Unpaid Debts

Unpaid Debts" provides a novel account of the New International Economic Order (NIEO), from the economic crises of the 1970s to the lost development decade of the 1980s. It shows that it was not just the Thatchers, the Reagans, and the neoliberal economists that sank the NIEO; its failure also resulted from the limits of socialist internationalism. This article tracks how Jamaican activists-working with key individuals across the Caribbean, Africa, Latin America, and Asia-worked to build support for the NIEO by redefining "socialism" and "socialist internationalism" nationally, regionally, and globally. They tried to push European social democrats to embrace the NIEO and global wealth redistribution, and help build an alternative to a post-Bretton Woods economic order defined increasingly by financialization. But they came up against hard limits, and the endurance of both imperial and Cold War logics. Centering the struggle for the soul of democratic socialism sheds new light on the world-making visions of the 1970s, the real-world obstacles they faced, and their unexpected afterlives. It broadens the conversation around the NIEO, showing how even if the NIEO failed, it fostered new forms of South-South collaboration that endured beyond the 1970s

Conversation · Debt · Latin Americans · Order (exchange) · Socialism · Vision · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism