Towards a New Global Deal

This chapter illuminates how developing countries have fared in postwar efforts to create a trade regime. After World War II, the Bretton Woods institutions were designed to help with economic betterment and avoid the repetition of such calamities as the world wars and the Great Depression. The world gradually outgrew the imperialist era and saw the creation of dozens of new states, which, however, were poorly integrated into the global economic system. An influential idea in the early stages of this system was to design a global New Deal including an effective and just trade regime to serve the poor. Subsequently ideas about a New International Economic Order became prominent, supported by dependency theories about the world economy. Before this historical canvas this chapter makes a philosophical plea for a New Deal for the world—a New Global Deal. It also touches on earlier intellectual responses to these developments, ranging from various versions of postwar intellectual radicalism to the emergence of the global justice literature in Western liberal philosophy to which this work belongs.