State Rights against Private Capital: The “New International Economic Order” and the Struggle over Aid, Trade, and Foreign Investment, 1962–1981

Abstract

Starting in the 1960s, Third World countries organized at the United Nations to achieve full economic independence. The “New International Economic Order” (NIEO) movement drafted charters and declarations, which placed the right to control natural resource industries and foreign direct investment squarely in the hands of newly decolonized nation-states. During the 1973 oil crisis, NIEO influence peaked. When debt and conditional loans followed in the wake of 1973, the NIEO’s leverage was removed. Instead of state-based right claims, the 1970s generally saw the triumph of the “last utopia” of individual human rights. It was mirrored by the rise of another anti-statist utopia, neoliberalism.