Harry Targ
“The
Progressive International inaugurated a global process to build a New
International Economic Order fit for the twenty-first century at a multilateral
summit in midtown Manhattan in partnership with UN Permanent Representatives,
sitting and former ministers from eight governments across the Global South.
You can watch the proceedings.” (No. 49 | Build the New International Economic Order in
Havana).
The Third World Demands a New International Economic Order: History of an
Idea
The
brutal overthrow of the Allende government in Chile in 1973 was reminiscent of
traditional US. activities as world policeman. The impact of the coup on the
Chilean people in terms of economic justice and political freedom was negative
in the extreme. The bloody victory of counterrevolution in Chile and elsewhere,
however, came at a period in world history when the rise of Third World
resistance to U.S. imperialism was reducing the prospect of more Chiles in the
future.
By the
1970s, the worldwide resistance to U.S. and international capitalism was
growing. The revolutionary manifestation of this resistance was occurring in
Southeast Asia, Southern Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Middle East, and
Central America and the Caribbean. During the Nixon-Ford period, the United
States and its imperialist allies lost control of the Indochinese states,
Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau. South Yemen, Nicaragua, Iran, and
Grenada would follow later in the decade. The Rockefeller Foundation and
leaders of colonial powers and multinational corporations and banks formed the
Trilateral Commission in 1973 to strategize about how to crush rising dissent
in the Global South.
Along with
the rise of revolutionary victories and movements throughout the Third World, a
worldwide reformist movement began to take shape around demands for a New
International Economic Order (NIEO). Its predecessor, the. nonaligned movement
of the 1950s and 1960s, had been nurtured by leading anticolonial figures such
as Nasser of Egypt, Nkrumah of Ghana, and Nehru of India. Their goal was to
construct a bloc of Third World nations of all ideological hues which could
achieve political power and economic advantage by avoiding alliances and
political stances that might tie them to the United States or the former Soviet
Union. The nonaligned movement saw the interests of member nations tied to the
resolution of "north-south" issues, which in their view were of
greater importance than "east-west" issues.
After two
decades of experience with political independence from formal colonialism,
revolutionaries who believed that economic exploitation resulted from the
structure of the international capitalist system were joined by Third World
leaders who saw the need to reform international capitalism. Consequently, a
movement emerged, largely within UN agencies, such as the United Nations
Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), increasingly populated by Third
World nations, that addressed Third World poverty and underdevelopment (https://unctad.org). This movement presupposed the
possibility of reducing the suffering of Third World peoples without
necessarily bringing an end to capitalism as the internationally dominant mode
of production.
To counter
the declining Third World percentage of world trade, fluctuations in prices of
exported commodities, foreign corporate repatriation of profits earned in Third
World countries, technological dependence, growing international debt, and
deepening crises in the supply of food, Third World leaders were forced by
material conditions and revolutionary ferment to call for reforms. The
inspiration for a NIEO movement came also from the seeming success of OPEC
countries in gaining control of oil pricing and production decisions from
foreign corporations.
Two special
sessions of the General Assembly of the UN in 1974 and 1975 on the NIEO
"established the concept as a priority item of the international
community" (Laszlo, Ervin, Robert Baker, Jr., Elliott Eisenberg, and Raman
Venkata, The Objectives of the New International Economic
Order, New York, Pergamon, xvi). The NEIO became a short-hand reference for a
series of interrelated economic and political demands concerning issues that
required fundamental policy changes, particularly from wealthy nations. The
issue areas singled out for action included aid and assistance, international
trade and finance, industrialization, technology transfer, and business
practices.
Paradoxically,
while the NIEO demands were reformist in character and, if acted on, could
stave off revolutionary ferment (as did New Deal legislation in the United
States in the 1930s), the general position of the Nixon, Ford, and Carter
administrations on the NIEO were negative. European nations were more
responsive to selected demands, like stabilizing Third World commodity prices
and imports into Common Market countries, but the broad package of NIEO demands
continued to generate resistance from the wealthy nations, which benefited from
the current system. Nabudere correctly understood the interests of Third World
leaders in the NIEO when he wrote that:
"The
demands of the petty bourgeoisie of third world countries are not against
exploitation of the producing classes in their countries, but of the domination
of their class by monopoly. The demands therefore for reform—for more credit to
enable the petty bourgeois more room also to exploit their own labor and
extract a greater share of the surplus value. This is unachievable, for to do
so is to negate monopoly—which is an impossible task outside the class
struggle." (Nabudere, D.Wadada, Essays on the Theory and
Practice of Imperialism, London, Onys Press, 1979).
Therefore,
the NEIO, commodity cartels like OPEC, and other schemes for marginal
redistribution of the profits derived from the international economy would not
go beyond increasing the shares which Third World ruling classes received from
the ongoing economic system. But minimal benefits to workers and peasants would
accrue. Third World successes against monopoly capital, however, would serve to
weaken the hold the latter had on the international system. Ironically, while
opposing channeling Third World militancy in a reformist direction, such as the
NIEO, had the opposite effect of generating a new militancy among masses of
Third World peoples where it did not exist before. Those workers, peasants, and
intellectuals who gained consciousness of their plight in global structural
terms through their leaders' UN activities realized that NIEO demands were not
enough. It was feared that they would come to realize what Nabudere argued,
namely:
“But in
order to succeed, the struggles cannot be relegated to demands for change at
international bodies, mere verbal protests and parliamentary debates,
etc. Therefore, demands for a new economic order are made increasingly
impossible unless framed in the general context of a new democratic revolution;
the role of the working class and its allies is crucial to the achievement, in
any meaningful way, of a new international economic order.” (Nabudere,
D.Wadada, Essays on the Theory and Practice of Imperialism, London, Onys
Press, 1979.180).
And
now in the contexts of demands for reconceptualizing international relations
away from fissures between “great powers” to those between the rich of the
Global North and the poor of the Global South, the NIEO is being revisited in
the contexts of environmental catastrophe, grotesquely growing economic
inequality, massive migration, religious fundamentalism, and civil and hybrid
wars. Progressives in the Global North should support demands, though modest,
for an NIEO.
