ABSTRACT
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) constitute more or less a normative consensus in the development community of the beginning of the 21st century. This chapter examines the MDGs from the perspective of poststructuralist discourse analysis and to situate them in their specific historical context It introduces the historic dimension by comparing the MDG documents to the United Nations (UN) declaration 2626 which spearheaded the Second Development Decade in 1970 and introduced the 0.7 per cent goal. The comparison of the Millennium Declaration with the International Development Strategy (IDS) of 1970 places results in a historical perspective. Comparing the two documents in terms of their topics, it is conspicuous that the IDS are far more focused on development, and mostly in a narrow sense of economic development and growth. The term globalization is linked with two slightly different signified in the documents: in a more general meaning with something like global interconnectedness, in a more specific one with global economic liberalization.
