the ubiquitous Foreign Relations of the United States series. Even though the prominence of sources from the West does not detract from the overall quality of the articles, which is extremely high, it reveals a tendency to see and analyze the NIEO through Western eyes.

This seems particularly evident in the overall assessment of the NIEO, which is on the whole quite traditional. Virtually all contributors agree that the initiative was animated by noble principles, but tarnished by internecine fighting and occasionally cynical posturing on the part of some of the members of the coalition of Third World states that advanced the NIEO demands. Giuliano Garavini quotes at length from energy expert and UN consultant Thomas W. Wälde, who argued that the NIEO was destined to fail because of the inadequacy of Third World states. According to Wälde, “they show the trappings of modern statehood – constitutions, laws and ambassadors, but do not have the strength of a modern state – cohesion, strength and effectiveness of public institutions, of public infrastructure, safety, education and healthcare” (90).^[59] Victor McFarland’s article is the most negative, arguing that not only all of the NIEO demands “never came close to be implemented”, but that the world economy evolved “in the opposite direction, toward a more purely market-based approach” (217).^[60] Gilman’s introduction is perhaps the most generous with the NIEO. He calls it an “unfailure,” meaning a “prophetic vision, available as an idiom for future generations to articulate their own hopes and dreams” (10).^[61] 

What if the NIEO was more than an “unfailure,” and its legacy more complex than what may seem at first sight? The triumph of the ‘Thatcherite’ order that Gilman sees as diametrically opposite to the NIEO (1), or of “the inalterable laws of the market” that allegedly regulate the global economy today (231), would need to be relativized.^[62] The narrative that maintains that at the end of the 1970s a market-driven economic orthodoxy wiped out all heterodox alternatives works well as long as the analysis remains focused on the West. Broadening the scope, the picture that emerges is more complex. The success of the ‘Asian tigers’ (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan), which embodied the ideal of development in the Third World in the aftermath of the NIEO (un?)failure, is the source of never-ending debate. Daniel Sargent ascribes it to “globalization” (212), but others have argued that prosperity in East Asia came as a consequence of state intervention and shrewd industrial policy, which did not shy away from protectionism before opening up to the international market.^[63] This approach would have been familiar to Raúl Prebisch and Hans Singer, whose ideas influenced NIEO via UNCTAD. As Johanna Bockman explains in her excellent contribution to the special issue, economists like Prebisch and Singer never rejected the market, and even championed international trade.^[64] The idea was precisely for developing countries to become able to use the international market to their advantage, gaining access to Western markets to sell their products. These ideas (and policies) are still very much with us today.

If the ‘Asian tigers’ were the success story of the 1980s and 1990s, the rise of the BRICS [Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa], which Antony Anghie evokes, albeit briefly, on pages 154-5, and of China in particular, is what has dominated both academic and public discourse on development since at least the early 2000s.^[65] Crediting the ‘market’ or ‘globalization’ as the key behind their record economic growth is even more problematic than in the case of the ‘Asian tigers.’ China explicitly defines itself as a mixed economy, which has embraced global trade, but maintains state supervision over production and exchange. All of the other BRICS countries have long histories of extensive state intervention, if not outright central planning. Far from wiping out all alternatives, as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would have liked, the ‘laws of the market’ proved to be much more flexible than many in the West thought. The Third World’s willingness to experiment with state and market during the 1960s and 1970s, which originated the NIEO demands, has certainly not disappeared without a trace. Failure or ‘unfailure,’ the ideas that the NIEO championed are very much present in the world we live in today – an aspect that would have deserved more discussion in the special issue.

In conclusion, this special issue offers a fantastic introduction to the ideas behind the demand for a New International Economic Order, and to the intellectual environment in which some of the NIEO protagonists developed their thinking. It also elaborates Third World development and economic contestation as an important driver for the promulgation of international legal instruments and ideas. However, the core aims of the NIEO – trade and aid – could have received more attention. In general, the assessment of the NIEO legacy, and more broadly of the economic history of the last two decades of the twentieth century, would benefit from a more critical analysis of what currently tends to be regarded simply as a ‘victory’ of market forces over state control. The Humanity special issue represents an indispensable first step in this direction. Hopefully, more will follow in the near future.

The New International Economic Order (NIEO) is nearly forgotten today, but whispers of its mission still haunt us. As I sit down to write this review, I sip a cup of certified Fair Trade coffee and glance at articles on the ongoing refugee crisis in the Mediterranean Sea. Many of those who perish at the bottom of the oceanic divide separating Europe from Africa might, some will argue, have been able to secure a dignified existence in their home countries were international trade in agricultural commodities more liberalized and tariffs abolished. Instead, however, many choose not to migrate to overcrowded and undergoverned Sub-Saharan metropoles, but instead to take their chances on the open seas to arrive in Europe and claim asylum on the basis of individual human rights. Some, not many, will succeed. Many more, however, are likely to be grouped as arrivals from ‘safe countries’–states from which it is categorically impossible to demand asylum as a persecuted individual–and, by mere virtue of their citizenship, ordered to return.

Discussions about global inequalities between North and South, in short, are ever-present today, but historical examination of the concepts we use to examine issues like trade, migration, and refugees less so. Hence this special issue of Humanity, based upon an April-May 2014 conference sponsored by New York University’s Remarque Institute, is welcome. As Nils Gilman notes in the issue’s introduction,^[66] looking back across the threshold of neoliberalism, the Latin American debt crisis, and the spread of structural adjustment as a condition of World Bank and IMF lending, the demands on the part of Third World leaders for a comprehensive restructuring of international economic relations so as to guarantee the “economic sovereignty” of Third World states seems “quaint” today (2). National investment councils are now more likely to advertise the speed with which foreign investors can set up a business than they are to defend the untouchability of their country’s natural endowments. But as this volume correctly emphasizes, for a crucial period of the mid-1970s–also the time when the human rights movement saw its “breakthrough”–the NIEO offered to overcome the stultifying horizons of the Cold War, or the North Atlantic economy, with a new geopolitical horizon.^[67]

This was, in short, a vision of the future radically different than the one that came to pass–a vision whose ostensible failure the special issue seeks to question and re-contextualize. Does it succeed at this mission? Overall, yes. The most helpful contributions, in this reader’s eyes, locate the NIEO project as something whose “unfailure” resonated well into the 1980s and 1990s, rather than as more or less wrecked on the iceberg of Reaganism, oil, and debt. Jennifer Bair’s piece on the regulation of multi-national corporations (MNCs) I found particularly useful both in focusing on a frequently overlooked part of the NIEO platform that nonetheless had a long afterlife to our present day.^[68] As she shows, throughout the 1970s, two newly-created ECOSOC sub-bodies, the Intergovernmental Commission on Transnational Corporations and an Information and Research Center on Transnational Corporations, labored over the creation of a ‘Code of Conduct’ that would govern MNCs’ investment abroad (the initiative had been launched by Chilean representatives concerned over International Telephone & Telegraph, or ITT, later notorious for its involvement in the toppling of Salvador Allende’s government).

Yet the faltering course of the Code of Conduct revealed as much as the Chilean epic did about the prospects for subaltern solidarity. Without the imposition of two-way rights and responsibilities (i.e. both on MNCs and on host governments), American or European acceptance of the Code over or in addition to customary international law regarding expropriation was impossible. Yet agreeing to such mutual responsibilities–something the G-77 agreed to in 1980–in effect treated MNCs as coequal parties to states themselves, a bitter pill for Third World governments to swallow. By the time the Code of Conduct was abandoned, in 1992, the nature of the global economy to be tamed, not to mention international discourses of rights, had changed massively. Arguably, some of the spirit of the Code of Conduct lives on in the United Nations (UN) Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council in 2011. In contrast to the Code, however, which envisioned sovereign states as the primary interlocutor of MNCs and control of natural resources as the primary issue, today’s Guiding Principles are oriented much more toward corporations’ responsibilities to engage ‘stakeholders’ (shareholders, subcontractors, etc.) to prevent violations of individual human rights. The NIEO, in short, may have succeeded in carving out institutional space at the UN for discussion of MNCs, but failed–differently from a ‘collapse’ in 1982–in enforcing such spaces as places to defend territorial economic sovereignty.

Bair’s discussion (along with that of Johanna Bockman^[69] and Gilman’s Introduction, which resonated with me as the three strongest pieces in a strong volume) makes clear the bigger stakes in rescuing the NIEO from oblivion. To take a case similar to that of Bair’s focus, today few would argue on principle against the claims of Acehnese villagers to have had their human rights violated by security forces employed by ExxonMobil (the world’s second largest company and an MNC by any definition). But one wonders: when these claims are examined (granted, in U.S. courts, but under the auspices of the Guiding Principles), does this discursive shift itself mark an abandoning of Third World solidarities that once would have advocated for expropriation, nationalization, revolution, or Acehnese autonomy?

Viewed from this perspective, the NIEO, as Bret Benjamin and Daniel Whelan suggest in their essays on Bandung and the “right to development,”^[70] respectively, invites questions beyond that of success or failure. Instead, the NIEO presents itself as a moment in an alternative chronology of post-decolonization debates about the moral primacy assigned to Third World sovereignty. It presents itself as a moment, indeed perhaps the high point in the gradual shift from the Third World state (and its ‘national economy’) to the Third World person (whether political prisoner or coffee farmer) as the prime object of moral claim making. For me, then, the volume largely works as an opening essay in uncovering this alternative chronology of postwar international history (even as one regrets more explicit engagement with the entanglement of the NIEO and the Cold War, or the NIEO and European integration, especially regarding the Common Agricultural Policy).

At the same time, I would like to express some reservations about the approach adopted toward the study of the NIEO and, indeed, the international history of the 1970s adopted in this volume–objections that are primarily methodological but which, I believe, carry consequences for the choice of research subjects and themes. As Nils Gilman writes, the fundamental objective of the NIEO “was to transform the governance of the global economy to redirect more of the benefits of transnational integration toward ‘the developing nations’–thus completing the geopolitical process of decolonization and creating a democratic global order of truly sovereign states” (1). Studying the NIEO project would thus seem to demand an understanding of how developing nations made claims on the industrialized world, and in what language they did so–something of which Bockman’s invocation of the guerrilla revolutionary Che Guevara demanding ‘freedom of trade’ reminds us.

However, a comprehensive understanding of the ‘words in motion’ about global economic inequality, sovereign equality, and North-South relations demands greater work in native-language sources than many of the volume’s contributions display.^[71] How did Tanzanian President and champion of “African socialism” Julius Nyerere or Algerian statesmen and Third World champion Houari Boumedienne present the NIEO to domestic audiences, and how did this differ from discussions held in Geneva, New York, or European Foreign Ministries? Given the predominance of English-language source material used for the bulk of the pieces, we are left with an incomplete sense of the buyer’s market of concepts of economic justice that exploded for this brief moment of the NIEO, if also left (thanks to Kevin O’Sullivan’s work on British and Irish NGOs)^[72] with an idea of how specific the discursive field of different national contexts was. Whether the evolution of Médecins sans Frontières (which spawned the anti-Third Worldist Liberté sans Frontières in the early 1980s) or the Dutch Wereldwinkel (world shop) and, later, the Max Havelaar Foundation is comparable to that of O’Sullivan’s case would merit further study, but it also requires immersion in the primary sources.

To stress, the critique here is not just one of international or global history as “history lite.”^[73] Any introductory foray into a subject as understudied as the NIEO is likely to be tentative, and one hopes that the volume inspires (for example) students of French or Dutch history to use the NIEO as one possible lens to internationalize those fields. The more constructive critique here builds upon Gilman’s observation that “for the NIEO […] the unit of poverty was the state, not the individual” (4). As Gilman notes, rejection of the NIEO agenda came not just from Establishment voices in the Global North but also from skeptics of subaltern internationalism as an ersatz for proletarian internationalism. During what seemed at the time to be the long-predicted crisis of postwar industrial capitalism, one could argue that the point was to radically transform or eradicate capitalism itself, not to insist on a more equitable division of profits between Global North capitalists and Third World despots. Even as the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China dueled in the early 1970s over the best way to co-opt elements of the NIEO spirit, the NIEO itself called for a “socialism among states” that had little to say about the internal distribution of wealth within the post-colonial nation-state.^[74]

Hence the importance of the call to turn toward domestic sources If Australian economist and NIEO critic H.W. Arndt was right in writing that the NIEO’s goal was to transfer wealth “from the poor in rich countries to the rich in poor countries,” how was this cynical mission actually presented to domestic audiences?^[75] What made the domestic economic space, and its accompanying inequalities, of the post-colonial nation state so different from the inequalities and historical justices of the world economy? The answer may be as simple as truncheons and a lack of independent trade unions, but those less cynical must wonder about the effects of the NIEO’s “pretended international moralism” on domestic political debates throughout the Third World (or indeed toward the attitude of publics toward OPEC states, Saudi Arabia especially, which were complicit in the dismantling of the NIEO project) (47). If a lack of devotion to this theme represents a shortcoming of the volume, it also represents an opportunity for future researchers interested in contributing at once to debates in national and international history. The NIEO may have been a failure on the international level, but it remains to be seen whether it was an ‘unfailure’ as a project for social democratic and socialist movements at the scale of the nation-state.

Fortunately, however, given the early professional stage of many of the contributors to this volume, the excellent overview this volume provides, and the sense of momentum international history approaches have today, I am confident that future scholarship on the NIEO and its afterlife will fill in the gaps noted in this review (namely entanglement of the NIEO with other international macro-processes and with national histories through ‘indigenous’ source material). In spite of these flaws, however, this issue of Humanity–unlike the NIEO itself–lands well beyond the realms of ‘failure’ or ‘unfailure.’ In inviting us to reconsider the pivotal decade of the 1970s from yet another angle, it constitutes a welcome additional to the thriving historiography of international history, human rights, and development.