core of rich countries and a periphery of poor states: at the end of the
1970s, the North – 25 percent of the world population – received
80 percent of global income, while the South – 75 percent of the world
population – lived on the remaining 20 percent.^78
The left in no way denied that the postwar years had seen progress
in the struggle for international equality. First, decolonization had
allowed the peoples of the South to acquire political independence.
Furthermore, the self-affirmation of the Third World – fostered by
charismatic leaders such as Mao Zedong, Gamel Abder Nasser, Fidel
Castro, and Salvador Allende as well as institutions like the Non-
Aligned Movement and the G-77 – had created a momentum toward a
reform of the international order. World events had also made clear
that the status quo was not immutable. The Vietnam War, for instance,
demonstrated that a small, poorly equipped state could defeat a
superpower. The 1973 raising of oil prices by the Organization of the
Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was also seen as a turning
point, because for the first time a group of developing countries could
impose a major economic decision on the developed countries. Above
all, the postwar period had made possible the emergence of a body of
development law that directly challenged traditional international
law. The failure of the NIEO could not annul the fact that, out of a
convergence between progressives of the North and the South, a new
awareness of international economic disparities had arisen.^79
These advances, however, were not sufficient to mitigate what
Egyptian economist Samir Amin called “unequal development.”^80
Noting that the political sovereignty of Third World countries had not
brought about true economic sovereignty, scholars on the left pro-
posed a new interpretation of the postwar order, which came to be
known as dependency theory. While productivity and trade grew
among the rich countries, the theory stated, Third World commodity
exporters faced a steady deterioration of their terms of trade. Industrial
(^78) Independent Commission on International Development Issues,North–South,
79 p. 32.
Richard Falk,On Humane Governance: Towards a New Global Politics,
80 University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995, p. 28.
Samir Amin and Brian Pearce,Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social
Formations of Peripheral Capitalism, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1977.
See also Andre Gunder Frank, “The Development of Underdevelopment,”
Monthly Review, vol. 18, no. 4, 1966, 17–31.
The age of universality (1945–1980) 133