Disinterring the NIEO

Revisiting the 50-year-old legacy can help reshape contemporary geopolitics

Fifty years ago, on May 1, 1974, the New International Economic Order (NIEO), expressed as a Declaration and Programme of Action, was passed without a vote at the Sixth Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). 

The NIEO was the most widely discussed transnational governance reform initiative of the 1970s. Its fundamental objective was to transform the governance of the global economy to redirect more of the benefits of transnational integration towards developing nations, thus completing the geopolitical process of decolonization and creating a democratic global order of truly sovereign states. In short, it was a proposal for a radically different future.

What made the NIEO remarkable was not so much the content of its programme as the possibility that the world might be witnessing the downfall of the centuries-long hegemony of the North. In contrast to the Thatcherite “There Is No Alternative” order that would soon emerge, the NIEO imagined and represented a dramatically “alternative” geopolitical future. In a special issue of Humanity (March 2015), which was dedicated to disinterring the NIEO and its moment, its contributors suggested that the NIEO was, among other things:

A bid to empower the UNGA as the legislative body for making binding international law;

The genealogical starting point for “the right to development”;

An effort to create a global regulatory framework for transnational corporations;

An extension of the principle of sovereignty from the political to the economic realm;

An incrementalist approach to reforming global economic and political power arrangements;

An endeavour to redress historical grievances of newly independent states, thereby “completing” decolonisation;

A call for global redistribution—including financial, resource, and technology transfer—from rich to poor countries;

The high noon of “Third Worldism” and its vision of solidarity among the poorer nations;

A radical challenge to the historic hegemony of the North Atlantic industrial core;

A realistic programme for global socialism;

A utopian political project, global and totalising in its ambitions; and

Globalisation as an alternative model for transnational economic integration.

Indeed, rather than see the NIEO as a failure, Humanity stated that it might be more helpful to see it as an example of what Jennifer Wenzel has called “un-failure.” Un-failure refers to the paradox that many seemingly failed political and social movements, even though they did not realise their ambitions in their own moment, often live on as prophetic visions, available as an idiom for future generations to articulate their own hopes and dreams. 

Although the historically specific institutional demands of the NIEO during the 1970s went unrealised, the undead spirit of the NIEO continues to haunt international relations.

The un-failed afterlife of the NIEO is perhaps most evident today in global climate change negotiations. For many key poor countries, the North/South geographic imaginary that gave life to the NIEO remains the dominant framing of the question of climate justice. 

The Global South has pursued a line of economic reasoning that strongly echoes the NIEO Declaration, arguing that because the North bears a historic responsibility for producing the vast majority of anthropogenic greenhouse gases currently in the atmosphere and the South still has a “Right to Development,” any fair climate treaty should be “nonreciprocal,” with binding responsibilities applying only to the North. 

Likewise, just as it did in the 1970s, the Global South insists that the North should transfer technology and provide aid as reparations for the damage caused by historic wrongs. In sum, the NIEO’s un-failed political imaginary of a more just and egalitarian global order lives on in contemporary climate negotiations.

From April 28 to May 1, 2024, Cuba hosted the 50th Anniversary Congress on the New International Economic Order. The Congress, co-convened by the Progressive International and the Asociación Nacional de Economistas y Contadores de Cuba, brought some of the world’s leading scholars, diplomats, and policymakers to Havana for three days of intense discussion, deliberation, and preparation of a Programme of Action to secure peace through sovereign development in the twenty-first century.

In its final declaration, the Congress noted that the current vision of the NIEO can only be realised through collective action from the South and the establishment of new and alternative institutions to share critical technology, address sovereign debt, boost development finance, and confront future pandemics together.

The 50th Anniversary Congress of the NIEO closed with a “roadmap for a Global South insurgency to remake the world system through new and alternative institutions of global governance for peace, prosperity, and planetary protection.” These proposals are to be developed into a renewed and detailed Programme of Action for the establishment of a NIEO ahead of the September 2024 UNGA.

(The writer is an honorary professor at Karnataka State Rural Development and Panchayat Raj University, Gadag)