New International Economic Order

They often expropriated Western assets on their own territories.

And one of the major impulses behind the neoliberal revolution, which was a reassertion of international law, was the attempt by third world countries using their numerical advantage in the UN to introduce a new international economic order, so-called the NIEO, which would throw out some of the fundamental concepts of Western international law.

And so that's when the US, using debt as a lever, countered with the Washington Consensus.

It reasserted the supremacy of international capital and property rights and everything, and created all kinds of new systems for corporations and shareholders to discipline states.

It has always been technocracy.

The movement that started in the 1930s, reintroduced by the Trilateral Commission in 1973 as the New International Economic Order, technocrats have staged a sweeping coup d'état in plain sight in Washington, D.C. during the Trump presidency.

The Dark Enlightenment wants to turn us into a monarchy.

Tokenization is flipping us into an asset-based economy system where you will own nothing.

Asante explained that, so long as it remains primarily preoccupied with the protection of foreign investment against the legitimate sovereign interests of the host state, international investment law would be perceived as inequitable by formerly colonized nations.

Georges Abyssab, another member of the network of Third World lawyers who were challenging the idea that the international legal system is universal and legitimate, and that new states should simply be born into that Western imperial legal system, ended up drafting the UN General Assembly's analytical study on the new international economic order.

Remember those names, SKB Asante and Georges Abyssab.

We'll hear about them again soon.

In 1974, a resolution on the new international economic order was passed by the UN General Assembly, asserting, among other things, the right of newly independent states to pursue development according to their own priorities, including the use of subsidies, nationalisation and capital controls, as well as their permanent sovereignty over natural resources, or PSNR.

Despite being passed, the new international economic order fell by the wayside in the 1980s.

Defaults on debt repayments during the so-called third world debt crisis in the early 1980s resulted in the IMF providing bailout loans that came with stringent conditions.

These conditions constrained the policy sovereignty of former colonies, turning newly independent states into what Tandika and Mukunda Wira called choiceless democracies, effectively barred from any pathway to development other than liberalisation and opening up of resources and industries to foreign investors.

... against the extractive and explosive forces that people are up against.

The actual trajectory of kind of the decolonized non-aligned movement, you know, from Bandung, you know, all the way to the new international economic order actually gives us a, an interesting period through which to traverse this particular debate.

Because, you know, in the very first era of decolonization, you do get this real belief in the potential of seizing the instruments of statecraft, you know? Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana talks about, you know, seek ye first the political kingdom.

You know, this idea that once you get your hands on the instruments of sovereignty, all your other problems will disappear because you will have the right to be able to make laws, and you'll be able to deal with all of these problems.

And it's by the time he's removed from government that he realizes when he writes, um, you know, um, Neocolonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism, he realizes that actually state, state statecraft and the instruments of state power are essentially useless unless you have that economic power.

You know, if you are allowed to wave a flag and name your national anthem, but your gold fields are still controlled by the Ashanti Goldfields Corporation, you're going to not be able to have the type of transformative politics that you actually espouse.

And so I think that early era actually changes by the time we get the kind of Michael Manley era of the new international economic order, and we look at the actual document that they got passed through the United Nations.

And you look at it today, this could be a model for having a more equitable and more environmentally even, um, sustainable economy across the world, you know, if it was passed yesterday.