The 1981 Cancún summit marked the NIEO’s death-knell as market orthodoxy took over

Evidence

In 1981, with neoliberalism in the ascendancy, US President Ronald Reagan used his speech at the Cancún summit on development to exhort Third World leaders to embrace ‘the magic of the market’. Cancún has been described as the ‘death-knell of the NIEO’, the moment when it was finally displaced by the neoliberal counter-revolution in development theory. … At the same time, the human rights–based ‘critique of the atrocity, misrule and despotism of the state’ was wielded by both human rights advocates and neoliberals against the utopia envisaged by Third Worldists. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 422

Categorization

• XREF: Provides a concrete anchor date/event connecting to literature on the 1980s debt crisis and structural adjustment (e.g., Harvey’s Brief History of Neoliberalism). — connects to: The 1981 Cancún summit marked the NIEO’s political end — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1750; Neoliberal advocacy outlasted the NIEO’s political viability as a threat — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1751
• QUESTION: The claim that human rights critique was ‘wielded by both human rights advocates and neoliberals’ against Third World states is provocative — worth pursuing how these strange-bedfellows alignments formed.

Broader Connections

• The 1981 Cancún summit marked the NIEO’s political end #corroborates (0.98) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1750