Inchoate Aspirations for World Order Change

Abstract

What is the significance of the Special Session? What are the various parties likely to call for? What should their strategy be? What will this event lead to? These are the obvious questions that come to mind. Since the Southern countries, in particular, the nonaligned, have been the prime movers behind this Special Session, this essay will briefly tackle these questions from essentially a Southern point of view. The history of what passes for disarmament, particularly since World War II, clearly shows that the institutional framework, the goals set, the driving premises, the modalities of negotiation and the instruments arrived at, are the products -of superpower interaction. Of course, this situation reflects the postwar domination of the world in political, economic, and military terms by the superpowers and their allies. However, changes in the world order partially caused by the addition of independent developing countries, the emergence of China, the Vietnam conflict, and the growing economic/political significance of oil, have led correspondingly to shifts in the procedure and substance of nearly all multinational negotiations. Despite at times divergent interests, the Southern world (imbued with a sense of us and them principally using the mechanism of the Group of 77) has increasingly tried to harmonize a position on many political, social and economic issues. This harmonization, at first dismissed as rhetoric, originally focused on decolonization and international economics. But no matter how distasteful this process has been to the developed countries, it has led to a recognition of goals that differ substantially from the status quo characterized by great power dominance. It is generally recognized that the current platform of the Southern world will continue to be the demand for a New International Economic Order. The developed world has grudgingly come to the view that whatever the merits of this demand and the chances of its realization, the NIEO will provide the main arena for interaction, be it by dialogue or confrontation, between the developed and the developing world. Events since the United Nation's 6th Special Session's call for the NIEO have shown that in fact Southern demands have remained inchoate in implementation though not in formulation. Simply put, the South lacks the political and economic