In November 1963, Julius Nyerere, president of the newly independent East African country of Tanganyika, delivered a stirring speech to open a conference of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) in Rome. He began by commending the rise of an "almost wo rid-wide recognition of the common humanity of man, and a growing sense of human brotherhood," affirming that "the existence of the FAO is indeed one of the expressions of this feeling of involvement in each other's welfare." Yet Nyerere's speech quickly departed from this sanguine language of global fraternity and mutual concern as he turned to the subject of economic development. "Economically there are still two worlds, not one," he declared. Decolonization was giving rise to "an atmosphere of ever rising expectations among the poor of the world," but "the gap between the haves and the have-nots of the world" was "widening on a progressive scale." At the heart of the problem, he insisted, was the nature of the international political and economic order itself, with its philosophical basis in "multilateral free trade theory" and attendant disregard of the pronounced hierarchies ordering the community of supposedly equal nations. To correct the growing trend of developmental divergence and achieve basic economic justice for underdeveloped countries like Tanganyika, Nyerere asserted that isolated commodity agreements and occasional disbursements of aid were insufficient; a "World Economic Development Plan" was essential. "The FAO must either have the power to plan world food and agriculture, both production and marketing, or it will remain what it is now; a charity organization," he concluded incisively.1Nyerere's speech simultaneously highlighted both the importance and irrelevance of international development organizations in their existing form, eschewed technical discussions about agricultural modernization in favor of explicit reckoning with global inequalities, and argued that atomized policy prescriptions for national development could not succeed without countering the forces of uneven development inherent in the ideologies and practices regulating the world economy as a whole. In doing so, it invoked two contrasting (although not mutually exclusive) models for conceptualizing the global community: a humanistic, harmonious vision of transnational familyhood structured by the principle of mutual obligation, on the one hand, and a more confrontational, Marxist-inflected image of a world increasingly divided-along national lines-into the two polarized groups of profiteers and the poor, on the other. These paradigms alternately animated Third World activism on a global scale during the mid-to-late twentieth century, variously translating into calls for increased solidarity or unity and demands for substantive structural reforms.Temporally positioned at a midpoint between what scholars have taken to identifying as the bookends of the Third World movement-the Bandung Afro-Asian Conference of 1955 and the New International Economic Order (NIEO) call of 1973- Nyerere's 1963 lecture serves as a useful point of departure for an examination of the roots of the NIEO, particularly given the broad resonance of his bid for a "World Economic Development Plan" with the G-yys later proposal.2 Returning to this earlier moment helps illuminate the broader dynamics of Third World activism as it transitioned from its Bandung-era incarnation-emphasizing cultural or racial bonds and promoting cooperation (in very general terms) among participating countries-to its NIEO one-joining these same players in the formal institutional setting of the United Nations to stage precise, concrete economic and legal demands on what they referred to as the global north. More specifically, it helps account for how and why specific forms of activism became imaginable, compelling, and impossible at particular stages of this trajectory.Revisiting Nyerere's 1963 address also serves as an important reminder that the NIEO was not "of marginal relevance" to sub-Saharan countries, and neither was sub-Saharan Africa a marginal player in the making of this movement. …

/pdf/african-socialism-and-the-limits-of-global-familyhood-396ld6yaoi.pdf

Africa and the New International Economic Order

Citations

African Socialism and the Limits of Global Familyhood: Tanzania and the New International Economic Order in Sub-Saharan Africa

In Quest of the Right to Development: Prospects for an African Financial Architecture

References

African Socialism and the Limits of Global Familyhood: Tanzania and the New International Economic Order in Sub-Saharan Africa

Related Papers (5)

Aid to Africa

Africa in the Global Economy

Africa and the new international economic order

The 1992 European Community and Africa

India's Economic Relations With Africa and Foreign Policy Implications