Evil Empire 33to the domestic projects of socialism Manley and other anti-colonial
nationalists were pursuing. How did such an ambitious effort—to create
an egalitarian global economy—emerge?
A decade prior to passage of the Declaration on the Establishment
of the NEIO and the Charter on Economic Rights and Duties of States,
the Afro-Asian bloc of states in the United Nations had come to recognize
a possible source of strength in their majority in the General Assembly.
They mobilized to create the United Nations Conference of Trade and
Development (UNCTAD). Unlike the World Bank and IMF, which were
created prior to the postwar surge of decolonization and empowered states
of the Global North, UNCTAD was organized as a forum to address
trade and development in the Global South. Despite the opposition of
the United States and its allies, Third World states used their majority to
place the Argentine economist and dependency theorist Raúl Prebisch
at the helm of this new agency. It was in UNCTAD, and then on the
floor of the UN General Assembly, that the policy prescriptions of the
NIEO were first articulated and backed by a group of Third World states
that had organized themselves under the name G-77. In its ambition to
transform international economic relations, the NIEO addressed critical
issues that included the ownership of resources in land, space, and the
seas; the growing power of transnational corporations; and the transpor-
tation of goods in an increasingly globalized commodity chain. At its core,
however, the NIEO was concerned with the unequal relations of trade
between the Global North and South. Proponents of the NIEO saw in
this inequality a distorted and damaging international division of labor,
one that, according to Manley, consistently relegated postcolonial states
to “the low end of the ‘value added’ scale.” Until something changed,
they would be condemned to serve as “planter and reaper,” economically
subservient to the Global North with its manufacturing economies, high
incomes, and domestic consumer markets.