V.

International Aspects of Development

This conflict between radical theories and orthodox theories of development often played out as part of the Cold War between the industrialized capitalist countries and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). During the Cold War the chief capitalist countries and the Soviet bloc competed for the allegiance of the developing world, and the rhetoric of exploitative versus benign capitalism played a part in this competition. But many developing countries wanted to separate themselves from this competition. A movement grew up, much of it organized in an official body known as the Nonaligned Movement, which reached its zenith in the 1970s. There was a demand for a New International Economic Order in which the inequities of the world economy as the developing world saw it would be corrected. When the power of the oil-producing countries within the developing world was at its height, it looked as though the developing countries might have some leverage to get what they wanted. See the Sidebar, “The New Global Economic Order.”

But eventually oil prices collapsed, and related swings in financial markets produced a problem of international indebtedness that both weakened and divided the developing world. At the end of the 1970s a new set of world leaders—United States president Ronald Reagan, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and German chancellor Helmut Kohl—brought a new conservatism to international debate, and the kinds of international cooperation implied by the New Economic Order went off the map of political possibility.