The NIEO effort was widely seen as futile by its own UN insiders.

Evidence

Reflecting years later on the Code project, Sahlgren remarked that the members of the Group of Eminent Persons, the staff at the Center, and the representatives and experts from different countries who served on the Commission agreed that it was important for the CTC to preserve “a neutral, impartial image in the eyes of its clients, which were both West and South, and also business… . The Code gave some concrete content to the NIEO… . Now personally I felt, and I still feel vindicated that the NIEO was a naïve mistake. It produced nothing and consumed a lot. Our [UNCTC] exercise could have been a signal to members—to the world, to put it a little bit pompously—that the NIEO could also mean something realistic and useful, like the code, instead of trying to introduce socialist concepts on the global scale” (Sahlgren 2002). — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1790

Categorization

• DEFINE: Vividly characterizes the NIEO-UNCTC split as ‘naïve mistake’ versus realistic code, useful for pinning down how these agendas diverged in practice.
• XREF: connects to: The NIEO peaked early and was already ineffectual by 1975. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1746

Broader Connections

• The NIEO peaked early and was already ineffectual by 1975. #corroborates (0.90) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1746