The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Geneva is one of the few international organizations in which the third world countries play a bigger role:

Established in 1964, UNCTAD promotes the development-friendly integration of developing countries into the world economy. UNCTAD has progressively evolved into an authoritative knowledge-based institution whose work aims to help shape current policy debates and thinking on development, with a particular focus on ensuring that domestic policies and international action are mutually supportive in bringing about sustainable development.

UNCTAD led to the creation of the G77, an association of developing countries which by now has 132 member states. Within the UNCTAD conferences this group is usually pitched against the group of developed countries.

Those developed countries control most world institutions like the IMF, World Bank and WTO. Unlike those institutions UNCTAD is often promoting policies to that do not favor them. UNCTAD has its own macroeconomic research arm and does quite good analysis on finance and trade. It has foreseen crisis the other institutions completely missed in their predictions. Like the G77 is firmly pitched against globalized finance and its excesses.

Now the developed countries want to kill off the independent UNCTAD research arm as it doesn’t conform with their Washington Consensus doctrines. While they are preaching competition and the market of ideas but want to suppress the competition UNCTAD’s research provides to their favored institutions.

For current negotiations on the future role of UNCTAD the developed countries played the usual divide and conquer game to split up the G77. But now the G77 seems ready to fight back:

Speaking on behalf of the G77 and China, Ambassador Pisanu Chanvitan of Thailand regretted that the accommodative stance of the group had been viewed as weakness or capitulation.

“The group hoped that the global economic and financial crisis marks for once and for all the end of the bad old days, and perhaps the dawn of an international regime of global economic governance based on the highest principles and ideals of the United Nations, including sovereignty, equality, and mutual respect,” he said.

“Instead, we see behaviour that seems to indicate a desire for the dawn of a new neocolonialism. We cannot, we will not, accept this.

In this the interest of the people in the developing country are the same than the interests of the 99% in the developed countries. The people in the developed countries must be made aware of this and whatever is left of Occupy Wall Street and other such groups should help to press for the G77 position.

In the global picture the “new neocolonialism” is on the list of “stuff white people like”, maybe as number 85 or so. A must-read piece at Jadaliyyah looks at another entry in that list and also refers to the 133 countries of the G77+China.

The piece is a quite hilarious lecture for non-white people on how to make friends with white people by adopting selected items on the “stuff white people like” list. To do as a non-white requires quite delicate knowledge on the white peoples’ standpoint on the relevant issue on that list – in this case about ‘humanitarian intervention’. The Jadaliyyah piece provides such knowledge:

Stuff White People Like n.135 – Humanitarian Intervention

With the “Arab spring” on the menu, the height of sophistication this season is to introduce the notion of ‘types of intervention’. Although it might require serious research on specialized blogs and a subscription to the Economist, explaining in great detail the type you believe most appropriate for the context under scrutiny reveals a subtle personality attuned to the minute nuances of killing non-white people abroad. Should the strikes be preemptive, or should we wait until a certain number of oppressed innocents have died before putting our foot down?

Once you’ve decided upon this matter, you must further pick between interventions that aim at drawing defensive curtains around specific zones of strategic white interest, surgical strikes that destroy the enemy fire capacity which a white government sold them the previous week, and physical military intervention which might ensure your current president won’t get another term in office. Alternatively, if you wear your heart on your sleeve, you may incense the unorthodox virtues of economic sanctions, guaranteeing local native children will starve in dignity, fully sheltered from international media attention.
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Stuff White People Don’t Like So Much

No decent rough guide to white etiquette surrounding ‘humanitarian intervention’ would be complete without mentioning the central absolute rule whose violation would seriously jeopardize all white friendships: never ask a white friend why ‘humanitarian intervention’ is a specifically white hobby. This taboo question might lead down one or four abrupt dead-ends, namely, white privilege, white man’s burden, white supremacy, and your friend losing his white temper.

Go read the whole thing.