[...] By the end of the 1970s, the era of neoliberal globalization had dawned, displacing visions of a welfare world. Leading the opposition to the NIEO, the World Bank and IMF rejected its aspiration to democratic and universal international economic law. Instead, these financial institutions insulated the global economy from political contestation by recasting it as the domain of technocratic expertise. In doing so, they rejected the claim that the global economy could be subject to demands for redistribution. The colony went free, stood for a brief moment in the sun, then moved back again toward servitude—this time to the empire of debt.

[...] demanding a return to the liberal world order—as leading scholars in international relations and international law have recently done—is an inadequate response. It obscures the ways that the illiberal backlash of our moment emerged out of the inequalities and hypocrisies of that very same system.

From our vantage point, the welfare world of the NIEO might appear utopian and unrealistic. But to dismiss the world that decolonization aspired to make is to refuse to reckon with the dilemmas we inherited from the end of empire. It is to evade our responsibility to build a world after empire. Our world, like Manley’s, is characterized by a battleground of widening inequality and ongoing domination. We cannot simply recreate the 1970s vision of a welfare world, but we can take from its architects the insight that building an egalitarian and postimperial world is the only route to true democratic self-governance.