Book Description

"In April of 1974, during the sixth special session of the United Nations General Assembly,a coalition of 134 developing states introduced the Declaration for the Establishment of a NewInternational Order (NIEO). This agenda aimed to renegotiate the terms of international trade andlaw, fiscal policy, and development aid. The NIEO's proponents were unable to secure a moreequitable international economic order. Instead, key industrialized states in the North won keybattles in public international law and accorded unprecedented protection to internationalinvestment that dismantled the NIEO's primary drive of granting developing states' absolutesovereignty over their natural resources. Scholars studying the NIEO posit that that the agendachallenged the very foundations of the postwar liberal order. More recent literature also attributesthe failure of the NIEO to the success of the neoliberal agenda of the 1980s. This thesis asks, onwhat grounds did the NIEO challenge the postwar liberal order and what specifically links theNIEO to global neoliberalism?Careful primary text analysis of UN archival documents reveals that the NIEO recast thefundamental norm of sovereign equality by designing an international nationalization lawframework, by seeking the establishment of a UN Special Fund, and by aiming for the expansionof a generalized system of preferences for developing countries. Thus, a central claim of this thesisis that the NIEO contested the legal and economic foundations of the postwar order. Furtheranalysis of foreign policy communiqués and policy responses from the industrialized Global Northsuggests that developed countries countered the NIEO with a strategy of policy reformulation. Byemploying process-tracing, I chart how specific NIEO principles were reformulated by the Northto secure policy outcomes antithetical to the NIEO's original mission. These policy reformulationssubsequently facilitated the rise of global neoliberalism in the decades to come.Finally, by drawing from Antje Wiener's theory of contestation and practice theory'snotion of competency, I advance the concept of "competent contestation" to capture the theoreticalsignificance of the NIEO. In doing so, I suggest that contestation can be spatially, procedurally,and relationally competent"--