Saturday, September 7, 2024

THE NEW INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ORDER a 50 Year Anniversary

Harry Targ

https://progressive.international/blueprint/collection/7e2256c4-1bb2-49a3-bf78-a3e0bc6160d2-new-international-economic-order/en

“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.

 

The Bookshelf

CHALLENGING LATE CAPITALISM by Harry R. Targ

Read Challenging Late Capitalism by Harry R. Targ.