ITT’s activities in Chile triggered the UN’s first major study of multinationals

Evidence

When the United Nations Center on Transnational Corporations was created in 1974 by the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), it was hailed as “a landmark in the development of the institutions needed for a New International Economic Order” (De Seynes 1976). By that time, multinationals were figuring prominently in academic as well as political debates. The publication of Raymond Vernon’s Sovereignty at Bay had focused attention on the implications of foreign direct investment in the Third World (Vernon 1971), and contemporary events, particularly in Latin America, generated anxiety about the extent to which powerful MNCs were meddling in the domestic affairs of host countries. But it was specific concern about the activities of ITT in Chile that led, in July 1972, to the creation of a Group of Eminent Persons appointed by the secretary general to study and report on the issue of multinationals. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1781

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Septio’s framing of decolonization-era international institutions and the NIEO; also to the broader Cold War history of US corporate interference in Latin America.