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France, Europe and Development Aid. From the Treaties of Rome to the Present Day

 | 
Gérard Bossuat
, 
Gordon D. Cummings

Enlargements and New Aid Paradigms (1975-1995)

The New Context of Relations between North and South, and between the EEC and Developing Countries from the 1960s to the 1980s

Giuliano Garavini

Full text

Introduction

1The European Economic Community (EEC) and the Global South – here I will use the terms Global South and Third World as synonyms – both had their roots in the same era of decolonisation, an era marked by a process of decolonisation that was developing with increasing speed by the middle of the 1950s.The very fact that the EEC and the Global South emerged more or less at the same time does raise more than one argument regarding the nature of the special link between the two.

2In the case of the Global South, while the Cold War was certainly instrumental in generating the need for a coalition of weaker nations able to promote peace against the threat of nuclear Mutually Assured Destruction, it is quite obvious that only the end of European colonial empires allowed for the possibility of autonomous action by the newly independent countries in the international arena.

  • 1 The research underpinning the argument for this article can by found in G. Garavini: After Empires. (...)
  • 2 J. Monnet, Mémoires, trans. Richard Mayne, London, Collins, 1978, p. 422.

3In the case of the EEC the link with decolonisation is possibly les straightforward, but hardly les stringent. We now know that even well into the 1950s European colonial powers had no clear intention of renouncing the strategic importance of their empires from a cultural, political and even from an economic point of view. This is well demonstrated by the most recent literature that takes very seriously the effort to revive European colonial empires in the 1950s; an effort mainly undertaken by France and Great Britain and defined by scholars as “post-imperial reflex”.1 Jean Monnet himself recalled how Louis Armand – one of the “three wise men” charged, after the failure of the European Defence Community in 1954, with re-launching a common European initiative through a joint atomic energy project – provocatively proposed the erection of a statue honoring Nasser as “the federator of Europe.”2 Having dealt a mortal blow to the imperial dreams of France and the United Kingdom in 1956, the Egyptian leader had also cleared the path for a new French commitment in Europe.

4This chapter will focus on how the two international actors interacted, from the beginning of the institutionalisation of Third World cooperation in 1961 – year of creation of the Non Aligned Movement – to the crisis of the Third World with the failure of global North-South negotiations at the Cancun Summit in 1981.

I. The Development Decade (1960-1969)

  • 3 M.P. Bradley, “Decolonisation, the Global South, and the Cold War, 1919-1962,” in M.P. Leffler and (...)

5Nobody could predict whether the newly independent nations that became members of the UN – spread out across Asia, Africa, and Latin America; millions of peoples with different religions, languages, and traditions – would be willing to find common interests or had the capacity for coordinated action. There was indeed a very real possibility that, once liberated from European colonial domination, these peoples would simply find themselves subject to a new form of imperial tutelage by the two emergent superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, each endowed with competing global ideologies, ambitions and military might.3

  • 4 J. Nehru, Glimpses of World History, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1980, p. 953.

6In 1933, in his last letter from jail to his daughter Indira Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote that “thought, in order to justify itself, must lead to action.”4 It should come as no surprise if, among the elites of the new nations torn between Wilson and Lenin, the virtues of free-market liberal democracy and the imperatives of social revolution under a planned economy, the practical need to make giant leaps forward through industrialisation and higher prices for raw materials initially prevailed over protracted theoretical debates regarding the appropriate form of government. The titanic task of achieving development would be accomplished both by exploiting the military and economic assistance of any nation willing to provide it, and through a coordinated effort to reform the international trade system in their own favour.

  • 5 D. Engerman and C. Unger, “Introduction: Towards a Global History of Modernisation,” Diplomatic His (...)
  • 6 S.L. Hoffmann, “Genealogies of Human Rights,” in S.L. Hoffmann (ed.) Human Rights in the Twentieth (...)

7The Third World was very soon to become the main arena for the competing visions of modernity and models of internationalism. But Third World countries did not simply choose between these competing versions of modernity, just as they did not passively accept the logic of the Cold War as a fait accompli – even though many of the developing countries were forced to endure some of its devastating effects. As the most recent historiography on the Third World has confirmed, developing nations often struggled, both individually and collectively, to advance their own visions of modernisation, more often than not characterized by high levels of state intervention and aspirations of fast-track industrialisation,5 just as they fought to promote their own priorities in the realm of human rights and international law.6

8Development was the key economic issue of the 1960s. The First Development Decade was launched by the United Nations in 1961 with the objective of achieving a minimum GDP growth rate of at least 5 per cent in each “developing” nation. Development was also enshrined as an objective of Atlantic and Western cooperation with the creation of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 1961. Article 1 of its Charter read that the organisation aimed: “to achieve the highest sustainable economic growth and employment and a rising standard of living in Member Countries”.7

  • 8  W. Rostow and M. Millikan, A Proposal: Key to an Effective Foreign Policy, New York, Harper and Br (...)
  • 9 J. M. Blair, The Control of Oil, New York, Pantheon Books, 1976.

9For the West development was not only an economic but also a political strategy. Externally it aimed at overcoming underdevelopment, and at the same time, at blocking the expansion of internationale Communism in the newly independent countries.8 But it also became a buzz-word for the Third World and Non Aligned Movement that had progressively advanced their own conception of economic development. The Third World as an economic project gave itself a more institutional framework at the beginning of the 1960s, and particularly in 1964 with the creation of the Group of G77 within the United Nations Conference for Cooperation and Development (UNCTAD). Even the creation of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries in 1960 in Baghdad can be viewed as an episode in the effort to wage a common and coordinated battle by raw material producers to obtain a stronger role in the international economy.9 At the same time, it should be noted, the efforts to coalesce developing countries into a revolutionary political struggle against imperialism, an effort pursued up to the extreme sacrifice by Che Guevara under the slogan “one, two, many Vietnams,” proved short-lived and ended symbolically with his death in 1967 in Bolivia. By the time of the second UNCTAD conference in 1968 in New Delhi global political revolution was out, also undermined by the tensions between Soviet and Chinese Communism, while the need to reform the international economy to the advantage of the poorer countries was still in.

  • 10 E. J. Dosman, The Life and Times of Raul Prebisch, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009.

10One of the main theoretical economic perspectives of Third World leaders struggling to escape the vicious circle of poverty and economic dependence of their countries, was provided by the first secretary general of UNCTAD: the Argentinean economist Raúl Prebisch.10 The theory that Prebisch and other mainly Latin-American economists started promoting with increasing success went by the name of “structuralism” or “dependency theory”. This was based on the idea that there was a growing and structural imbalance between the North, producer of manufactured goods whose prices were constantly increasing due to technological innovations and pressures from trade unions; and the South, producer of raw materials with declining prices and ever worsening incomes to be distributed among the booming urban population. This imbalance had to be overcome sooner rather than later if one wanted to avoid global revolution, possibly by resorting to a combination of reforms:

  1. Preferential access for the manufactured goods of developing countries to the markets of industrialised countries, which would imply the creation of a Generalised System of Preferences (GSP);

  2. Agreements to stabilise (or increase) the prices of raw materials to be negotiated under UN supervision;

  3. An increase in development aid to foster industrialisation up to at least 1 per cent of the GDP of industrialized country;

  4. Abolition of taxes on tropical products and of all barriers to agricultural trade.

11Considering the measures above as a possible guideline for a common Third World action plan within UNCTAD, what was the image projected by the EC on the international arena and in particular within the UN in this period?

  • 11 One inventory of such criticisms listed some forty-three possible offenses, along with their respec (...)

12Even though the worst aspects of a potentially colonial legacy embodied by the idea of Eurafrique had been weakened with the signing of the Yaoundé Association in 1963, the EEC had not yet managed to offer an image significantly different from that of its colonial members. Indeed the EEC became one of the main polemical objectives of developing countries in the 1960s. These are only a few of the charges raised against it in the UN:11

  1. Yaoundé was based on historical connections which perpetuated the dominance of the former colonial powers in Africa (for example through the system of “reverse preferences” or even of linguistic imperialism);

  2. Yaoundé was aimed at splitting the world economy in three large macro economic areas: the Americas, dominated by the US; Eurafrique, dominated by the EEC; and Asia, dominated by Japan;

  3. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) discriminated against the agricultural products of the Third World thus undermining one of the most important sources of income for those countries;

  4. Western Europe had benefited from Marshall aid to rebuild its shattered economy after World War II, but now it did not recognise the need for a massive flow of aid to the really poor areas of the world.

13Indeed the Community was made up of a number of countries mainly ruled up to the end of the 1960s by conservative governments that were primarily focused on improving the performance of the nationale economy and that had scant interest in the building of a new global relationship between North and South. The main political families in western Europe, Socialists and Christian Democrats, were both heavily suspicious of the neutrality of the Non Aligned Movement which many judged as “immoral”, and far more reliant on western economic cooperation also through aid than on supporting any scheme proposed by developing countries.12 Arguably the Catholic Church, an organisation that at the beginning of the 1960s had clearly perceived the need to speak directly to the new massively populated nations, was more open to requests coming from developing countries. To such a point that Pope Paul VI in the March 1967 Encyclical Popolorum Progressio explicitly came out in favour of an agreement on commodity prices.13

II. The Decade of the North-South Dialogue (1970-1980)

  • 14 G. Garavini,“The Empire Strikes Back: The Impact of the Third World on Western Europe 1968-1975”, i (...)

14The end of the 1960s was characterised by political radicalisation in many Third World countries but, at the same time, by a radicalisation of public opinion in western European countries due to the impact of the 1968 social and political movements and to widespread opposition to the war in Vietnam.14

  • 15 G.R. Horn, The Spirit of ’68. Rebellion in Western Europe and North America 1956-1976, Oxford, Oxfo (...)

15It is important here to note that one of the main cultural innovations behind workers’ and students’ movements in western Europe consisted of a radical criticism of the priority attached to national allegiance and of the realpolitik and militarism of the ruling elite. A new idea was emerging, also due to innovation in media networks such as the introduction of satellite communications, that humanity was in some ways united by global common issues such as peace, the defence of environment, the fight against malnutrition and poverty.15 There was a widespread curiosity towards political experiments as well as the literature and art coming from Third World countries. “Thirdworldism”, vaguely defined, was in fact one of the main cultural trends of the post-1968 era. It affected not only large sections of the intellectual milieu in universities but also political elites. It was one of the components of a shift to the Left by the west European political establishment, which seemed to depart radically from the conservatism of the 1960s; a shift that clearly made an impression on the new President of the United States Richard Nixon. Nixon became increasingly concerned about the potential drift of the Europeans towards a “neutral” or, at any rate, a more autonomous position in international relations and aptly summarised the new political scenario to his assistant Henri Kissinger:

  • 16 Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), Foreign Economic Policy, 1973-76, n. 31, draft memo (...)

The way the Europeans are talking today, European unity will not be in our interest, certainly not from a political viewpoint or from an economic viewpoint. When we used to talk about European unity, we were thinking in terms of the men who would be at the top of Europe who would be in control. Those men were people that we could get along with. Today, however, when we talk of European unity, and when we look ahead, we have to recognise the stark fact that a united Europe will be led primarily by left-leaning or socialist heads of government. I say this despite the fact that Heath is still in power. Even in Britain and France we have situations where the media and the establishment strongly pull to the left at this point, and also where the media and the establishment take an increasingly anti-US attitude.16

  • 17 R. Burke, “From Individual Rights to National Development: The First UN Conference on Human Rights, (...)

16The new idea behind the action of the G77 and Non Aligned Movement – increasingly acting together – had already been presented in the first International Conference on Human Rights in Tehran 1968: it was the idea that collective and economic rights, and in particular the right to sovereignty over natural resources should prevail over individual human rights.17 Not by chance the third UNCTAD in 1972 was held in Santiago Chile under the charismatic leadership of president Salvador Allende, the Socialist leader who had nationalised his country’s copper industry and who, in a now-famous speech at the UN General Assembly, had voiced the need for a reform of the international monetary system.

17The request for sovereignty over natural resources and reform of the Bretton Woods institutions was reinforced by the participation of the oil producing countries in the struggle. Once the new Ghadafi leadership in Libya in 1969 opened the way for a more robust stance on the part of oil producing countries in the battle against oil multinationals, OPEC started acting in many ways as the spearhead of the Third World and of the demands of raw material producers – Algeria being the main link between oil producers and the rest of developing countries. This new climate within the Non Aligned Movement was soon noticed by diplomats in Venezuela, itself a Latin American country and an oil producing country. At the beginning of 1973, Venezuela – the largest oil producer in Latin America and a pivotal country in continental politics – was seriously considering membership in the Non Aligned Movement, believing that the Movement had shifted its emphasis from neutrality to economic concerns. The Foreign Ministry’s newly elaborated position was that:

  • 18 Archivos Ministerio Poder Popular para Relaciones Exteriores (AHMPPRE), Algeria, IV Conferencia de (...)

The era when the democratic governments of Venezuela were afraid of the idea of irritating the United States or conservative sectors of our own country are over … Right now it is important that the African and Asian countries recognise the liberating, nationalist and anti-neocolonialist content of our measures regarding oil, and that they be willing to align themselves with Venezuela in a united front of defense against the hegemonic forces that will try to deny us our right to set our own course.18

  • 19 R.L. Rothstein, Global Bargaining: UNCTAD and the Quest for a NEIO, Princeton, NJ, Princeton Univer (...)

18Possibly the highest peak of this radicalisation process was the approval during the sixth UN General Assembly in1974, the first session being entirely dedicated to economic matters, of the declaration on the establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO). The NIEO also came with an “action plan” that had at its centre the project of creating a common fund for commodities, to be created with the contributions of both consuming countries and raw material producers, with the aim of structurally redistributing wealth from the industrialized to the developing countries.19 Then came the Charter of the Economic Rights and Duties of States, approved by a majority of the UN General Assembly on December 12, 1974. The first article of the Charter, in fact, declared: “Every State has the sovereign and inalienable right to choose its economic system as well as its political, social and cultural systems in accordance with the will of its people.” Among the other rights asserted in the Charter were the freedom to nationalise strategic sectors without penalty and the liberty of every state to manage its own commodities.

19In fact, up to the very end of the 1970s the international debate within the UN system was dominated: by the Southern block, by the effort to reduce the role of the Bretton Woods institutions and to alter the power relations within them, by the need to defend the right to self determination of smaller and poorer nations against the intrusions of more powerful countries or of enormously rich multinationals. This was the mindset behind the debate on a new Law of the Sea to protect the coast of each country from exploration by foreign governments and companies and of the battle for a New World Information Order (NWIO) to help establish autonomous media in the Global South.

  • 20 On the efforts from 1969 to 1974 by the new leaders of France, Germany, and Britain to create a com (...)

20There is more than one way in which this new climate impacted on a now much more open political leadership in the EEC which, it should be remembered, in 1969 had just approved the first procedures for European Political Cooperation (EPC) and had approved the first enlargement to the UK, Denmark and Ireland, thus rendering the EEC the largest trading block in the world and potentially one of the strongest actors in international institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank and the UN.20

21Here I will only take the opportunity to list some of the initiatives that seemed to demonstrate the new diplomatic attention of EEC countries towards the Third World:

  • In 1971 the EEC was the first entity to approve its Generalized System of Preferences;

    • 21 J. van der Harst, “Sicco Mansholt: Courage and Conviction,” in Dumoulin (ed.), The European Commiss (...)

    In the Paris Summit of 1972 the EEC proclaimed itself a “privileged partner” of developing countries and, also under the impulse of the then president of the European Commission Sicco Mansholt, opened the way to a global cooperation and development policy with the aim of overcoming the regional concentration on Africa;21

    • 22 J.M. Palayret, “Mondialisme contre régionalisme: CEE et ACP dans les négociations de la Convention (...)

    The signing of the Lomé Convention in February 1975 with the introduction of a new mechanism, the Stabex, which in many ways responded to the request coming from the Third World for a stabilisation of the income from raw materials exports;22

    • 23 G. Garavini, “The Conference for International Economic Cooperation: a Diplomatic Reaction to the O (...)

    The launching in Paris of the North-South Dialogue – Conference for International Economic Cooperation (CIEC) held from December 1975 to June 1977 – in which the EEC participated as a single actor and during which the questions of oil, development, international debt and reform of international economic institutions were all discussed together and linked one to the other.23

  • 24 G. Garavini, “The Battle for the Participation of the Community in the G7”, in Journal of European (...)

22In all the initiatives described above the Community participated as a single actor and was expected by the developing countries to do so. And the drive towards a more important role for the EEC in external affairs seemed to be confirmed by the successful battle by the EEC to be accepted as a member of the G7, first launched in the Rambouillet conference of 1975. As a result of this battle the president of the European Commission Roy Jenkins was admitted for the first time to the G7 held in London in 1977.24

  • 25 Willy Brandt was elected President of the Socialist International in 1976.

23But did this mean that the EEC was definitively affirming itself as an international actor, one with particularly strong relations with developing counties? Certainly this process was favoured by the fact that, contrary to the majority of its members, the EEC itself had no direct colonial past to be ashamed of and could indeed be considered a positive model of regional and peaceful integration. Also, it is true that a more positive attitude towards the Global South was precisely one of the requests coming from European Socialists under the leadership of Willy Brandt and one of the possible grounds for consensus among different European political families – relations with the US and the Soviet Union remaining, on the contrary, far more controversial.25

24However, the limits to coherent international action of the Community were particularly evident in certain dossiers such as the Euro-Arab dialogue where the EEC never managed to become a credible interlocutor because it could not directly deal with the crucial Arab-Israeli issue. Also these limits appeared to be difficult to overcome in the dialogue with oil producing countries: the efforts by single European countries to establish preferential links with oil producers or to protect the oil multinationals established in their territory, eventually prevailed over the possibility of a common energy policy, one which would have assured secure oil and gas imports at reasonable prices, in exchange for industrial cooperation with, and some degree of political appeasement of, OPEC members.

III. The Globalisation Era After 1981

25The two years between 1979 and 1980 were literally filled with events that pointed in the direction of the weakening and, eventually, the failure of cooperation between the countries of the Global South.

26The second “oil shock” in 1979 resulted in an increase in the prices of crude oil from 13 $ per barrel to 40 $ per barrel and was favoured by the instability generated by the Islamic revolution in Iran. This second increase in oil prices after 1973 was not accompanied, as in the case of the first oil shock, by a financial effort from the OPEC towards the rest of the developing world. Rather it was followed by a war between Iraq and Iran, two founders of OPEC and also two developing countries with a key role in the G77.

  • 26 V. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev, Chapel Hill U (...)

27The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, itself a poor country and member of the Non Aligned Movement, led to serious tensions between those governments in the Movement that remained pro-Soviet and the more critical ones that embraced a pro-Western stance. The suicidal gamble of a military mission in Afghanistan had been foreseen by the Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko in March 1979: “All that we have done in recent years with such effort in terms of Détente in international relations, arms reductions, and much more – all that would be overthrown. China, of course, will receive a nice gift. All the nonaligned countries will be against us”.26

  • 27 According to Bernard Nossiter, the “Volcker shock” and the deflationary policy of the most importan (...)

28Finally, the new monetary policy in the US and the raising of interest rates by the Federal Reserve Bank led to dollar revaluation and with it to a massive worsening of the debt of developing countries with private banks. Debt increases, coupled with slow growth in the industrialized countries due to the new deflationary US monetary policy, had devastating effects on the economies of most developing countries by depriving them of markets for exports and leading them into financial dependence on Wall Street and Washington-based institutions.27

  • 28 M. Mazower, Governing the World. The Rise and Fall of an Idea 1918 to the Present, New York, Pengui (...)

29The weakening of the Global South alliance led to the weakening of the New International Economic Order project and to the emergence of what the historian Mark Mazower has defined as the “Real New International Economic Order”.28

  • 29 French National Archives (AN), 5 AG 4, 4273, Note, Préparation du sommet de Cancun; aspects commerc (...)
  • 30 Interview with Henri Nau (Senior Staff Member of the NSC in the White House responsible for Economi (...)

30This can be considered to have been inaugurated with the failure of the last North-South summit in Cancun. The summit had been organized by the Mexican President López Portillo, the Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, and the Austrian President Bruno Kreisky with the firm intention of reviving the North-South dialogue at the highest levels and of discussing the future concrete reforms inspired by the Brandt Commission. All of the world’s most powerful leaders were present at the seaside resort meeting, twenty-two heads of state or government in total, including Reagan and Thatcher. Mitterrand with his cries against “international economic Darwinism” and his call for expansion in international aid and commodity agreements was, with Trudeau, the only hope for the success of global negotiations.29 But France’s position was not a majority one among industrialised countries, many of which by then shared the World Bank’s new position that developing countries should open up and help themselves and that decreasing trade barriers and open capital markets would be the best means to favour global growth. The primary roadblock was Reagan, not only for his personal ideological aversion to the United Nations, but because solutions on commodities or questions of international debt would be expensive for, and call into question the centrality of, the international economic institutions based in Washington, in which the United States had a much stronger position than in other international forums.30

31The Real New International Economic Order was characterised by: a new role for Washington-based international economic institutions based on the newly elaborated policy of “structural adjustment”, the marginalisation of the UN, a greater role for financial markets based on the need of developing countries to attract international capital and accept in exchange liberalisation of trade in goods and services. Within the new neoliberal economic order countries had to compete for financial resources one against the other, or otherwise be condemned to lag behind and be marginalized in the international economy.

  • 31 P. Bruckner, The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt, New York, Free Press, 1986.

32The very same EEC faced harsh internal divisions at the end of the 1970s, first and foremost the one between Mitterrand’s France and Thatcher’s Great Britain. But it also had to face a serious economic crisis due to slow growth, unemployment and the need to restructure its industries. This is not the place to dwell on the progressive departure from Keynesian economics and towards a greater reliance on the idea of market liberalisation. However, it is important to note that this new internal intellectual challenge against the role of the state and regulation also brought with it a strong reaction against the Thirworldism of the previous decade. This challenge was based on the idea that poverty was not the industrialized countries’ fault but simply the result of corruption and bad economic choices in the developing world. A sign of these new times was the 1983 publication of the French writer Pascal Bruckner’s The Tears of the White Man – which equated European compassion with contempt, derided the notion of decolonisation as the liberation of a mythical form of new man, and denounced the unjust and antidemocratic regimes of the Third World – enjoyed spectacular public success.31

33Faced with momentous challenges – the disappearance of the Third World and the appearance of aggressive Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs) – the EEC started to concentrate on its regional dimension to the detriment of its effort to be perceived as a global actor. It began concentrating on the potential for expansion to Southern Europe (Portugal and Spain) and to the possible economic stimulus offered by the internal market through liberalisation of capital movements and a decreased role of the state in industry and services. The shift in emphasis from international economic cooperation to internal liberalisation and regional expansion, went in parallel with a shift of paradigm according to which conditional aid and the spreading of international regulation coming from the Bretton Woods institutions became a priority of aid and cooperation policies. In many ways private capital and investment seemed to be able to substitute themselves for the state in development policies.

34Is it possible to draw any conclusions from this story?

  • 32 One of the strongest criticism of the potentially negative effects of market hyperliberalisation ca (...)
  • 33 S. Lucarelli, “The EU in the Eyes of Others: Towards Filling a Gap in the Literature,” in European (...)

35A general remark is certainly that isolation does not seem a real possibility for European countries, not only due to their past colonial links but because of dependence on imports of raw materials, exports of manufactured goods, as well as due to immigration coming mostly from former colonies in the Global South. Secondly it could be argued that the failure of international economic cooperation, embodied by the failure of the North-South dialogue in 1981, and the reliance on policies conceived by the Bretton Woods institutions have certainly been a way to cope with the aggressive trade and financial globalisation of the 1980s,32 but they have in many ways increased the doubts of countries of the Global South regarding the ambiguous role of the European Union as an agent of international capitalism and liberalisation.33

Notes

1 The research underpinning the argument for this article can by found in G. Garavini: After Empires. European Integration, Decolonisation and the Challenge from the Global South (1957-1986), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012; F. Cooper, “Reconstructing Empire in British and French Africa” in M. Mazower – J. Reinisch – D. Feldman, Post-War Reconstruction in Western Europe. International Perspectives, 1945-1949, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011.

2 J. Monnet, Mémoires, trans. Richard Mayne, London, Collins, 1978, p. 422.

3 M.P. Bradley, “Decolonisation, the Global South, and the Cold War, 1919-1962,” in M.P. Leffler and O.A. Westad, eds, The Cambridge History of the Cold War: Origins, 1945-1962, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012.

4 J. Nehru, Glimpses of World History, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1980, p. 953.

5 D. Engerman and C. Unger, “Introduction: Towards a Global History of Modernisation,” Diplomatic History, 33, No. 3, (June 2009), pp. 375-385.

6 S.L. Hoffmann, “Genealogies of Human Rights,” in S.L. Hoffmann (ed.) Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2011.

7 www.oecd.org/document/7/0,3746,en_2649_201185_1915847_1_1_1_1,00.html

8  W. Rostow and M. Millikan, A Proposal: Key to an Effective Foreign Policy, New York, Harper and Brothers, 1957, R.A. Packenham, Liberal America and the Third World, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1973.

9 J. M. Blair, The Control of Oil, New York, Pantheon Books, 1976.

10 E. J. Dosman, The Life and Times of Raul Prebisch, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009.

11 One inventory of such criticisms listed some forty-three possible offenses, along with their respective defences. The accusations ranged widely: that the Community constituted nothing more than the economic arm of NATO; that it was dominated by the church and the Catholic parties; that it widened regional disparities potentially generated by the Common Market; and that the CAP would impoverish small farmers to the advantage of large agribusiness. Historical Archives of the European Union (HAEU), CM 2-1962, 122, Note, “Criticisms of the Community by members of the United Nations,” November 8, 1961.

12 P. Van Kemseke, Towards an Era of Development: The Globalisation of Socialism and Christian Democracy, 1945-1965, Leuven, Leuven University Press, 2006, p. 262. In particular for the Christian Democracy see: W. Kaiser, Christian Democracy and the Origins of European Union, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007.

13 www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/encyclicals/documents/f_pvi_enc_26031967_populorum_en.html

14 G. Garavini,“The Empire Strikes Back: The Impact of the Third World on Western Europe 1968-1975”, in Contemporary European History, n.16, 3, 2007, pp. 299-319.

15 G.R. Horn, The Spirit of ’68. Rebellion in Western Europe and North America 1956-1976, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007.

16 Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), Foreign Economic Policy, 1973-76, n. 31, draft memo from President Nixon to the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger), March 10, 1973.

17 R. Burke, “From Individual Rights to National Development: The First UN Conference on Human Rights, Tehran, 1968,” in Journal of World History, 19(3), 2008, pp. 275-296.

18 Archivos Ministerio Poder Popular para Relaciones Exteriores (AHMPPRE), Algeria, IV Conferencia de Jefes de Estado y Gobierno de los Países no Alineados, Director de Política Internacional, “Venezuela y Los Países No Alineados,” January 15, 1973.

19 R.L. Rothstein, Global Bargaining: UNCTAD and the Quest for a NEIO, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1979.

20 On the efforts from 1969 to 1974 by the new leaders of France, Germany, and Britain to create a common European foreign policy, see: D. Möckli, European Foreign Policy during the Cold War: Heath, Brandt, Pompidou and the Dream of Political Unity, London, IB Tauris, 2008.

21 J. van der Harst, “Sicco Mansholt: Courage and Conviction,” in Dumoulin (ed.), The European Commission 1958-75: History and Memories, Luxembourg, Office of the Publications of the European Communities, 2007.

22 J.M. Palayret, “Mondialisme contre régionalisme: CEE et ACP dans les négociations de la Convention de Lomé,” in A. Varsori (ed.), Inside the European Community. Actors and Policies in European Integration 1957-1973, Baden-Baden & Brussels, Nomos–Bruylant, 2006, pp. 369-98.

23 G. Garavini, “The Conference for International Economic Cooperation: a Diplomatic Reaction to the Oil Shock (1975-1977)”, in M. Rasmussen and A.C. Knudsen (eds.), The Road to a United Europe. Interpretations of the Process of European Integration, Baden-Baden, Brussels, Peter Lang, 2009.

24 G. Garavini, “The Battle for the Participation of the Community in the G7”, in Journal of European Integration History, n.23, 2006, pp. 141-159.

25 Willy Brandt was elected President of the Socialist International in 1976.

26 V. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev, Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press, 2007, p. 260.

27 According to Bernard Nossiter, the “Volcker shock” and the deflationary policy of the most important Western nations “cost third world nations. . . more than $140 billion in goods and services: $41 in extra interest, $79 billion in lower commodity prices and $21 billion in reduced export volume.” B. Nossiter, The Global Struggle for More: Third World Conflicts with Rich Nations, New York, Harper & Row, 1987, p. 16

28 M. Mazower, Governing the World. The Rise and Fall of an Idea 1918 to the Present, New York, Penguin, 2012.

29 French National Archives (AN), 5 AG 4, 4273, Note, Préparation du sommet de Cancun; aspects commerciaux, September 28,1981.

30 Interview with Henri Nau (Senior Staff Member of the NSC in the White House responsible for Economic Affairs from 1981-3). Available online at: www.g7.utoronto.ca/oralhistory/nau040507.html.

31 P. Bruckner, The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt, New York, Free Press, 1986.

32 One of the strongest criticism of the potentially negative effects of market hyperliberalisation can be found in: D. Rodrik, The Globalisation Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy, New York, Norton & Company, 2011.

33 S. Lucarelli, “The EU in the Eyes of Others: Towards Filling a Gap in the Literature,” in European Foreign Affairs Review, 3(20), 2007, pp 249-70.

Author

Giuliano Garavini is a post-doctoral researcher in international history at Padova University. He is the author of Dopo gli imperi. L’integrazione europea nello scontro Nord-Sud, Le Monnier, Florence, 2009, published in 2012 by the Oxford University Press under the title: After Empires: European Integration, Decolonization and the Challenge from the Global South (1957-1986). Giuliano Garavini is working on a book about the 1973 oil shock and coordinating a three-year research project (FIRB), funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, on the subject of conflict between oil and renewable energy in the 1970s and 1980s.

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