A Charter for Economic Decolonization: Mexico, the Third World, and the Contradictions of South-South Development Cooperation

• In Event: 3442 - South-South Flows in Global Context

Abstract

With the rise of China and the halting progress of South-South formations such as ALBA and BRICS, scholars are increasingly deploying historical analysis to understand the possibilities and limits of South-South cooperation. If the debate, as laid out by Gray and Gills (2016), revolves around whether new South-South initiatives have the capacity and the will to transform the global economic system, a reconsideration of the historical record is instructive. In the 1970s, a remarkable effort at reforming the rules of the international economic order was pursued by countries throughout what was then referred to as the Third World, culminating in the passage at the UN of the declaration of a New International Economic Order (NIEO) and a Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States (CERDS). The NIEO has long been understood as a collection of impractical demands from radical, “cup-rattling Third World militants,” as one contemporary observer had it (Safire 1981). In fact, however, a closer archival reading of the NIEO moment reveals the complications and contradictions inherent in South-South negotiations, which involve trying to reconcile the sometimes-competing interests of semi-peripheral and peripheral states. This paper will argue that the heretofore ignored but crucial role in the NIEO negotiations of one semi-peripheral country — Mexico — reveals both the promise and peril of the reform of institutions of global governance.

This paper takes up Acharya’s (2016) focus on the emergence of crucial ideas about global governance from the South, but complicates his contention that the NIEO “caused a sharp North-South divide,” by examining Mexico’s attempts at reconciling the viewpoints of the First and Third worlds through the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States. (1158). While it is incontestable that such a divide emerged, the historical record reveals that Mexican experts, taking up a self-appointed leadership role in the Third World, recognized and attempted to mitigate that divide in the process of negotiating the CERDS.

Author

• Christy Thornton, Johns Hopkins University