Boston Review - October 2018

Evil Empire 35

and capital. The NIEO was, to use Gunnar Myrdal’s term, a “welfare
world” that would democratize global economic decision-making and
redistribute the gains of global trade. In the absence of a world state
armed with the coercive power of taxation, this international welfarism
sought to deploy the United Nations to regulate market prices of primary
commodities, provide compensatory financing when prices fell unex-
pectedly, remove protectionist barriers in the Global North, and provide
“special and preferential treatment” for the products postcolonial states
produced. UNCTAD justified this set of policy prescriptions by insisting
that the international community had “a clear responsibility towards
developing countries that have suffered a deterioration in their terms of
trade in the same way as Governments recognize a similar responsibility
towards their domestic primary producers.” This responsibility was not
framed as a rectification or reparation for past injustices of the global
economy. Instead, it was a claim that internationalizing the welfare
state was necessary for overcoming the structural inequality of global
trade—and thereby, for achieving a postimperial global economy. Just
as the workers’ movements of the Global North had, in their struggles
for unions and socialism, built democracy in Germany, Britain, France,
and the United States, so too would the states of the Global South, in
pursuing global economic equality, achieve a new world political order.
The welfare world of the NIEO marked the high point of anti-
colonial politics in the United Nations and indicated a sharp break with
the postwar status quo. If the right to self-determination had univer-
salized legal equality for postcolonial states, the NIEO radicalized
the meaning of sovereign equality. In the hands of postcolonial states,
sovereign equality now entailed equal decision-making power within
the United Nations. According to the Charter of Rights and Duties,
the juridical equality of all states and their equal status as members of
the international community granted them “the right to participate