New Internationalist (NI), a monthly magazine published in the UK, has put together a selection of the articles it has carried since its founding in 1973. The book and the organisation carry the subheading of "30 years years of campaigning for global justice". So what is on offer is the essence of global politics over the last generation as seen by NI.

NI has fashioned a niche by presenting issues in an attractive way. The editors take care over stylistic matters, so that their monthly could appeal to a general reader. The topics tend to be those with a more popular range than is the norm with specialist publications and there is little of the academic or institutional. NI is something you might pick up in a newsagents where there are always a few well-known weeklies aimed at conservative readers, but few from a progressive bias. NI is more journalism than research - though many of its contributors have been academics.

Probably because it has sought to be both upmarket in style and leftie in its politics, NI has been something of a trendsetter. It has helped to mark out the fashions, so reading this anthology we are reviewing much of our recent history as seen from an influential point of view.

That viewpoint, as the title suggests, is academic anarchist. The machine against which NI rages is the one built from the "planner’s mechanistic models" (to take an example from one of the articles). To NI a planner’s mechanistic model is something akin to the place of capitalism in Marx or original sin in medieval Christianity. It’s the devil from which you seek deliverance. This is by no means a fault. It indicates that NI is writing from a consistent and coherent perspective. Any good outfit should offer its members what they signed up for.

NI got off to a memorable start in the year of the Nestle boycott. If you don’t remember, the giant corporation was pushing for mothers in Africa to switch from breastfeeding in favour of its product. As the women had to mix the powder with often dirty water, their babies sickened and often died. There was a boycott of Nestle, one of the first such global campaigns of the modern era. It worked. In 1981 the United Nations adopted a health code.

NI no longer refers to a developing world. A major theme of the anthology is the group’s replacement of its original banner "world development" by the present phrase, "global justice". The collection reprints a 1992 piece by Wolfgang Sachs which it claims to be a landmark in NI’s ideological evolution. "The idea of development", Sachs had written, "stands today like a ruin in the intellectual landscape, its shadows obscuring our vision...[It is] the outdated monument to an immodest era" (p226).

To US President Harry Truman (1945-53) the South and underdevelopment were two terms for one problem that he would fix. Conversely the American model was projected on the world as being a universal ideal of success. The bulk of NI’s reports have been on the consequences when these two worlds meet in often mutual bewilderment. There’s plenty of sharp reporting here.

Truman was President at the time of the founding of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, now the World Trade Organisation [WTO]) and of the first years of the United Nations. So "development" as an ideology, which NI calls the invention of the Truman era, is at least closely related to the world trade policies that Truman was launching at the same time. Whether or not they’re different names for the same process, it’s a safe bet that NI readers and Watchdog readers would share most basic assumptions about what’s at stake.

NI offers lots of self-flagellation. There’s a section devoted to the "confessional" mode of the 80s, in which writers invite us to reflect on their troubles. That self-absorption, too, is so Western. One Aussie man in 1984 reflected on the inherent violence of his sex, congratulating himself on being "A New Man" and on disliking one day cricket internationals. Don’t expect false modesty from the enlightened. But do expect repentance. Another chap apologises for the futility of his penis and all it was supposed to do.

Did the editor include the identity politics and the talk of post-modernism to remind us again how times change? It seems not. These contributions are included in a section entitled "Bringing it all back home". They are meant to illustrate the contributors’ prescience and how well it stands up.

Not everyone will agree that the two parts fit together. One major theme is the suffering of poor people in Mozambique or Brazil. The other theme is the angst of middle class intellectuals in London or California. NI internationalism veers between the hip extremes of global culture, bypassing the millions of Europeans and Americans who don’t obsess about therapy and penises.

Reading this selection you’d suppose they don’t exist. Amid the standard critiques of American waste, one contributor regrets living among "rich world consumers with more money than sense". Is this more self-flagellation, or does NI’s author not think of himself as being a rich consumer? "The poor could hardly be more different" from us, another writer maintains. He’s talking about the "developing world", but he could be talking about the next suburb. It won’t bring it all back home.

Beyond being informed that rich world citizens would be well advised to "exorcise the work ethic" the millions of citizens with average amounts of money and work are ignored. In a time of rising structural unemployment, was it a good political idea to preach welfare dependency as a goal, or did the writer assume that no wage worker with children would read his words?