Epitaph for a monument to a failed protest? A North-South retrospective

Abstract

The great debate of the 1970s on the New International Economic Order (NIEO) seems to have ended with a conclusive defeat for the South. The South won some battles and shifted the terms of discussion on some issues (especially debt and the interdependence of trade and monetary issues), but it clearly lost the war, at least in terms of achieving its most important declared goals. There are many interpretations of why these results ensued but, in general, the South has continued to insist that failure to reach agreement on a new international economic order should be attributed to Northern selfishness and shortsightedness, and the North has continued to insist that failure should be attributed to misguided domestic policies in the South and badly flawed and excessively ambitious international policy proposals. Disagreements about how much reform the international order needs also persist, even though some Northern governments have recently and tentatively begun to consider substantial changes in existing regimes and institutions. Southern analysts and their liberal supporters in the North have argued that the international political and economic systems were unfair, that a power shift was occurring (manifested and accelerated by the OPEC phenomenon), that the North was incorrectly perceiving its own long-run interests, that the Third World had enough common interests to hang together during the transition, and that enough issues could be treated in a North-South