On the creation of a new international economic order: issue linkage and the Seventh Special Session of the UN General Assembly

1976 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-345 ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 233-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. H. Kirkpatrick ◽  
F. I. Nixson

The demands of the less developed countries (LDCs) for a fundamental reform of the economic, commercial and financial relationships between themselves and the rich, developed economies have dominated international affairs for the past three years. In April–May 1974, the sixth Special Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations called for the establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO) and similar appeals have been made on a large number of occasions since then. 1976 was marked by UNGTAD IV meeting in Nairobi, Kenya in May and the commencement of the deliberations of the Conference on International Economic Co-operation (the so-called North-South Conference) meeting in Paris, originally scheduled to end in December 1976, but reconvened for a final session at the end of May 1977


Author(s):  
Mai Taha

In Gillo Pontecorvo’s evocative film The Battle of Algiers (1966), viewers reach the conclusion that the fight against colonialism would not be fought at the UN General Assembly. Decolonization would take place through the organized resistance of colonized people. Still, the 1945 United Nations Charter and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights provided some legal basis, albeit tenuous, for self-determination. When Third World leaders assembled in the 1955 Bandung Conference, it became clear that the UN needed to shift gears on the question of decolonization. By 1960, and through a show of Asian and African votes at the General Assembly, the Declaration for the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples was adopted, effectively outlawing colonialism and affirming the right of all peoples to self-determination. Afro-Asian solidarity took a different form in the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, which founded the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The conference gathered leftist activists and leaders from across the Third World, who would later inspire radical movements and scholarship on decolonization and anticolonial socialism. This would also influence the adoption of the 1974 Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order and later lead to UNESCO’s series that starts with Mohammed Bedjaoui’s famous overture, Towards a New International Economic Order (1979; cited as Bedjaoui 1979 under the Decolonization “Moment”). This article situates this history within important international-law scholarship on decolonization. First, it introduces different approaches to decolonization and international law; namely, postcolonial, Marxist, feminist, and Indigenous approaches. Second, it highlights seminal texts on international law and the colonial encounter. Third, it focuses on scholarship that captures the spirit of the “decolonization moment” as a political and temporal rupture, but also as a continuity, addressing, fourth, decolonization and neocolonial practices. Finally, this article ends with some of the most important works on international law and settler colonialism in the 21st century.


1998 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 49-80
Author(s):  
Chulwoo Lee

This study reviews the initiative for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) and its implications in the discourse of international law. The NIEO enterprise, a product of the international political economy of the 1970s, has come to a stalemate. Yet international forums have continued to articulate many of its messages. In addition to its political and economic effects, the NIEO initiative has contributed to the development of jurisprudence and legal philosophy by stimulating a rethinking and elaboration of the notion of justice in international law and by rekindling the question of what law is in international law. This study canvasses how the NIEO enterprise has unfolded itself through various international forums, particularly the United Nations General Assembly, and the major issues raised in the NIEO-related resolutions, analyses the politico-ideological implications of various NIEO-related arguments, explores the debates on the nature and status of the NIEO principles in international law, and addresses the inherent conflict between the state-centred notion of the world order and the supranational, global approach which has straddled the NIEO discussions.


2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 627-635
Author(s):  
Arash Davari

Abstract This essay extends themes in Adom Getachew's Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (2019) by introducing Iran as a mediating element in Cold War worldmaking. It recovers the story of Pahlavi Iran's diplomatic efforts during the Sixth Special of the United Nation General Assembly, which resulted in the declaration of the New International Economic Order. Getachew's book provides a framework to interpret these diplomatic efforts with greater precision. The same framework explains the Islamic Republic's internationalist policies in the 1980s. Worldmaking after Empire is less equipped, however, to explain the popular revolution separating different modes of Iranian statecraft between the 1970s and 1980s. This observation reveals the limits of the book's methodological approach—namely, its overemphasis on elites and its overinvestment in exactitude. These limits invite a revised approach to writing histories of anticolonial worldmaking. An alternate approach focuses on statecraft (exactitude) and popular politics (inexactitude) at once, echoing the simultaneous affi rmation of nation building and worldmaking in Getachew's theory of decolonization.


1979 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard E. Bissell

Africa's rôle in the international economic order during the last five years has been changing, if in any direction, for the worse. The impact of African statesmen in the negotiations for a new order has been marginal, despite the symbolic presence of General Obasanjo from Nigeria at the Jamaica summit of January 1979. Yet in many quarters, these trends have not been recognised for the vital sign they are: symptoms of the weakness of African states in the creation of new institutions to govern our fragmented international economic system.


1991 ◽  
Vol 85 (1) ◽  
pp. 192-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russel Lawrence Barsh

A recently concluded special session of the General Assembly adopted, for the first time by consensus, a blueprint for the coordination of national and international economic policies. Carefully worded without any reference to the “New International Economic Order,” the session’s declaration nonetheless echoed the NIEO and its principal instrument, the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States, which provided: “States should co-operate in facilitating more rational and equitable international economic relations and in encouraging structural changes in the context of a balanced world economy in harmony with the needs and interests of all countries, especially developing countries, and should take appropriate measures to this end.”


Author(s):  
Edward McWhinney

The claims on behalf of a new international economic order and for the corresponding change in the basic structure of international law that such a postulated new order is thought to imply, are proclaimed, in programmatic form, in two resolutions adopted without vote by the United Nations General Assembly at its Sixth Special Session on May 1, 1974 — the Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order, and the so-called Programme of Action on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order; and in the further Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States, adopted by the General Assembly at its agth regular session on December 12, 1974, this time by a recorded vote of 120 to 6, with 10 abstentions.


Author(s):  
Christy Thornton

In December of 1974, Mexico’s president, Luis Echeverría, stood before the General Assembly of the United Nations to present the founding principles of what was to be a New International Economic Order, a project intended to address the economic crisis then wracking the Third World. The principles that the Mexican president imagined were codified a document that Echeverría had been drafting over the previous two years, the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States. This chapter traces this advocacy to discover the Mexican roots of the New International Economic Order, and in so doing demonstrates how Mexican diplomats, economists, and policymakers shaped not only ideas about sovereignty, self-determination, and economic development during the twentieth century, but also the codification of those ideas in international law, agreements, and institutions.


Author(s):  
Edward McWhinney

The movement on behalf of a new international economic order emerged in the early 1970’s and achieved an early, signal success with three great ventures in international lawmaking by the United Nations General Assembly in 1974 and 1975. These were the Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order, the Programme of Action on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order, and the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States. All three acts were adopted in the form of General Assembly resolutions, the first two by consensus and without formal vote, at the Sixth Special Session of the General Assembly. The Resolution on the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States, being pushed to a vote at the succeeding regular Annual Session, was adopted by 120 to 6, with 10 abstentions (with the United States, Great Britain, and West Germany among the negative votes, and France, Italy, Japan, and Canada among the abstentions).


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