Humanity Journal

During the 1970s, a coalition of developing countries known as the G-77 launched a far-reaching effort at the United Nations to realize a New International Economic Order (NIEO). At its core, the NIEO was a plan to transform what was, from the perspective of this coalition, a profoundly inequitable international economy biased against the global south. This program of structural reform and global redistribution was presented as a precondition for meaningful development in the Third World but also as a natural and necessary extension of Continue reading → Continue reading →

On May 10, 1974, representatives from six leading British NGOs sat down to a meeting with Prime Minister Harold Wilson and three of his cabinet colleagues at 10 Downing Street. Their aim was simple: to persuade Wilson’s Labour Party government of the inherently global nature of poverty and the need for an appropriately global response. Coming just nine days after the UN General Assembly approved the G-77’s Declaration for the Establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO), this ad hoc Group for Action on Continue reading → Continue reading →

The New International Economic Order (NIEO) was among the more notable aspects of the 1970s, a decade that scholars have begun to view as a critical period in contemporary history.1 Although anticolonial leaders, dependency theorists, and others had long advocated reforming the international political economy to spur more rapid development of the global south, the attempt to enumerate and codify these proposals under the auspices of the United Nations was unprecedented. So too was the fact that, for a time, northern governments entertained some of the Continue reading → Continue reading →

Endings, not beginnings, preoccupied the makers of American policy in the era of the New International Economic Order (NIEO). The collapse of the international monetary system; the expiration of cheap oil, which had fueled the postwar resurgence of industrialized societies; the disgrace of Richard Milhous Nixon; the crisis of American world leadership, even of the Cold War international order: these were among the transitions that American leaders were struggling to navigate when President Houari Boumediene of Algeria took the floor at the United Nations in Continue reading → Continue reading →

The New International Economic Order (NIEO) was a failure as a political program. Its proposals called for a sweeping transformation of the global economy, but most of them never came close to being implemented. In fact, during the following decades, the world economy evolved not toward the NIEO vision of multilateral oversight and income redistribution but in the opposite direction, toward a more purely marketbased approach that has variously been called globalization, neoliberalism, market fundamentalism, or the “Washington Consensus.” Why, then, study the NIEO? Scholars Continue reading → Continue reading →