The reviewers in this forum agree that Michael Franczak’s Global Inequality and American Foreign Policy in the 1970s is a “well researched” book that offers a “skillful synthesis,” as William Glen Gray puts it, of US approaches toward Third World efforts at global economic reform in the 1970s. Franczak’s analysis begins with the campaign for a New International Economic Order (NIEO), but is significantly more expansive, surveying what Gray calls the “kaleidoscopic tumble of acronyms” that marked UN initiatives in the 1970s. As Third World coalitions fought for international agreements to regulate the prices and distribution of food, energy, and technology in the context of the various ongoing crises of the 1970s, they forced the US foreign policy apparatus to shift its focus, as Dong Wang highlights, from an “East-West” understanding of the Cold War to one focused on what would come to be called the “North-South Dialogue.” One key contribution of this approach is that it “brings together US human rights and economic policies,” as Sarah B. Snyder points out, in a single historiographic frame. Thus, the book has much to offer historians of US foreign policy.
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Roundtable Review 15-23
Michael Franczak, Global Inequality and American Foreign Policy in the 1970s. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022.
15 January 2024 |PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt15-23 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo
Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editor: Seth Offenbach
Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Pre-Production Copy Editor: Bethany Keenan
Contents
Introduction by Christy Thornton, Johns Hopkins University. 2
Review by William Glenn Gray, Purdue University. 5
Review by Sarah B. Snyder, American University. 8
Review by Dong Wang, Lived Places Publishing, New York. 10
Response by Michael Franczak, International Peace Institute and University of Pennsylvania. 14
Introduction by Christy Thornton, Johns Hopkins University
The reviewers in this forum agree that Michael Franczak’s Global Inequality and American Foreign Policy in the 1970s is a “well researched” book that offers a “skillful synthesis,” as William Glen Gray puts it, of US approaches toward Third World efforts at global economic reform in the 1970s. Franczak’s analysis begins with the campaign for a New International Economic Order (NIEO), but is significantly more expansive, surveying what Gray calls the “kaleidoscopic tumble of acronyms” that marked UN initiatives in the 1970s. As Third World coalitions fought for international agreements to regulate the prices and distribution of food, energy, and technology in the context of the various ongoing crises of the 1970s, they forced the US foreign policy apparatus to shift its focus, as Dong Wang highlights, from an “East-West” understanding of the Cold War to one focused on what would come to be called the “North-South Dialogue.” One key contribution of this approach is that it “brings together US human rights and economic policies,” as Sarah B. Snyder points out, in a single historiographic frame. Thus, the book has much to offer historians of US foreign policy.
The question of how we should evaluate the long struggle for a New International Economic Order hangs over the reviews, and indeed, over the broader scholarship that has returned to the topic over the last few years. If the NIEO was regarded for decades as little more than an inconsequential failure, scholars have recently attempted to reconsider the moment, the movement, and the legacies it left. But these reconsiderations are fraught with normative implications, not least because of what Gray calls in his review the “vast gap in power and resources between the Global North and the Global South.” Was the NIEO a defeated attempt at a more egalitarian global future, a plan for social democracy on a planetary scale? Or was it a desperate attempt to codify the economic privileges of a few less-than-democratic Third World leaders, propped up by oil wealth? Was the fight for the NIEO the cause of the neoliberal onslaught that followed, as the Ronald Reagan revolution globalized a Washington Consensus on the need for austerity? Or did the coordinated interests of capital—in the form of the National Foreign Trade Council or the National Association of Manufacturers, to say nothing of the Geneva, Virginia, or Chicago schools of neoliberal thinkers—seize the opening created by the crises of the 1970s to lay the groundwork for a future in which capital’s prerogatives would be protected from democratic constraint, both locally and globally? In his review, Gray argues that Franczak “signals approval for those who favored cooperative positions” in the Third World, but he wonders if their alternative vision, what he calls a “world of resource cartels controlled by the Global South,” was preferable to the one we got—perhaps wading in, himself, to the normative quagmire through which scholars now slog.
One of the reasons that these normative ambiguities persist is that we still know relatively little about what the NIEO’s various proponents actually wanted, what they negotiated for, and where they were and were not willing to compromise. Despite the recent resurgence in scholarly interest, there are still few detailed country-specific studies of NIEO diplomacy from Global South perspectives. In some cases, archives that would provide such documentation are scarce, missing, or not yet open, leading scholars to continue to rely on UN documents and conference proceedings to recover Global South perspectives, as Franczak does. As I have argued elsewhere, however, such documents frequently reveal only the “front-stage” negotiations among parties, recording what is said from the dais in the General Assembly, for example, but leaving key “back-stage” discussions obscure.[1] The reviewers similarly take issue with a methodology that relies almost exclusively on documents produced in Washington and, to a lesser extent, New York; each reviewer highlights the actions of Algerian, Mexican, or Chinese leaders and diplomats, but does so to point out that these actors are not central to the book’s intervention. While recognizing, as Snyder does, the author’s extensive research in the Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter presidential libraries, Snyder and Gray both see the reliance on US state archives as a shortcoming of the book. Franczak argues in his response, however, that this source base is entirely appropriate for the book’s “limited mandate” of explaining how the US foreign policy apparatus reacted to the NIEO and exploring its legacies within that apparatus. Thus, Snyder’s contention that the book is “telling this story as it was perceived in Washington and elsewhere in the North,” is one with which Franczak largely agrees.
In sum, this forum can ultimately be read to contend that Franczak’s book should be considered as one vital piece in a larger scholarly endeavor of trying to understand the NIEO moment—an endeavor that will hopefully continue to be taken up by historians with language skills and country expertise across a wide range of Global South contexts. But by giving us a detailed blow-by-blow of Washington’s view, Global Inequality and American Foreign Policy in the 1970s provides a firm base on which to continue to build the necessarily collective effort at reconstructing a truly global history of this key moment of struggle.
Contributors:
Michael Franczak is a Research Fellow in the Division of Peace, Climate, and Sustainable Development at the International Peace Institute and a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.
Christy Thornton is Assistant Professor of Sociology and the co-chair of the Program in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Revolution in Development: Mexico and the Governance of the Global Economy (University of California Press, 2021).
William Glenn Gray is Associate Professor of History at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. He is the author most recently of Trading Power: West Germany’s Rise to Global Influence, 1963–1975 (Cambridge University Press, 2023). He has published numerous articles and book chapters on various aspects of German foreign relations history, including monetary policy, European integration, human rights, Ostpolitik, and the export of weapons and nuclear technology. In 2022 he co-edited volume 6 of the German Yearbook for Contemporary European History, which is dedicated to “Secret Services and the International Arms Trade.” His current book project involves a study of West German capitalism and Brazil’s development dictatorship during the Cold War.
Sarah B. Snyder teaches at American University’s School of International Service and is the author of two award-winning books, From Selma to Moscow: How Human Rights Activists Transformed U.S. Foreign Policy (Columbia University Press, 2018) and Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (Cambridge University Press, 2011). She is the executive editor, with Darren Dochuk, of Modern American History and founding editor, with Jay Sexton, of the Global America book series with Columbia University Press.
Dong Wang is collection editor of Asian Studies at Lived Places Publishing (New York), visiting professorial fellow at Free University Berlin, research associate at Harvard Fairbank Center (since 2002), a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, an elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, and vice chair of the Association for Asian Studies’ Editorial Board. Her single-authored books in English are: Tse Tsan Tai (1872–1938): An Australian-Cantonese Opinion Maker in British Hong Kong (Lived Places Publishing, 2023), The United States and China: A History from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Rowman & Littlefield, 2nd and rev. ed. 2021; 1st ed. in 2013), Longmen’s Stone Buddhas and Cultural Heritage: When Antiquity Met Modernity in China (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), Managing God’s Higher Learning: U.S.-China Cultural Encounter and Canton Christian College (Lingnan University), 1888–1952 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), and China’s Unequal Treaties: Narrating National History (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).
Review by William Glenn Gray, Purdue University
For scholars distressed by the seemingly omnipresent “neoliberalism” of the past several decades, the 1970s hold special interest. Social scientist David Harvey, for example, locates the historical origins of neoliberalism in the 1970s.[2] Non-Marxists, too, often depict the 1970s as a turning point in the history of global capitalism—a “shock of the global” that served as a precursor to the more thoroughgoing globalization of the 1980s and 1990s.[3] Might the structures of the world economy have evolved differently in the 1970s, and thus given less play to the Western powers and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and more agency to the countries of the Global South? In recent years, scholars have begun to revisit prominent alternatives such as the New International Economic Order (NIEO) or the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States, both proclaimed in 1974.[4]
Franczak frames his study of US policy more broadly than just the NIEO. To him, the underlying problem is the vast gap in power and resources between the Global North and the Global South; he considers how four US administrations—those of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan—responded to the strident demands of the Global South. His principal argument is that the challenge of “Third World solidarity” forced the United States to “defend, sometimes concede, but ultimately consolidate US hegemony over an international economic order that was under attack abroad and lacked support at home” (2). It is a strong claim about the salience of the North-South conflict for defining US positions on the global economy.
In offering an outline of the guiding philosophies and internal debates on North-South issues within the four administrations, the book is extremely useful. There is some material here about public pressure from Congress and the media, though more would have been welcome; the section on Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s antagonism toward “Third Worldism” at the United Nations is particularly vivid. Franczak documents a kind of learning process within each administration, as US positions were tempered by interaction with envoys from the Global South—only to be overturned by the succeeding presidential administration. Thus, we learn that President Jimmy Carter came to office with a clear set of priorities for Third World affairs, guided by the Overseas Development Council (ODC) and the Trilateral Commission; but ironically, these plans worked at cross purposes with initiatives previously undertaken by Henry Kissinger’s State Department in direct engagement with the unfolding “North-South dialogue” (114, 173). The book offers numerous examples of a pernicious dynamic in US foreign relations: opposition presidential candidates tend to misread the details of current foreign policy and then implement poorly calibrated policy revisions upon entering office.
Given the kaleidoscopic tumble of acronyms that marked the “North-South dialogue,” Franczak has done yeoman’s work in sorting out US positions at long-forgotten gatherings such as the UNCSTD (United Nations Conference on Science and Technology for Development) in 1979. Franczak also recalls the various futile initiatives put forward by Washington to sound constructive at North-South gatherings, such as Kissinger’s “international system of nationally-held grain reserves” (29) or Carter’s stillborn Institute for Scientific and Technical Cooperation (ISTC). The book lacks a well-developed conclusion (there is an “epilogue” instead), but it appears to explain US success in withstanding the pressure of the NIEO as follows: at every stage in the “dialogue,” key American players appeared just flexible and sympathetic enough to avoid universal condemnation—until Ronald Reagan stopped the charade altogether at the 1981 North-South Conference in Cancún.
Would the world have emerged in a better place if US policymakers had heeded the admonitions of Algeria’s Abdelaziz Bouteflika or Mexico’s Luis Echeverría and fostered a greater dispersal of political and economic power in the international system? Franczak does not offer overt counter-narrative prescriptions, but in characterizing internal US decisionmaking, the book signals approval for those who favored cooperative positions, and disapproval for those who advocated for US-centric options. For example, Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz emerges as a negative foil to Henry Kissinger by insisting on the expansion of US food production from “fencerow to fencerow” (25)—but did this crop expansion not play some role in abating the world food crisis?[5] As Franczak amply demonstrates, US policy was herky-jerky and sometimes completely incoherent. But that is no reason to assume that the solutions of Third World leaders were preferable.
The book’s chief limitation is its exclusive reliance on US sources. The voices of the Global South are heard, but only as refracted through US bureaucracies. To be sure, a truly global perspective is impossible to achieve on linguistic grounds, and also because of limitations on the availability of archival sources. But there are ways to triangulate. British sources are extremely well-organized and have been declassified at a brisk pace.[6] The World Bank and IMF also present outside views, however biased in their own right; at the very least, one might consult independently culled statistics for impressions of the state of the world economy. None of these techniques can really compensate for the absence of foreign-languages sources, but they at least help to loosen the North American mental cage.
As things stand, virtually every detail in Franczak’s book derives from a desk in Washington.[7] There is no stand-alone assessment of the NIEO agenda. Was a world of resource cartels controlled by the Global South ever remotely feasible, given the bounteous mineral resources of the United States, Canada, and Australia? How did the world’s poor and middle-income countries expect to attract greater foreign investment while identifying absolute national sovereignty as their most sacred value? What leverage did the UN majority actually have to insist upon, say, technology transfer and the voluntary surrender of patents? Franczak flags examples of US protectionism in the 1970s, which was indeed growing more pronounced (123), yet he has little to say about the high tariff barriers across Latin America that doomed any prospect of regional economic integration. Nor does he interrogate the priorities of Third World governments, which were overwhelmingly nondemocratic regimes pursuing policies that benefited local elites rather than the population at large. Franczak’s book might best be read alongside Christy Thornton’s marvelous study Revolution in Development, which displays a keen sense for the ambivalence of Mexican policy in international financial institutions.[8]
If the NIEO project was riddled with internal contradictions and fundamentally unrealizable, Franczak is nevertheless right to take the “North-South dialogue” seriously as a historical process with long-term consequences. A decade of wrangling over the global economy might well have reinforced the position of neoliberal voices in Washington, as Franczak suggests, culminating in the market-oriented globalization of the Reagan years (though the precise link between the failure of the NIEO and the triumph of globalization is not drawn to this reviewer’s satisfaction). One can anticipate that other scholars will build on Franczak’s work to consider other historical outcomes of the “dialogue.” To what extent did the entire NIEO operation—as conceived by Bouteflika—serve as a shield to protect sovereign oil revenues from critique by the non-oil-producing states in the Global South? Might the NIEO in that sense have reinforced global inequality, contributing to the obscene spectacles of wealth that mark the Gulf monarchies today?
Given the immense complexity of the subject matter, a certain number of minor factual slips are inevitable. This book has its share. Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz did not serve as president of Purdue University (23); the European Development Fund was administered by the European Economic Community in Brussels, and not the Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (39); Britain exited, not entered, the European Free Trade Area in 1973 (42); it is anachronistic to suggest that the 1947 Rio Pact was based on Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (121); Jimmy Carter did not tour Brazil, Nigeria, India, Iran, and Venezuela all in the span of September 1977 (159). None of these small mistakes affect the book’s overall argument, however, and in many respects they reflect the challenges of adequate peer review and proofreading for a subject as wide-spanning as Franczak’s.
Review by Sarah B. Snyder, American University
Michael Franczak’s new book, Global Inequality and American Foreign Policy in the 1970s, engages with some of the most pressing issues of our time: human rights and income inequality. His work is relatively unique in two ways. First, it continues the analysis by US foreign relations scholars of human rights as a policy priority, although in the context of efforts to bridge the North-South divide rather than in the Cold War or East-West context. Second, it brings together US human rights and economic policies, which very few previous works have done.[9]
Franczak’s research elevates and gives sustained attention to the New International Economic Order (NIEO), an agenda to rebalance economic and political power between North and South. He explores the challenge the NIEO posed to US international leadership and the steps US leaders and others took to blunt its appeal. He argues, “Although US foreign policy did not change the NIEO’s character, the NIEO changed the character of US foreign policy” (3).
Much of Franczak’s account reveals debates within American administrations, such as those of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, as well as between them, say in the very different approach that Ronald Reagan’s team took to these issues than Jimmy Carter’s had. Carter, along with his National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, emphasized a “basic human needs” approach as the guiding force for US development policy (147-74). At the heart of these new conceptions of development and needs was a decision to focus on the individual rather than state level. Such an approach struck many on Carter’s team as the most equitable way to address global inequality, but did not assuage southern governments dissatisfied with imbalances between states in the international economic system.
Franczak shows that in the minds of many US officials, the food and energy crises of the 1970s were inextricably linked. He recounts the inner workings of many international meetings intended to address these myriad challenges. For the United States, addressing them offered a “NIEO containment strategy” (35). Franczak shows how the NIEO proposal complicated not only US relations with the global South but also transatlantic relations, which were ultimately strengthened as the challenge from the South solidified the West.
As the Carter administration tried to do, Franczak has connected two of the most significant themes of interest to historians of US foreign relations in recent decades: development and human rights. His evaluation of the Carter administration as making “an attempt to transcend the postwar Cold War framework for US foreign policy” is in line with previous accounts of Carter-centered scholarship.[10] He contextualizes this analysis effectively by showing the evolution of US policy and how these efforts were squandered in the Reagan years. Franczak effectively uses the concepts of negative and positive rights to show how conceptions of economic rights were transformed in by Reaganites from a right to education, shelter, education, and sustenance to the right to be free from government intervention in economic matters. Economically, Franczak shows the economic effects of the NIEO’s demise in terms of the global South’s “lost decade of development” (188). Within American politics, he demonstrates how efforts to sink the global South’s economic agenda facilitated the movement of neoliberals and neoconservatives from “the fringes of foreign policy” to its dominant forces (190).
National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and US Ambassador to the United Nations Daniel Patrick Moynihan are key actors in Franczak’s first three chapters. The two had a complicated relationship; and in the space opened up by Ford’s assumption of the presidency, they often competed to shape US foreign policy. In Franczak’s telling, Kissinger comes off as less combative than Moynihan and more accommodating rhetorically whereas Moynihan saw the Third World’s agenda as a serious threat to a US-led world order. Kissinger, in contrast, was willing to both talk about human rights and acknowledge different types of rights that held significance in newly independent countries. In contrast to many scholars who work on human rights, Franczak argues that in this instance “Kissinger’s unwillingness to inject morality into foreign policy was an asset” (11).[11]
In an account focused on states and institutions, Kissinger, Moynihan, and University of Notre Dame president Theodore Hesburgh are three of the most developed figures. They are effective ideological foils and reveal much about the debates at the center of Franczak’s book. Other individuals received such sustained attention to their biographies, ideas, and actions.
In some respects, Franczak makes claims to be conveying a southern perspective on the international economy. Yet he does so by relying on northern, specifically American and English-language, records. He conducted extensive research in the Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter presidential libraries (6, 191-3). Thus, he is telling this story as it was perceived in Washington and elsewhere in the North. This methodological approach sidelines the voices of these who experienced or worked against global inequality. In the chapters on US relations with Latin American and African countries, the voices of non-northern leaders are mostly missing. In his epilogue, Franczak writes thoughtfully about the limits of the global South as a grouping, but he could have done more in his analysis to disaggregate a unit which, as much as it existed, was made up of distinct and diverse entities. Even with a focus on northern sources and actors, the book would have been improved had we heard from global inequality activists’ allies in the North.
Review by Dong Wang, Lived Places Publishing, New York
Dr. Michael Franczak’s book is a well-researched account of how the United States wrangled with the new scope of action of the Third World countries that gained momentum through coordinating their interests in the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in the 1970s. This rise of a New International Economic Order (NIEO) challenged America’s economic dominance. It forced US foreign policymakers not only to deal with unprecedented and extremely complex exigencies like the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC, founded 1960)[12] oil crisis of 1970, but also to compete with the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), in order to rally support—for instance, in the form of the UN votes and security block allegiance in the fight against communism—from some of the poorest countries in the world.[13] To put this in highly simplified terms, one famous/infamous example is the UN Resolution 2758, where the United States and the Republic of China (ROC) were “defeated” because seventy-six countries, including Britain and France (vs. thirty-five nation-states in support of the US and ROC interests) voted to give the PRC the hugely important permanent UN Security Council China seat in 1971. African states played a decisive role in making that happen.[14]
Political agendas and mind frames accordingly began to shift from exclusive East-West to also encompass North-South dichotomies. The book pioneers a skillful synthesis of the evolving events and ideas in the exchanges of American top decision makers with a pantheon of global leaders during the 1970s, and the way in which the United States sought to shape and influence various global agendas, processes, and forums that waxed and waned as the decade went on.
An intelligent chronicle that is strong in describing top politicians’ rather one-dimensional preoccupations, Global Inequality and American Foreign Policy in the 1970s brings together many viewpoints and protagonists in sharp profiles. It offers an important insight into a crucial, yet understudied, period of contemporary history.[15] Chapter 1 starts off with the May 1974 proposal put forth to the UN General Assembly by a diverse coalition of developing countries, including Algeria, Tanzania, etc., for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) and wealth redistribution, especially through controlling oil prices. Together with Earl Lauer Butz, the Secretary of Agriculture, and other officials, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made counter-efforts to use “food as a foreign policy tool,” since it was, in his words, “one of the few weapons” (22) against the Arab oil producing countries, all of which were large importers of American grain at the time, in terms of US domestic food policy and at international arenas including the 1974 World Food Conference in Rome, Italy.
Chapter 2 turns to Kissinger’s strategies for stronger transatlantic relations to align Europe with the United States in order to deal with the challenge from OPEC and oil-importing developing countries. At the same time, the European Commission leader, Sicco Mansholt, was determined to “use his role as EC president to reposition Europe’s North-South policy as progressive, united, and distinct from that of the United States” (43). Meanwhile, as is shown in chapter 3, the politics of inequality was evident at the US decisionmaking level, as manifested by the open denunciation by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the US Ambassador to the UN, of Kissinger for not standing up for human rights in foreign policy, as well as of leaders of developing countries, especially in Africa, for their poor records on human rights.
Chapter 4 focuses on President Jimmy Carter’s adoption of social egalitarianism, economic rights, basic human needs, and world-order liberalism to open up new possibilities in America’s engagement with developing countries. This line of rethinking was implemented particularly in the US relationship with Latin America, where human rights, democracy, debt, and development intersected. These evolutions and continuities in US foreign policy are discussed in chapter 5, on the policies of the Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations on the economic demands of developing countries at the UN Conference on Trade and Development, the UN General Assembly’s new forum to address development issues from the Third World perspectives that was led by Mexican president Luis Echeverría.
Chapter 6 explains the failed attempts made by Carter, his National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to “revamp” America’s global responsibilities and “redirect aid away from large-scale development projects and toward antipoverty programs [more within nations than between nations in developing countries], and setting up a world hunger initiative that declared US policy to be a ‘basic minimum level of health, nutrition, and family planning services’” (147-148). Chapter 7 examines the Reagan revolution and triumphalism that disbanded the Global South coalition of 1974–1982, temporarily.
It may still seem too close to the events for a much deeper conclusion that Franczak hints at in the epilogue: the neo-liberal globalization fall-out from the 1980s onwards. What today stirs the curiosity of scholars of globalization about the 1970s is not the Nixon-Ford-Carter era eo ipso, but the way in which it fueled the heady cocktail of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism, the clash of civilizations, and the continued global inequality that later turned the world upside down. A more useful explanatory approach to the period would have taken the “global inequality” in the title and the epilogue as a focused point of investigation and explained the dynamics of the 1970s and early 1980s. For example, during the 1970s, the East-West confrontation of the Cold War masked the underlying global tectonic tensions in the economy, technologies (institutionalized in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, and PRC’s quasi-autarchy), demographic growth, and global division of labor.[16]
In a similar vein, the rapprochement between the United States and the PRC at the outset of the decade is briefly mentioned, even though it gave strength to the New International Economic Order (NIEO) agendas and to the PRC’s old and restated claim in the 1970s to lead the Third World. For more than a decade, the strong economic challenge from Japan and the palpable rise of Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan were valued exclusively in the Cold War and not in liberal economic terms; nonetheless, they heralded the PRC’s export processing bonanza that began in the 1980s and surged in the 1990s under the neo-liberal regime.[17] Franczak’s book prompts many reflections on why the protagonists could not fathom the consequences of their decisions.
The narrative at times gives the impression that the NIEO served as a framing device for policymaking that was used by statesmen, diplomats, and their academic advisors; that it was a mirage, or a journalistic shorthand. This vagueness of the book’s core conception is not resolved, and given its unclear provenance, suitability, internal coherence, and evolving use by key protagonists, the conclusion that “perception is reality” seems to be a stretch.[18] It is not clear that that “perception” was a real reflection of historical realities.
Instead of offering a comprehensive examination of the reasoning and motivations of important policymakers over time, the book outlines their hazy ideas and reactive measures to remedy the unexpected outcomes of past decisions. Global Inequality and American Foreign Policy in the 1970s can be appreciated when viewed from the perspectives of international politics, the international political economy, and the history of international institutions. But the book’s lack of a discussion of the driving forces behind economic growth, inequality, and global economic development during the 1970s hinders it.
Somewhat surprisingly, the book does not engage with Thomas Piketty’s work on world inequality alongside debates in recent decades of the “nation state” as a “container” that blurs global perceptions of inequality.[19] Applied retrospectively to the 1970s, current thinking can, by force of counterfactual inquiry, add depth to an understanding of the changes in American foreign policy from the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to those of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan. We know today that the agency of Global South, labor migration, offshoring of production (supply chains and overseas investments), technological development, the thriving of global corporations and cosmopolitan elites, as well as demographic growth/change are important drivers of global and domestic inequality.[20] To what extent were these underlying factors, which were perhaps not clearly understood at the time, relevant to the 1970s? How has the PRC reinvented the rhetorical toolbox and the “weaponry” of population and economic power including currency, foreign aid, raw material, and new technology to carry on the fight against the “Global North”?
On balance, Franczak should be commended for this detailed account that is useful for students of American foreign policy to mull over and further our understanding of development, diplomacy, and human rights.
Response by Michael Franczak, International Peace Institute and University of Pennsylvania
I would first like to thank William Glenn Gray, Sarah Snyder, and Dong Wang for their detailed and thoughtful engagement with Global Inequality, and Seth Offenbach, Diane Labrosse, and the H-Diplo team for making this roundtable possible. I’ve been an H-Diplo reader and review contributor since my first year in graduate school, so it is a special honor to have my book reviewed here, and by three distinguished and distinguishing reviewers.
William Gray finds the book useful as “an outline of the guiding philosophies and internal debates on North-South issues” across the Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan administrations, which was one simple but important objective of the book. I think he also captures well my final judgement on the United States’ performance in North-South forums, which was (and in many ways continues to be) to “appear just flexible and sympathetic enough to avoid universal condemnation,” though I also stress in the book the critical role of ideology, whether Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s pro-Atlantic realism or Carter’s liberal internationalism.
At the same time, Gray finds the book’s “chief limitation” is its “exclusive reliance on US sources,” in contrast to other works that have focused on the New International Economic Order’s (NIEO) Third World proponents. For example, Gray cites Christy Thornton’s treatment of the NIEO in her excellent book on Mexico and global economic governance,[21] and I would add to the list Giuliano Garavini’s pathbreaking history of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).[22] Sarah Snyder, too, notes in her review the relative lack of Southern leaders’ voices.
This is indeed a limitation of my book, but an admitted one. While I agree that the book would have benefitted from serious research into non-US and non-United Nations archives, I did set out a more limited mandate in the introduction. I aimed to answer “two basic questions”: how US foreign policymakers responded to the NIEO and the legacy of the NIEO in US foreign policy (3). As Snyder notes on this matter, “[Franczak] is telling the story (of the NIEO) as it was perceived in Washington.” To put it another way, it is a study of how Washington’s “official mind” perceived, engaged with, and ultimately defeated the NIEO.
In her review, Dong Wang suggests that the book is vague on what the NIEO actually is, and instead suggests that for statesmen, diplomats and others, the NIEO was more of a “framing device” than policy proposal. I think this is an important insight, and one I wish I had made myself. In fact, this is exactly what the NIEO became for US policymakers. What began in 1974 as a laundry list of demands at the United Nations General Assembly, one which was important because of OPEC’s leadership, became for US administrations a vital heuristic for understanding the 1970s, a time when the political and economic balances struck after World War II had come undone.
This does not mean that the book does not contribute to our understanding of developing countries’ advocacy for the NIEO. Another way Global Inequality distinguishes itself from other works on the NIEO is by telling the (American) side of the story through the negotiations. The major North-South negotiations that the book covers include the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) III (1972), the UN Sixth Special Session and World Food Conference (1974), the Seventh Special Session (1975), the Conference on International Economic Cooperation (1975–1977), UNCTAD IV (1976), UNCTAD V and the UN Conference on Science and Technology for Development (1979), and the Cancun Summit (1981), as well as various UN General Assemblies, OPEC summits, and pre-UNCTAD Group of 77 preparatory meetings, in which the developing countries’ perspectives are discussed and group positions are formed. Thus, Global South technocrats like UNCTAD Secretary-Generals Manuel Perez-Guerrero (1969–1974) and Gamani Corea (1974–1984) take their place in the story alongside Kissinger and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Finally, Wang notes that the book does not engage with Thomas Piketty’s work on global inequality in the epilogue. I instead chose to engage with the work of Branko Milanovic, another economist and scholar of global inequality. In my discussion of trends in global economic inequality since the 1980s, I quote extensively from Milanovic’s influential 2018 and 2020 books.[23] For the American context, which is the focus of the other half of the epilogue, I draw on the work of economist (and Piketty collaborator) Emmauel Saez.[24] All of this is to say that I believe the book delivered on each half of its title.
[1] Christy Thornton, “Developmentalism as Internationalism: Toward a Global Historical Sociology of the Origins of the Development Project,” Sociology of Development 9:1 (2023), 33–55.
[2] David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
[3] Niall Ferguson, Charles Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel Sargent, eds., The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).
[4] See Nils Gilman, “The New International Economic Order: An Introduction,” Humanity 6:1 (Spring 2015), https://humanityjournal.org/issue6-1/the-new-international-economic-order-a-reintroduction/, which opens an entire issue devoted to the NIEO. As of yet there is no single-volume international history of the NIEO. Atom Getachew dedicates a chapter to the topic in Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019); and the NIEO also features prominently in Giuliano Garavini, The Rise and Fall of OPEC in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). A conference dedicated to considering the “lessons and legacies” of the NIEO will convene in Venice in May 2024; see https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/12499025/cfp-new-international-economic-order-lessons-and-legacies-50.
[5] While arguing along similar lines as Franczak, Bryan McDonald acknowledges that good harvests in 1973 and 1974 “helped to alleviate some of the immediate concerns about food deficiencies.” McDonald, Food Power: The Rise and Fall of the Postwar American Food System (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 182.
[6] One can hope that Canadian sources will also one day be routinely declassified and available to scholars of U.S. foreign relations. Tim Sayle’s “Canada Declassified” blog represents a significant effort to promote change in Ottawa; see https://timsayle.substack.com.
[7] One welcome exception is the papers of the University of Notre Dame’s president, Theodore Hesburgh, a key Carter advisor on development aid questions.
[8] Christy Thornton, Revolution in Development: Mexico and the Governance of the Global Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021).
[9] Among the small number of exceptions are Daniel Sargent, A Superpower Transformed (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014) and Courtney Hercus, The Struggle over Human Rights: The Non-Aligned Movement, Jimmy Carter, and Neoliberalism (London: Lexington Books, 2019).
[10] See, for example, Vanessa Walker, Latin America and the Politics of U.S. Human Rights Diplomacy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020); and William Michael Schmidli, The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere: Human Rights and U.S. Cold War Policy toward Argentina (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013).
[11] For a different approach to Kissinger and morality, see Barbara J. Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s (Cambridge: Harvard University Pres, 2014); Kathryn Sikkink, Mixed Signals: U.S. Human Rights Policy and Latin America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); and Sarah B. Snyder, From Selma to Moscow: How Human Rights Activists Transformed U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
[12] OPEC was founded in September 1960 by the Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela at the time, and is now headquartered in Vienna, Austria since 1965.
[13] The North-South dichotomy as perceived during the 1960s and 1970s was synthesized in the landmark Brandt Report of 1980: Willy Brandt, North-South: A Programme for Survival: Report of the Independent Commission on International Development Issues (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980). See also Edward Heath, “North-South: A Programme for Survival,” The Geographical Journal 147:3 (1981): 298-306. For a “critical studies” overview, see, for instance, Anne Garland Mahler, “Global South,” in Eugene O’Brien, ed., Oxford Bibliographies in Literary and Critical Theory (database), 2017, https://globalsouthstudies.as.virginia.edu/printpdf/191, and https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780190221911/obo-9780190221911-0055.xml (both accessed on July 7, 2023).
[14] For some carefully written details, see Dong Wang, The United States and China: A History from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2nd and rev. ed. 2021; 1st ed. in 2013), pp. 213-216, chs. 7 and 9.
[15] Thomas Borstelmann, The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (Princeton, NJ: Princetop University Press, 2013). Kenneth Iversen, “Reflection on Development Policy in the 1970s and 1980s,” 2017 UN-DESA Policy Brief #53, https://www.un.org/development/desa/dpad/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/publication/WESS2017-PB53.pdf (accessed on July 9, 2023).
[16] Gregg A. Brazinsky, Winning the Third World: Sino-American Rivalry during the Cold War (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Jason C. Parker, Hearts, Minds, Voices: US Cold War Public Diplomacy and the Formation of the Third World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War in the Third World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge university Press, 2005); Paul A. Cammack, Capitalism and Democracy in the Third World: A Critique of the Doctrine of Political Development (London: Leicester University Press, 1997).
[17] Wolfgang Streeck and Kōzō Yamamura, The Origins of Nonliberal Capitalism: Germany and Japan in Comparison (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005); Yongping Wu, A Political Explanation of Economic Growth: State Survival Bureaucratic Politics and Private Enterprises in the Making of Taiwan’s Economy, 1950-1985 (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005); Hayter Roger and David W. Edgington, “Flying Geese in Asia: The Impacts of Japanese MNCs as a Source of Industrial Learning,” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 95:1 (February 2004): 3-26; Justin Yifu Lin, “From Flying Geese to Leading Dragons: New Opportunities and Strategies for Structural Transformation in Developing Countries,” Global Policy 3:4 (November 2012): 397-409.
[18] The whole sentence reads: “US policymakers had an obvious interest in defeating the NIEO, or at least rendering it toothless, but perception is reality, and the perception up until 1982 was that a breakdown in the dialogue could sabotage the West’s fragile post-1973 economic recovery.” (2)
[19] Thomas Piketty, Une brève histoire de l’égalité (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2021); Capital et idéologie (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2019). Also see the “national container fallacy” argument made by Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller, in their “Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-state Building, Migration and the Social Sciences,” Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs 4:2 (October 2002): 301-334; Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, “Global Generations and the Trap of Methodological Nationalism. For a Cosmopolitan Turn in the Sociology of Youth and Generation,” European Sociological Review 25:1 (February 2009): 25-36.
[20] Thomas Burnham, “Supping with Long Spoon in the Indian Ocean: The Negotiation of the 1972 Agreement on Economic and Technical Cooperation between Mauritius and the People’s Republic of China,” Cold War History 22:3 (2022): 245-63. Theodor Tudoroiu and Dr. Anna Kuteleva, eds., China in the Global South: Impact and Perceptions (Hamburg: Springer, 2022). Also listen to Dong Wang’s nearly 60-minute interview with Dr. Tudoroiu and Dr. Kuteleva published on May 13, 2023, at https://newbooksnetwork.com/china-in-the-global-south.
[21] Christy Thornton, Revolution in Development: Mexico and the Governance of the Global Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021).
[22] Giuliano Garavini, The Rise and Fall of OPEC in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
[23] Branko Milanovic, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Cambridge: Harvard/Belknap, 2018) and Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World (Cambridge: Harvard/Belknap, 2020).
[24] Emmanuel Saez, “Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States” (Updated with 2018 estimates), https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2018.pdf.