| Summary/Abstract |
In the early 1970s, Americans of both parties came to resent what they saw as their government’s acceptance of the United States’ declining global power and the Third World’s rise. In speech after speech at the United Nations, Third World representatives denounced the postwar economic order as unequal and immoral, designed by and for the benefit of rich Western countries (above all the United States). On May 1, 1974—International Labor Day—the UN General Assembly adopted the “Group of 77” (G-77) developing countries’ resolution calling for “economic decolonization” and a “right to development” through the establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO).1 Acting just months after Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) quadrupled the price of oil, the NIEO’s Third World supporters hoped to negotiate a redistribution of money and power from the global North—the rich capitalist countries—to the global South—everyone else but the Communist bloc. Their weapon was control over the price of major commodities, especially oil, that had made possible the United States’ and Europe’s spectacular prosperity after World War II. “What we aim,” explained Venezuela’s President and OPEC leader Carlos Andrés Pérez, “is to take advantage of this opportunity when raw materials, and energy materials primarily, are worth just as much as capital and technology, in order to reach agreements that will ensure fair and lasting balances.”
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