A Moment of Possibility: The Rise and Fall of the New International Economic Order

Abstract

The New International Economic Order (NIEO) was a political campaign brought to the United Nations by the Group of 77 (G77) – the state elites from 120 countries of the Global South. The G77 sought to transcend what they saw as ongoing colonial features of the post-World War II world order, defined as the rules and institutions designed to manage the world capitalist system. The NIEO project aimed to overturn Northern protectionism; increase the stability and diversity of Southern economies through the creation of new institutions; and increase the power of the South in global institutions. With few exceptions, International Relations (IR) theory, both Orthodox and Critical, has either ignored the NIEO, or constructed it as an authoritarian attack on global liberalism that had little to no chance of succeeding. With new archival research and a relational historical materialist approach, this thesis traces the rise and decline of the NIEO as a political project and challenges these assumptions. First, it argues that the systemic reforms advocated by the G77 were not based on a rejection of liberalism, but on the premise that the post-war order was not “liberal” enough. Second, it shows that experiments in a NIEO came very close to being launched and offers an explanation of how G77 state elites might have succeeded. This history of the NIEO contains important insights into the role that non-Western agency and power have played in the post-war order. Not only did G77 state elites, in relying on the wider ‘Third World Project’, offer a powerful critique of the post-war order, they created a viable strategy for its reformation. This is significant for several reasons. First, it challenges the assumption of Critical IR theory that the United States was so overpowering that non-Western agency was insignificant to the post-war order. Second, it questions the prevalent assumption of Orthodox Liberal Internationalism that only liberal states create liberal international institutions and orders. These assumptions are embedded within Eurocentric narratives that conceive the post-war order as the sole creation of the United States. Such narratives are used to frame the present crisis of world order as a result of the rise of non-Western powers, and a failure of American leadership. Any potential for non-Western states to participate in reforming world order is viewed as unprecedented and is certainly not linked to any possibility of global movements encompassing the world’s poorest states. This thesis revises such historical narratives, and in doing so, sheds light on the present crisis. A more general implication of this is a historically justified optimism. The NIEO was built by decades of work by many Third World intellectuals, diplomats, and states people. Their collective praxis culminated in evidence that amidst the uncertainties of world economic crises, global projects aimed at reforming world order can create viable power and are therefore worth pursuing.