The OECD as a Global Preacher for Capitalism

This article deals with the history of the OECD from 1961 to the mid-1990s. Even though there will be several references to the present-day Organisation’s activities, this contribution aims to explore the manifold aspects of the OECD’s experience through a historiographical approach. It will be taken into account the context of the OECD creation, as well as the contents of its original aims. Then, I will examine the way in which the OECD enlarged and reframed its goals, paying specific attention to the rise of environmental concerns within the top-level structures of the Organisation. The subsequent parts of the article will be dedicated to the geographic dimension of the OECD and to the way in which the Organisation tried to promote its influence on member states’ national sovereignty. In doing so, we will specifically reflect on the outcomes of the OECD’s peer-review processes, understood as one of the core elements through which the OECD elaborates its “hortatory” recommendations. Finally, the article will analyse the relationships that, over the past five decades, the OECD has developed with other international organisations or supranational institutions, namely the G7 group and the European Economic Community (then European Union). This contribution aspires to draw a general overview of the OECD historical experience and, for this reason, it will ignore several aspects of the Organisation - from its internal bureaucratic articulations to the policies promoted within single committees or working groups - that obviously deserve further historical investigations. However, our intention is to focus the article’s perspective on the turning points that, between the late 1960s and the mid-1970s, led the OECD to dismiss its previous Keynesian macroeconomic approaches and to gradually espouse supply-side and neo-classical theoretical mindsets. The article will try to highlight the gradual and even contradictory paths that the Organisation’s leading officials - in primis Emile Van Lennep, OECD Secretary-General from 1969 to 1984 - ran through in order to respond to the unprecedented challenges of the 1970s and 1980s’ capitalist crises.