Getachew
To overcome the dependence that structured international trade,
UNCTAD and the postcolonial statesmen who supported the NIEO
looked for lessons in the welfare states of the twentieth century. These
systems, constructed by the labor movements of industrialized societies,
were by the 1970s at the peak of their success in diminishing domestic
inequality. The assumption that an egalitarian global economy could
be modeled on the welfare state thus depended on viewing the position
of postcolonial states as structurally analogous to the working class
and rural sector within the states of the Global North. This analogy,
transposing from the domestic political economies of the Global North
to the political economy of the whole planet, shaped the politics of the
NIEO in two ways.
First, it framed Third World solidarity as an assertive class poli-
tics. As Manley noted, the postcolonial world “now proclaimed itself
the Third World to mark its transition from an age of apology to one
of assertiveness.” According to Julius Nyerere, president of Tanzania
and one of Manley’s collaborators, postcolonial states had constituted
themselves as an international “trade union of the poor.” The G-77 in
the UN General Assembly—as well as commodity associations modelled
on OPEC that would negotiate the price of products such as bauxite
and coffee—were manifestations of this trade unionism. Like the labor
movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, their demand
for economic equality was predicated on the view that the postcolonial
world had produced the wealth that the Global North enjoyed. In this
recasting of economic relations between the Global North and South,
the NIEO’s proponents reimagined the international arena as a site for
a politics of redistribution that extended far beyond the discourses of
aid and charity.
Second, the domestic analogy cast the postcolonial project as an
effort to internationalize the postwar social compact between labor