The Geneva School mobilized against the NIEO as a threat to decolonize international law.
Evidence
The danger of Global South mobilization after the end of empire was that the will of the majority could become a new norm, even against the desires of the entrenched powers. The NIEO presented the prospect of a continuation and perhaps a completion of the process that dissolution of European overseas empires had begun: the fear was of the scandalous prospect of a decolonization of international law. The lack of “order” in the NIEO was a problem to be corrected by beating back the encroachment of the UN on international legal practice and the establishment of binding arbitration and adjudication, including the dispute settlement mechanisms that Roessler and Petersmann would help design for the WTO. Against the attempt of the G-77 to use law for their own purposes, the Geneva School fought to reclaim law as an enforcer of private property and competition. The neoliberal program in the 1970s was not about growth, equilibrium, optimum, equality, social justice, or prosperity. It was about the reproduction of an interdependent complex system—the defense of the totality of the world economy against an assault from nationalists that threatened to be as much of a catastrophe as the 1930s. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 846
Categorization
- ADDENDUM: The framing of the NIEO as a feared ‘decolonization of international law’ parallels how the sacrifice article treats ritual as stabilizing stratified orders — here law itself is the stabilizer the Global South threatens to dismantle.
- DEFINE: Defines what the neoliberal program of the 1970s was actually for — reproducing the world-economy system, not growth or equality — which is a counterintuitive definition of the era’s agenda.