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Cancún and After: The United States and the Developing World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 November 2022

Howard J. Wiarda
Howard J. Wiarda*
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts, and American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
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Extract

The meetings of heads of state and foreign ministers of the eight already industrialized and the fourteen developing nations held at Mexico's lush island resort of Cancun raised high hopes and expectations among some, consternation and frustration among others. The real meaning and substance of the meeting were often obscured by the media's forced reliance on the official press briefings and, in the absence of other information, the emphasis on the food eaten, the elaborate security precautions, and the luxury of the surroundings. By now Cancún has faded from the headlines, but the issues and agendas raised are likely to be with us for a long time.

The Cancún meeting may have been a watershed. It is not that the place is so important or even that this particular gathering was so crucial. The issues have been building for years. But what Cancún did was to provide a prestigious forum and sounding board for the Third World ideas, and to bring some of these home to the American public for the first time.

Type
Four Perspectives on World Affairs
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , Winter 1982 , pp. 40 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1982

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References

1 Why these nations were invited and not others remains something of a mystery to those not invited.

2 An amusing but also discouraging account of one such, not unrepresentative UN forum is Berns, Walter, “Where the Majority Rules: A UN Diary,” The American Spectator, 14 (November, 1981) 7–12 Google Scholar.

3 Strange, Susan, Sterling and British Policy (London: Oxford University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; and Vale, Peter C.J., “North-South Relations and the Lomé Conventions: Treating the Symptoms and Not the Causes” (Braamfontein: The South African Institute of International Affairs, July 1981)Google Scholar.

4 The analysis follows that of Vale, “North-South Relations.”

5 Some reasonable suggestions for such negotiations have been set forth in an Op-Ed statement by former Gardner, Ambassador Richard N., “Beyond Cancún,” New York Times (November 8, 1981)Google Scholar.

6 These ideas have been elaborated and analyzed in considerably greater detail by the author in two papers: Wiarda, Howard J., “The Ethnocentrism of the Social Sciences: Implications for Research and Policy,” The Review of Politics, 42 (April, 1981), 163–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Toward a Non-Ethnocentric Theory of Development: Alternative Conceptions from the Third World.” Paper presented at the 1981 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, New York, September 3-6, 1981 Google Scholar.

7 See, on this theme, Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978)Google Scholar; Jansen, G.H., Militant Islam (New York: Harper and Row, 1980)Google Scholar Mehta, Vrajenda Raj, Beyond Marxism: Toward an Alternative Perspective (New Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1978)Google Scholar; Wiarda, Howard J., Corporatism and National Development in Latin America (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Wiarda, Howard J. (ed.) Politics and Social Change in Latin America: The Distinct Tradition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, rev. ed., 1982)Google Scholar. Additional literature and sources on these themes are cited in the two articles in note 6 above.