The third world forum and the new international economic order :general conclusion

Abstract

With this collective volume, the Third World Forum is making its contribution to the great debate which has now been opened on the economic and social prospects for the world as a whole in the medium and long run. Many of us feel that, the failure of the model of dependent development has been obvious for a long time. Nevertheless, it was not until the world system of which this model formed a part entered a crisis that there was a general recognition of this failure and that the states of the Third World raised, at official diplomatic level, the question of a new international economic order. But although the vast majority of mankind experienced no nothing but poverty and degradation during the century and a half of prodigious development of capitalism, it was not this fact that started the debate on the medium and long-term prospects. It was rather the combination of the difficulties confronted by the West in its frantic plundering of the world's resources, the growing resistance of the Third World peoples and countries to that plunder and the disillusionment of the Western intellectuals and masses with the very purposes of their consumer civilization that triggered off the debate.