Socialist Globalization: Decolonization, Non-Aligned Economic Institutions, and the Debt Crisis

• In Event: 264 - Regular Session. Economic Globalization

Abstract

Much globalization scholarship focuses on the United States and other advanced industrialized capitalist countries as the primary globalizing agents. In spite of non-aligned and socialist countries’ historical claims to internationalism, scholars have often presented Third-World countries primarily as passive victims of globalization and socialist countries as autarkic and thus isolated from the rest of the world. If we examine economic globalization more closely and from the perspective of Third-World institutions, we can see that the Non-Aligned Movement and the Third World more broadly worked hard to create a global economy in the face of active resistance by the United States and other current and former colonial powers, which sought to maintain the economic status quo of the colonial system. In this paper, I examine the globalizing practices of one specific institution, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). UNCTAD, the Second World, and the Third World had to work concertedly to transform the colonial world economies into a global economy based on multilateral rules and horizontal relationships. UNCTAD and broader UN economists were inspired by neoclassical economic ideas of socialism to forge a socialist global economy. However, the debt crisis of the 1980s allowed the United States and other core countries to coopt and exploit the emergent global economy.

Author

• Johanna K. Bockman, George Mason University