Near-complete code talks were abandoned due to NIEO political taint

Evidence

Yet if one can point to the OECD Guidelines as a positive legacy of the UNCTC, by the time of the Center’s demise in the early 1990s, the entire Code-drafting effort was viewed by some as an unfortunate patrimony of the Cold War. For example, in Sandrine Tesner’s recounting of the UNCTC’s demise, the Code did not so much fail as fade away from lack of relevance. She describes the “quiet burial of negotiations on the Code of Conduct on Transnational Corporations” in 1992: … Trying not to call undue attention to the failure of these discussions, the president of the 46th General Assembly reported that “delegations felt that the changed international economic environment and the importance attached to increasing foreign investment required a fresh approach.” In fact, in the 1980s as negotiations had moved from the charged atmosphere of the NIEO, differences on the content of the code had progressively been narrowed to the point where a text acceptable to all parties was within reach. The legacy of these discussions, however, and the suspicion they inspired because of their historic linkage to the NIEO, made it preferable to give up the entire enterprise. In the 1990s, the CTC gave up its hostile tune to multinationals and began to praise their positive impact on job creation, technology transfers, and the facilitation of access to global markets by developing countries. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1800

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how close exactly was a final code text, and which specific provisions still divided parties?
• XREF: connects to: Nationalization disputes over applicable law blocked the UN corporate code — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1792