The Crisis of World Order and the Problem of International Organization in the 1980s

Bibliographic Data

ID5884089
AuthorsRobert W Cox (0000-0002-0031-1568, York University, corresponding author)
Year1980
Volume35
Issue2
Pages370
Publication date1980-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Journal Canada s Journal of Global Policy Analysis (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0020-7020 • E-ISSN: 2052-465X
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2307/40201868
OpenAlexW4245874255
LanguageEN
Citations received21

The symptoms became apparent one by one during the 1970s, and some people, especially those Europeans who had no great commitment to the status quo, began to link them together and speak of the crisis of capitalism. The decade began with the 'Nixon shocks.' The United States proved unable or unwilling to correct its continuing and cumulatively massive payments deficit, originating in President Lyndon Johnson's guns plus butter policies during the Vietnam War era and growing with the take-over of European businesses by United States-based multinationals. The immediate response was to obscure the weakness of the United States dollar by severing its relationship to the only other universal standard of value gold. A cosmetic job, not a fundamental corrective. Two years later came the awareness of an energy crisis with the Arab oil embargo and the success of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (opec) in raising prices fourfold. This worked against the United States but even more dramatically against Western Europe and Japan, both much more dependent upon imported oil, and against the non-oil producers of the Third World whose international indebtedness mounted steeply. There followed a foodgrains crisis, short-lived, to be sure, but sufficient to signal that the era of subsidized surpluses was gone, to demonstrate the lopsidedness in world consumption patterns as between rich and poor, and to sound an alarm that many of the poorest countries with the vast majority of their populations in rural areas were unable to

Economic system · Economics · Order (exchange · Political science · Politics · World order · Global Financial Crisis and Policies · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · Law · State Capitalism and Financial Governance

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub