Global Inequality And American Foreign Policy In The 1970s

In Global Inequality and American Foreign Policy in the 1970s, Michael Franczak demonstrates how Third World solidarity around the New International Economic Order (NIEO) forced US presidents from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to consolidate American hegemony over an international economic order under attack abroad and lacking support at home. The goal of the nations that supported NIEO was to negotiate a redistribution of money and power from the global North to the global South. Their weapon was control over the major commodities—in particular oil—that undergirded the prosperity of the United States and Europe after World War II. Using newly available archival sources, as well as interviews with key administration officials, Franczak reveals how the NIEO and "North-South dialogue" negotiations brought global inequality to the forefront of US national security. The challenges posed by NIEO became an inflection point for some of the greatest economic, political, and moral crises of 1970s America, including the end of golden age liberalism and the return of the market, the splintering of the Democratic Party and the building of the Reagan coalition, and the rise of human rights in US foreign policy in the wake of the Vietnam War. The policy debates and decisions toward the NIEO were pivotal moments in the histories of three ideological trends—neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and human rights—that formed the core of America's post–Cold War foreign policy.

Geopolitics and globalization collided in the 1970s, and their collision produced difficult challenges for the makers of American foreign policy. 'A Superpower Transformed' explains how policymakers across three administrations worked to manage complex international changes in a tumultuous era, and it explores the legacies of their efforts to accommodate American power to new forces stirring in world affairs.

Now in its fifth edition, this volume offers a clear, concise, and nuanced history of U.S. foreign relations since the Spanish–American War and places that narrative within the context of the most influential historiographical trends and debates. The History of American Foreign Policy from 1895 includes both revised and new sections that incorporate insights from recent scholarship on the United States in the world. These sections devote more attention to the international framework as well as the domestic constraints under which American foreign policymakers operated. This edition also emphasizes the role of non-state actors such as missionaries, aid workers, activists, and business leaders in shaping policies and contributing to international relations. As a result, the text considers a broader and more diverse range of people and voices than many other histories of U.S. foreign policy. Expanded final chapters bring the story of U.S. foreign relations to the present and explore some of the contemporary challenges facing American and global leaders, including terrorism, the effects of climate change, China’s increasing influence, and globalization. Updated controversial issues sections and suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter reflect important contributions from new studies. This engaging text is an invaluable resource for students interested in the history of American foreign policy and international relations.

This book argues that inequality is not just about numbers, but is also about lived, historical experience. It supplements economic research and offers a comprehensive stocktaking of existing thinking on global inequality and its historical development. The book is interdisciplinary, drawing upon regional and national perspectives from around the world while seeking to capture the multidimensionality and multi-causality of global inequalities. Grappling with what economics offers – as well as its blind spots – the study focuses on some of today’s most relevant and pressing themes: discrimination and human rights, defences and critiques of inequality in history, decolonization, international organizations, gender theory, the history of quantification of inequality and the history of economic thought. The historical case studies featured respond to the need for wider historical research and to calls to examine global inequality in a more holistic manner. The Introduction 'Chapter 1 Histories of Global Inequality: Introduction' is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.

The surprising story of how Cold War foes found common cause in transforming China’s economy into a source of cheap labor, creating the economic interdependence that characterizes our world today. For centuries, the vastness of the Chinese market tempted foreign companies in search of customers. But in the 1970s, when the United States and China ended two decades of Cold War isolation, China’s trade relations veered in a very different direction. Elizabeth Ingleson shows how the interests of US business and the Chinese state aligned to reframe the China market: the old dream of plentiful customers gave way to a new vision of low-cost workers by the hundreds of millions. In the process, the world’s largest communist state became an indispensable component of global capitalism. Drawing on Chinese- and English-language sources, including previously unexplored corporate papers, Ingleson traces this transformation to the actions of Chinese policymakers, US diplomats, maverick entrepreneurs, Chinese American traders, and executives from major US corporations including Boeing, Westinghouse, J. C. Penney, and Chase Manhattan Bank. Long before Walmart and Apple came to China, businesspeople such as Veronica Yhap, Han Fanyu, Suzanne Reynolds, and David Rockefeller instigated a trade revolution with lasting consequences. And while China’s economic reorganization was essential to these connections, Ingleson also highlights an underappreciated but crucial element of the convergence: the US corporate push for deindustrialization and its embrace by politicians. Reexamining two of the most significant transformations of the 1970s—US-China rapprochement and deindustrialization in the United States—Made in China takes bilateral trade back to its faltering, uncertain beginnings, identifying the tectonic shifts in diplomacy, labor, business, and politics in both countries that laid the foundations of today’s globalized economy.

Amid the mass protests of the 1960s, another, less heralded political force arose: public interest progressivism. Led by activists like Ralph Nader, organizations of lawyers and experts worked "inside the system." They confronted corporate power and helped win major consumer and environmental protections. By the late 1970s, some public interest groups moved beyond U.S. borders to challenge multinational corporations. This happened at the same time that neoliberalism, a politics of empowerment for big business, gained strength in the U.S. and around the world. No Globalization Without Representation is the story of how consumer and environmental activists became significant players in U.S. and world politics at the twentieth century's close. NGOs like Friends of the Earth and Public Citizen helped forge a progressive coalition that lobbied against the emerging neoliberal world order and in favor of what they called "fair globalization." From boycotting Nestlé in the 1970s to lobbying against NAFTA to the "Battle of Seattle" protests against the World Trade Organization in the 1990s, these groups have made a profound mark. This book tells their stories while showing how public interest groups helped ensure that a version of liberalism willing to challenge corporate power did not vanish from U.S. politics. Public interest groups believed that preserving liberalism at home meant confronting attempts to perpetuate conservative policies through global economic rules. No Globalization Without Representation also illuminates how professionalized organizations became such a critical part of liberal activism—and how that has affected the course of U.S. politics to the present day.

This volume is the first to explore transnational anticolonialism as a general global phenomenon that spanned the entire twentieth century. Its collected essays model both a broadening of the issues under consideration and the collaboration necessary to do justice to the scope of this vibrant field. They showcase new work by scholars who explore the anticolonial transnational in multiple geographical regions, from a variety of perspectives, and at many different times across the long twentieth century. Revealing that anticolonial movements everywhere in this period were invariably transnational in terms of their imaginaries, mobilities, and networks, these essays also demonstrate that centering transnational connections can change our understanding of the anticolonial past. The legacies of transnational anticolonial strategies and networks fundamentally shaped the present. Together, these essays present a fresh, kaleidoscopic view of the geographical, chronological, and thematic possibilities of the global anticolonial transnational.

Examines the history of the rise and fall of the twentieth century's last major attempt to decolonize international law.