ABSTRACT
The discussions about comprehensive reforms of the international economic system to create a New International Economic Order have now gone on for so long as to seem almost a permanent and unchanging feature of the life of the United Nations organizations. After all those years, disenchantment is inevitable. As John Lewis (1979, p. 17) noted in his 1979 report as DAC Chairman, ‘the specialists in North-South dialoguing find their fora awkward, their constraints cumbersome, and their audiences slipping away’. More serious than the flagging attention of the public is the lack of interest of governments increasingly evident on both sides. How should one explain the failure of this massive political and economic effort? The record of these negotiations and the substantive issues are well known and I shall not restate them here. Briefly, the perspective in which they will be seen is the following.
