The Chronicle Library Shelf
An Incoherent International Order?
By Arvind Sivaramakrishnan

“...every country which has moved ... to strong, sustained growth (except Britain) ... has done so in outright violation of free-market principles.” (Paul Ormerod)

“...donors don’t want to leave any responsibility to the borrower, except the responsibility for the failure of the project.” (Mohammed Younus)

“We want them to own the programme, of course, but they must do what we want.” (A senior World Bank official)

Expecting results in Africa in a matter of years is absurd, “as if the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution were all telescoped into a single lifetime.” (Arthur Toynbee)

There is nothing in history to suggest that capitalism is anything but disruptive, dirty and unequal however many material and technological advances it brings. (Michael Edwards)

These are just five of the many meticulously sourced and highly apposite comments with which Michael Edwards damns virtually the entire contemporary international order. His critique is authoritative and powerful, and he does not shrink from unpleasant truths. For example, the “decidedly mixed” enlightenment legacy is one of great ideas - individual freedom, justice and equality, science and rational thinking - as well as the “unremittingly destructive” exploitation of people and raw materials: 10 million forcibly deported from Africa to slavery in the New World, 30 million “enticed” from India to indentured labour in the rest of the British empire, and so on. The attitudes involved are no better. While there is no need to reproduce here Edwards’ quotations of repulsively racist comments by famous statesmen, including purportedly socialist leaders of recent times, the very fact that in 1904 Hamburg zoo exhibited Samoan women speaks for itself.

Although international cooperation is hardly new and has expanded enormously since 1945, its contemporary character merely replicates the power relations of the imperial period. The Marshall Plan, Edwards says, succeeded precisely because it drew upon a genuine sense of partnership between the United States and Western Europe and was based on the best of conditionalities - grants not loans, up-to-date technology, autonomy in the use of funds, and so on. All this could have been repeated in aid to, for example, Africa, but it was not: “Why not? Because they were only Africans?” Inevitably, those States which started in the worst positions have stayed there, irrespective of the dominant ideas in international cooperation. When the “free market obsessions” of the 1980s deemed economic management and even cooperation misconceived, aid became even more tightly conditional than it had been, deflationary action in the industrial world triggered global recession, commodity prices collapsed, aid flows stagnated, and debt repayments added up to a net flow from poor to rich States of some $15 billion. Even the originators of the policies involved admitted that they were based on a myth.

Edwards, to his lasting credit, does not hesitate to identify the primacy of the political as essential to economic growth: “The ‘free market’ is itself a ‘public good’ that has to be guaranteed by the State in the form of property rights, the enforcement of contracts and essential infrastructure.” The European Union is perhaps the outstanding contemporary example of that principle, and Edwards notes the successes of those States which have refused to get caught in “a false polarity between States and markets”. He mentions certain East Asian States and notes the significance of highly-focused Governments and a genuine commitment to sharing the benefits of growth widely through society, although he does not comment on these States’ continuously low share of the volume of international trade in manufactured goods.

International organizations have not been a great success in cooperation, often serving as little more than the theatres and instruments of rivalries between superpowers and their major allies, who have respectively sanctioned and engaged in mass slaughter and the calculated overthrow of legitimate governments. Edwards spares neither East nor West, States nor non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the World Bank nor the International Monetary Fund. The United Nations own record too has been less than successful: in Somalia in 1993 the operation mounted by the United Nations and the United States resulted in spending $4 billion for the delivery of less than $100 million in relief supplies, and the famine was virtually over by the time they arrived. Yet, in 1992, a ceasefire had been agreed by the parties in the civil war, but because the United States had blocked a Security Council resolution, a priceless opportunity for intervention was missed. In the former Yugoslavia, a UN commander said: “I am convinced that the Serbs could have been stopped in October 1991 with three ships, three dozen planes and 3,000 men.” Perhaps worst of all in recent years, according to Edwards, the entire Security Council ignored warnings that Hutu extremists in Rwanda were planning genocide against the Tutsi community, and France even lobbied against reinforcing the small UN contingent sent to Rwanda late in 1993.

Edwards is caustic about the international financial institutions and frankly shows how the game is rigged against the poor. Why should poorer countries be prevented from borrowing technology after the rich ones have borrowed to improve their own position? Equally, giving one vote to each State in the World Trade Organization, but leaving enforcement to individual States, simply hands all the power back to the rich. In WTO negotiations on the banana trade, the producer States had no right even to ask for factual answers or to submit rebuttals. Unless poorer countries get help to the point where world trade is both fair and free, “liberalization simply accelerates the international transmission of inequality”.

Matters are further hindered by the “bean-counting” approaches of funding bodies in all sectors and narrow measurements of cost-effectiveness. Edwards does not mention the example, but the aggregate increase in Indian carpet exports in the early 1990s only concealed the vast increase in the number of poor children sucked into the sweatshops to meet the First World’s demand for carpets and the employers’ greed for profits. As to NGOs, Edwards cites Alex de Waal: “The humanitarian international” is a “transnational elite of relief workers, civil servants, academics and others”, which has caused many problems. In Sudan, where famine itself was a result of civil war, qualified and increasingly unsustainable measures began to obstruct a political solution. In Kenya, Australian agencies misread the situation of the Giriama people so badly that they left them even more vulnerable than they had been before the agencies arrived. Also in Kenya, the Norwegian experts who persuaded 20,000 Turkana tribespeople to give up a nomadic way of life for fishing simply did not see that the cost of refrigerating their catch far exceeded anything the local buyers could afford. Equipment worth millions of dollars was abandoned, as were the Turkana, who ended up dependent on food aid.

This is indeed a wretched state of affairs, and Edwards’ strongest response is that ordinary people have enormous amounts of know-how and honest determination. In the Horn of Africa, the Tigrean and Eritrean rebel movements were far better at distributing aid than the official agencies, because they had the popular legitimacy these agencies lacked. Similarly, the Somali Red Crescent’s food distribution succeeded in 1991 and 1992, and in the secessionist territory of Somaliland the clan elders took responsibility for governance and reconciliation. In western India in 1973, an impending famine was averted by private individuals who imported a million tons of food from neighbouring States. In 1997, some 600,000 Rwandan refugees organized their return from their refuge in what was then eastern Zaire. Furthermore, when famine threatens, people look first to preserve what they already have, with a view to ensuring their future livelihood, rather than seek immediate food aid.

Edwards has the courage to try and build on the strengths of ordinary people: “Our welfare is affected by events from Mexico to Thailand, decisions taken in distant capitals, and threats from enemies we may never see.” Therefore, the task of creating new solidarities is the “increasingly rational choice”. This will involve both the creation of new symbols - even such everyday things as recycling banks for bottles, cans and plastics - and the dissemination of direct and accessible information, in effect “a process of coming to public judgement”.

Well-informed publics - Edwards mentions Sweden and the Netherlands - are far more favourable to international cooperation than, say, those of the United States and Japan. Here, despite the undoubted value of bringing the problem to our attention, Edwards is less convincing, possibly because it is not his central concern to address the politics and inequalities of international news coverage and information transmission.

In addition, his relatively technical treatment of cooperation runs the risk of neglecting certain major issues in the intellectual provenance of the questions involved. For example, he notes that people would far rather be treated as an end in themselves and not as a means to others’ ends, but he seems not to appreciate that that conception has its modern origins in the work of Kant, and further seems not to see just how much would have to change if we were to observe or embody that principle. In particular, although Edwards is direct about the evils of capitalism, he holds that its domesticated form is tenable and essential, especially in view of the failure of socialism or communism. Yet, if capitalism necessarily involves the generation of surplus value in and through the exercise of labour power, then the controllers of capital, and thereby of others’ labour power, inevitably violate the Kantian principle.

Secondly, Edwards seems to be unmindful of the argument - well publicized by Habermas, for example - that the inner logic of capitalism itself destroys the moral foundations on which capitalism depends, such as deferred gratification, the nuclear family, the willingness to labour at the same whatever the season or time of day, and so on. Further, how anyone can sustain ethical capitalist activity against the pressures of competition is not made entirely clear in Edwards’ argument, and neither is the matter of how élites are to be coopted into spreading benefits and opportunities throughout society.

The impact of that issue on international cooperation is only partly addressed by Edwards. He knows that NGOs have become an interest group in themselves and documents some remarkable crassness on their part, but does not say much about what goes on within them. This reviewer has encountered NGO staff who sustain their own consciences by working for agencies of high standing, but who in private reveal considerable ignorance and racism. In addition, locally-recruited NGO staff often speak privately of widespread racism and discrimination within their own organizations, but feel they cannot raise these issues with their employers. Thirdly, although Edwards rightly seeks to give all sides of the historical record, he seems not to appreciate that if such record were exhaustive of a scheme of ideas, then we might be just as likely to repudiate liberal democracy as we apparently are to repudiate communism or socialism.

These are, undoubtedly, severe criticisms to make of a book which takes on pressing and enormously important issues and attempts to say things on behalf of those who would otherwise be ignored by the wealthy and the powerful.

It is no small virtue either that Edwards is free of the assumptions of cultural and racial superiority which bedevil the field. And given that, it is only a disappointment that the book is littered with typographical errors: the great Brazilian thinker Paulo Freire is called “Friere” throughout, the colonial administrator Macaulay becomes “MaCauley”, Junius Jayawardene become “Julius Jayawardene”, and so on.

The great value of this book is that it demonstrates the incoherence and the destructiveness of the contemporary international order, if “order” be the right word. In reaching for the inclusion of ordinary people in open discourse about the nature of our shared predicament, Edwards in effect reminds us of Aristotle’s conception of what it is to be a human and therefore a judging being. However unlikely it is that the major participants in world affairs will read works of philosophy, Edwards has shown us just how much is involved in addressing seriously the problems which confront all of us - and just how soon we must address them.

Future Positive: International Co-operation in the 21st Century by Michael Edwards (London: Earthscan, 1999, $29.95).

Links:
Read the book’s preface

Arvind Sivaramakrishnan is a lecturer in politics and law at Taunton's College, Southampton, United Kingdom, and a member of the Southampton United Nations Association Committee.