Cold War Era in World Politics

International History Review, 2015

This article examines the response of a group of small and medium-sized states to the Global South’s demands for a new international economic order in the 1970s and early 1980s. Reading that experience through the eyes of the group’s smallest state, Ireland, it describes the rise of a loosely organised collective whose support for economic justice was based on three pillars: social democracy; Christian justice; and a broadly held (if variously defined) anti-colonialism. Internationalism, and in particular support for the institutions of the United Nations, became another distinguishing feature of ‘like-minded’ action, and was an attempt by those states to carve out a space for independent action in the cold war. De_tente and the decline of US hegemony helped in that respect, by encouraging a more globalist reading of the world order. Once the United States resumed its interventionist policies in the late 1970s, the room for ‘like-minded’ initiatives declined. Yet the actions of the ‘like-minded’ states should not be understood solely in terms of the changing dynamics of the cold war. This article concludes by arguing for the prominence of empire, decolonisation, and the enduring North_South binary in shaping international relations in a post-colonial world.

The 1994 Declaration of Barbados and the Barbados Programme of Action (BPOA) was a watershed in the scale and scope of international cooperation between small island developing states (SIDS). It was also the beginning of a heightened international concern with the particularities of SIDS developmental trajectories, constraints and opportunities. However, while the Declaration opens with the affirmation that ‘sustainable development programmes must seek to enhance the quality of life of peoples, including their health, well-being and safety’, it does not affirm the centrality of island peoples as key agents in this development. In order to investigate this issue, this article demonstrates historical shifts in SIDS discourse and provides a critical evaluation of contemporary claims for the particularity of SIDS. It goes on to critically assess empirical and theoretical examples of South–South cooperation in order to generate possible insights for the SIDS grouping. The article argues that for the genuine ‘sustainable development’ of SIDS, a popular democratic base of island citizens must exist within island societies that in turn cooperate and coordinate – including material, political-social and operational linkages – across the spatially disparate regions of the global oceans. It is suggested that only through the heightened consciousness of island citizens of linkages across oceanic regions and their explicit incorporation as social agents to complement and, if required, counter interstate negotiations and strategies can contemporary forms of inter-island cooperation in the global ‘South’ be sustained.

1900

Cold War History, 2020

Process: A Blog for the Journal of American History, 2019

The global economy and oil prices no doubt transformed Venezuela in the 1970s, almost certainly for the worse. Less understood is how during that time Venezuela, in concert with other Third World producers as well as consumers, sought to use oil prices to transform the global economy. Historians now acknowledge the oil price increases initiated by Arab members of OPEC in October 1973 as part of a longer and larger arc of Third World efforts toward “economic decolonization” and development. These efforts culminated in the 1974 Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO) at the United Nations. Venezuela’s advocacy for the NIEO during the 1970s deeply impacted its relationship with the United States, especially in the areas of human rights and foreign aid. Yet its warnings about the growing borrowing costs of Third World nations (including but far from limited to itself) were dismissed by the U.S. and other rich countries. Failure to head these warnings led in the 1980s to a debt crisis spanning three continents and a “lost decade of development” for Latin America in particular.

Asia Maior, 2018

Humanity, 2014