The Mirage of NIEO: Reflections on a Third World Dystopia

Abstract

Even as the UN General Assembly adopted the ‘Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order’ (NIEO) at its sixth special session (2229th plenary meeting) on 1 May, 1974, and appended to it a ‘Programme of Action’, Mr. John Scali, then US representative at the UN, gave notice in the clearest possible terms that his government would not cooperate in the ‘unrealistic’ exercise. Mr. Scali, and Dr. Henry Kissinger later, were speaking, everyone knew, not only for the US but for the Western governments in general. The fate of NIEO (which, even the proponents knew very well, could not have materialized without the willing and unreserved cooperation, at the cost of whatever sacrifice it entailed, of the industrialized West) was thus sealed. All the numerous conferences, negotiations, dialogues, etc. held since have failed to unseal it. This paper argues that even if the programme of action had been implemented in its entirety, no new order would have been in sight and the problem of poverty in the Third World-which was made out by the spokesmen of the Third World elites to be the rationale behind the demand for NIEO - would have been accentuated, as it in fact has been. The benefits, questionable at best, that have accrued from aid, loans on easier terms, better terms of trade, transfer of technology, etc., have been absorbed by a thin top layer of elites in the Third World, encouraging, on the one hand, their indulgence in a wasteful consumerist lifestyle, and deepening, on the other, the misery of the vast majority and the degradation of the environment. The article presents an alternative concept of development, at once self-reliant and self-sustaining without damaging the life-support system, that would ensure sustainable improvement alike in the standard and quality of life, and social equity. Towards this end, the article proposes that a beginning in structural change must be made in the Third World societies themselves, for a secure new international order can grow only from a new domestic order.