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Stalemate in the North-South Debate: Strategies and the New International Economic Order

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Michael W. Doyle
Michael W. Doyle
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Abstract

A review of the recent literature reveals that during the 1970s there were three major positions in the North-South debate over the New International Economic Order (NIEO). Each represented a relatively coherent perspective on and strategy for reforming the international economy. The Structuralist position, advocating the NIEO, captured the allegiance of much of the South (the developing countries). The Functionalist position, supported by most of the governments of Northern capitalist societies, rejected the NIEO and sought to promote stable and dependable change through the specialized international agencies, such as the IMF, in which the North has considerable influence. A third position, with nongovernmental adherents from both North and South, urged Neofunctionalist reform directed toward global human rights, both civil and economic. Each of these perspectives represented a significant aspect of the actual condition of the international order, but none had the capacity to carry out its strategy. The result has been stalemate both in the negotiations for a NIEO and in the debate over the direction future international change should take.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , April 1983 , pp. 426 - 464
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1983

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References

1 For an extensive and illuminating survey of the theoretical foundations underlying the political economy of North-South relations, see Cox, Robert, “Ideologies and the New International Economic Order,” International Organization, XXXIII (Spring 1979)Google Scholar, and Hoffmann's, Stanley “Problems of Distributive Justice” (chap. 4 of Duties Beyond Borders [Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1981])Google Scholar, which critically examines the ethics of the North-South dialogue. In the following analysis, I gratefully draw on certain of the categories of the first and some of the practical arguments of the second; but my focus is on strategies and the perspectives on policy making they reflect.

2 Sabri-Abdalla is using World Bank statistics for 1977.

3 An exposition of the NIEO demands is UNCTAD Secretariat, “The Elements of the NIEO,” in Sauvant, Karl P. and Hasenpflug, Hajo, eds., The New International Economic Order (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1977), 39–62.Google Scholar The speeches made at the 11th Special Session are covered in U.N. Monthly Chronicle, XVII (November 1980).

4 Rose, Sanford, “Third World Commodity Power Is a Costly Illusion,” Fortune, Vol. 94 (November 1976), 146–50.Google Scholar

5 Olson, Mancur, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965, 1971), chap. 3.Google Scholar

6 Muskie, U.N. General Assembly, A/S-11/PV. 2, p. 51.

7 Ibid., 58–60; for a presentation of similar arguments by Richard Cooper, written before he joined the Carter Administration, see “A New International Economic Order for Mutual Gain,” Foreign Policy, No. 26 (Spring 1977).

8 U.S. Council of Environmental Quality and Department of State, The Global 2000 Report to the President, I: Entering the Twenty-First Century (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1980)Google Scholar, 1. U.S. Council on Environmental Quality and Department of State, Global Future: Time To Act (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1981)Google Scholar focuses on policy options, and describes U.S. concerns with the global environment under three headings: “serious moral concern” about extreme poverty, interest in averting the impact of environmental degradation on human health and welfare, and political and economic security (primarily the threat of political instability).

9 See, for example, Mitrany, David, A Working Peace System (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1966).Google Scholar

10 Leigh S. Ratiner, Deputy Chairman of the U.S. delegation to the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, made these points in his criticism of President Reagan's failure to sign what Ratiner believes to have been an acceptable compromise text. Ironically, his description of Reagan diplomacy at this conference closely resembles the criticisms made of Southern diplomacy by the Functionalists. Ratiner, , “The Law of the Sea: A Crossroads for American Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 60 (Summer 1982), 1006–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Krasner, Stephen, “Trade in Raw Materials: The Benefits of Capitalist Alliances,” in Kurth, James and Rosen, S., eds., Testing Theories of Economic Imperialism (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1974).Google Scholar

12 Helleiner, Gerald K., International Economic Discorder (London: Macmillan, 1980), 90Google Scholar; Vaitsos, Constantine V., Intercountry Income Distribution and Transnational Enterprises (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974)Google Scholar, chap. 4; UNCTAD, “The Marketing and Distribution System for Bananas, Report by the UNCTAD Secretariat” (TD/B/C.1/162); UNCTAD, “Dimensions of Corporate Marketing Structure: Fibres and Textiles; Study by the UNCTAD Secretariat” (TD/B/C.1/219). These UNCTAD studies should call further into question the South's advocacy of commodity price “strengthening”; whatever additional income might arise therefrom would most probably enrich the North's multinational corporations.

13 Helleiner (fn. 12), 32–34, 55. Conversely, the North's willingness to accept highly skilled Southern labor (e.g., physicians) may also harm the poor in the South.

14 Kindleberger, Charles P., The World in Depression (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Gilpin, Robert, U.S. Power and the Multinational Corporation (New York: Basic Books, 1975).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 See Haas, Ernst, Beyond the Nation State (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1968)Google Scholar, and Nye, Joseph Jr, Peace in Parts (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971).Google Scholar

16 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, A Lasting Peace Through the Federation of Europe, trans, by Vaughn, C. E. (London: Constable and Co., 1917), 101.Google Scholar

17 The Carter Administration did not appear to share this sanguine reading of the prospects for a deal with OPEC. Richard Cooper commented:

“When one contemplates in technical detail the requirements for maintaining, for example, a steady path of oil prices, there is first the question of what the path should be, and second, maintaining the agreed path. These are formidable challenges. One has only to think of our experience during the last 18 months in which the second largest oil exporter [Iran] of the world has had a revolution. How can OPEC countries insure the rest of the world against a repetition of that kind of event which was, as we know from 1979, a source of major disturbance in the world oil market?” (Hearings I, 135.)

Nor is it clear that the heaviest Southern debtors (the semi-industrialized countries) would gain from having to negotiate future loans with a single international organization heavily influenced by countries that represent so substantial a concentration of the supply of international finance. See Bacha, Edmar L. and Alejandro, Carlos Díaz, International Financial Intermediation: A Long and Tropical View (Princeton Essays in International Finance, No. 147, May 1982), 34.Google Scholar

18 Hansen, Roger, “North-South Policy—What is the Problem?” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 58 (Summer 1980), 1126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 See Haas (fn. 15).

20 Brecht, Bertolt, “Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters,” in Ein Lesebuch für unsere Zeit [A Primer for Our Time] (Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1965)Google Scholar, 4. This reference was pointed out to me by Robert Darnton.

21 Thucydides, , The Peloponnesian War (New York: Penguin, 1954)Google Scholar, Book III, chap. 2. A partial exception is Ambassador Daniel Moynihan's account of the 6th and 7th Special Sessions, but the political policy process he describes is not reflected in the contending literature reviewed here. See Moynihan, Daniel and Weaver, Suzanne, A Dangerous Place (New York: Berkley Publishers, 1980).Google Scholar

22 Ayres, Robert L., “Breaking the Bank,” Foreign Policy, No. 43 (Summer 1981), 104–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar, points out that the “Socialist-leaning” charge cannot be sustained by the Bank's record of loans.

23 Mackay-Smith, Anne, Wall Street Journal, commodities column, July 14, 1981.Google Scholar

24 A perspective which reflects a purely political analysis of the international relations between North and South can be found in Tucker, Robert, The Inequality of Nations (New York: Basic Books, 1977)Google Scholar and, with different conclusions, in Farer, Tom, “The United States and the Third World: A Basis for Accommodation,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 54 (October 1975).CrossRefGoogle Scholar This perspective does not appear to play a large role in the articulation of North-South strategies, even though it does help account for the stalemate (and I use it for criticisms of three strategies examined here). See also Ajami, Fouad, “The Global Logic of the Neoconservatives,” World Politics, XXX (April 1978), 450–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 This perception is likely to last as long as a large number of countries are in the international economic position Sabri-Abdalla describes. Should a significant number of populous, now “Southern” countries escape from those conditions, the old “South” could become politically unimportant. The North-South debate could then be dismissed by the North.