In 1969 as International Labor Organization (ILO) Director-General David Morse surveyed the organization’s almost two decades of development endeavors, Morse was frank. The organization failed to meet its primary objective of reducing intractable inequality between the industrialized North and the developing South. None of the ILO’s marque initiatives moved the needle. Although the ILO could boast of an enviable record of development projects—particularly in building state capacity and bureaucratic knowledge production—the ILO’s operationalizing of an ambitious development spirit and agenda was insufficient. The will to develop was not enough.

This dissertation examines the ILO’s heady Cold War history under Morse’s director-general leadership from 1948 until 1970 when the organization matured into a development leviathan. Promising postcolonial states such as India and Indonesia partnered with the ILO in a broad effort to embed the organization’s suite of capitalist practices in local economies. The ILO’s programs attended to the needs of Indian and Indonesian governments’ desire to fuel rapid economic growth in the absence of domestic and foreign capital investment. Training, research, and advising by the ILO advertised simple solutions that organically trained managers who possessed expert knowledge in the productivity that propelled Western economies. Morse and much of the ILO staff espoused the merits of post-war American and European capitalism. Morse quietly advanced the United States’ Cold War interests, and under his management the organization functioned as an instrument of American power to spread capitalism. Nearly-insurmountable barriers prevented the realization of the ILO’s mission—as was clear by the late 1960s—and the pressure of developing states, embodied by the Group of 77, to remedy systemic inequities precipitated friction within the ILO and the United Nations.

By 1969 the ILO reached its zenith, celebrating its fiftieth anniversary from its founding at Versailles in the creation of the League of Nations. The ILO received the 1969 Nobel Peace Prize and was poised to launch its sweeping World Employment Programme to remedy the shortcomings of its first twenty years of development campaigns. Morse resigned in early 1970 after twenty-two years as director-general, and his successor’s appointment of a Soviet national triggered a diplomatic crisis with the United States. American policy makers looked to reforming the ILO as a route to stifle protest within the United Nations against American interests. The United States’ withdrawal from the ILO in 1977 was culmination of five years’ threats by policy makers and labor leaders such as George Meany. The end of American membership starved the ILO and was the catalyst for change within the organization. When the United States rejoined in 1980, it weakened the organization at a time when the international economy’s commanding heights transformed into a new vision of global market economics that had little space for the ILO.