The road from Tidewater Inn: UN Second Development Decade and the making of a post-colonial world order, 1969−1975

The purpose of the project THE ROAD FROM TIDEWATER INN is to deepen our understanding of the strategic and tactical considerations that shaped the industrial countries’ response to the 1970s growing demands for an egalitarian world order.

Drawing from a renewed interest in the history of capitalism, the history of development aid, and the global politics of decolonization, the project offers a behind-the-scenes account of the wide range of activities that were initiated in connection with the UN Second Development Decade, proclaimed by the General Assembly in October 1970.

Particular attention is paid to the small group of heads of international organizations and national aid bureaucracies who, at the invitation of the World Bank’s director of Information William Clark, met for the first time at the luxurious getaway Tidewater Inn outside Washington DC in 1969 for “informal” and “off-the-record” discussions on prospects for development, and how to secure global economic governance and political stability in a world enmeshed in post-colonial conflict.

In the project we map and analyze this transnational network and its activities from 1969 to the early 1980s.

Thus, the main research questions of the project concern how the Tidewater group and other members of OECD elite may have used international aid to stabilize a Western-dominated world order that the new era of self-determination had thrown into turmoil.