summit would serve as a launching pad for global negotiations on
international economic issues. The meeting, however, yielded only
results which observers judged “insubstantial and disappointing.”^63
No agreement was reached on the opening of global negotiations and,
more tellingly, the participants even rejected the idea of institution-
alizing their forum.
The road to the Cancu ́n Summit was already unpromising, with the
newly elected Ronald Reagan only reluctantly agreeing to participate.
The American president was on the whole more concerned with
domestic economic problems than international affairs and, to the
extent that he was interested in foreign affairs, East–West issues
remained in his view far more important than North–South questions.
In Cancu ́n, Reagan argued that through its trade and aid policies
the United States already contributed more than any other country to
Third World development, and he reaffirmed his confidence in the
market economy and in existing international economic institutions.
With the world’s foremost power taking such a stance, the summit
could hardly produce a program of substantial reforms.
Even the most optimistic, who, like Willy Brandt, maintained that
Cancu ́n had produced some new consensus, had to admit there was a
“setback” in North–South relations after the Summit.^64 The problem
was confirmed by the little attention paid to the second Brandt report,
published in 1983, and by the gradual disappearance of any allusion
to the new international economic order from the discourse of inter-
national institutions. In 1990, the South Commission – an independent
body created in 1987 to promote views from the South – complained
that North–South diplomacy had “virtually collapsed.”^65 The failure
of Cancu ́n had indeed been a turning point. It would take until 2002,
with the holding of the Monterrey Summit on development financing,
for such a high-level meeting to address again the problems of poor
nations in a “holistic manner.”^66
(^63) Charles A. Jones,The North–South Dialogue: A Brief History, New York,
64 St. Martin’s Press, 1983, p. 115.
Independent Commission on International Development Issues (chaired by
Willy Brandt),Common Crisis. North–South: Co-operation for World
65 Recovery, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1983, p. 4.
South Commission,The Challenge to the South: The Report of the South
Commission, Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 18.
(^66) Nitin Desai, “Preface,” in United Nations,Financing for Development:
Building on Monterrey, New York, United Nations, 2002, p. vii.
154 Left and Right in Global Politics