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CHAPTER 1
Introduction: The Rich Wage War, The Poor Die (apologies to Sartre)
The acceptance of globalisation, of universal neo-liberalism, particularly by much of the left, has allowed its consolidation to go uncontested. In promoting their world view, Clinton-Blair-Giddens have silenced the reactionary right, but only at the cost of striking dumb the struggle for social justice. Democratic rights are not a substitute for social justice and social justice itself cannot be delivered without tackling property relations – for that purpose we have to create a deeply embedded network of collective institutions for the twenty-first century.
An essential part of that creative process must be to address the issues of sustainability, particularly in the matter of rights to global commons. Ultimately, this will mean organising against, challenging and transcending the globalising dialogue. We accept Goldman's point that strong states are not simply being replaced by markets, tradition by modernity and the local by the global. Quoting Hadaway, he argues that 'local' does not mean provincial, limited or unscientific understanding, but understanding which is located, situated and partial; 'global' does not mean universal, general and apolitical understanding, but understanding which is distributed, layered and equally partial. Both understandings demand realism not epistemological relativism. This is why we explore, no matter how briefly, cultural canons as well as case material in order to criticise transnational corporations (TNCs) and international financial institutions (IFIs). That approach also makes us question that dea ex machina, the international NGOs (INGOs) who see themselves as the solutions, as civil society and as the fountain of good governance.
Both the authors of this book were engaged in and around the debate of the '10 Years after Stockholm', held in Nairobi in 1982, and one of them was present at it. It was the occasion when the global powers, under a Reagan-Thatcher hegemony, reviewed environmental progress, or rather the lack of it. The centre of attention was the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), locally translated as the United Nations Egyptian Programme (since its director, at the time, was M.W. Kassas, an Egyptian national) or sometimes, more appropriately given its lack of impact, the United Nations Entertainment Programme. UNEP had offered, as its two striking successes, its Global Environmental Monitoring System (GEMS) and its Regional Seas Programme. Since neither of them had much to do with people and their problems, we feel that they hardly add up to a success. But during this environmental menagerie, one of us was invited to two famous meals in which the future of global environmental policy was determined.
The first, a dinner party given by a member of the Swedish Embassy, was a rather splendid affair and the splendour was in the conversation. It was about creating, and maintaining in being, a social-democratic global initiative linking environment and development, which should be financed separately from both the UN system and the Reagan-Thatcher axis and beyond the control of either. Representatives of the Nordic countries present at that dinner applauded the idea as it emerged and declared themselves to be strongly in favour of it. That conversation subsequently led to the creation of the Brundtland Commission, the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED). The second was a private lunch in which a leading American scholar informed us that the US had already decided to respond to global environmental issues, also quite separately from the United Nations. A leading research institute, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, was to be established; it is now known as the World Resources Institute (WRI). The environment had suddenly become politics.
Sustainability was at the centre of the Brundtland Commission's work. The concept was deliberately ill-defined to prevent unnecessary and destructive objections and much of this book is concerned with the problems produced by that diplomatic vagueness. Three broad areas of concern were covered by the Commission – ecological, economic and social – and each of them brought its own agenda. Ecologists were driven by the work of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) which, guided by the second law of thermodynamics, addressed the tendency of systems to be entropic. They sought to maintain ecological sustainability by maintaining the complexity and variability of systems, by emphasising the non-reducibility of organisms and by paying attention to uncertainty, spontaneity and collectivity in nature. Economists looked at the environment as so much capital stock and pushed a form of analysis, macro and micro, that proposed the polluter (user) pays principle. Social concern amounted to little more than nice words designed to lower expectations, but little guidance to building stable, resilient and equitable communities was offered.
After the Brundtland Report and its follow-up, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), these areas of concern have consolidated. Ecological concern focuses primarily on rural issues and the global commons without paying very much attention to urban settlements where most people live. The denial of urbanisation, a product of the romantic tradition which we discuss at greater length in Chapter 3, is found well beyond what is commonly understood to be 'literary' work. Glacken's Traces on the Rhodian Shore and, more paradoxically, Hoskins' The Making of the English Landscape,6 both came abruptly to an end when they arrived at the Industrial Revolution and its attendant urbanisation. It took E.P. Thompson, mimicking Hoskins' title, to carry the tale forward in The Making of the English Working Class, in which he abandoned rural idylls for urban reality. Nature, for Thompson's predecessors, was everything not industrialised or urbanised, a mistaken view still pursued by much of today's environmental movement.
Similarly, economic concern was reduced to a very particular economic argument – external costs, resource exhaustion, discounted cash-flows, common property, valuation, regulation and cost-benefit analysis all led to an understanding of the environment as a market problem, not to an analysis of the market as an environmental problem.
Social issues, which should have focused on community, failed to emerge, not least because Brundtland tried to square the circle of ecological and economic concerns by arguing for growth with equity – the infamous canard of 'trickle down'. We confront the issue of social justice and its meanings and address those organisations, particularly international non-governmental organisations (INGOs), which frequently claim to provide solutions. Table 1 summarises the argument and the logic of this book; it is, after all, our way of seeing our world and its future.
It is first necessary for us to set out the bones of the problems that we are addressing. Some adjectives, or adjectival phrases, have become so embedded in their nouns as to render them almost nugatory; thus all communists are 'card-carrying', all Catholics 'devout' and all development 'sustainable'. No longer adjectival in popular speech, these words have become parts of their nouns. Communists and Catholics may look after themselves, in this book we are concerned with the assumptions made when the words 'sustainable development' are uttered in the context of relations between the industrialised and soi-disant 'developing' worlds. For some theorists they are a pleonasm since development which is not sustainable is not development, for those who see most, if not all, development as exploitative it is an oxymoron; there can be none for whom the expression is not an ideological battlefield. Since the world hovers perennially on the edge of massive financial recession and, not infrequently, begins to tip over it, we are forced to examine at least some of the meanings attached to development and, in particular, to sustainability. It is, after all, the poor who suffer the most from financial disaster, just as they suffer from every other kind.
In recent years, a morally mildly repugnant question has arisen what is the collective noun for poor countries? 'Third World' is preserved as a political label by many radicals within it although they are busy redefining the phrase. It is, for that reason, viewed with nervousness or distaste by those who would prefer to tame theory by depoliticising it. 'Poor countries', 'severely indebted low income countries (SILICs)', 'high human poverty index (HPI) countries' or 'low human development index (HDI) countries' are among the many that have been offered and become controversial because they have been found patronising. With what we may legitimately regard as a crude sense of satire, there are those, still, who talk and write of 'developing countries'. Recent summary figures demonstrate, yet again, the depressing contradiction contained in this misnomer (see table 1.2). These figures are little more than a guide; they conceal, for example, the substantial disparities between rich and poor in all the regions they cover, including the 'industrial countries'. Nonetheless they demonstrate the ways in which, despite marginal absolute improvements, the relative difference between rich and poor has not lessened and, in some cases, has actually increased. We, like many others, commented on this long ago and see no reason now to change the judgement we made in 1993:
For the last few years it has made no sense to talk of 'developing' countries – huge parts of the world are now spinning down into national collapse and destruction involving misery, starvation and death for immense numbers of ordinary people ... we ... see not merely the ludicrous disparities, the hopeless distances to be made up, but also the chronicle of a situation rapidly worsening.
The centripetal nature of capital has produced a politics and an economics of exclusion. Phenomena like 'fortress Europe', the US failure to honour even its financial obligations to the UN and the growing divisions between rich and poor within the industrialised world, as well as between rich and poor countries, are all examples. We shall return, indirectly, to the arguments suggesting that this exclusivity is structural, that is to say, built into capital and its institutions. Here it is only necessary to point to a conceptual difficulty facing, in particular, INGOs. Whatever the economic policies or circumstances of the states at issue may be, the aim of development, the eradication of humanly disabling poverty, must, in some degree, involve substantial modernisation; that is, the admission of the world's poor to contemporary forms of production and to adequate levels of mass consumption. Figure 1.1 provides a startling image of how little the world's poor really consume. Modernisation is thus a challenge to the exclusivity of capital structures and is the source of the difficulty for the INGOs. Two major impediments stand in the way of recognising this. On the one hand there is a politically powerful romantic nostalgia, which we shall examine in later chapters, which makes many otherwise progressive people shy away from what they understand to be involved in modernisation. It is a sort of utopianism, heavily influenced by writers like Thoreau, in which we feel that others should be helped to avoid the errors that we have made. On the other hand the extent to which we have been persuaded of the rightness of private entrepreneurism, a belief which ludicrously encompasses the forms of late capitalism, persuades us also that incorporation into the present order is the only way forward. The extent to which this is so may be observed from the rise of green movements. It is a phenomenon accompanying the growing strength of capitalism and, unengagingly, frequently reproduces its priorities. There are honourable exceptions, like the groups around the CNS agenda, but the overwhelming majority of them concentrate on interference with nature, but not on interference with people. Protests are mounted against genetically modified plants, but not, for example, against the human genome project. We shall examine the ideological separation of nature and people in Chapter 3.
In his otherwise admirable book, Striking a Balance, Alan Fowler, writing about ways in which INGOs can be more effective, points out that it is wrong to suppose that 'economic growth is always good'. He goes on to say that development activity should be 'more holistic, people-centred ... unimpeded by the blinkering made necessary by IFI's limited economic mandates'. Social justice, the reduction of poverty leading 'to the growth and functioning of strong, autonomous organisations', are the aims of development. These organisations, founded geographically and socially around the small projects for which they were created, will 'collaborate, associate and form other social structures within which they exert themselves' and thus have a profound effect on governance. In other words, they would be politicised and politicising. Fowler begins his analysis by looking first, and for this reason, at micro-projects in development, but in doing so overlooks the two principal difficulties in the way of widespread success.
The first difficulty is that of scale: even within a single, unitary, non-industrial state, organisations formed in this way would be tiny in number and would combine very slowly; worldwide the progress would be infinitesimal. In a way we feel that the model here may be that of early trade unionism, but if so, precisely because the unions emerged from rapidly industrialising societies, it is inappropriate. It is less than apt for another reason: in Britain it took trade unionism over two centuries from the repressive acts of 1719 and 1726 through the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800, to the smashing of the General Strike of 1926, to achieve the relatively short-lived success of trade unionism from about 1946 until Margaret Thatcher's successful onslaught on it in the 1980s. There is no reason to suppose that the process would be much faster, or any less confrontational, in the societies that Fowler is considering. The second difficulty arises from the existing political and economic structures. These include repressive states commonly in pawn to what Fowler calls the IFIs; global agreements, frequently forced on weaker governments and backed by a body of international, even if dubious, law; and most importantly, force majeure, as in the war against Iraq designed, among other things, to protect the USA's hegemony in general and its control of oil and gas resources in particular. All these are in place precisely to circumvent the political threat to the stability of client regimes throughout the Third World which would be posed by the politicisation hoped for by Fowler. It is not our contention that these difficulties are insurmountable, merely that they must be recognised by INGOs for what they are – difficulties which are largely created by the very societies from which these international organisations, including INGOs, come.
It is possible, without too great an abuse of historical method, roughly to trace an ideological progression which has led to contemporary understandings of development. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries a number of philosophers, much influenced by Nicolaus Copernicus's cosmology and by Galileo Galilei's polemics in Italy's universities in support of new astronomies and physics, began to propose a new cosmogony. Among the most significant were Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), a monist who tried to identify an infinite universe with God and nature, and Tomasso Campanella (1568-1639) who, among other things, suggested that the study of nature in the light of reason would be the most fruitful means of improving the lot of humankind. For their pains, the Inquisition burnt the former and imprisoned the latter for very many years. A Spanish philosopher, Francisco Suarez (1548-1617), may also reasonably be seen as a founding father of much contemporary consciousness in his influential assertion that all reality is solely made up of individuals (he was, no doubt, Margaret Thatcher's bedside reading). These philosophers, late representatives of the Renaissance, prepared the ground for the emergence of that intellectual world in which an immutable natural and social order could be abandoned in favour of an individualism exemplified in the works of others like Descartes and, especially in the work of the German philosophers, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Redefining Sustainable Development"
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Copyright © 2001 Neil Middleton and Phil O'Keefe.
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