Description
On 16 December 1975 the Conference on International Economic Cooperation (CIEC) opened in Paris gathering 27 diplomatic delegations from the First and Third Worlds to conduct high-level negotiations over the reform of global economic governance. The first diplomatic conference between oil producers and consumers, the CIEC meant to negotiate a solution to the oil crisis as well as the implementation of the Declaration for a New International Economic Order (NIEO). Often forgotten from mainstream histories of global governance, the conventional historiographic account of the Conference is a story of failure attributed to divisions between OPEP and non-OPEP G77 members. These accounts underappreciate the institutional innovation that the CIEC constituted as the first attempt at a form of institutionalized cooperation between former empires and newly independent countries along principles of universal redistribution and equitable representation, long before the G20. How exactly did the CIEC fail to establish a lasting precedent for a new form of multilateral cooperation between North and South ? I study this case of failed institutional change through a granular analysis of diplomatic negotiations between 1975 and 1977. Engaging with CIEC and French archives, the analysis centers the evolving relation between two leading diplomatic delegations, France and Algeria, on the backdrop of the renegotiation of their own postcolonial relation.