OPEC’s oil price coup briefly empowered the South until the oil divide broke solidarity

Evidence

The uncertainty created by growing instability in the global economy at the beginning of the decade was followed by OPEC’s audacious move to regulate petroleum output, and thus control the world market price for oil—an apparent coup in international economic relations that reverberated throughout the developing world and precipitated the G-77’s increasingly assertive posture at the UN. It was in this context that the NIEO was launched, and while in objective terms the obstacles confronting the G-77 were still formidable, the international environment, characterized for the moment by Southern solidarity and Northern apprehension, was perceived by the developing countries as being exceptionally propitious for advancing their agenda of structural reform (Rothstein 1984). However, the window of opportunity that the Third World perceived to have been opened by the events of that winter was brief. Following the initial shock of the oil crisis, the industrial economies adjusted rather briskly to the prospect of paying more for energy, and as Northern confidence returned, Southern solidarity waned, thanks in part to the economic difficulties higher fuel prices caused for the so-called NO-PEC members of the G-77 that found themselves on the wrong side of the “oil divide.” — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1748

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how structural power shifts (commodity control) translate into institutional bargaining power at the UN. — connects to: The exploited South generated its own reaction against northern extraction — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 457; Commodity boom timing drove the South’s brief bargaining advantage at the UN — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1747

Broader Connections

• The exploited South generated its own reaction against northern extraction #corroborates (0.85) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 457
• Commodity boom timing drove the South’s brief bargaining advantage at the UN #expands (0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1747