From Redistribution and Reconstruction to Self-Help

Abstract This chapter analyzes a key period in the intellectual history of global egalitarian politics. With the 1974 United Nations Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order and the 1980 Brandt Report, ideas about development, redistribution, and restructuring the world political economy took on an unprecedented political salience. In other ways, however, it was a much less comforting time for global egalitarianism. Spanning from the early 1970s to the early 1980s, this chapter analyzes the emergence of a backlash against global egalitarianism, examining key figures within international relations theory, development, and dependency theory: Robert W. Tucker, John G. Ruggie, Kenneth Waltz, Willy Brandt, Raúl Prebisch, and Barbara Ward. The new consensual view was that developing countries would rely on self-help. The market was rediscovered as a model for thinking about international relations and the state. Contemporary thinkers concluded that the prospects for a robust global equality regime had dwindled.