An incoherent international order?

• Author: Sivaramakrishnan, Arvind
• Position: The Chronicle Library Shelf

" ... 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 de bt repayments added up to a net flow from poor to rich States of some $15...