The transition from past (“the Treaty came to be viewed”) to present tense (“the NIEO operates”) in Kirkpatrick’s remarks is instructive. To suggest that the NIEO functions today through the institution of the General Assembly is to reinscribe the danger that the G-77 agenda poses thirty years after it was declared at the Sixth Special Session, and in so doing to efface the dramatic transformation that has occurred within the international political economy in the intervening three decades.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 1816