Development Diplomacy and the New International Economic Order
The decade of decolonisation in Africa, the 1960s, was also termed the ‘development decade’. It was widely hoped that political self-determination would be a catalyst for economic development, as independent states would invest their economic resources in the service of their populations rather than the imperial metropole. Adom Getachew’s book “Worldmaking After Empire” charts the evolution of this relationship between political and economic sovereignty as expressed and practiced in international society. Paying particular attention to the perspective of anticolonial nationalists of the Black Atlantic, she argues that self-determination only meant an international society of equal sovereign states in theory - in practise the UN was riven with inequality, most evident in the constitution of the security council and the vastly different terms of trade. We have been inspired by Getachew’s concept of ‘worldmaking’ of anticolonial leaders and thinkers, and in the project are examining how postcolonial diplomats engaged with this same process. In particular, the question of training African diplomats in ‘development diplomacy’ in our empirical material offers a new perspective on how diplomacy was imagined as a route to economic independence in the years following decolonisation, and with that, economic and political sovereignty.
UNCTAD, the Group of 77 and the NIEO
To paraphrase Yolanda Kemp Spies, development diplomacy can be defined as an alternative diplomatic narrative focused on countering asymmetry in the global economy, which since the 1960s succeeded in inserting development onto the global diplomatic agenda. Central to this move was the United Nations Conference on Trade And Development (UNCTAD) and the Group of 77, launched at the conclusion of its inaugural meeting in 1964. Headed by Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch, who had coined the term ‘New International Economic Order’ (NIEO) in 1963, UNCTAD and the Group of 77 embarked on a series of initiatives within the international system, arguing that in order to overcome economic dependence inherited from colonialism, postcolonial states needed full economic as well as political self-determination. This would mean a radical redistribution of wealth and control over natural, monetary and financial resources. Efforts to promote the NIEO agenda would culminate in the adoption of a Declaration on the Establishment of an NIEO by the UN General Assembly on 1st May 1974.
Delegates of the Group of 77 at the first session of UNCTAD I in Geneva, 1964 (Source: UN Photo)
Training ‘Development Diplomats’
Development diplomacy therefore played a particularly important role in the decades following decolonisation in Africa, from the 1960s to the 1980s. How diplomatic training courses sought to respond to the needs of diplomats entering this arena of foreign policy can offer us geopolitical insights. Of course, many of the courses training African diplomats during this period were themselves framed in terms of either bilateral or multilateral development assistance. A salient example of multilateral assistance is the UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), founded in 1963 to “enhance the effectiveness of the United Nations itself”, primarily by providing assistance in training for diplomats of developing countries.
An analysis of the curricular development of the diplomatic training courses included in our study confirms that though some lectures on the principles of economic and social development and international aid were included in Geneva (Carnegie/IUHEI), Paris (IHEOM) and Oxford University from 1960, these courses didn’t extend to any specific training in “development diplomacy”. However by the mid-1960s, with the institutionalisation of UNCTAD and UNITAR, the situation began to change. In Geneva, criticisms were made of the Carnegie courses’ lack of engagement with the economic realities of diplomatic activity after decolonisation, and as UNITAR trainees began to arrive there a seminar was included on “the diplomacy of development”.
However, it was sub-Saharan Africa’s first university-based diplomatic training course that first radically prioritised development diplomacy within its curriculum. From its very first year in 1972, IRIC ran a core module called ‘development diplomacy’ which set out to explore in detail the theoretical and practical considerations African diplomats would need. During the 1970s, this module was taught by Joseph Tchundjang Pouemi, a radical Cameroonian economist who was critical of the IMF and French policy in Africa. A student during this period, Ambroise Behalal, recalled in an interview how professors like Pouemi were influential in critiquing Euro-centric international economics, introducing the ‘Third-Worldist’ ideas of Gunnar Myrdal, Tibor Mende, André Gunder Frank and others, which he found particularly formative. According to IRIC’s former director;
“it was very important that all those who would teach at IRIC were motivated to make development diplomats capable of discussing hard problems […] in the spirit of African solidarity and unity and the NIEO”
UNITAR, which from its beginnings perceived its mission as serving the interests of developing states, and whose priorities were dictated by a UN General Assembly numerically dominated by the Group of 77, was also an early adopter of the NIEO. From 1977 it organised annual month-long diplomatic training “seminars” on Multilateral Diplomacy and the NIEO. Held in Vienna, they aimed to bring together junior diplomats from both Global North and South, including states of ideological East and West, for a series of presentations and debates on how to advance the economic and political provisions of the NIEO.
Participants at the UNITAR Diplomatic Training Seminar on Multilateral Diplomacy and the New International Economic Order, June 1978 (Source: UNOG Library)
Resisting the ‘UNCTAD Ethos’
Whilst the language of the NIEO was clearly embraced at IRIC and through UNITAR, trainers in the Global North were more circumspect. Speaking to the first gathering of the International Forum on Diplomatic Training (IFDT) in 1973, Ralph Feltham of the Oxford FSP identified a challenge amongst trainee diplomats stemming from what he called the “UNCTAD ethos”. This, he said, was “the growing insistence in less developed countries that the developed countries have a moral obligation to share their wealth with them” which was leading to an unrealistic gap between “the sacrifices that the rich countries are likely to make, and the sacrifices that poorer countries are becoming convinced that they have a right to expect them to make”. Diplomatic trainers could play a role, Feltham suggested, in injecting a bit of reality to the situation: “it is the diplomats, with their sense of realism and political awareness” he argued, “who have to convince their political masters that change, in human attitudes and outlook, is a slow process"[1]. Rather than embracing ideas for a different international order in which diplomats trained at Oxford might work and continue to transform, Feltham instead focused in accepting International Relations as they were.
We might consider Feltham to have been proven right by the ultimate failure of the NIEO to achieve its goals, or rather consider his ‘realist’ perspective to be indicative of the kind of resistance the NIEO faced from the countries of the Global North which ultimately defeated it. Either way, the differing way in which ‘development diplomacy’ was imagined and taught in the training courses for African diplomats during the years following decolonisation underlines a geopolitical and epistemic divide between North and South with implications for their diplomatic practice and ‘worldmaking after empire’.
[1] FSP Publicity File - R. Feltham, November 1973