Re: role of Third World governments

Gernot-

I skimmed through the G77 proposals, and they are indeed progressive
(although there is virtually no mention of the environment).

But we are back to the blueprint/plan distinction.  This is a fine list
of demands, of policy proposals, but how will they be implemented?  
Without any stuctural change, there may be the occasional concession by
the imperialists (ie, some debt relief, perhaps even some limited capital
controls, advocated by C. Fred Bergsten in the latest Trilateral
Commission report), but no serious move toward global political or
economic equality.

In the Boswell & Chase-Dunn scenario, it is a wave of democratic socialist
revolutions in the semiperiphery that pushes the EC to a stronger stand
vis a vis the U.S., in the way that movements from below often push
liberal elites farther than they would otherwise go.  (And this then leads
to the democratic victory of the combined forces of the EC, defecting from
the core, and the semiperiphery and periphery, over the U.S. hegemon in
the new world government.)

Perhaps this same sort of dynamic could happen without such a drastic push
from below, simply as the result of the ongoing accumulation of moral
suasion applied to the North by the South and ordinary workings of the
U.N. general assembly.

Again, I'm skeptical.

Richard