50 years ago, 27 nations

from across the world gathered in Paris for the Conference on International Economic Co-operation.

Setting up special commissions on energy, raw materials, development, and finance, the Conference marked the highpoint of so-called “North-South Dialogue,” the debates of the 1970s that set out to restructure the relationships between liberated nations of the South and their former colonizers in the North.

Today, the economic relationship between the South and North is once again under severe strain. Sovereign debt traps drain vital resources to rich creditors in the North. Natural resources are pillaged from poor countries to satisfy Northern populations. Sanctions weaponize the financial system to punish their Southern neighbors. And systems of “intellectual property” defend Northern profits from a Southern response to crises like viral pandemics and a rapidly changing climate.

Yet we lack today a common forum to facilitate the North-South dialogue that animated the debates of the 1970s. The result is not only the sustained domination of Northern interests in the international economic system. It is also the absence of common vision to motivate allies across the North-South divide in their pursuit of economic cooperation, and the absence of a shared plan to win it.

The South-North Dialogue — hosted on the occasion of the European Union-Community of Latin American and Caribbean States Summit in Brussels — provides the ideal context to revive, relaunch and rejuvenate the these debates. Fifty years and 300 kilometres from the original CIEC, the new dialogue will invert the terms of its original: led from the South to dictate terms of cooperation to their Northern neighbors.

Convening parliamentarians, diplomats, scholars, and social leaders to the Cumbre de los Pueblos — running parallel to the EU-CELAC Summit 17-18 July — the South-North dialogue will chart a path to a New International Economic Order fit for the needs of working peoples across this deepening geopolitical divide.

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