The UN and Development: From Aid to Cooperation

Part 2. The Formative Years

Part two The Formative Years n The International Environment n The Ideological Environment Part 2 covers some of the most important developments during the 1960s and 1970s. The 1970s proved a turbulent decade in North-South relations. Economic stagflation characterized western economies and two oil crises developed.Itwasalsoatimewhereconflictingdevelopmentideologieswere exploredandpursued.Theoilcrisisof themid-1970swashardontheeconomies of both industrialized countries and Third World nonproducers of oil, and these effects were reinforced by a second oil crisis later in the decade. ThesecrisesheavilyinfluencedtheagendaforNorth-Southrelations,including development cooperation, as did evolving development paradigms. The International Environment During the late 1950s and early 1960s, many former colonies and dependencies became sovereign states and members of the United Nations. Thisobviouslyaffectedtheworldorganization’sagenda.Moreattentionwas given to the situation in less-developed countries and regions, bringing the issue of social and economic development up front. Moreover, North-South relations came increasingly to the fore. Nevertheless, the bipolar system that evolved in the late 1940s remained the dominant feature of international politics. The Cold War continued to dominate relations between the two superpowers, including politics within the UN framework. North-South relations were also affected: increasingly, development assistance became an instrument in the Cold War. Security concerns were given primacy at a high price. Violent conflicts outside the 132 n The Formative Years core areas of the two security systems heightened the intensity of the power game, particularly the Vietnam War. The East-West divide affected the South beyond matters of aid policy. While some governments of the South sought active alignment with one of the two parties, the great majority sought to keep out of the conflict, inter alia by creating and joining nonaligned groups of countries and adopting “middle-of-the road” positions in international politics. The Non-Aligned Movement gained fresh momentum in the 1960s and 1970s. During these years, the United Nations broadened its position as a global organization with the influx of a large number of new members, mainly developing countries. Indeed, the UN gradually became the primary arena for developing countries to pursue their foreign policies. The Ideological Environment Ideologies about development, including discussions of development cooperation, also affected North-South relations. The modernization paradigm found itself confronted from both the “right” and the “left.” Neoclassical traditionalists contested the wisdom of state intervention in the market. Scholars from disciplines other than development economics, although under the spell of the modernization paradigm, focused on other dimensions of the development process. They identified cultural, sociological , political, and psychological barriers to development, providing a more complex framework. However, the modernization paradigm maintained a hegemonic position in the 1960s. In the real world, however, the development optimism of the 1950s and 1960s had not been matched by results: the gap between the North and South, in terms of indicators of aggregate economic was widening , and actual development in the South was skewed. These failures nourished the emergence of the dependencia perspective , which confronted mainstream western perspectives: development could not be conceived within the limited framework of the nation-state. As early as the early 1950s, economists associated with the UN and the UN Economic Commission for Latin America had argued that development in the South depended on relations with the industrial North and that these structural relations led to dependency and underdevelopment in the South.1 Structuralists argued for industrialization through import substitution. André Gunder Frank argued this perspective from a neo-Marxist point of view with special reference to Latin America.2 The center/periphery Part 2 Introduction n 133 model interpreted the core processes involved in a new way: the integration of the South into the capitalist North would further deepen its dependence and increase its underdevelopment, except for the elite (the “centers” in the South) that served as bridgeheads for exploitation from the North.3 Implicitly, if not explicitly, this school argued that the South should delink economically from the North. In the early 1970s, nevertheless, the South came up with answers that favored closer collaboration with the industrialized countries. However, the core message was that existing relations of economic and political power would have to be fundamentally reformed. The call for reform was, in part, based on arguments for a more just international division of labor and distribution of welfare and power. It was also based on a sense of strength that emerged from the experiences of the first oil crisis: what had been achieved within one raw-material sector (oil) might be copied in...