Content area
Abstract
The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) was completely reorganized after its eighth session in 1992. While previous conferences had been noted for conflict between Northern and Southern states, the eighth conference attempted to outline a new approach to development based on cooperation and shared goals. This study examines UNCTAD's reorganization with a focus on the African group of states who are both the most numerous in terms of membership, yet least powerful in terms of economic status.
The historical argument advanced here is that neither African states, nor their missions in Geneva, were "remade" ideologically at the end of the Cold War. Domestic considerations that changed the thinking of certain segments within African states on economic liberalization had much more to do with debt, than with playing off the East and West ideologically. Although the US initiated reform in the UNCTAD secretariat in the mid 1980s, that reform was far from complete until real changes occurred in the missions of other states to UNCTAD. This study argues that ultimately the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations in the GATT cemented the direction of change, transforming UNCTAD into a "coach" vs. the GATT's "referee."
An organization like UNCTAD cannot be considered in terms of a conventional organizational chart, nor can it be divorced from broader considerations of structural power. Therefore, this study offers a theoretical conceptualization of a formal international organization as a dense intersection of relationships at the center of a web of international relationships. Conceptualizing UNCTAD thus, reform resulted from the initiatives of the US as a hegemonic power, the intersection of organizations among themselves, and changes in the structure of the international political economy over UNCTAD's thirty year history. Given the African historical trajectory, this study takes issue with the Italian School's notion of "consent" in the international system, arguing instead for a distinction between consent that is "normative" from that which is "pragmatic."
