CHRISTY THORNTON
Just nine months into his presidency, in October of 1981, Ronald Reagan stepped off a plane into the sweltering autumn sunshine in the resort city of Cancún, Mexico, to deliver the coup de grâce to the already faltering effort to create a New International Economic Order (NIEO). On disembarking in Cancún, where the North-South Summit on Cooperation and Development was to take place over the following days, Reagan shared an embrace with Mexican President José López Portillo, who had spearheaded the effort to convene the summit together with the Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky.1 But the U.S. president’s professions of friendship with the leaders of what had come to be called the “developing world” belied the message he would deliver: not only would there be no consideration of any redistribution of global wealth, as the Brandt Commission Report had urged the year before; there would be no further “global” negotiations on the matter, either.2 Instead, Reagan repeated his insistence on the “magic of the marketplace,” a refrain he had repeatedly used since taking office, arguing that “massive transfers of wealth” would not “somehow miraculously produce new well-being.”3 The prospect of reordering the global economy to take into consideration the needs of the developing world was all but dead. As López Portillo would put it, “Tragic paradoxes were raised in Cancún that could not be solved.”4
It was a sad irony that the already wounded NIEO project faced its final blow in Mexico, for Mexican leaders had been among its fiercest champions—and of the ideas underpinning it. It was, in fact, Mexico’s previous president, Luis Echeverría, who had proposed one of the NIEO’s core documents: the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States, adopted by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 1974 after more than two years of negotiations. For many scholars, the charter is a consummate document of the 1970s: conceived in the context of the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system and the energy crisis surrounding the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil embargo, the charter and the NIEO more broadly have been interpreted in recent scholarship as emerging at a moment of political possibility, when the decolonizing groundswell of newly independent states entering the UN system encountered a crisis in the capitalist world economy, which resulted in a call for a new kind of global economic imaginary. But while the form the NIEO and the charter took within the structures of the UN was undoubtedly embedded in the political-economic specificities of its time, the particular tenets of this imaginary actually had deeper roots. Although the proximate influence was obviously the 1960s agenda of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), under the ideological leadership of Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch, the underlying principles actually date all the way back, as scholars have recently noted, to the Mexican revolutionary constitution of 1917.5 Indeed, if we pull this single thread from the fabric of the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States, we unravel a decades-long history of Mexican advocacy for precisely the economic ideas codified in the charter—a history that both predates our traditional periodization of political struggles over international governance and development and widens our geographic understanding of where and by whom those struggles were fought.
That it was Mexico’s president who both proposed and was the fiercest advocate of the Charter of Economic Right and Duties of States—frequently referred to in Mexico as the Carta Echeverría—was not an accident.6 In fact, the charter represented the culmination of decades of advocating such rights and duties by Mexican politicians, economists, and diplomats in international fora: during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, within the Pan-American Union in 1923, at the 1933 Inter-American Conference at Montevideo, in the planning for the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, at the 1948 UN conference at Havana that was to have created an International Trade Organization, and beyond, into the era of UNCTAD and the finally the NIEO. In each of these moments, Mexican actors seized on moments of crisis and reform to project a developmentalist vision outward and to argue for new systems of international governance. The charter was, then, shaped in profound and heretofore unexamined ways by the political, social, and economic ideas that emerged from the Mexican Revolution and the postrevolutionary governments that carried its legacy into the international arena. In insisting on the fundamental premise of juridical equality of states, large and small, the right of those states to maintain sovereignty over economic decision-making, and the organization of the global economy for the mutual benefit of rich and poor nations, the 1974 charter directly echoed each of these earlier interventions made by Mexican experts on behalf of what were variously termed the “smaller,” “weaker,” “debtor,” or “less-developed” states. The roots of the New International Economic Order had long been nurtured in Mexican soil.
Despite this legacy, we know relatively little about the particularly Mexican foundations of the New International Economic Order. Renewed interest in the NIEO has emerged in the context of a larger turn toward global history, and particularly within an emerging subfield that could loosely be categorized as “histories of the global”—that is, research about historical projects that were themselves avowedly, explicitly globe-spanning. This new work, building on existing themes in transnational and international history, seeks to examine how the international and the global were conceived by historical actors, and how institutions and organizations for their governance were imagined and built. This emerging field brings together the robust historiography of international institutions such as the League of Nations and the vast UN system with a growing body of scholarship on the norms, ideological projects, and legal frameworks, such as human rights, global governance, and development, which have guided those institutions.7
A central concern of much of this new historiography of the global has been to read its subjects, long viewed through a North Atlantic lens, “from the outside in,” as Erez Manela puts it, using sources and perspectives from those “on the margins.”8 Thanks to this new scholarship, the exchange between center and periphery—of activists, diplomats, and intellectuals; the ideas with which they analyzed their world; and the policies they put in place to shape it—is now more frequently understood not as a one-way diffusion from the West to the rest, but a multidirectional and reciprocal process unevenly structured by power relations. The achievements of this path-breaking scholarship are to be celebrated, as it has opened new avenues of historical inquiry and offered new and exciting explanatory frameworks for historical change not only in what we now call the Global South—an imprecise but expansive term used to refer to the world beyond Europe and the United States—but in the Global North, as well.9
But even as renewed interest in the history of the global has pushed scholars to take seriously interventions from the South, a curious divide has emerged in this literature: Latin America is frequently left off the maps scholars have drawn.10 Latin America was, of course, a region colonized by European powers, ruled using imperial systems of control and resource extraction, and decolonized in fierce wars of independence.11 In fact, Latin America came into being as a kind of prototype of the modern interstate system, a community of nations simultaneously challenging and affirming one another’s right to existence through their shared commitment to republicanism and anti-imperialism.12 But by the late twentieth century, the region would come to form an integral part of the Third World: independent, unaligned, and indebted. Despite this, however, there has been a marked tendency to leave Latin America out of new histories of the global, even where actors and ideas from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East have been centered.13 The distance between these regions of the world is perhaps less geographical, however, than chronological, deriving from the century or more between their struggles for decolonization. In this emerging literature on global institutions and ideas, there is an apparent incommensurability of the decolonizing world in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East with the formally sovereign but economically and politically weak states of Latin America.14
The imperative toward global history, as Sebastian Conrad has noted, is motivated not only by moving beyond the nation-state as the container of history but also by decentering Europe as the driver of that history.15 In the push to decenter, however, much of this new literature—produced largely by scholars trained in European history—nonetheless replicates particular understandings of the relationship between Europe and its colonial peripheries, leaving Latin America largely beyond the frame. When Latin Americans do appear, their ideas and actions are frequently painted either as derivative of European antecedents, and therefore as not distinctive or, conversely, written off as simple pawns of a hegemonic United States, whose power is already always constituted and largely uncontested. In Samuel Moyn’s highly influential The Last Utopia, for example, much-lauded Latin American interventions in the midcentury codification of human rights at San Francisco merely “reflected long since globalized European practices in the first place.”16 In Giuliano Garavini’s impressive and wide-ranging After Empires, Latin Americans play a distinctly more active role, but the story is still one in which representatives of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961 could find themselves “offering admission” in Belgrade to a “Latin America whose states had been considered to that point almost as culturally dependent arms of the Western powers.”17 Considered by whom, we aren’t told, but presumably it wasn’t Latin American intellectuals, diplomats, or revolutionaries themselves, who had a long history of contention with the United States and other great powers.
Other work notes the importance of Latin American contributions to, for example, ideas about global governance—drawing on a dynamic and growing body of scholarship about Latin American contributions to international law—but leaves these episodes for area-studies scholars to detail.18 Mark Mazower, for instance, acknowledges in Governing the World: The History of an Idea, that “South Americans such as … Carlos Calvo and Alejandro Alvarez were important pioneers of the new international law, and Pan-Americanism itself emerged as an alternative to the ossified hierarchies and rivalrous alliances of Europe”—but despite this assertion, these experiences remain peripheral to the story he tells.19 To argue for the noninclusiveness and European focus of the League of Nations, for example, Mazower notes that of the forty-seven countries in attendance at the first League Assembly meeting, only four were from Asia and none from the Middle East.20 He fails, however, to note that fully sixteen of the countries represented—more than one-third—were from Latin America, as compared with twenty-one from Europe.21 Similarly, Glenda Sluga’s concise but influential Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism examines many of the diverse contexts for twentieth-century internationalist activism, including Black internationalism, Gandhian anti-colonialism, and Japanese regional internationalism, but makes only fleeting reference to the long experience of multilateral cooperation, contestation, and institution-building in the Western Hemisphere.22 In Sluga’s account, the Universal Postal Union comes in for considerably more discussion than the Pan-American Union, which merits not a single mention, despite being a forum for intergovernmental negotiations that predated the league and presaged many of the great debates on multilateralism that would define the twentieth century. This marginalization of the Pan-American Union is, is fact, something of a conventional wisdom: the Routledge History of International Organizations describes the Universal Postal Union’s work at length, but dismisses much of the international cooperation and contestation of the Pan-American Union as “specialized.”23 For many scholars—including, frequently, Latin Americanists ourselves—the long history of inter-American cooperation and contestation is insufficiently international, relegated to the “merely” regional.
Even some scholarship that is grounded in the analytical terrain of the Third World itself marginalizes, dismisses, or leaves out Latin America altogether. A recent special issue of the International History Review on Non-Alignment, for example, that sought to look “Beyond and Between the Cold War Blocs,” featured not a single article on Latin America.24 In another example, Roland Burke’s recent article about the struggle for economic and social rights in the 1960s sets up two antagonists in the battle he describes: the Western democracies, on the one side, and Africa, Asia and Middle East—as the constitutive parts of the Third World—on the other.25 The Latin Americans appear in this story only cursorily, when it is noted that “Latin American and communist states pressed the newer rights with the greatest vigor.”26 That this would be so makes sense, of course, given that economic and social rights have been at the core of Latin American liberalism since at least independence and were especially central to Latin American international interventions in the twentieth century, as Greg Grandin has argued.27 But here, the Latin American contribution to the struggle for a more expansive social rights regime within the United Nations is left unexamined, marginal even to a story told from the perspective of the Third World. A final example comes in Erez Manela’s groundbreaking The Wilsonian Moment, which traces “the international origins of anti-colonial nationalism” in a broad swath of the globe, looking at Egypt, India, Korea, and China. Left unexamined, however, are those places where Wilsonian ideals were actively belied in practice: the countries in Latin America and the Caribbean occupied by Marines sent by Wilson himself. In fact, the “universal moral authority” of Wilsonian self-determination was questioned not only by African Americans fighting racial subjugation in the United States, but also by Latin Americans grappling with continued U.S. military and economic intervention in their countries—something recognized by prominent African American thinkers of the time.28
So despite the fact that much of Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East shared the experiences of colonial rule, economic subordination, and the struggle for decolonization and self-determination, and despite the fact that actors from these varied regions would come together to form the fractious political project of the Third World, much of the new historiography of the global renders these regions of the world all but impossible to understand together, in relation to one another and to the Global North. Actors and ideas travel through Bandung and Belgrade, but only rarely Bogotá or Buenos Aires. There is too frequently in this literature, then, an apparent “decolonization divide,” resulting in an inability to cross the chronological and historiographic barrier between the regions of the Global South.29
Perhaps this decolonization divide is the reason the new literature on the NIEO has similarly deemphasized the importance of Latin America, even while highlighting the interventions of actors from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. The 2015 special issue of Humanity devoted to the New International Economic Order, and the publication of Vanessa Ogle’s “States’ Rights against Private Capital” a year earlier, brought a wealth of new scholarship on the NIEO, sparking new debate about the project and the era.30 Essays in the issue highlight the intervention of actors from Tanzania and Algeria, the socialist bloc and the United States, as well as those from institutions such as OPEC, the World Bank, and British nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Certainly, Latin American actors are far from absent in this work—Raúl Prebisch, Luis Echeverría, Hernán Santa Cruz, and Che Guevara all make appearances in the empirical details of the essays, as do other figures. Mexico City appears as the setting for a transnational struggle over women’s rights and how they would be best achieved. And the work of Latin American delegations at the 1948 Havana Conference, in UNCTAD and the UN Economic Commission on Latin America (ECLA), and within the struggles over the NIEO at the UN General Assembly, is duly noted. One essay even observes, in a single sentence about the legal project of the NIEO, “This project had a long history, which extended back to disputes between the United States and Mexico regarding the rights of U.S. investors,” but leaves those disputes largely unexplored.31 In failing to uncover the specifically Latin American contributions to the NIEO moment, this new literature overemphasizes the novelty of the arguments being put forward and misses the conceptual roots of the NIEO in earlier moments of Latin American, and particularly Mexican, internationalism. As detailed below, for example, the notion that states had both rights and duties in the world economy had motivated Latin American internationalism since well before the existence of the United Nations.32 The language of “interdependence” in the international economy was one that the Latin Americans used forcefully to argue for global economic change in the 1930s.33 And the idea of “states’ rights against private capital” was a core principle of the Mexican Constitution of 1917, one that motivated its outward projections in the decades that followed. These are the deeper roots of the NIEO, uncovered in the Mexican archives.
Of course, Mexican experts were far from alone in their advocacy for an international order that was more fair to what were variously called the “weaker,” “poorer,” or “debtor” countries of the world—by necessity, these campaigns were multilateral and coalitional.34 The ideas that would come to be embodied in the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States in the early 1970s had circulated widely for years, forming the basis for debates across the Global South and even for what Johanna Bockman has called “socialist globalization.”35 And in addition to ongoing debates within UNCTAD and the Group of Seventy-Seven (G-77), Mexican experts drew on a long history of Latin American interventions in the realm of international law, taking inspiration from the Calvo and Drago doctrines, which sought to subject foreigners and their capital to local law, in advocating their own principles for foreign affairs, such as the Carranza and Estrada doctrines.36 In moments of crisis in the world economic system of the twentieth century, then, Mexican diplomats, economists, and political figures consistently carried out their campaigns for the creation or reform of international regimes and institutions in close cooperation with representatives from other countries, both in Latin America and beyond.
There were, however, important ways in which Mexico occupied a unique position in the rapidly changing international order of the twentieth century: in its proximity to the United States, which resulted in a sustained history of economic, diplomatic, and intellectual engagement with the rising hegemon; in its status as an increasingly important oil producer, and one that had defied the United States and Great Britain in nationalizing its petroleum industry; and, perhaps most importantly, in the legacy of Mexico’s fractious social revolution, from which subsequent governments all claimed to derive their legitimacy, providing a continuity across administrations of markedly different political orientations. Relying on these factors, Mexican authorities repeatedly asserted and affirmed a historical duty to lead the other poor, weak, and debtor states in the international arena. (And in fact, Mexico’s self-styled leadership frequently resulted in the serious irritation of other states with whom they were to have been allied.) The ideas and institutions promoted by Mexico were not unique, then, but Mexico consistently played a crucial role in the struggle to turn such ideas into actions and institutions—indeed, into a new international economic order, even before it was given such a name.
While examining any single episode in the history of Mexican campaigns to realign the international order in which the country found itself might reveal only marginal or fleeting influence, taken together, they reveal a larger pattern. From the beginning, Mexico’s campaigns turned on the struggle for economic sovereignty, the need for equitable representation in international institutions, and the rights of weaker and indebted countries in the global system. Recognizing that Mexico, and countries like it, lacked domestic capital and were therefore reliant on foreign investment and foreign markets, Mexico’s postrevolutionary government began to chart a path toward a developmentalist future that focused not only on national development strategies in agriculture and industry, but also sought to rectify the international conditions in which such strategies were necessarily embedded. As Mexican officials sought to create a state-guided, developmental, mixed economy at home—always pushed and pulled by the social forces of labor, the peasantry, and the business classes, domestic and international—they also sought to scale up such a model. Their vision was an international economic architecture that, they argued, would distribute the gains of global capitalism more evenly and therefore prevent the recurrence of crises not only in the poor countries, but in the rich ones, as well.
These efforts began even before the military phase of the Mexican revolution truly ended—and just as the first global organizations of the twentieth century were being crafted. Beginning in 1919, the leader of the victorious Constitutionalist faction of the revolution, Venustiano Carranza, intervened in the debates about the creation of the League of Nations to argue for the juridical equality of states, large and small, and for their right to sovereignty over economic decision-making. Carranza had set forth an eponymous doctrine of international affairs that closely paralleled U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s vision for the world, but derived its force from Mexico’s revolutionary redefinition of property rights.37 The 1917 constitution had declared that “private property is a privilege created by the Nation” and argued that this privilege would be constrained by the “public interest” and managed by the state “to ensure a more equitable distribution of public wealth.”38 This conception of property rights underpinned Mexico’s international political program, and Mexican experts argued that their vision was not a rejection of Wilsonian liberalism, but rather an extension of its principles into the realms of collective economic and social rights. It also, of course, represented a claim to the substantial subsoil resources represented in Mexico’s oil fields, over which Mexico would clash with richer countries for decades.39 Carranza’s program included an end to secret diplomacy; absolute nonintervention in the internal affairs of other nations; the formal equality of foreign and national individuals—and corporations—before the law; and complete equality among nations and mutual respect for their sovereignty.40
Despite the basic underlying congruence of some of their ideas, however, Carranza’s doctrine would clash forcefully with Wilson’s plans for the League of Nations.41 After a roaring debate within the United States, Republican critics of the League—anxious that the new organization might foreclose any future U.S. intervention to recover losses in Mexico—convinced Wilson that the only way to guarantee ratification of the League Covenant in the Senate was to include an explicit recognition of the Monroe Doctrine within the document.42 When Wilson announced his amendment to the covenant, Carranza’s reaction was swift. In a bombshell interview published in the United States, Carranza declared that Mexico did not recognize the validity of the Monroe Doctrine and argued that, if all sovereign nations were juridically equal, there was no need for Wilson’s amendment: “There is no Monroe Doctrine for strong nations and there would be no necessity for such doctrine for [the] benefit of weak ones if [the] principle of equality is adhered to,” he told a U.S. journalist. The League as negotiated did not establish “a perfect equality for all nations and races,” he argued, and he went on: “The Mexican government has proclaimed as fundamental principles of its international policy, that all the states of the globe should have the same rights and the same obligations.”43 After Carranza’s declaration, it was clear to Wilson’s critics in Congress that the covenant’s protection of the Monroe Doctrine was an insufficient guarantee of U.S. privilege. If the negotiations over the League represented the first time that the United States had attempted to reconcile unilateral prerogative with multilateral legitimacy, Carranza’s critique laid bare the contradictions from the very beginning.
Carranza soon dispatched representatives throughout the hemisphere as part of a concerted effort to bring other Latin American countries on board with his vision. Over the next few years, even after the deaths of both Wilson and Carranza, Mexican diplomats would continue their quest to enshrine the principle of equality of nations in multilateral institutions. In the context of ongoing negotiations with international creditors and diplomatic pressure from the great powers, Mexican representatives used a reform effort at the fifth Inter-American Conference, at Santiago, Chile, in 1923, to codify their ideas about absolute sovereignty and the juridical equality of states into the statutes of the one interstate organization to which the United States and Mexico both belonged: the Pan-American Union. If the Union had to that point functioned as what many Latin Americans saw as “the colonial division of the Department of State,” such an impression was underscored by two rules in Union governance: its presidency was reserved for the U.S. secretary of state, and its governing board was made up only of the diplomats formally recognized by Washington, residing in the U.S. capitol.44 Because the Mexican government, now under president Álvaro Obregón, had not been formally recognized by the Harding administration (which hoped to force Mexico to recognize the property rights of U.S. oil companies), Mexico had been excluded from the governing board’s planning of the Santiago conference—and therefore didn’t send official delegates to the meeting.
During the conference, however the Mexican chargé d’affaires in Santiago, Carlos Trejo y Lerdo de Tejada—whom, despite not being a formal delegate, the Chilean president called the “most important person at the conference”—organized a group of delegates, including the representatives of Cuba, Costa Rica, and Venezuela, among others, into what he called the bando latinoamericano.45 The group introduced a series of proposals to radically reorganize the Union’s governance structure: the United States should no longer have the exclusive right to control which countries had representation on the governing board, they argued, and, what’s more, the presidency and vice-presidency should be rotating, not automatically vested in the U.S. secretary of state.46 After a protracted debate on the reform proposals, the U.S. representative, Henry Fletcher, was forced by Latin American insistence to largely accept the position taken by the bando latinoamericano.47 In the end, the new governance rules adopted at Santiago included the right of representation for all members at all international conferences, the ability to appoint a special representative to the governing board in the case of nonrecognition in Washington, and the right of the members of that board to elect their president and vice-president. In asserting the formal equality of sovereign nations within international institutions and insisting on their rights to participate in decision-making structures, Mexico had established a principle it would continue to pursue all the way up through the NIEO.
If debt had been an underlying issue structuring Mexico’s international relations in the 1920s—a decade when bankers’ and bondholders’ groups deployed massive international pressure to try to recoup defaulted loans from the Mexican government—it would become a global issue after the dislocations of the Great Depression. At the 1933 World Economic Conference in London, Mexico’s Alberto J. Pani joined those arguing for the necessity of international economic coordination to overcome the financial crisis. But after Roosevelt thwarted any possibility of cooperation in London, Mexican economists and diplomats looked to the upcoming Inter-American Conference in Montevideo, Uruguay, to lay out their plans for new vision of the world economy. Having witnessed Pani’s surprisingly forceful interventions in London, a British Foreign Office staffer reported to his superiors that it was likely that the Montevideo conference was to bring a contest “between Argentina and Mexico for the theoretical leadership of Latin America.” In such a contest, he continued, “Argentina has the resources, Mexico the theories.”48
At Montevideo, Mexico put forward its theories forcefully, once again assuming a self-appointed leadership role (much to the chagrin of the Argentine delegation, which fought Mexico’s proposals). Mexico’s foreign minister, José Manuel Puig Casauranc, issued a series of proposals for a wholesale reform of the system of international debt and credit and rallied support from other Latin American countries with a rousing speech in which he called for “a new legal and philosophic conception of credit” based on a recognition of international finance not as a technical economic science, but as a reciprocal, international social relation.49 Just as borrowers needed creditors to lend to them, Puig argued, the lenders needed borrowers to make productive use of their surplus capital. Despite this interdependent relationship, however, the poorer countries were robbed of their sovereignty over economic decision-making—meaning, Puig argued, that the credit form itself had become an ordering principle for international politics. He proposed a series of interventions to rectify this order, including an explicit recognition of the Drago doctrine, a debt moratorium, a bi-metalist international monetary system, and the creation of an international bank that would oversee currency stabilization and channel capital to productive investments in Latin America. The implications of his new conception of credit, Puig argued, were global: his plans should help in establishing “a procedure that we wish to be continental, that may perhaps come to have some effect of a universal order.”50 Such an order would be devised four decades later, of course, in the Carta Echeverría.
As the conference came to a close, U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull managed to postpone any binding discussion of Puig’s proposals by putting them off for a subsequent financial conference that never occurred. But the ideas that underwrote them would resurface quickly in a campaign to create an the Inter-American Bank (IAB), which was, as one scholar put it, “the first international organization to be formally negotiated whose central mandate included the promotion of international development”—a mandate that came not from the United States or Europe, but from Latin America.51 The creation of the IAB was, then, a key moment in making concrete the vision Puig had laid out in Montevideo. Mexican treasury official Eduardo Villaseñor detailed the specifics for the bank at a meeting of finance ministers in Guatemala in 1939: the IAB, he said, would be an international agency that would prevent the financial predations of private bankers, stabilize foreign exchange systems, and, crucially, “act as a channel for the investment of capital which will promote sound economic development in the American Republics.” Once again, the protection of economic sovereignty for the poor nations was key; Villaseñor argued that the bank would have to “avoid in all cases the aspect of hegemony or privilege that [foreign] investment could represent in the internal economy” of the debtor countries.52
By the late 1930s, and particularly after key nationalizations of oil in Mexico and Bolivia, Latin American insistence had convinced U.S. officials that they would need to play an active role in the development of the proposed bank, in order to ensure U.S. interests were protected.53 Treasury official Harry Dexter White, who had been arguing for increased U.S. aid to both China and Latin America, promoted the IAB to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau by insisting not only that such a multilateral institution would reduce the risk of default, but also that with such a bank, “the charge of dollar diplomacy would be absent.”54 The United States was learning from the criticisms that had been leveled against it—and it would seek to take those lessons beyond the hemisphere. As he looked to the postwar order, for instance, Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle thought the IAB might serve as a “laboratory study” for the kind of international economic planning would be necessary after WWII ended.55 Under the direction of White, Treasury officials worked with Latin American experts and with representatives from the State Department and the Federal Reserve to draw up a charter and bylaws for the bank. The proposed bylaws took up nearly all of the original proposals of the Mexican planners, establishing a bank whose purpose was to “facilitate the prudent investment of funds and stimulate the full productive use of capital and credit,” as well as to stabilize currencies; increase trade in the Western Hemisphere; facilitate research, data collection, and technical advising; and promote “the development of industry, public utilities, mining, agriculture, commerce and finance” in the Americas.56 Finally, Puig’s vision for “a new legal and philosophic conception of credit” was on the verge of being operationalized.57
The Inter-American Bank, however, faced severe opposition from private banking interests in the United States, and congressional representatives friendly to Wall Street managed to delay ratification of the bank’s charter long enough to prevent the institution from coming into being in the early 1940s (though Mexican officials would continue to argue for its creation until 1948). In the United States, attention turned to the creation of the new, global financial institutions that would govern the world economy after the war. As Eric Helleiner has argued, Harry Dexter White would take with him all of the lessons learned in the IAB negotiations—as well as negotiations with Mexico and other countries under the rubric of the Treasury Department’s Exchange Stabilization Fund—as he set out to create those new institutions: the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).58 In those negotiations, Mexican representatives continued to argue for the rights of small states—and the duties of rich ones—within the international financial system and the organizations that governed it. As the Mexican delegation prepared for the Bretton Woods conference, a headline in Mexico City summed up their plans: “Mexico Will Seek Voice and Vote for the Weaker Nations at the Monetary Meeting.”59
For Harry Dexter White, the proximity to and long experience with Mexican experts such as Antonio Espinosa de los Monteros, who had been at Harvard with White and had negotiated many bilateral agreements on behalf of Mexico, was crucial.60 Of course, White recognized the need for buy-in from the Latin Americans to sell his plans on a world stage, but he also drew from his experiences in the IAB and Exchange Stabilization Fund negotiations in developing his understanding of the problems of global finance. Over the course of the years preceding the Bretton Woods conference, Espinosa and his colleagues had repeatedly emphasized to White the need for a mechanism that would provide long-term capital to the developing countries, not simply short-term commercial credits for small-scale investment projects. In interagency planning for Bretton Woods, White explicitly referenced Espinosa’s demands and detailed how the proposed institutions would provide such capital.61 White’s insistence on Latin American participation in the planning and execution of the conference scandalized many in Great Britain, including John Maynard Keynes, whose assessment of the conference as “the most monstrous monkey-house assembled for years” is a well-known dismissal of the presence of so many representatives from Latin America.62 Less well-known, but more direct, was the assessment of another British Treasury official, who wrote to a colleague, “It is also silly to make the pretense that the Mexicans (even though their representative in July was, I understand, a graduate of the London School of Economics) and the Brazilians would discuss ‘at the expert level’ a document which the American Treasury was endorsing,” in the way that Dutch and Belgian experts might. He concluded dismissively, “Their function is to sign in the place for the signature.”63
Mexican officials had made clear to White, however, “that small countries have interests and responsibilities no less than the large countries,” and that if the institutions they were building were to be, indeed, multilateral, they must not benefit only a few countries at the expense of the majority.64 Espinosa de los Monteros would explicitly argue at the conference against rules for the IMF and the World Bank that would allow the rich countries to force “smaller countries [to] change their laws and perhaps even their constitutions”—an unacceptable violation of sovereignty.65 It was, therefore, on these questions of economic sovereignty that Mexico’s interventions at the conference turned. During the conference, Mexico joined with other countries to advocate for a series of measures: recognizing the responsibility of creditor nations, as well as debtors, for resolving financial disequilibria; protecting sovereignty over currency valuation decisions; guaranteeing adequate voting power for the developing countries, so that the United States could not unilaterally make policy without the smaller states; obtaining adequate representation for Latin Americans among the IMF executive directors; and ensuring that the World Bank would not focus exclusively on European reconstruction, but would include the development of the poorer nations.66 And in the end, the Mexican vision for an institution that would provide long-term development financing was fully integrated into the design of the bank and was one of the institution’s most innovative features.67 But while Mexico and its allies were able successfully negotiate provisions for each of these features into the chartering documents for the new institutions, it remained to be seen if the World Bank and the IMF would actually function to the benefit of the developing countries.
Even Mexican experts who had participated in the negotiations and were therefore seen as supporters of the new institutions quickly made their concerns clear. In 1945, economist Víctor Urquidi, who had been a central figure on the Mexican delegation, published an analysis of the new institutions in which he noted that as they were constituted, they “didn’t attack the root of the problem of investments for world economic development.”68 And so Mexican advocacy for a more just international economic system continued. Near the end of the Bretton Woods conference, the final meeting of the Third Commission (which was chaired by Mexican Finance Minister Eduardo Suárez) had considered two important topics: the creation of an “international agreement on maintaining high employment” and consideration of “trade and its relation to other financial policies.”69 While these issues were not addressed in depth at Bretton Woods, they would be taken up just a few years later, at the 1948 UN Conference on Trade and Employment in Havana. There, Mexico’s foreign minister, Ramón Beteta, worked diligently with representatives from countries such as Cuba and Australia to include provisions on commodity prices and labor protections in the charter of a proposed International Trade Organization (ITO).70 After four contentious months of negotiations, a charter was drawn up for the ITO that included some, but not all, of Mexico’s proposals. But as in the case of the Inter-American Bank, the U.S. Congress never ratified the ITO charter, and the organization came to be substituted by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), a supposedly temporary agreement between the advanced countries of the world that lasted almost half a century. While many Latin American countries joined GATT, Mexico refused and did not become a party to the agreement until the mid-1980s.
The failure to create an ITO reflected the sea change in geopolitics that occurred between 1944 and 1948, as new U.S. Cold War priorities shifted international concerns away from full employment and anything resembling international economic redistribution. Mexican officials sought to adapt to this new reality, and the path to import-substituting industrialization (ISI), meant to lessen the country’s dependence on foreign goods, became clear. But the pursuit of what was called “stabilizing development” was not a total retreat from the attempt to change the international systems within which Mexico and the other developing countries pursued their national strategies.71 Parallel to the negotiations at Bretton Woods, Mexico had argued at Dumbarton Oaks, Chapultepec, and San Francisco for the rights of what were called the “small countries” within the new United Nations organization and proposed language for a Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Nations, which was deemed a “substantial contribution toward the progressive development of international law” by the General Assembly in 1949.72 That proposal both crystalized much of the previous three decades of activism and prefigured the Carta Echeverría in crucial ways, including arguing for all countries’ “right to develop materially and spiritually” and promoting the principle of nonintervention, about which the Mexicans noted that their intentions were in a draft “expressly referring to political and economic intervention.”73
As UN agencies and bodies proliferated, Mexican officials continued to argue for these principles in the various reform efforts that shaped the practices and policies of the organization throughout the 1950s. In the aftermath of the Bandung conference in the fall of 1955, Jorge Castañeda, who would go on to be Mexico’s ambassador to the UN, wrote, “Lately, our governments have come to realize that the independence of colonial peoples is already an important economic problem which will become more acute in the future.”74 The question of the role of Latin America in what had not yet consolidated into the Third World was, then, already on the table. So even as the Mexican government ramped up ISI, Mexican economists and diplomats participated actively in negotiations in the 1950s on Latin American economic integration and continued to argue for changes to the international financial system. Mexican economic experts were crucial in the creation of institutions such as the long delayed Inter-American Development Bank, which was finally chartered in the late 1950s after Brazil’s Juscelino Kubitschek and Argentina’s Arturo Frondizi took up the cause, and the Latin American Free Trade Association, which was chartered in 1960 to foster complementarity and reciprocity (and not simply open markets) in Latin American trade.75
In the 1960s, as the shape of the postcolonial world became clearer and the first “development decade” got underway, Mexican officials would more forcefully begin to ally themselves with the Third World. Presidents Adolfo López Mateos (1958–64) and Luis Echeverría (1970–76) would undertake well-known diplomatic campaigns to this end, with what Vanni Pettinà has called the “urge to hasten the creation of a fairer international context for Third World countries’ development aspirations.”76 But below the level of presidential diplomacy—and even during the interregnum of the decidedly more conservative Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964–70)—Mexican state officials continued their campaign to promote not just the rights of the developing countries, but the responsibilities of the rich countries, as well. Through institutions such as ECLA and UNCTAD, as well as within the World Bank and the IMF, economists such as Víctor Urquidi spent the 1960s waging a campaign with other representatives from around the world who argued for reform of the international monetary system.77 Urquidi and his colleagues continuously warned—as he had in 1945—that not only did the international financial institutions still not provide the resources for development that the Third World needed, but also that they lacked the capacity to force the rich countries to confront the disequilibria their policies introduced. Such fears proved justified when the United States undertook unilateral action in August 1971, suspending gold convertibility, levying a 10 percent surcharge on imports, and devaluing the dollar, thereby reducing the purchasing power of Third World reserves. Mexico, which sent nearly two-thirds of its exports to the United States, worried that it would be particularly hard hit by the new U.S. policy.78 In response to this new moment of crisis, therefore, Mexico’s president would not only draw on the ongoing struggles over reform of the international monetary system, but would in fact summon the entire long history of Mexican advocacy for a fairer world economy in the quest to create a new international economic order.
The long history outlined above was the deeper context for the plans that Echeverría would promote for a Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States. That it was Luis Echeverría who led the charge for a kind of global economic justice has always been seen as something of a contradiction, as the other policy for which he is best known was the violent repression of student and guerrilla movements at home. How could he champion the cause of the Third World—lending support to leaders like Allende and Castro, flirting with the Non-Aligned Movement, establishing diplomatic relations with the Peoples’ Republic of China—all while waging a dirty war against those fighting for justice within his own country?79 In fact, the struggle over the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States reveals the basic coherence of his domestic and foreign policies. Throughout the campaign for what would become the charter, Echeverría used the threat of leftist insurgency, both within Mexico and throughout the Third World, to argue that his agenda represented a kind of responsible, reformist middle ground in a revolutionary world. Drawing on an exceptionalist narrative about the legacy of Mexico’s non-Communist social revolution, Echeverría tried to head off rebellious discontent through economic and social reforms that would make revolution less attractive, both at home and abroad. Where such reform was not enough, repression of student and guerrilla movements and cooperation with CIA surveillance of Cubans would prove, to the United States above all, that Mexico was crucial international interlocutor.80 As had been the case throughout the long history of Mexican developmentalism and internationalist advocacy surveyed above, Echeverría’s reforms—democratic opening of and increased state intervention in the economy at home and a new global economic framework abroad—were intended to save capitalism from succumbing to its contradictions.
Echeverría debuted his ideas about the world economy at the 1971 UN General Assembly, convened just weeks after the United States closed the gold window. The Mexican president began his speech to the assembly by reaffirming the similarities between Mexico’s own struggle against colonialism and the struggles of the recently decolonized world, putting Mexico in the ranks of the “majority of the world,” up against the powerful nations, whose own economic progress had “caused an unbalanced stratification of the world community.”81 He argued that the experiences of Latin America, and of Mexico in particular, had demonstrated that the achievement of formal independence and political sovereignty was insufficient for the achievement of justice, and he expressed the hope that “after the era of political decolonization through which we have lived, there comes another, of economic decolonization.” To achieve this, he called for a “basic reorganization of economic relations among nations.”
Back in Mexico City, Echeverría aide Porfirio Muñoz Ledo assembled a small team of experts to design such a reorganization, and their vision was debuted just a few months later at the third UNCTAD conference in Santiago, Chile.82 Decrying the failure of the industrialized world to meet the aid goals set out by the first “development decade” and noting the success that the Marshall Plan had brought to Europe, Echeverría told the gathered delegates that “there now needs to be a second process of the massive transfer of resources, directed this time to the periphery, that will correct many of the current economic distortions and open the path to shared prosperity for all nations.”83 Achieving this prosperity, he declared, would require a Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States. He then outlined the basic tenets of such a charter in his speech:
Freedom to dispose of natural resources; the right of every nation to adopt the economic structure it considered most suitable and to treat private property as the public interest required; renunciation of the use of economic pressures; subjection of foreign capital to domestic laws; prohibition of interference by supranational corporations in the internal affairs of States; abolition of trade practices that discriminated against the exports of non-industrial nations; economic advantages proportionate to levels of development; treaties guaranteeing stable and fair prices for basic products; transfer of technology; and greater economic resources for long-term untied aid.84
He concluded this list of principles with a warning: “The solidarity we demand,” he said, “is a condition of survival.” He argued that there could never be stability if the majority of the peoples of the world found themselves impoverished and discontented: “Our people,” he noted, “are aware that their misery produces wealth for others.”85
In response to Echeverría’s proposal, the conference created an international working group charged with drawing up a draft of the charter.86 The working group, initially made up of thirty-one countries and eventually expanded to forty, would include representatives from both industrialized and developing countries, both socialist and capitalist.87 Echeverría’s proposal now had a global mandate, and back in Mexico, the team that had initially proposed the idea began to draw up a first draft of the charter for the working group to consider.88 The Mexican draft drew on ideas that had been circulating in Third World forums, including the 1962 Cairo Declaration of Developing Countries and the 1967 Charter of Algiers. But it placed more emphasis than those previous documents on the responsibilities of the rich countries for the ongoing economic crisis, even going to so far as to call for the “structural adjustment” of the developed countries’ economies.89
In order to obtain such an adjustment, Muñoz Ledo reasoned, echoing Mexico’s interventions at the UN in 1949, it would be necessary that “international law and its codification should be progressively developed.”90 That is, the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States should move international law forward from its presently accepted norms. This was supported by figures such as the renowned Chilean jurist Hernán Santa Cruz, who considered the Mexican proposal an extension of the principles codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into the economic sphere.91 At the first working-group meeting, in Geneva in February of 1973, Mexico’s Sergio González Gálvez stressed the need for the working group to consider “not only norms of lex lata [current law], but also of lex ferenda [future law],” as well. For the Mexican representatives, the fight was for the creation of international law that governed the world as it should be, not simply as it was.92
The positions taken by the industrialized countries, however, consistently sought to confine the charter’s draft within their own understandings of the existing principles of law, particularly with regard to the rights of the developing countries to regulate foreign investment.93 The U.S. and International Chambers of Commerce and the American Bar Association lobbied strongly against any version of the charter that did not carve out adequate protections for international law, and they held sway with important members of the developed country delegations.94 Given this fundamental disagreement, the first working-group meeting managed during the two weeks of negotiations to produce only a draft outline that contained numerous alternative suggestions included for each article. The meeting was judged by its chair, Mexico’s Jorge Castañeda, to have been “extraordinarily difficult and turbulent.”95 The second working-group meeting in June of 1973 advanced the draft somewhat, but it still included a long series of seemingly irreconcilable proposals. The group sought an extension of its mandate from the Trade and Development Board at UNCTAD and agreed to hold two additional negotiating sessions, one in Geneva in February of 1974 and then in Mexico City in June.96
Throughout the negotiations, Echeverría undertook a worldwide campaign to promote the charter personally. On his first trip, he tried to woo skeptical officials in London, Brussels, and Paris before making his way to Moscow, where Leonid Brezhnev offered enthusiastic backing for the charter—particularly for the draft’s emphasis on nondiscrimination against countries with different socioeconomic systems.97 From Moscow, Echeverría traveled to China, where the government of Zhou Enlai agreed to undertake the “maximum efforts” for the formulation of the charter.98 He would later make another trip to Europe, stopping in Salzburg, Munich, Bonn, Rome, and Vienna, as well as in Belgrade, where he met personally with Josip Tito, who offered his “full support” for the charter.99 In addition, he toured South America, meeting with the presidents of Ecuador, Argentina, Peru, Brazil, and Venezuela, with whom he discussed the idea of creating primary producers’ cartels for Latin American exports.100 He also met multiple times with U.S. officials, including Nixon and Kissinger, to whom he made explicit his strategy of positioning Mexico as the responsible reformist in a world threatened by revolution. After reminding Nixon of his own effectiveness at quashing internal rebellion within Mexico—something U.S. embassy staff noted he did at every meeting—Echeverría put it bluntly: “If I don’t take this flag in Latin America,” he told Nixon, “Castro will.”101 By playing up the destabilizing threat represented by those to his left, he was positioning Mexico’s plans—modeled on what he called “capitalist solutions of a mixed type”—as the responsible way to head off social conflict and therefore attempting to make the economic vision represented by the charter indispensable to a skeptical United States.102
In addition to push-back from the industrialized world, Mexico’s attempts to position themselves as the responsible middle ground revealed serious division among the developing countries themselves. At a meeting of the foreign ministers of the Non-Aligned Countries in Georgetown, Guyana, just after the Santiago UNCTAD conference, Algeria’s Abdelaziz Bouteflika had laid out one important axis of disagreement, arguing pointedly that “the road of Third World economic emancipation does not run through UNCTAD.”103 And even within Latin America, the more radical governments of Peru, Chile, and Cuba had used ongoing negotiations about reforming the international monetary system to argue that the reform of existing institutions such as the IMF would be insufficient—instead, they declared, the Third World needed new global financial structures altogether.104 Mexico faced skepticism, then, from those in the Third World who sought a more revolutionary path forward. Nevertheless, in 1973, when the Algerian government called for a special session of the UN General Assembly to address not just the spiraling energy crisis but “raw materials and development” more broadly, the Mexican government enthusiastically supported the effort.105
Mexican officials broadly understood the special session’s agenda on development as complimentary to, if not derivative of, the effort to create a Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States, and they thought that the session’s final declaration would be an important means of advancing the charter. In fact, the background paper laying the groundwork for the special session was prepared in the February 1974 charter working-group meeting in Geneva, which meant that the issues to be discussed closely mirrored the language of the draft charter as it was being negotiated.106 During the session, the Mexican representative served on a six-member ad hoc committee that worked to bring the G-77 countries into agreement. In addition, Mexican delegates worked hard to drum up support for the charter; the Foreign Ministry noted that at least twenty-three countries had publicly voiced support for it in the general debate. A memo for Echeverría from the Foreign Relations Ministry after the special session noted that the NIEO declaration represented an “important advance and a convergence of positions” between the various countries, which it was hoped would facilitate the task of the final working-group session in Mexico City only a few weeks later.107 The draft worked out by the ad hoc committee of the G-77 was remitted to the plenary session as unanimous, though in plenary the United States, members of the European Community, and Japan all registered reservations to the text, with the United States and the United Kingdom making special mention of international law.108 Nevertheless, the resolution was adopted by the General Assembly without a vote and therefore carried the imprimatur of unanimity.
Despite initially supporting the effort, Mexico’s Foreign Minister Emilio Rabasa soon came to realize that the NIEO declaration may have had the effect of making the passage of the charter itself more difficult. In response to the increasing militancy of the Third World, particularly once the OPEC oil embargo was underway, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had devised what he called a “New Dialogue” with Latin America, hoping to peel off regional allies from the Third World coalition. Such a move reinforced the position of Mexico as a mediator between the industrialized countries and Third World radicals, and Mexican officials attempted to take advantage of this space. In addition to the ongoing official working-group negotiations and Echeverría’s own ceaseless worldwide advocacy of the charter, Mexican officials had been undertaking sidebar negotiations with two legal advisors to the U.S. State Department, Carlyle Maw and Stephen Schwebel. By the end of the third working-group meeting, Rabasa noted that the Mexican and U.S. teams had “agreed upon a formula” regarding language around nationalization and multinational corporations, which would be the basis on which they would enter into negotiations in the fourth and final session.109 Indeed, in the final working-group session, the Mexican and U.S. teams worked to introduce compromise language about the issue of international law, secretly ghostwriting an alternative to the charter’s controversial Article 2—on permanent sovereignty over natural resources, nationalization, and the regulation of multinational corporations—which was then introduced by the Philippine representative as his own.110 The NIEO declaration as passed in the special session, however, went beyond this compromise language. When Rabasa met with Kissinger in Washington in August of 1974 (just after Nixon had resigned), Rabasa argued that by not abstaining from or voting against the NIEO resolution, the United States had emboldened what he called the “unaligned” countries and that it would therefore need to compromise further. But Kissinger stuck to the compromise they had already reached. At a later meeting, he argued, “We want a charter consistent with the Maw-Rabasa agreement but we cannot go beyond that. We do not want to elaborate principles of international law to be used against us.”111
Despite his refusal to compromise further, however, Kissinger had come to see support for the charter as an important means of keeping Mexico in the U.S. orbit. He was frustrated that others in the U.S. government could not see the geopolitical logic at stake: he accused Maw and Schwebel of legalistic nitpicking and told those who championed the business interests aligned against the charter, such as Republican Senator Charles Percy of Illinois (himself the former head of Bell and Howell Corporation), that U.S. businessmen were “morons” who could not see that the charter, as conceived, would actually have little impact on them in practice.112 President Ford, for his part, seemed to get Kissinger’s strategy: meeting at the U.S.–Mexico border in October of 1974, Ford surprised the assembled reporters, as well as the Mexican president, by saying that the charter “had very great merit and support.” Echeverría seized on Ford’s remarks, telling reporters, “actually this is a complete change from what it was before, and this is very valuable support.”113 While the U.S. delegation to the UN released a statement a few days later indicating that there had not, in fact, been a change in its position, Echeverría’s remarks were enough to stir up great controversy in the United States, not least among the business class. The National Foreign Trade Council, representing some six hundred U.S.–based multinational firms, released a statement saying that the charter “would seriously deter if not fully shackle foreign private investment.”114 The chorus of business-class opposition was growing louder.
In late November, the final deliberations got underway at the General Assembly in New York. It was clear that, given the compromise reached with the U.S. representatives, Mexico’s original efforts at the creation of lex ferenda, codifying the international law for the world as they wished to see it, would remain an unfinished project at the General Assembly. But Mexican representatives had come up with a justification for the success of the charter, despite this failure: Mexico’s Jorge Castañeda argued that the charter had, “in a certain sense, the character of a constitution, that should only set forth basic principles.”115 So, Castañeda argued, just as the Mexican constitution of 1917 had required enabling legislation to nationalize petroleum or effect land reform, so would the charter require, over the coming years, just that sort of international codification. Once again, Mexico mobilized its own historical legacy as a guide for its global vision.
The last few days of furious negotiation turned on how the industrialized countries would vote: the Europeans had made clear that they hoped to abstain, rather than voting against the charter, shielding themselves without having to go too far. Kissinger wanted the United States to abstain, as well, but others on the U.S. delegation—especially Deputy Secretary of State Robert Ingersoll, Senator Percy, and UN Ambassador John Scali—continued to argue on behalf of the business class that explicit protection for international law was necessary to preclude a no vote. After France introduced a resolution to postpone the vote, the G-77 countries introduced further compromises, deciding for instance to drop a reference to the “codification and progressive development” of international economic law.116 They hoped this and other changes would be sufficient to bring the developed country skeptics around, but to no avail. In the final vote, Japan and a number of the European countries abstained, while Belgium, Denmark, Luxembourg, West Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States voted no.
After the vote, Kissinger was exasperated. Excoriating Percy and Scali, he told an incredulous Rabasa, “Assuming you’re not going to quote me, I think our people behaved very badly.”117 Kissinger later worried to his staff that “Echeverría, who was always basically a third-worlder, is going to be unloosed”—and therefore that rather than an ally who sought to temper the most radical demands emanating from Latin America and the Third World, Mexico might instead lend its weight increasingly to efforts against U.S. interests.118 Indeed, it now seemed that Mexico had a broad set of allies: from Afghanistan to Zambia, 120 countries voted in favor of the charter, and it therefore passed overwhelmingly. Rabasa noted in his remarks after the vote that those voting yes “represented 3.2 billion people, on five continents.”119 The Mexican representatives could now claim that the majority of the world had spoken, and it had done so with Mexico’s voice.
Of course, by ensuring that the compromise language worked into the charter would have no binding legal power, the industrialized countries insulated themselves from the demands of what they saw as a surprisingly unified Third World. As a result, the NIEO and the charter are largely remembered as failures. The period that followed saw the birth of an entirely different new international economic order, presaged by Reagan’s visit to Cancún, based in the neoliberal tenets that came to be codified in the Washington Consensus. Mexico itself would be emblematic of this change: when Mexico defaulted on its international debts in 1982 and subsequently turned to the IMF for assistance, the structural adjustment programs that followed marked the true end of the Mexican revolutionary process. But if, as Nils Gilman has recently argued, the NIEO should be thought of not as a failure, but as what Jennifer Wenzel has termed an “unfailure”—a failed project that can “live on as prophetic visions, available as an idiom for future generations to articulate their own hopes and dreams”120—then that idiom should be traced all the way back through the long history of Mexican interventions in the international arena, through the lineage that led to Echeverría’s advocacy of the charter.
The Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States echoed and realized fifty years of Mexican campaigning for an international order that would harness global capitalism to an agenda of social and economic justice. The document’s fundamental insistence that “all states are juridically equal” was a reformulation of Carranza’s assertions about the “principle of equality” in international relations a half-century earlier. The charter’s argument that states had equal decision-making rights within international institutions directly paralleled the reforms of the Pan-American Union that Trejo y Lerdo orchestrated in 1923. Its insistence on economic sovereignty and its vision for a world economic system based in reciprocity drew directly from the arguments of Pani and Puig at the London and Montevideo conferences in the 1930s. Echeverria’s invocation of an “identity of interests” in reform directly echoed the Mexican planners who had called for the creation of an Inter-American Bank and had written in 1931 that such a bank would create what they called a “solidarity of interests.”121 The charter’s focus on the right to development drew from the insistence of Espinosa and Urquidi on the centrality of these issues at Bretton Woods. And its vision of the role of trade in development drew from the proposals Beteta had pursued in the negotiations over an international trade organization in 1948. Indeed, the entire struggle to codify international economic law was a direct echo of an argument Beteta had made in 1940, defending this agenda: “As Mexico questioned the sacredness of a profit-making system based on an absolute right of private property, in her Agrarian Reform and in her Labor Laws—to mention but two of her fundamental reforms—she could not accept without reserve the so-called ‘principles of international law’ which often were but means to protect that very system and absolute right which foreigners might not have at home, but which they expected to enjoy in the small countries where they had made their investments, as much as in the colonies belonging to their powerful fatherlands.”122 This refusal to accept the principles of international law was, as demonstrated above, not just rhetorical: it was made manifest in repeated campaigns to reform those laws and institutions that governed the international economy during the twentieth century.
This legacy, however, is one that has been all but ignored in the recent scholarship, even as the NIEO has been subject to renewed study. Because the NIEO resolution was passed first and because it did not receive any negative votes, we remember the charter as largely derivative of the NIEO effort, when in fact the historical record shows the reverse was true. Overlooking this chronology, as well as prior moments of Latin American struggle, as influences on the emergence of the NIEO causes us to misidentify what precisely is novel in that 1970s moment and therefore to misapprehend both where the struggle came from and how it was understood by the United States as a world economic power in a moment of crisis. The argument made by Vanessa Ogle, for example, for the centrality of the “role and function of trade, private capital, and foreign direct investment” in our understandings of the history of development is indispensable.123 But by insisting that “states rights vs. private capital” and that “permanent sovereignty over natural resources” were novel political concepts of the 1960s, her analysis overlooks Latin America’s long fight against economic imperialism, which took U.S. and European capital as its target. Moreover, it also overlooks the centrality of the Mexican Revolution’s radical redefinition of property rights—and its long struggles over control of its petroleum industry—as its most important manifestation.124 Mexican and other Latin American economists and diplomats had identified the problems of the organization of international finance as early as the 1920s and 1930s, and in proposing the reforms outlined above, they attempted to preclude many of the inequities that would motivate the call for a new international economic order.
Uncovering this history helps us to see international projects such as the NIEO not as novel products of postwar decolonization, but as culminations of projects of modernization from below, originating in the decades before World War II. Rather than locating the emergence of demands for “development-related rights” and the “corresponding obligations of developed countries and the international community as a whole” in the early 1970s, the story outlined above reveals the origins of the project of international development as emanating from Latin America and in postrevolutionary Mexico in particular.125 This perspective centers the importance of economic sovereignty as a necessary counterpart to territorial sovereignty—indeed, as a major constitutive part of self-determination. Nationalist leaders of newly decolonized countries in Africa and Asia would come to stress the importance of economic sovereignty in the 1960s and 1970s, but it had been a central impetus for Latin American nationalism and internationalism in a much earlier period.126 As we now know, the postrevolutionary Mexican state’s internationalist project was animated by many of the same aspirations (and, it should be said, suffered many of the same contradictions) that would emerge later in other regions of the world in the process of decolonization. Centering economic sovereignty and self-determination, rather than political decolonization, in the history of the twentieth century might provide a new and more accurate periodization of the emergence of the project of not just the New International Economic Order, but of the Third World itself.
The author would like to thank Samuel Moyn and Nils Gilman for their helpful feedback, as well as the anonymous reviewers at Humanity, where this piece originally appeared in 2018. In addition, comments by the participants of the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History seminar at Harvard University, especially Arne Westad, Angélica Márquez-Osuna, Sven Beckert, and Quinn Slobodian, as well as additional feedback from Thomas Field, Vanni Pettinà, Stuart Schrader, Erez Manela, Giuliano Garavini, and Vijay Prashad, were invaluable. Research for this piece was supported by a Lewis Hanke Postdoctoral Award from the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH).
1. María Luisa González Marín, “México ante el diálogo Norte-Sur,” Foro Internacional 24, no. 3(95) (1984): 327–40.
2. Walter Goldstein, “Redistributing the World’s Wealth: Cancun ‘Summit’ Discord,” Resources Policy 8, no. 1 (March 1982): 40.
3. Howell Raines, “Reagan Meets with Chinese and Mexican Leaders,” New York Times, 22 October 1981; Ronald Reagan, “Remarks to Reporters upon Departure for the International Meeting on Cooperation and Development in Cancun, Mexico,” 21 October 1981, The Public Papers of the President: Ronald Reagan, 1981–1989, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
4. José López Portillo, “Las Naciones Unidas en la encrucijada,” Comercio Exterior 32, no. 11 (1982): 1244.
5. Nils Gilman, “The New International Economic Order: A Reintroduction,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 6, no. 1 (2015): 3; Antony Anghie, “Legal Aspects of the New International Economic Order,” Humanity 6, no. 1 (2015): 150.
6. See César Sepulveda, “El sentido y el alcance de la Carta de Derechos y Deberes Económicos de los Estados,” in Estudios en Honor del Doctor Luis Recaséns Siches, ed. Fausto E. Rodríguez García (México DF: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Facultad de Derecho, Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas, 1980), and John Toye and Richard Toye, The UN and Global Political Economy Trade, Finance, and Development (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 239–42.
7. Exemplary work that fits in the “histories of the global” frame includes Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin, eds., Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Marc Frey, Sönke Kunkel, and Corinna R. Unger, eds., International Organizations and Development, 1945–1990 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Patricia Clavin, Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations, 1920–1946 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York: Penguin Press, 2012); Daniel Maul, Human Rights, Development, and Decolonization: The International Labour Organization, 1940–70 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Giuliano Garavini, After Empires: European Integration, Decolonization, and the Challenge from the Global South 1957–1986 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010); Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), among others. Human rights and development have become subfields of their own. For a review of recent debates in human rights history, see Christopher McCrudden, “Human Rights Histories,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 35, no. 1 (1 March 2015): 179–212. For a recent review of literature on development, see Joseph Hodge, “Writing the History of Development (Part 1: The First Wave),” Humanity 6, no. 3 (2015): 429–63, and “Writing the History of Development (Part 2: Longer, Deeper, Wider),” Humanity 7, no. 1 (2016): 125–74.
8. Manela, The Wilsonian Moment, 6.
9. Of course, the turn toward the global is not without its skeptics. See especially Frederick Cooper, “What Is the Concept of Globalization Good For?,” African Affairs 100, no. 399 (2001): 189–213, and, more recently, “How Global Do We Want Our Intellectual History to Be?,” in Global Intellectual History, ed. Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 283–94.
10. This is not to argue that Latin America has not figured in broader histories of transnational or global processes: from World Systems theory to postcolonial studies, many scholars have made the case for the centrality of Latin American commodities, markets, ideas, and movements to countless world historical processes and events. But even in much Latin Americanist scholarship, we tend not to argue for the “global” impact of interstate and transnational processes: region remains the dominant analytic frame for the international, and Pan- and Inter-American movements and processes are often regarded as merely regional and therefore insufficiently international. For an example of a regional engagement with the League of Nations, see Alan L. McPherson and Yannick Wehrli, eds., Beyond Geopolitics: New Histories of Latin America at the League of Nations (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015).
11. Latin American engagements with postcolonial theory have generated a vast and much debated literature that has long sought to understand the place of Latin America in broader world systems. See, for example, Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Jauregui, eds., Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Walter Mignolo, “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-Coloniality,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2 (2007): 449–514; Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–80; Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein, “Americanity as Concept: Or the Americas in the Modern World-System,” International Social Science Journal 131 (1992): 549–57.
12. Michel Gobat, “The Invention of Latin America: A Transnational History of Anti-Imperialism, Democracy, and Race,” American Historical Review 118, no. 5 (1 December 2013): 1345–75; Greg Grandin, “The Liberal Traditions in the Americas: Rights, Sovereignty, and the Origins of Liberal Multilateralism,” American Historical Review 117, no. 1 (1 February 2012): 68–91.
13. There are, of course, important exceptions to this trend, such as Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2008), and Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). This volume also seeks to address connections across regions.
14. The problem posed by Latin America for these new concepts of the global also appears in a series of recent methodological volumes. Sven Beckert and Dominic Sachsenmaier, eds., Global History, Globally: Research and Practice around the World (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), bucks the trend somewhat, as it is grounded in scholarship emerging from the various regions of the world and therefore includes a chapter on how Latin American scholars have understood the place of their region in world historical processes by the Brazilian historians Rafael Marquese and João Paulo Pimenta. But in Julian Go and George Lawson, eds., Global Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), which outlines an exciting research agenda that combines history, historical sociology, and international relations, there is scant mention of Latin America, even while other regions receive in-depth case studies. In Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, eds., Global Intellectual History, the crucial ideas that circumnavigated the earth to make meaning of the concepts of the global and the universal make only one brief stop in the Western Hemisphere outside the United States, in revolutionary Haiti (though in his reply to Moyn and Sartori, Frederick Cooper evokes Garcilaso de la Vega, signaling further intellectual exchanges to be examined. Cooper, “How Global Do We Want Our Intellectual History to Be?,” 290.) In Margrit Pernau and Dominic Sachsenmaier, eds., Global Conceptual History: A Reader (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), “encounters leading to the transformation of concepts” do not occur in the Western Hemisphere at all.
15. Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).
16. Moyn, The Last Utopia, 66.
17. Garavini, After Empires, 25.
18. An overview of Latin American interventions in international law is provided by Jorge L. Esquirol, “Latin America,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law, ed. Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peters (New York: Oxford, 2012). For further work on the topic, see Juan Pablo Scarfi, “In the Name of the Americas: The Pan-American Redefinition of the Monroe Doctrine and the Emerging Language of American International Law in the Western Hemisphere, 1898–1933,” Diplomatic History 40, no. 2 (2016): 189–218; Arnulf Becker Lorca, “International Law in Latin America or Latin American International Law? Rise, Fall, and Retrieval of a Tradition of Legal Thinking and Political Imagination,” Harvard International Law Journal 47, no. 1 (2006): 283–305; Liliana Obregón, “The Colluding Worlds of the Lawyer, the Scholar and the Policy Maker: A View of International Law and Foreign Policy from Latin America,” Wisconsin International Law Journal 23, no. 1 (2005): 145–72; and Teresa Davis, “The Continent of Peace: Sovereignty, Empire and Internationalism in Latin America, 1914–1939,” PhD diss., Princeton University, in progress. This chapter takes up Mark Mazower’s expectation that “much more will certainly be written from the vantage point of what was once known as the Third World to reframe the version of history told here.” Mazower, Governing the World, xviii.
19. Mazower, Governing the World, 9. He recognizes, additionally, that “the South American contribution to the League and the United Nations, to postwar global debates about development and neoliberalism, begins … in a nineteenth-century hemispheric counterdiplomacy that unified North and South in a common if uneasy embrace against European diplomatic hegemony” (9). But even a quick survey of the relationship between the United States and Latin America in this period reveals that there is a great deal more contention in the “common if uneasy embrace” than is allowed here. While U.S. power was undeniably preponderant in, for example, the Pan-American Union, it was far from uncontested. It is by paying closer attention to those contests that we can discover how the United States came to understand both the advantages and dangers of multilateralism and international cooperation and reveal how U.S. actors saw institutions such as the Pan-American Union as a laboratory for working out more expansive forms of international association.
20. Mazower, Governing the World, 254. Mazower counts the total number at forty-eight, but Honduras did not send a representative to the first meeting. In addition, Persia was, in fact, in attendance, and its representative, Emir Zoka-Ed-Dowleh, argued passionately for the “representation of all the peoples who form the human race” in the assembly. See League of Nations, Records of the First Assembly: Plenary Meetings (Geneva, 1920), 568, and Arnulf Becker Lorca, Mestizo International Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 272.
21. Representatives from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, El Salvador, Uruguay, and Venezuela were in attendance at the first League Assembly meeting; League of Nations, Records of the First Assembly. An analysis of the history of the idea of governing the world should take seriously the presence of these countries not as multilateral fig-leaves covering the bare pretentions of U.S. or European power but as internationalist interlocutors continuously defining the boundaries within which the great powers would have to reconcile multilateral liberalism with unilateral prerogative.
22. Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism.
23. This is due, as we shall see, to the notion that the “United States obviously acted as the regional hegemon” within the Pan-American Union, therefore, apparently, rendering the Pan-American Union’s internationalism inferior to that of telegraphers and postal services. See Bob Reinalda, Routledge History of International Organizations: From 1815 to the Present Day (New York: Routledge, 2009).
24. See the special issue “Beyond and Between the Cold War Blocs,” ed. Janick Marina Schaufelbuehl, Sandra Bott, Jussi Hanhimäki, and Marco Wyss, International History Review 37, no. 5 (2015).
25. Roland Burke, “Some Rights Are More Equal than Others: The Third World and the Transformation of Economic and Social Rights,” Humanity 3, no. 3 (2012): 427–48.
26. Burke, “Some Rights Are More Equal than Others,” 428; emphasis mine.
27. Grandin, “The Liberal Traditions in the Americas.”
28. Manela, The Wilsonian Moment, 26. Critics such as James Weldon Johnson, in fact, honed their critique of U.S. production of racial inequality through recourse to analysis of the occupation of Haiti. See Mary Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). My thanks to Stuart Schrader for emphasizing this point.
29. As H. Reuben Neptune points out, “decolonization” has been used to refer, as well, to independence of the United States, and it was only with the rise of the Cold War and the move from an “old and new” world schema to a “first, second, third” one that the United States lost its affinity with, as he puts it, “Argentina and Haiti, for example,” and thereby “precluded the presumption of commensurability across the hemisphere.” H. Reuben Neptune, “The Irony of Un-American Historiography: Daniel J. Boorstin and the Rediscovery of a U.S. Archive of Decolonization,” American Historical Review 120, no. 3 (2015): 941.
30. Nils Gilman, “The New International Economic Order: A Reintroduction,” Humanity 6, no. 1 (2015), http://
31. Antony Anghie, “Legal Aspects of the New International Economic Order,” Humanity 6, no. 1 (2015): 150.
32. This idea of obligations, of duties as important as rights, has been largely forgotten in the history of international governance, as Samuel Moyn reminds us. See Moyn, “Rights vs. Duties,” Boston Review, 16 May 2016, https://
33. Victor McFarland, “The New International Economic Order, Interdependence, and Globalization,” Humanity 6, no. 1 (2015): 217–33. A resolution on the creation of a Pan-American economic organization passed in 1931, for example, explicitly recognized the “interdependence” of the economies of the Western Hemisphere. See Pan-American Union, Fourth Pan-American Commercial Conference: Final Act with Annexes and a Summary of the Work of the Conference (Washington, DC: Pan-American Union, 1931).
34. The multilateral strategies employed by weak states in the global system has been characterized by political scientists as “meta-power behavior” and “soft-balancing.” Stephen D Krasner, Structural Conflict: The Third World against Global Liberalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Robert Pape, “Soft Balancing against the United States,” International Security 30, no. 1 (2005): 7–45. For the application of “soft-balancing” to historical cases in Latin America, see Max Paul Friedman and Tom Long, “Soft Balancing in the Americas: Latin American Opposition to U.S. Intervention, 1898–1936,” International Security 40, no. 1 (2015): 120–56.
35. Johanna Bockman, “Socialist Globalization against Capitalist Neocolonialism: The Economic Ideas behind the New International Economic Order,” Humanity 6, no. 1 (2015). On Third-World coalitional politics, see Stephen Krasner, Structural Conflict: The Third World against Global Liberalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Krasner theorized that this sort of activity was typical of weak states that were seeking to promote new international regimes and institutions through what he calls “meta-power behavior.” For the role of Latin American economists and experts in promoting international economic regulation within the League of Nations structure in the 1920s and 1930s, see José Antonio Sánchez Román, “América Latina y los orígenes de la regulación económica internacional,” XV Encuentro de Latinoamericanistas Españoles, November 2012 (Madrid: Trama Editorial), 1461–72.
36. The Estrada Doctrine called for the diplomatic recognition of all governments on the principle that nonrecognition was a form of intervention and a violation of sovereignty. See Amelia M. Kiddle, Mexico’s Relations with Latin America during the Cárdenas Era (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2016), 16.
37. Indeed, the Mexican government was at pains throughout the conference to stress how closely its program for international affairs paralleled that promoted by Wilson. See especially “El Senado de México desea la participación de nuestro pais en la Liga de Naciones,” El Universal (México DF), 18 March 1919.
38. Constitution of Mexico, Article 27, reproduced in Gilbert M. Joseph and Timothy J. Henderson, The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 398–401.
39. The literature on revolutionary Mexico’s oil politics is substantial, but is almost always examined from a bilateral perspective and rarely examines Mexico’s multilateral diplomacy. A few key works are Lorenzo Meyer, Mexico and the United States in the Oil Controversy, 1917–1942 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977); Jonathan Brown, Oil and Revolution in Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and Linda Hall, Oil, Banks, and Politics: The United States and Postrevolutionary Mexico, 1917–1924 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995). More general works on revolutionary and postrevolutionary foreign policy tend to focus on Mexico’s “revolutionary nationalism” to the exclusion of internationalist tendencies; an exception is Roberta Lajous Vargas, Historia mínima de las relaciones exteriores de México (1821–2000) (México DF: El Colegio de México, 2012), which situates Mexican foreign relations in their international context. The best general studies include Friedrich E. Schuler, Mexico between Hitler and Roosevelt: Mexican Foreign Relations in the Age of Lázaro Cárdenas, 1934–1940 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998); Daniela Spencer, The Impossible Triangle: Mexico, Soviet Russia, and the United States in the 1920s (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Stephen R. Niblo, War, Diplomacy, and Development: The United States and Mexico 1938–1954 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1995); Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), Mark T. Gilderhus, Diplomacy and Revolution: U.S.-Mexican Relations under Wilson and Carranza (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977), and Robert Freeman Smith, The United States and Revolutionary Nationalism in Mexico, 1916–1932 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). More recently, works that have looked to Mexico’s relations with the rest of Latin America or with international institutions have been more multilateral in focus. See Kiddle, Mexico’s Relations with Latin America during the Cárdenas Era; Renata Keller, Mexico’s Cold War: Cuba, the United States, and the Legacy of the Mexican Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Fabián Herrera León, “México En La Sociedad de Naciones: Modernización Y Consolidación de Una Política Exterior, 1931–1940,” PhD diss., El Colegio de México, 2010, and Pablo Yankelevich, La Revolución Mexicana en América Latina: Intereses políticos e itinerarios intelectuales. (México DF: Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. José María Luis Mora, 2003).
40. “Don Venustiano Carranza, al abrir el Congreso de sus sesiones ordinarias el 1o. de Septiembre de 1918,” Los presidentes de México ante la Nación: Informes, manifiestos y documentos de 1821 a 1966, vol. 3 (Mexico DF: XLVI Legislatura de la Cámara de Diputados, 1966). As Friedrich Katz has pointed out, “In these statements he anticipated some of the principles of the Bandung conference in the 1950s, which stressed the solidarity of the underdeveloped countries and called on the great powers not to interfere in their domestic affairs”; Katz, The Secret War in Mexico, 498.
41. This congruence was frequently invoked by Mexican politicians, such as Juan Sánchez Azcona, who argued in the Mexican Senate that “the principal tendencies of the international politics of President Wilson are the same as those which on solemn occasions President Carranza has made known as the current Mexican international policies, with the applause of the entire nation.” See “El Senado de México desea la participación de nuestro pais en la Liga de Naciones,” El Universal (México, DF), 18 March 1919.
42. In the long discussion of the text of the amendment, Wilson insisted that the doctrine be mentioned by name, but repeatedly rejected the idea, raised by the French and others, that it might be explicitly defined. He reiterated his interpretation of the League as an extension and protection of the doctrine and told the other members of the commission that he was introducing the language “by way of concession” to his critics at home. David Hunter Miller, Drafting the Covenant (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1928), 444.
43. Secretaria de Relaciones Exteriores, Memorandum, 22 April 1919, L-E-1845 (1), Archivo Histórico de la Secretaria de Relaciones Exteriores de México (hereafter SRE); Telegram, Robert H. Murray to the New York “World,” 8 May 1919, United States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States 1919: The Paris Peace Conference, Vol. II (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1942), 547.
44. This characterization is mentioned in Samuel Guy Inman, Inter-American Conferences 1826–1954: History and Problems, ed. Harold Eugene Davis (Washington, DC: University Press, 1965), 101.
45. Inman’s impression was confirmed by numerous other observers, such as the Mexican chargé d’affaires in Havana, who reported that Cuban delegate Manuel Márquez Sterling had praised Trejo y Lerdo, “who is said to have captured the great sympathies of President Alessandri, the intellectual circles, and the press.” See Mariano Armendáriz del Castillo (La Habana) a Alberto J. Pani, 2 June 1923, L-E-191, SRE. Of course, as was often the case, support for the reforms was not unanimous, and most notable among the Latin American opponents was Chile’s Augustín Edwards, that country’s longtime ambassador in London who had been recently been elected president of the General Assembly of the League of Nations in Geneva. His arguments, however, carried little weight with the reformers: when Edwards tried to insist to Cuba’s Carlos Agüero that the Pan-American Union’s stability and prestige rested on the leadership being vested in the United States and not turned over to a Latin American, Agüero replied, “Tell me, Mr. Edwards, how is it, then, that League of Nations did not collapse with you as president?” Trejo y Lerdo, Mexican Legation in Chile, “Informe sobre la Quinta Conferencia Panamericana: Tercera Parte—Carácter General de la Conferencia,” May 1923, L-E-194, SRE.
46. Trejo y Lerdo, Mexican Legation in Chile, “Informe sobre la Quinta Conferencia Panamericana.” The stakes were quite clear from the beginning: the New York Times reported that the proposal brought up “the question of North American control” of the Pan-American Union. See “Delay Endangers Latin Arms Plan,” New York Times, 11 April 1923.
47. Fletcher’s defeat was palpable when he cabled to Secretary of State Hughes: “After a week of protracted negotiation I believe this is the best possible solution and that any further attempt at mediation would be unwise and unsuccessful.” Fletcher to Hughes, 24 April 1923, Record Group (RG) 43, Entry 133, Box 2, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD (hereafter NARA).
48. Cover attachment to Thompson to Foreign Office, 4 October 1933, Foreign Office Files (FO) 371/16530, British National Archives (hereafter TNA). On the long history of debt crises in the region, see Carlos Marichal, A Century of Debt Crises in Latin America: From Independence to the Great Depression, 1820–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 203. The only country to avoid default on federal loans by the time the Montevideo conference convened was Argentina, although the Mexicans were quick to point out that even there, payments had been suspended on provincial and municipal loans. See Jose Manuel Puig Casauranc, “Memorandum para ampliar—en un terreno personal y no official—la plática de Puig, de esta mañana, con el señor Embajador Daniels,” 14 September 1933, L-E-210 (I), SRE.
49. Jose Manuel Puig Casauranc, Remarks on the Position Taken by Mexico at Montevideo (México DF: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1934), 24. Puig’s vision had three important implications: first, that repayment should be premised on a state’s capacity to pay (and therefore that the practice of taking on further debt simply to meet existing repayment obligations should be abandoned); second, that there should be some mechanism for disciplining not just debtors but creditors, as well, for their role in generating financial imbalance; and finally, that the ultimate responsibility for the smooth operation of the system credit must fall to the state and be regulated through cooperation between states. Puig’s “new legal and philosophic conception of credit” was, in many ways, an international version of what Keynes would come to call, in the General Theory, a “somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment”; John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (London: Macmillan, 1936), 377. But the Mexican insistence on the capacity to pay drew explicitly not from Keynes, but from Pierre Jaudel, whom Secretary of Foreign Relations staffer Luis Sánchez Pontón saw as the intellectual progenitor of the Dawes Plan. See Luis Sánchez Pontón, “Las Deudas de Guerra y su Influencia en la Crisis Economica Presente,” Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1933, L-E-254, SRE.
50. Puig, Remarks on the Position, 30; emphasis added.
51. Eric Helleiner, Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods: International Development and the Making of the Postwar Order (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 53.
52. Villaseñor’s Guatemala proposal is detailed in Eduardo Villaseñor, “Problemas financieros y de comercio interamericano,” El Trimestre Económico 8, no. 31 (1941): 355–97.
53. For this argument, see David Green, The Containment of Latin America: A History of the Myths and Realities of the Good Neighbor Policy (New York: Quadrangle, 1971), 60–72.
54. White to Morgenthau, “Proposed Inter-American Bank,” 28 November 1939, RG 56, Treasury Records of the Assistant Secretary for Monetary and International Affairs, Chronological File, Box 3, File 14, NARA.
55. Memorandum of conversation, 25 January 1940, Re: Proposed Inter-American Bank, in Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Morgenthau Diaries, Volume 237, 21–25 January 1940, 266, quoted in Helleiner, Forgotten Foundations, 71.
56. Inter-American Financial and Economic Advisory Committee, Convention for the Establishment of an Inter-American Bank (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1940).
57. Berle himself echoed this when he wrote in 1941 that the new institution represented “complete departure from the nineteenth-century form of development.” Rather, he said, the bank “should be the beginning of a system in which finance is the servant of exchange and development … in direct contrast to the older system, which insisted that the development and the commerce must serve finance, or it could not go forward”; Adolf Berle, “Peace without Empire,” Survey Graphic 30, no. 3 (March 1941): 107.
58. Helleiner, Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods, 77.
59. “Mexico Pedirá Voz y Voto para los Países Débiles, en la Junta Monetaria,” Excelsior (México, DF), 14 June 1944.
60. For a more detailed treatment of Mexican interventions at Bretton Woods, see Christy Thornton, “Voice and Vote for the Weaker Nations: Mexico’s Bretton Woods,” in Global Perspectives on the Bretton Woods Conference and the Post-War World Order, ed. G. Scott-Smith and J. Simon Rofe (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018), 149–65.
61. “Memorandum of a Meeting on the International Stabilization Fund,” 25 May 1943, RG 56, Memoranda of Conferences held in Harry Dexter White’s Office, 1940–1945, Entry 360T, Box 20, NARA.
62. Keynes to Sir David Walley, 30 May 1944, cited in John Maynard Keynes, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, ed. Elizabeth S Johnson and D. E Moggridge, vol. 26 (Cambridge: Royal Economic Society, 1978), 42.
63. Sir Wilfred Eady to Padmore, 12 January 1944, Treasury Files, Papers of Lord Keynes, T247/27, TNA.
64. White to Morgenthau, 23 June 1944, RG 56, Records of the Secretary of the International Monetary Group–Records of the Bretton Woods Agreements, 1938–46 (BWA), Box 1, NARA.
65. “Commission I International Monetary Fund Fifth Meeting: Transcript,” 14 July 1944, 10:00 A.M., in The Bretton Woods Transcripts, ed. Kurt Schuler and Andrew Rosenberg (New York: Center for Financial Stability, 2012).
66. Eduardo Turrent y Diaz, México en Bretton Woods (México DF: Banco de México, 2009).
67. Helleiner, Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods, 63–66.
68. Víctor L. Urquidi, “Elasticidad y rigidez de Bretton Woods,” El Trimestre Económico 11, no. 44(4) (1945): 595–616. This is one reason why Mexican experts such as Villaseñor continued to advocate for the creation of the Inter-American Bank, even after the Bretton Woods institutions came into being.
69. “Commission III: Other Means of International Financial Cooperation, Third (Final) Meeting: Transcript,” 20 July 1944, in The Bretton Woods Transcripts, ed. Kurt Schuler and Andrew Rosenberg (New York: Center for Financial Stability, 2012).
70. Mexico’s draft on labor can be found at United Conference on Trade and Employment, “Draft Charter, Mexico: Proposed Amendments,” E/CONF.2/11/Add.28, GATT Documents, World Trade Organization; Beteta’s correspondence with Mexican president Miguel Alemán and other officials is in Fondo Miguel Alemán Valdés, 433/216, Archivo General de la Nación (Mexico) (hereafter AGN). For more on this, see Jill Jensen, “Negotiating a World Trade and Employment Charter: The United States, the ILO and the Collapse of the ITO Ideal,” in The ILO from Geneva to the Pacific Rim: West Meets East, ed. Jill Jensen and Nelson Lichtenstein (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), 83–109.
71. Vanni Pettinà, “Adapting to the New World: Mexico’s International Strategy of Economic Development at the Outset of the Cold War, 1946–1952,” Culture & History Digital Journal 4, no. 1 (2015).
72. UN Document A/RES/375(IV), “Draft Declaration on Rights and Duties of States,” 6 December 1949, https://
73. See Jorge Castañeda, Mexico and the United Nations (New York: Manhattan Publishing, 1958), 24–36.
74. Castañeda, Mexico and the United Nations, 65. The study was published in 1958 in English, but completed in fall of 1955, according to a preface by Daniel Cosío Villegas.
75. Philippe C. Schmitter and Ernst B. Haas, Mexico and Latin American Economic Integration (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1964).
76. Vanni Pettinà, “Global Horizons: Mexico, the Third World, and the Non-Aligned Movement at the Time of the 1961 Belgrade Conference,” International History Review 38, no. 4 (2016): 741–64.
77. Inter-American Committee on the Alliance for Progress, “International Monetary Reform and Latin America: Report to CIAP by the Group of Experts” (Washington, DC: Pan-American Union, 1966).
78. E. V. K FitzGerald, “The Financial Constraint on Relative Autonomy: The State and Capital Accumulation in Mexico, 1940–82,” in The State and Capital Accumulation in Latin America: Volume 1: Brazil, Chile, Mexico, ed. Christian Anglade and Carlos Fortin (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), 210–40.
79. On Echeverría’s repression, see Alexander Aviña, “ ‘We have Returned to Porfirian Times’: Neopopulism, Counterinsurgency, and the Dirty War in Guerrero, Mexico, 1969–1976,” in Populism in Twentieth-Century Mexico: The Presidencies of Lázaro Cárdenas and Luis Echeverría, ed. Amelia Kiddle and María L.O. Muñoz (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010), 106–21; and Alexander Aviña, Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
80. See Keller, Mexico’s Cold War.
81. UN Document A/PV.1952, “Address by Mr. Luis Echeverria Alvarez, President of the United Mexican States,” United Nations General Assembly, Twenty-Sixth Session, Official Records, 1952nd Plenary Meeting, Tuesday, 5 October 1971, https://
82. While one Mexico City newspaper considered Muñoz Ledo “a sort of Mexican Henry Kissinger,” his politics were firmly on the Left. Muñoz Ledo considered himself a “man of the Third World” and would go on to be one of the founders of the Democratic Current, the left-wing group that split from the PRI and then became the Party of the Democratic Revolution after the fraudulent 1988 elections. Leopoldo Mendív, “Oficio: Reportero,” El Heraldo (Mexico City), May 25, 1972; Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, James W. Wilkie and Edna Monzón Wilkie, Historia oral, 1933–1988 (México, DF: Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial México, 2017).
83. “Discurso Pronunciado por el C. Presidente Constitucional de la República Mexicana, Lic. Luis Echeverría Álvarez,” Estudios Internacionales 5, no. 18 (April–June 1972), 123. Echeverría forcefully added that international financing should not be made conditional on politics, and therefore should not be denied to those countries using revolutionary means to achieve progress—no doubt an allusion to the economic blockade being levied against the host country, Chile, under Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government.
84. As translated in “Summary of Address Given at the 92nd Plenary Meeting, 19 April 1972,” in UN Document TD/180, Proceedings of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Third Session, Santiago de Chile, 13 April to 21 May 1972, Vol. lA, Part One (New York: United Nations, 1973), 186.
85. “Discurso Pronunciado por el C. Presidente Constitucional de la República Mexicana, Lic. Luis Echeverría Álvarez,” 126–27.
86. UN Document TD/L.62, https://
87. After they came to consensus on a draft, it was to be sent to the member states for consultation, and then remitted for comment to the Trade and Development Board, the UNCTAD governing body, before going before the General Assembly. Revised draft TD/L.84 adopted as Resolution: 45 (III).
88. The working group included Alfonso García Robles, Permanent Representative of Mexico before the United Nations; Gustavo Petriccioli, Subscretary of Revenue; Eliseo Mendoza Berrueto, Subsecretary of Trade; and Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, Subsecretary of the Presidency. See Rabasa a Echeverría, 22 May 1973, Fondo Secretaria Particular, Exp. A-1117-1 (IV), SRE.
89. Documento de Trabajo: Que contiene un anteproyecto de Carta de Derechos y Deberes Económicos de Estados, 5 July 1972, Fondo Secretaria Particular, Exp. A-1117-1 (IV), SRE.
90. Documento de Trabajo. See also Antony Anghie, “Legal Aspects of the New International Economic Order,” Humanity 6, no. 1 (2015): 145–58.
91. UN Document TD/180, Proceedings of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Third Session, Santiago de Chile, 13 April to 21 May 1972, Vol. IA, Part Two (New York: United Nations, 1973), 124.
92. Partido Revolucionario Institucional, México y el nuevo orden económico internacional: documentos (México, DF: Comisión Nacional Editorial, 1976), 13.
93. In the original group of thirty-one, the subgroup of industrialized countries was, twice as big as any of the other groupings of countries from Africa, Asia, Latin America, or the Socialist bloc. See “Paises que integran el grupo de trajabo encargado de preparar un proyecto de Carta Sobre los Derechos y Deberes Económicos de los Estados,” Fondo Secretaria Particular, Exp. A-1117-1 (IV), SRE. By agreement in November of 1972, nine more countries were added to the working group, bringing its total to forty.
94. For example, see Memorandum of Telephone Conversation, 18 October 1974, Digital National Security Archive (DNSA) collection: Kissinger Telephone Conversations, 1969–1977. The American Bar Association even went so far as to form a subcommittee to study the charter and passed a resolution against its approval without any mention of existing international law. See Charles N. Brower, Letter to the Editor, New York Times, 8 December 1974.
95. “Memoradum para información del Señor Secretario, Tlatelolco, 26 February 1973,” Fondo Secretaria Particular, Exp. A-1117-1 (IV), SRE. On the various proposed alternatives, see the accompanying “Esquema de Carta de Derechos y Deberes Economicos de los Estado,” Fondo Secretaria Particular, Exp. A-1117-1 (IV), SRE. In addition to the industrialized countries’ opposition, the Socialist bloc had submitted its own proposal for consideration by the General Assembly, a resolution on a “UN Declaration on the Development of Cooperation in the Spheres of Economy, Trade, Science, and Technology,” which some Mexican experts worried might hinder the ability to come to agreement on the charter due to confusion over competing projects. “Evolución de las Negociaciones sobre la Carta de los Derechos y Deberes Económicos de los Estados, 29 July 1972,” Fondo Secretaria Particular, Exp. A-1117-1 (IV), SRE. For the attempts of Mexico to reconcile the Soviet proposal with their own, see Fondo Embajada de México en la URSS, Leg. 87, Exp. 2, SRE.
96. The third meeting draft is found in UN Document TD/B/AC.12/3, “Report of the Working Group on the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States in Its Third Session,” 8 March 1974; the fourth is in TD/B/AC.12/4, “Report of the Working Group on the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States in Its Fourth Session,” 1 August 1974, https://
97. “Documentos y comentarios en torno al viaje del Presidente Echeverría (Marzo-abril de 1973),” Foro Internacional 14, no. 1(53) (1973): 24–40. On British skepticism during Echeverría’s visit, see Telegram, Secretary of State to U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, May 24, 1973, Wikileaks Document 1973STATE100257.
98. “Documentos y comentarios en torno al viaje del Presidente Echeverría,” 40–54.
99. “Charlaron Tito y Echeverría,” El Informador (Guadalajara), 14 February 1974.
100. “Necesaria Unión de Latinoamérica,” El Informador (Guadalajara), 22 July 1974.
101. Transcript of Conversation No. 735-1, Cassette Nos. 2246–2248, 15 June 1972, 10:31 A.M.–12:10 P.M., Oval Office, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book 95, “The Nixon Tapes,” 18 August 2003. An embassy memo noted Echeverría’s “comments concerning mischief making of the communists, foreign and domestic,” which “gave strong indication he has not forgotten his experiences in controlling their activities as minister of interior before becoming president”—a barely veiled reference to the repression of the student movement in the late 1960s. “As he has often done in the past,” the embassy concluded, “he left no doubt as to his belief in a firm hand when dealing with extremists”; cable, United States Embassy, Mexico to Secretary of State, 19 May 1973, Digital National Security Archive (hereafter DNSA).
102. The translator interpreted this as “close to capitalism” to Nixon and Kissinger.
103. Quoted in Robert A. Mortimer, The Third World Coalition in International Politics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984), 37.
104. Mexico would eventually win the struggle to keep the reform effort within the IMF. See, for instance, “Impase en la CECLA,” Expreso (Lima), 25 October 1971, Fondo SubSecretario, B1-415-1 (3a), SRE, and Summary Record of the Seventh Plenary Meeting, 1 November 1971, in The Third World without Superpowers: The Collected Documents of the Group of 77, vol. 2, ed. Karl P. Sauvant and Joachim W. Müller (New York: Oceana Publications, 1981), 129–46.
105. Mortimer, The Third World Coalition, 49.
106. Karen Hudes, “Towards a New International Economic Order,” Yale Journal of International Law 2, no. 1 (1 January 1975), 102.
107. Memorandum para información del Señor Presidente de la Republica, n.d. Fondo Secretaria particular, Exp. A-1117-1 (II), SRE.
108. Hudes, “Towards a New International Economic Order,” 114–16.
109. Memorandum of Conversation [Kissinger-Rabasa], Secretary’s Office, 29 August 1974, 11:15 A.M., Kissinger Conversations: Supplement I, 1969–1977, DNSA; Telegram, Maw to Secretary of State, 1 July 1974, Wikileaks Document 1974STATE141990_b.
110. Telegram, Secretary of State to USUN Geneva, 1 July 1974, Wikileaks Document 1974STATE142000_b. The compromise language concluded that states seeking to nationalize resources or regulate transnational corporations should “fulfill in good faith their international obligations.” When the Philippines’ Hortencio J. Brillantes introduced the compromise proposal as his own at 2:00 A.M. on 28 June, however, he changed the language from “international obligations” to “international commitments and undertakings,” which angered most of the developed countries, which thought it implied that only treaties, and not “customary international law as well,” were relevant.
111. Memorandum of Conversation, Ford and Echeverría, 21 October 1974, DNSA.
112. Telecon, Percy and Kissinger, 18 October 1974, DNSA. Kissinger called U.S. businessmen “morons” repeatedly, in fact. See also Telecon, Mr. Maw/Secretary Kissinger, 21 June 1974, 9:40 A.M., Kissinger Telephone Conversations, 1969–1977, DNSA.
113. News Conference of the President and President Echeverria of Mexico in Tubac, Arizona, 21 October 1974, American Presidency Project, http://
114. Quoted in Kathleen Teltsch, “New Declaration Voted in the U.N.,” New York Times, 13 December 1974.
115. Informe del embajado Jorge Castañeda a la Segunda Comisión de la Asamblea General de la Naciones Unidas en su Caracter de Presidente del Grupo de 40 Países Encargado a Elaborar una Carta de Derechos y Deberes Económaicos de los Estados, acerca de las Labores de Dicho Grupo en Nueva York, NY, a 25 de Noviembre de 1974, en Partido Revolucionario Institucional, México y el nuevo orden económico internacional: documentos (Mexico City: Comisión Nacional Editorial, 1976), 83–97.
116. UN Document A/C.2/L.1419, https://
117. Telecon, Rabasa and Kissinger, 6 December 1974, DNSA.
118. Memo, Secretary’s Staff Meeting, 9 December 1974, DNSA.
119. Quoted in Teltsch, “New Declaration Voted in the U.N.”
120. Nils Gilman, “The New International Economic Order: A Reintroduction,” Humanity 6, no. 1 (2015): 10.
121. Alta Comisión Americana, Sección Nacional Mexicana, Memorandum (1931), L-E-201 (I), SRE.
122. Ramón Beteta, “Mexico’s Foreign Relations,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 208, no. 1 (1940): 170. This, too, prefigures the NIEO, as Gilman writes: “Rather than accepting international law as a neutral device, NIEO legal theorists claimed that existing international law, unsuited to promoting structural reform, was biased toward economic incumbents and needed recasting in order to favor developing nations”; Gilman, “The New International Economic Order: A Reintroduction,” 4.
123. Ogle, “State Rights against Private Capital,” 211.
124. Ogle, “State Rights against Private Capital,” 219.
125. Daniel J. Whelan, “ ‘Under the Aegis of Man’: The Right to Development and the Origins of the New International Economic Order,” Humanity 6, no. 1 (2015): 93–108.
126. See Bradley Simpson’s The First Right: Self-Determination and the Transformation of Post-1941 International Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). As Johanna Bockman has argued, “if we examine economic globalization more closely and from the perspective of Second and Third World institutions, we can see that the Non-Aligned Movement, the Second World, and the Third World more broadly worked hard to create a global economy in the face of active resistance by the United States and other current and former colonial powers, which sought to maintain the economic status quo of the colonial system”; Bockman, “Socialist Globalization,” 109.