Getachewthe vagaries of the international market. This contradiction between
the achievement of political sovereignty and the persistence of economic
dependence, famously captured in Kwame Nkrumah’s term neocolonialism,
was heightened as Manley inaugurated his socialist project. Already
beginning in the late 1960s, prices for primary products in international
markets experienced a precipitous decline. Coupled with OPEC’s 1973
oil embargo, which heavily burdened new postcolonial states dependent
on oil imports, the decline in commodity prices resulted in steep foreign
exchange shortages and exacerbated postcolonial states’ reliance on debt.
The end of this story is a familiar one. By the 1980s, unable to
service their debt, postcolonial states entered structural adjustment
agreements with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund
(IMF). While Mexico’s 1982 default is often viewed as the beginning of
this process, Manley’s Jamaica was the first victim of the Third World
debt crisis and began structural adjustment in 1977. Then in his second
term, Manley acceded to the terms of the IMF’s stabilization program,
which required a 30 percent devaluation of Jamaica’s currency; major cuts
in public expenditures, especially in the wages of public sector workers;
and the privatization of state assets. Long before Greece’s SYRIZA,
there was Manley and his PNP.although the 1970s ended with postcolonial capitulation to the new
age of neoliberal globalization, the decade had begun on a very different
note: with a radical call from the Global South for a New International
Economic Order (NIEO). Announced in the UN General Assembly
with the Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Eco-
nomic Order (1974) and the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties
of States (1974), the NIEO was conceived as the international corollary