Description
The historiography of the political economy of global wealth inequality remembers the 1980s as the global neoliberal backlash against 1970s proposals for universal welfare policies. At the global level, diplomatic negotiations to implement the New International Economic Order (NIEO) failed to establish a universal “welfare world.” At the national level, it started a long trend of welfare state retrenchment in affluent liberal democracies, followed by the global adoption of social investment policies in the mid-1990s. While these two stories are generally told separately, recent scholarship on reproductive and racial capitalism shows that these historiographies silence how imperial extraction and exclusion have enabled liberal welfare state development. Taking this imperial context as starting point, this paper tells an alternate history of welfare state retrenchment that centers the transnational circulation of social policy scripts across the Global North and South. Through engagement with new archival material from the OECD and UNCTAD pertaining to Mexico’s involvement in negotiations over the implementation of the NIEO and its accession to the OECD, I show that Mexican diplomats and economists have played an important yet understudied role of brokerage in the articulation of new global social policy scripts embracing conditionality at the expense of universality.