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Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
-William Wordsworth, 1805
I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it.
-H.P. Lovecraft, 1917
What, exactly, was the New International Economic Order (NIEO)? Promulgated as a United Nations declaration in 1974 (reprinted as the frontispiece to this special issue of Humanity), the NIEO was the most widely discussed transnational governance reform initiative of the 1970s. Its fundamental objective was to transform the governance of the global economy to redirect more of the benefits of transnational integration toward "the developing nations "-thus completing the geopolitical process of decolonization and creating a democratic global order of truly sovereign states.
It was, in short, a proposal for a radically different future than the one we actually inhabit.
Viewed from our present conjuncture, the NIEO seems like an apparition, an improbable political creature that surfaced out of the economic and geopolitical dislocations and uncertainties of the early to mid-1970s, only to sink away again just as quickly. Appearing today as the figment of a now all but lost political imaginary, the NIEO sprang forth during a narrow and specific window of geopolitical opportunity, a "moment of disjunction and openness," when wildly divergent political possibilities appeared suddenly plausible.1 What made the NIEO remarkable was not so much the content of its program as the fact that political and economic leaders throughout both the postcolonial world and the industrial core of the global economy took seriously the possibility-the former mainly with Wordsworthian hope, the latter often with Lovecraftian horror-that they might be witnessing the downfall of the centuries-long hegemony of what was coming to be known simply as "the north." In contrast to the Thatcherite "There Is No Alternative" order that would soon emerge, the NIEO imagined and represented a dramatically "alternative" geopolitical future.2
Although the idea of a NIEO reverberated through the halls of power from Washington and New York to Algiers and Dar es Salaam throughout the late 1970s, it faded from view during the 1980s, replaced by discussions of structural adjustment programs, the Washington consensus, and the "end of history."3 By the late 1990s, few (in the north, at least) would have disagreed...