Thinking about Global Inequality in an Age of Abundance: Debates on the New International Economic Order in Norwegian Civil Society

Abstract

This thesis examines debates about the New International Economic Order (NIEO) in Norwegian civil society in the 1970s. While much has been written about it from the perspective of high politics, less attention has been given to the international project’s path as a transnational idea in a local context. The thesis does this by writing an intellectual history of the NIEO in Norway. It examines the ideas of the development researchers that made up the core of the Idea Group for the New International Economic Order and some civil society organizations that were part of the idea group’s network. The idea group was a group of researchers, journalists, state officials, and civil society actors that mobilized for and wrote extensively about the NIEO. It had an advisory role to the Norwegian government and actively tried to shape the public debate on the issue. The thesis shows that the international political project of the NIEO sparked extensive debates about global inequality and the north-south relationship. In addition, the discussions were accompanied by a rich world of ideas on how the international order should be changed to benefit the world’s poor. The discourses were based on some premises specific to this historical conjuncture. The ideas examined contained a global distributional aspiration of equality. Because the global wealth divide was perceived to stem from the mechanisms of international economic structures, a prerequisite to reaching this aspiration was to change the structures of the international economy. Built on these common premises, many different visions of how the new international order should look were imagined. Situated in wealthy Norway, the examined actors argued that the country, in the name of global solidarity, had to take an active role in creating the new order and take measures that could have significant economic consequences for domestic society.