The world press on AGF: AGF in the 10 years Reuters archive

This is a fascinating glimpse of debates in world system theory, as
reflected by the world press according to Reuters Business Briefing archive

Arno Tausch

(no other selection criterium was used - just 10 years of articles on AGF)


11Mai2001 AUSTRALIA: Weekend Review - Rome and the East - a classic
balls-up. 
By Paul Monk Paul Monk is senior fellow of the Australian Thinking Skills
Institute (www.austhink.org) and an honorary research fellow in Asian
studies at La Trobe University.
Paul Monk tackles a controversial book on the origins of Western
civilisation
Modern ideals of political freedom, law and critical thinking have their
foundations in the Greek and Roman republics. Renaissance and Enlightenment
thinkers, from Machiavelli and Montesquieu to Hume, Smith and Gibbon, looked
back to an ancient pagan virtue corrupted by empire, then overthrown by
barbarism and religion. They sought to recover civic virtue from the feudal
and ecclesiastical morass into which, they believed, Europe had descended
with the collapse of the Roman Empire. But they saw the empire itself as the
beginning of the corruption because it succumbed to oriental despotism and
Eastern religion before it fell.
As John Pocock reminds us, in his remarkable new study, Barbarism and
Religion* (1999), this was the core Enlightenment narrative. If you are a
modern rationalist, secularist and democrat (whether liberal or socialist),
this is the foundation of your world-view. It is this that has been under
attack by Romantics and religious conservatives, deconstructionists,
cultural relativists and post-modernists from the 19th century to the
present. It is attacked, also, by those who claim that these very Western
ideals are the seeds of modern imperialism and "orientalism", in Edward
Said's sense. Warwick Ball's new book, Rome in the East: The Transformation
of an Empire* requires us to think this through.
"We look to Rome for our own European roots," Ball writes. "But Rome itself
looked east." True enough: Rome looked to Greece for political, legal and
philosophical models. Romans also came to see themselves as descended from
the survivors of the sack of Troy. Ball claims a lot more than this, though.
It was the very acquisition of the eastern provinces of Asia Minor, Syria,
Phoenicia, Judaea and Egypt, he argues, that "led directly to the rise of
Rome and of Roman greatness, the first period of greatness in European
history". Rome may have civilised the Celtic barbarians of Europe, but it
was "on the receiving end of civilisation" in its Asian provinces.
Far from Romanising the East, he argues, the Roman Empire witnessed the
"triumph of the East". This triumph began with the Romans gradually
abandoning their republican institutions and opting for an imperial monarchy
in emulation of the Iranian Great Kings. It was manifested by the
abandonment of the crude and poor West to the barbarians and the removal of
the seat of empire to the East, from the 4th century until the 15th.
It was manifested, also, by the rise in Europe itself of Christianity an
amalgam of Judaic, Zoroastrian and other Levantine religious cults.
Christianity, he writes, was a truly "revolutionary" phenomenon in Europe
and it came from Asia. In short, Western civilisation owes its spirit to a
fascination with the riches and religions of the East, not to the raw
provincialism of the old Romans.
Ball's book is a passionate response to Fergus Millar's The Roman Near East
31 BC-AD 337* (1993). Millar asserted rashly that the Romans had found only
two cultures in the Near East, the Greek and the Jewish, and put a seal of
unity and greatness upon them. This is lambasted by Ball. Millar worked only
with Greek and Latin texts, he remarks, but the material evidence tells a
very different story. He reminds us that, in Anatolia, Syria, the Levantine
coastlands and the Arabian interior, to say nothing of Egypt and
Mesopotamia, Rome encountered civilisations that were thousands of years old
and which outlasted its domination. This polemical part of the book is
strongly argued and beautifully illustrated. It fails, however, to provide a
sufficient foundation for Ball's more sweeping argument.
His pivotal claim is that the acquisition of the eastern provinces "led
directly to the rise of Rome and of Roman greatness, the first period of
greatness in European history". It is pivotal for two reasons. It is
fundamental to his sustained argument that "the East was the real heart of
the Roman Empire" and to his further claim that Western civilisation "as we
know it" came out of the East, in the form of Christianity. On the basis of
these claims, Ball implicitly overturns traditional Western historiography.
His pivotal claim, however, cannot be sustained.
Acquisition of the eastern provinces certainly did not lead to the rise of
Rome. Rather, the rise of Rome culminated in its acquisition of the eastern
provinces. Moreover, "the first period of greatness in European history"
has, since classical times, been thought to be the Athenian 5th century BCE.
What precipitated that period of greatness was the defeat of the Great Kings
of the East by the free Greeks. Finally, while Christianity certainly came
from the East, it brooded during the Dark Ages, in Hobbes's famous words,
"among the ghosts of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the
grave thereof". Catholicism might owe much to the Levant, but it would have
lacked its most formidable characteristics had it not draped itself in the
mantle of Rome. Above all, it was the recovery and enlargement of the
republican and philosophical ideas of Greece and Rome, by thinkers
increasingly sceptical of Christianity, that gave modern Western
civilisation its defining character.
In writing what he has about Rome's rise, Ball disregards even the classical
historians in as cavalier a fashion as Millar disregarded the Semitic and
Iranian cultures of the Roman East. It would have struck Polybius, for
example, as very strange indeed to assert that the acquisition of the
eastern provinces "led directly to the rise of Rome". In his 2nd century BCE
Universal History, Polybius argued that "in all political situations ... the
principal factor which makes for success or failure is the form of a state's
constitution: it is from this source, as if from a fountainhead, that all
designs and plans of action not only originate but reach their fulfilment".
It was the Roman constitution, he believed, that enabled the republic to
master the whole Mediterranean world "an event completely without precedent
in the past".
It was this constitution which Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Gibbon and Mommsen
alike, over four centuries of modern historiography, saw as the admirable
thing about Rome. Not its empire, but its institutions. Not its riches, but
its virtues. What Ball points to as the "triumph of the East", all these
thinkers saw as the decadence of the institutions they admired and the
failure of the republican virtues to survive the acquisition of the eastern
empire. This failure was foreshadowed by Antony's follies in Egypt and came
to a head when the very classical-spirited Antonine emperors of the 2nd
century CE were succeeded by the Eastern-derived Severan dynasty, at the
beginning of the disastrous 3rd century.
According to Livy, in the 33rd book of his 1st century BCE History of Rome
from its Foundations, when the Romans defeated Philip of Macedon in 197 BCE,
they did so in the name of the liberty of the Greek cities. When they then
confronted Antiochus the Great heir to both Alexander and the Great Kings of
Persia they challenged him, also, in the name of Greek liberty. The Greeks
responded with joy that, "There really was a nation on this earth prepared
to fight for the freedom of other men, and ... even prepared to cross the
sea in order to prevent the establishment of an unjust dominion in any
quarter of the globe, and to ensure that right and justice and the rule of
law should everywhere be supreme." (How easily Livy could, here, have been
an American historian writing in the 1950s or 1960s!).
Was this merely the notorious "propaganda of the victors"? No. Their own
historians excoriated the crimes and follies of the Romans in the East and
in the civil wars that ruined the republic, as have the moderns. Few
historical phrases ring more clearly through the annals of Western history
than the words Tacitus put into the mouth of a barbarian chieftain. "They
(the Romans) make a desert and call it peace." Yet none of those crimes and
follies, nor the decline and fall of the empire itself ever obliterated the
memory and importance of the institutions and ideals which had been at the
foundation of the rise of Rome. Ball, however, seems strangely unacquainted
with this whole historiography.
His reflections on the architectural wonders of the ancient world aside (for
this is his true metier), Ball is at his best in pointing out how vital the
commercial networks of the East were, before, during and after Roman
domination. He writes of Phoenician commercial penetration of the western
Mediterranean, centuries before the rise of Rome. He points to Indian and
even Chinese merchants sailing up the Euphrates over many centuries. He
argues that the Achaemenid Empire, between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE,
was a great cultural bridge between the West and the Indo-Iranian worlds. He
observes that "evidence for Palmyrene merchant houses has been found as far
apart as Bahrain, the Indus delta, Merv, Rome and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in
England".
He is perfectly correct in arguing that all this has a significance which
the narrower views of historians like Fergus Millar tend to obscure. In
wanting to go further, however, and insist that it was the East that "made"
Rome, he overreaches himself. His often vehement argument reminds one of
Andre Gunder Frank's passionately anti-Western assertions in ReOrient:
Global Economy in the Asian Age* (1998). Frank asserted that, in the second
millennium CE, "Europe did not pull itself up by its own economic
bootstraps, and certainly not thanks to any kind of European
`exceptionalism' of rationality, institutions, entrepreneurship, technology,
geniality, in a word of race". Rather, he declares, "Europe climbed up on
the back of Asia, then stood on Asian shoulders temporarily". Both authors
go astray where Polybius was on the right track. Institutions were in both
cases crucial to the Western ascendancy. They are now equally crucial to the
future of world order for reasons that have nothing to do with "race".
"Pagan architecture," Ball writes, "has ... an arrogant self-confidence, an
unquestioning belief in the superiority of its own culture that Christian
architecture cannot match ... [late imperial Christian] construction was
often second rate, even shoddy." The same, unfortunately, is true of Rome in
the East, compared with the great works of Roman history and historiography.
For a student of architecture, Ball exhibits a notable lack of architectonic
sense in the construction of his argument and an often sloppy lack of
attention to detail. He remarks at one point, for example, that "the
Parthians had little conception of the Romans as a great power, even less as
a civilised one". Yet he later writes that "the Tigris may have been Rome's
eastern frontier ... but the presence of so great a power as Rome was felt
far beyond".
He declares that Roman rule in the East was brutal and exploitative, but
elsewhere that "Roman oppression, such as it was, seems to have kept a
remarkably low profile". He describes Alexander the Great at Tyre as
bringing "Dunsinane Wood to Cawdor" a confused allusion to Shakespeare's
Macbeth, in which Birnam Wood is brought to Dunsinane. He confuses, at a
crucial point, the 6th century Great King, Khusrau Anurshivan, who fought
Emperor Justinian, with the 7th century Khusrau Parviz, who fought Emperor
Heraclitus. He describes Constantine as leaving "a crumbling, ramshackle
Rome" for the East, but Rome in the early 4th century was very far from
being either crumbling or ramshackle and Constantine further embellished it.
He declares, at the very end of his narrative, that with Constantine's move
to the shores of the Black Sea, "Troy had achieved its greatest triumph."
This is vacuous rhetoric. Constantine did not choose Troy. He chose
Byzantium. Yet he and all his successors, down to the 15th century, called
themselves Roman emperors.
The greatest of Ball's solecisms is his failure to acknowledge the modern
Western preoccupation with how the classical world lapsed into barbarism and
religion. As Nietzsche exclaimed, in Antichrist (1888), "The whole labour of
the ancient world in vain: I have no word to express my feelings about
something so tremendous ... Wherefore Greeks? Wherefore Romans? All the
presuppositions for a scholarly culture, all scientific methods, were
already there ... Is this understood? ... the methods, one must say it ten
times, are what is essential, also what is most difficult, also what is for
the longest time opposed by habits and laziness. What we today have again
conquered with immeasurable self-mastery ... had already been there once
before".
Ball shows no more sense of this than Frank does of the importance of
methods and institutions in the modern world. This strange and, I suspect,
wilful myopia vitiates their historical and economic arguments. It is not
that there is nothing to be said for the deepened perspective on universal
history that they demand. On the contrary, such depth is precisely what both
classical circumspection and modern enlightenment have been about. It is
precisely what inspired Herodotus and Polybius. Ball asserts, however, that
the East was the "heart" of the Roman Empire and that Christianity was the
triumph of the religion of the East over the provincialism of Rome. In doing
this, he behaves like some intellectual Arbogast, blundering into Rome as a
would-be ruler without any grasp of what had made the city great.
Why does all this matter? Because, at the beginning of the 21st century, the
whole human world faces the most profound challenges in consolidating free
political institutions, the rule of law and the predominance of critical
thinking over dogmatism and superstition. These things were not the fruit of
the East, however much cultural relativists and Frankophiles may resent
this. They were overwhelmingly the fruit of classical Greco-Roman
civilisation and the modern Western enlargement of it. Being in awe of
Eastern temple ruins or palaces, like Ball, or of the ill-fated splendours
of old China and India, like Frank, risks blinding one to this reality.
When Montesquieu wrote his great 18th-century treatise on the spirit of law,
he did so with critical reflection on Chinese, Persian and Byzantine
despotism in mind, but the Greek and Roman republican constitutions as a
beacon. If, nearly 400 years after Montesquieu, we seek to enlarge the sway
of the spirit of law in the world, then in irreducibly important ways, we
must start with the problem of Rome in the East. If our reflections on this
problem lead us only, with Warwick Ball, to the conclusion that Rome was "on
the receiving end of civilisation" in the East, we may well fail to find any
basis on which to extend political freedom and the rule of law in the
emerging global culture. For it is neither Eastern despotism nor Eastern
religion that we are in need of. It is civic virtue and those "methods" to
which Nietzsche referred, in 1888. It is what he lauded as "the free eye
before reality, the cautious hand, patience and seriousness ... the whole
integrity in knowledge". It is enlightened classical virtues that we need.
The challenge is how to engender and sustain them in a crowded and turbulent
world.
*Barbarism and Religion. By John Pocock. Cambridge University Press. $75.
Rome in the East: The Transformation of an Empire. By Warwick Ball. 523pp.
Routledge. $63.80. The Roman Near East: 31BC-AD337. By Fergus Millar.
Harvard University Press. $35.20. ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age.
By Andre Gunder Frank. California University Press. $55.
Copyright John Fairfax Holdings Limited 2001. Not available for
re-dissemination. 
Quellen:AUSTRALIAN FINANCIAL REVIEW 11/05/2001 P6 
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
02Mär2001 INDIA: Marx and globalisation - II. 
By Gail Omvedt.
FROM THE 1950s onwards, most of the newly-independent colonies and
dependencies switched to policies of protectionism, disengagement from the
world market and heavy state controls, including nationalisation of basic
industries and planning. India's "Nehru model" was only one example of this
process. The suspicion of capitalism and the market was quite
understandable. Unbridled free market capitalism had resulted in
unprecedented economic crisis with the Great Depression of the 1930s
followed by war and turmoil throughout the world, and capitalist countries
themselves had responded with a move to planning and state controls,
including the "New Deal" in the United States. The evident success of early
Soviet industrial development and opposition to the imperialist world was
also inspiring to many poor countries and supported an upsurge in marxist
ideology and socialist trends throughout the world.
Marxists themselves turned away from the idea that countries had to go
through a stage of capitalism. Those who supported protectionism and
withdrawal from the world market became known as "dependency theorists". All
social science theories recognised the problems of industrialism along with
its unprecedented growth, but they fell into two trends in explaining how
growth took place and how it could spread. The dominant "modernisation
theories" emphasised internal factors; capitalism, it was argued, could
develop in the West because of inherent values supporting individualism,
accumulation and technological innovation, and could spread to non-Western
countries as well if existing barriers of feudal values and social relations
could be overcome. Trade and exchange of ideas were seen as engines of
growth, while the more ethnocentric sociologists emphasised the supposed
"backwardness" of many non-Western cultural systems as the major factors in
holding back change. In contrast, dependency theorists argued that economic
growth in the West had been based on imperialist exploitation, and that the
very success of developed countries was at the cost of the misery and
continued backwardness of others. In the words of one of the most famous of
these, Andre Gunder Frank, it was said that "development creates
underdevelopment". Not only forms of direct colonisation, but trade itself
was seen as keeping the poorer countries backward. Thus dependency theorists
recommended not only state controls and nationalisation as steps towards
socialism, but also protectionism, autarchy and withdrawal from market
forces as necessary to "independent capitalistic development".
In fact, Marx himself was a modernisation theorist of a very particular
type. Unlike those economists and sociologists who saw the process as
harmonious, Marx viewed the historical process as one of contradiction and
exploitation; unlike conventional social scientists he did not see it as
ending with capitalism. With all of this, though, he still believed that
capitalism produced growth, that this was transmitted through market
relations and foreign investment, and that there was no road directly from
feudalism to socialism. Thus dependency theorists, though calling themselves
Marxists, were rejecting crucial themes of Marx himself, and found their
social base in the intellectuals and nationalist elites of the third world
rather than in working class movements. In this sense, they were
"revisionists".
There is nothing, of course, wrong with "revisionism"; sciences, unlike
dogmas, progress through engagement with the changing real world and through
developing and revising their hypotheses and theories. But in this respect,
Marx seems to have been more correct than his dependency theory followers of
the current period. If we look at the broad paradigms of modernisation
theory and dependency theory simply in terms of the predictions about
increasing inequality, it is clear that from 1800 to the 1960s or so - the
classic period of imperialism and colonialism - economic social inequalities
increased dramatically throughout the world. In this sense, dependency
theory was correct: industrialisation did have internal sources of dynamism,
but its effect throughout the world was to increase inequality and
exploitation, to extract resources from the third world for the development
of capitalism in the West.
From the 1960s onwards, however, the picture is different. Economic
inequalites (though these are hard to measure, given problems of exchange
rates) have remained in many respects; however, there are two counter
trends. First, according to the Human Development Reports, as measured in
terms of most material indicators, such as calories of food available per
capita, maternal mortality rates, child mortality rates, life spans etc.,
the gap between the North and the South has on the whole declined, not
increased.
During the "decade of globalisation" in the 1990s almost all countries, with
the notable exception of the former Soviet bloc, improved in terms of human
development. Further, during the 1990s, the share of the U.S. in world GDP
increased marginally from 26 per cent to 28.8 per cent (after declining from
over a third of the world total in the 1960s), but the share of China
increased from 1.6 per cent to 3.3 per cent, the share of East and South
East Asian developing countries as a whole increased from 4.3 to 6.2 per
cent, while India's share increased marginally from 1.1 to 1.5 per cent.
Developing countries, especially those in Asia and Latin America, have moved
from dependence on agricultural, mineral and oil production and exports
fostered by the colonial regime to increasingly sophisticated manufactured
goods.
Dependency theorists have partly recognised this by talking of "dependent
development", but this would have been a rather meaningless category for
Marx, who spoke from the viewpoint of the working class for whom the crucial
factor was overall development and the increase in capacities of the
majority of toilers in a country, not the skin colour of the capitalists;
the ability of Asian and Latin American capitalists to gain a role in the
world industrial hierarchy would not have been a major criterion for him.
It is also undeniable that there have been dramatic differences among the
growth rates and poverty reduction achievements of different third world
countries. Generally speaking (except for the crisis in the former Soviet
bloc, which has its own dynamic), those countries most marginalised in terms
of the world market - including most of the African countries - grew the
slowest and remained poorest. Those which engaged intelligently with the
world market, for instance with policies of export orientation, grew. South
Asian countries such as India had some of the highest degrees of state
involvement in production and in regulating the market forces and at the
same time had among the slowest growth rates. In China also, the communist
period could produce an equalitarian spread of education and health, but it
was only after economic reforms began in 1978 that rapid economic growth
took place. Today many Chinese see the state sector as providing stability,
while the private, capitalistic sector is the engine of growth.
Marx himself would not have disagreed. Capitalism to him meant not simply
exploitation, which has existed in all pre-capitalist class societies, but
specifically the rapid advancement of the forces of production, the
overturning of old ways of life and the increasing integration of the world
- all factors he saw not as negative, but as laying the basis for socialism.
While those speaking in his name today are taking opposition to
"liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation" as a simple slogan, Marx
himself would have looked to the ways the new developments in capitalist,
science-based information technology and biotechnolo-gies provide both
opportunities for growth in welfare and the liberation of the masses of
working people and the basis for using the contradictions they represent for
moving towards socialism. If the old ways of trying to build socialism have
seemingly failed, people themselves through their movements will find out
the new ways on the basis of the reality of the world today.
(Concluded).
(c) 2001 Katsuri & Sons Ltd. 
Quellen:THE HINDU 02/03/2001 
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
28Dez2000 JAPAN: THE STATESMAN (INDIA) - COLUMN ONE - DEPENDENCY THEORY-I -
History's Verdict Against It. 
By SUSHILA RAMASWAMY.
IN the immediate aftermath of World War II, as a consequence of
decolonisation, many new nations emerged and became full-fledged sovereign
members of the world community. Their utmost consideration was economic
development, eradicating poverty and raising the standards of living of
their people. They understood that political independence alone was not
enough unless they could achieve economic power and self-reliance. They
carved out a distinct place in the world and styled themselves as the Third
World with a definitive ideology that provided a radical critique of
existing world order, one marked by sharp inequities and disparities. They
questioned the rationale for their poverty and backwardness, which was in
sharp contrast to the affluence of Europe, North America and Japan. Their
emphasis was on the role of governments and controlling markets to bring
about accelerated national economic growth.
To find a solution to this problem many intellectuals began to question the
proposition of classical economists like Adam Smith and Ricardo that growth
in free world trading would abolish poverty and backwardness. There were two
basic objections to this proposition. First that poverty was not inevitable
and second, world market in itself was not adequate to tackle it.
Governments in the developed countries played a central role by regularly
intervening and regulating the market.
NEOCOLONIALISM
Raul Prebisch understood that the 19th century paradigm of free trade was
inoperative and disadvantageous to these new raw materials exporting nations
in the middle of 20th century. He stressed a solution that had both national
and international ramifications. Internationally the centre ought to help
the peripheries through foreign aid and technical assistance. It ought to
give special treatment to raw materials exporting countries and aid the
third world governments trying to reform domestic industry till a point when
the nation consumed its own locally produced manufactured goods irrespective
of the costs. Such an effort at import substitution would lessen dependence
on imports and reduce the need to export simultaneously increasing domestic
employment and income. This would result in an expanded domestic market
accelerating the process of industrialisation. The dependency theory was
Marxist in orientation but intellectually drew its sustenance from the
non-Marxist analysis of Prebisch. It originated among the radical social
scientists of Latin America. Using the Latin American experiences they
developed their formulations. By giving a twist in the neo-Marxist direction
to Prebisch's formulations dependency theory became a critique of the
modernisation theory. Moderni-sation theory combining economic,
psychological and sociological factors understood modernity to include value
systems, individual motivation and capital accumulation. It emphasised
considerably the role values, norms and belief-structures played in the
transformation of a traditional society into a modern one.
Dependency theorists rejected the modernisation theories both with regard to
analysis and prediction. They associated under-development to the linkage
under-developed countries had with the developed countries. Unlike Prebisch
who suggested remedies both national and international, the depen-dency
theorists analysed the problem of under-development within the framework of
international structures and pro-cess. They followed the Leni-nist legacy of
Marxism and connect the continued impoverishment and under-development of
the periphery to the sustained unequal exchange with the developed West.
While Lenin regarded imperialism as the last stage of capitalism the
dependency theorists gloomily considered imperialism as the basis of
perpetuating inequality and dependency.
Unlike the development theorist for whom domestic factors were crucial to
explaining poverty and backwardness the dependency theorists attributed the
poverty of the poor countries to the affluence of and exploitation by the
rich ones. They pointed to historical antecedents when the colonial powers
deliberately thwarted the indigenous development of their colonies. For most
of the newly independent countries political freedom remained meaningless
since advanced countries through multinational corporations, foreign aid and
technological and cultural dependence economically dominated them. This was
established and perpetuated through a policy of collaboration bet-ween
foreign and local capital with the help of the support base of a new class.
GRAND NARRATIVE
Andre Gunder Frank developed dependency theory into a grand one by
emphasising the intrinsic link between under development and dependency with
globalisation of capitalism. The dependency theorists contended that the
distinction between un-development and underdevelopment was due to the
mercantilist and capitalist expansion of the European powers. What followed
was a unity of interests among the developed countries while the
under-developed regions re-mained disunited. Since then the unequal
relationship bet-ween the developed and underdeveloped regions continued
with calamitous consequences for the latter.
The dependency theorists located the problem of under-development in the
very nature of contemporary capitalism and recommended the erstwhile Soviet
model of industrialisation, in which the state rather than the consumer
decided priorities as the only way out of the limitations of bourgeois
reforms. A leap towards socialism would guarantee both a balanced growth and
total national control over production and allocation of its resultant
surplus. However they ignored one important historical fact that the
socialist countries in the developing world suffered as much from the
phenomenon of dependency as their own non-socialist counterparts. A good
example was Cuba whose economy was paralysed and dependent on subsidy from
the former Soviet Union to the tune of four billion dollars a year, half of
Cuba's national income. Both Ethiopia and Vietnam in the early 80's faced
virtual famines and had to be helped by the West to tide over the crisis.
The Communist nations in the developing world were as much dependent on the
developed socialist countries, as were the non-communist ones on advanced
capitalist countries.
The crux of the argument of the dependency theorists was that countries with
a high deg-ree of dependency would have very low rates of economic growth.
The growth rate in the satellites would be highest when their link with the
centre is at the weakest. For instance Frank cited the examples of the two
World Wars and the period of the Great Depression when the Latin American
economies did very well. Another caveat of the argument was that within the
dual economy an augmented foreign investment led to greater inequality in
incomes and attenuated foreign indebtedness. Dependency theorists dismissed
the argument of the conventional economists that foreign trade and capital
could be beneficial. However they did not satisfactorily deal with the
problem of isolationism.
GROSS FALLACIES
The erstwhile socialist society pursued an isolationist economic policy with
aims of self-sufficiency and independent development as demonstrated by the
fact that they produced little less than 25 per cent of World GNP yet their
share of world exports were merely 14 per cent. This also meant that they
were out of the prevailing trend towards internationalisation of the
production process and membership of financial institutions. The
exclusiveness meant that the three important components of modern business
organisation, increased efficiency, product quality and consumer choice did
not be-come a part of their economic processes. In not dealing with these
important issues the dependency theory ignored some of the very key issues
of modern organisational structure and the role of scientific and
technological innovations and in that sense is pre-modern.
In course of testing the hypothesis of the dependency theory in the context
of Latin America Kaufman, Cheronosky and Geller took into account the
relationship between the dependency economies and economic growth. They
incorporated variables like degree of trade partner concentration, degree of
concentration of commodities and flow of foreign capital and investment and
found gross fallacies in the dependency theory. The majority of indicators
pointed to the fact that the more dependent countries grew faster rather
than slowly as contended by the dependency theorists. This was important for
it falsified one of their core assumptions about dependency and economic
growth. Furthermore, Kaufman, Cheronosky and Geller also established the
fact that though dependency produced income inequality yet there was a
strong negative link between dependency and land inequality, disproving
another major contention of the dependency theorists.
(To be concluded)
All Material Subject to Copyright
Copyright 2000: The Statesman (India). All Rights Reserved. 
Quellen:ASIA INTELLIGENCE WIRE 
THE STATESMAN 28/12/2000 
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
28Dez2000 JAPAN: THE STATESMAN (INDIA) - COLUMN ONE - DEPENDENCY THEORY-I -
History's Verdict Against It. 
By SUSHILA RAMASWAMY.
IN the immediate aftermath of World War II, as a consequence of
decolonisation, many new nations emerged and became full-fledged sovereign
members of the world community. Their utmost consideration was economic
development, eradicating poverty and raising the standards of living of
their people. They understood that political independence alone was not
enough unless they could achieve economic power and self-reliance. They
carved out a distinct place in the world and styled themselves as the Third
World with a definitive ideology that provided a radical critique of
existing world order, one marked by sharp inequities and disparities. They
questioned the rationale for their poverty and backwardness, which was in
sharp contrast to the affluence of Europe, North America and Japan. Their
emphasis was on the role of governments and controlling markets to bring
about accelerated national economic growth.
To find a solution to this problem many intellectuals began to question the
proposition of classical economists like Adam Smith and Ricardo that growth
in free world trading would abolish poverty and backwardness. There were two
basic objections to this proposition. First that poverty was not inevitable
and second, world market in itself was not adequate to tackle it.
Governments in the developed countries played a central role by regularly
intervening and regulating the market.
NEOCOLONIALISM
Raul Prebisch understood that the 19th century paradigm of free trade was
inoperative and disadvantageous to these new raw materials exporting nations
in the middle of 20th century. He stressed a solution that had both national
and international ramifications. Internationally the centre ought to help
the peripheries through foreign aid and technical assistance. It ought to
give special treatment to raw materials exporting countries and aid the
third world governments trying to reform domestic industry till a point when
the nation consumed its own locally produced manufactured goods irrespective
of the costs. Such an effort at import substitution would lessen dependence
on imports and reduce the need to export simultaneously increasing domestic
employment and income. This would result in an expanded domestic market
accelerating the process of industrialisation. The dependency theory was
Marxist in orientation but intellectually drew its sustenance from the
non-Marxist analysis of Prebisch. It originated among the radical social
scientists of Latin America. Using the Latin American experiences they
developed their formulations. By giving a twist in the neo-Marxist direction
to Prebisch's formulations dependency theory became a critique of the
modernisation theory. Moderni-sation theory combining economic,
psychological and sociological factors understood modernity to include value
systems, individual motivation and capital accumulation. It emphasised
considerably the role values, norms and belief-structures played in the
transformation of a traditional society into a modern one.
Dependency theorists rejected the modernisation theories both with regard to
analysis and prediction. They associated under-development to the linkage
under-developed countries had with the developed countries. Unlike Prebisch
who suggested remedies both national and international, the depen-dency
theorists analysed the problem of under-development within the framework of
international structures and pro-cess. They followed the Leni-nist legacy of
Marxism and connect the continued impoverishment and under-development of
the periphery to the sustained unequal exchange with the developed West.
While Lenin regarded imperialism as the last stage of capitalism the
dependency theorists gloomily considered imperialism as the basis of
perpetuating inequality and dependency.
Unlike the development theorist for whom domestic factors were crucial to
explaining poverty and backwardness the dependency theorists attributed the
poverty of the poor countries to the affluence of and exploitation by the
rich ones. They pointed to historical antecedents when the colonial powers
deliberately thwarted the indigenous development of their colonies. For most
of the newly independent countries political freedom remained meaningless
since advanced countries through multinational corporations, foreign aid and
technological and cultural dependence economically dominated them. This was
established and perpetuated through a policy of collaboration bet-ween
foreign and local capital with the help of the support base of a new class.
GRAND NARRATIVE
Andre Gunder Frank developed dependency theory into a grand one by
emphasising the intrinsic link between under development and dependency with
globalisation of capitalism. The dependency theorists contended that the
distinction between un-development and underdevelopment was due to the
mercantilist and capitalist expansion of the European powers. What followed
was a unity of interests among the developed countries while the
under-developed regions re-mained disunited. Since then the unequal
relationship bet-ween the developed and underdeveloped regions continued
with calamitous consequences for the latter.
The dependency theorists located the problem of under-development in the
very nature of contemporary capitalism and recommended the erstwhile Soviet
model of industrialisation, in which the state rather than the consumer
decided priorities as the only way out of the limitations of bourgeois
reforms. A leap towards socialism would guarantee both a balanced growth and
total national control over production and allocation of its resultant
surplus. However they ignored one important historical fact that the
socialist countries in the developing world suffered as much from the
phenomenon of dependency as their own non-socialist counterparts. A good
example was Cuba whose economy was paralysed and dependent on subsidy from
the former Soviet Union to the tune of four billion dollars a year, half of
Cuba's national income. Both Ethiopia and Vietnam in the early 80's faced
virtual famines and had to be helped by the West to tide over the crisis.
The Communist nations in the developing world were as much dependent on the
developed socialist countries, as were the non-communist ones on advanced
capitalist countries.
The crux of the argument of the dependency theorists was that countries with
a high deg-ree of dependency would have very low rates of economic growth.
The growth rate in the satellites would be highest when their link with the
centre is at the weakest. For instance Frank cited the examples of the two
World Wars and the period of the Great Depression when the Latin American
economies did very well. Another caveat of the argument was that within the
dual economy an augmented foreign investment led to greater inequality in
incomes and attenuated foreign indebtedness. Dependency theorists dismissed
the argument of the conventional economists that foreign trade and capital
could be beneficial. However they did not satisfactorily deal with the
problem of isolationism.
GROSS FALLACIES
The erstwhile socialist society pursued an isolationist economic policy with
aims of self-sufficiency and independent development as demonstrated by the
fact that they produced little less than 25 per cent of World GNP yet their
share of world exports were merely 14 per cent. This also meant that they
were out of the prevailing trend towards internationalisation of the
production process and membership of financial institutions. The
exclusiveness meant that the three important components of modern business
organisation, increased efficiency, product quality and consumer choice did
not be-come a part of their economic processes. In not dealing with these
important issues the dependency theory ignored some of the very key issues
of modern organisational structure and the role of scientific and
technological innovations and in that sense is pre-modern.
In course of testing the hypothesis of the dependency theory in the context
of Latin America Kaufman, Cheronosky and Geller took into account the
relationship between the dependency economies and economic growth. They
incorporated variables like degree of trade partner concentration, degree of
concentration of commodities and flow of foreign capital and investment and
found gross fallacies in the dependency theory. The majority of indicators
pointed to the fact that the more dependent countries grew faster rather
than slowly as contended by the dependency theorists. This was important for
it falsified one of their core assumptions about dependency and economic
growth. Furthermore, Kaufman, Cheronosky and Geller also established the
fact that though dependency produced income inequality yet there was a
strong negative link between dependency and land inequality, disproving
another major contention of the dependency theorists.
(To be concluded)
All Material Subject to Copyright
Copyright 2000: The Statesman (India). All Rights Reserved. 
Quellen:ASIA INTELLIGENCE WIRE 
THE STATESMAN 28/12/2000 
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
28Dez2000 JAPAN: THE STATESMAN (INDIA) - COLUMN ONE - DEPENDENCY THEORY-I -
History's Verdict Against It. 
By SUSHILA RAMASWAMY.
IN the immediate aftermath of World War II, as a consequence of
decolonisation, many new nations emerged and became full-fledged sovereign
members of the world community. Their utmost consideration was economic
development, eradicating poverty and raising the standards of living of
their people. They understood that political independence alone was not
enough unless they could achieve economic power and self-reliance. They
carved out a distinct place in the world and styled themselves as the Third
World with a definitive ideology that provided a radical critique of
existing world order, one marked by sharp inequities and disparities. They
questioned the rationale for their poverty and backwardness, which was in
sharp contrast to the affluence of Europe, North America and Japan. Their
emphasis was on the role of governments and controlling markets to bring
about accelerated national economic growth.
To find a solution to this problem many intellectuals began to question the
proposition of classical economists like Adam Smith and Ricardo that growth
in free world trading would abolish poverty and backwardness. There were two
basic objections to this proposition. First that poverty was not inevitable
and second, world market in itself was not adequate to tackle it.
Governments in the developed countries played a central role by regularly
intervening and regulating the market.
NEOCOLONIALISM
Raul Prebisch understood that the 19th century paradigm of free trade was
inoperative and disadvantageous to these new raw materials exporting nations
in the middle of 20th century. He stressed a solution that had both national
and international ramifications. Internationally the centre ought to help
the peripheries through foreign aid and technical assistance. It ought to
give special treatment to raw materials exporting countries and aid the
third world governments trying to reform domestic industry till a point when
the nation consumed its own locally produced manufactured goods irrespective
of the costs. Such an effort at import substitution would lessen dependence
on imports and reduce the need to export simultaneously increasing domestic
employment and income. This would result in an expanded domestic market
accelerating the process of industrialisation. The dependency theory was
Marxist in orientation but intellectually drew its sustenance from the
non-Marxist analysis of Prebisch. It originated among the radical social
scientists of Latin America. Using the Latin American experiences they
developed their formulations. By giving a twist in the neo-Marxist direction
to Prebisch's formulations dependency theory became a critique of the
modernisation theory. Moderni-sation theory combining economic,
psychological and sociological factors understood modernity to include value
systems, individual motivation and capital accumulation. It emphasised
considerably the role values, norms and belief-structures played in the
transformation of a traditional society into a modern one.
Dependency theorists rejected the modernisation theories both with regard to
analysis and prediction. They associated under-development to the linkage
under-developed countries had with the developed countries. Unlike Prebisch
who suggested remedies both national and international, the depen-dency
theorists analysed the problem of under-development within the framework of
international structures and pro-cess. They followed the Leni-nist legacy of
Marxism and connect the continued impoverishment and under-development of
the periphery to the sustained unequal exchange with the developed West.
While Lenin regarded imperialism as the last stage of capitalism the
dependency theorists gloomily considered imperialism as the basis of
perpetuating inequality and dependency.
Unlike the development theorist for whom domestic factors were crucial to
explaining poverty and backwardness the dependency theorists attributed the
poverty of the poor countries to the affluence of and exploitation by the
rich ones. They pointed to historical antecedents when the colonial powers
deliberately thwarted the indigenous development of their colonies. For most
of the newly independent countries political freedom remained meaningless
since advanced countries through multinational corporations, foreign aid and
technological and cultural dependence economically dominated them. This was
established and perpetuated through a policy of collaboration bet-ween
foreign and local capital with the help of the support base of a new class.
GRAND NARRATIVE
Andre Gunder Frank developed dependency theory into a grand one by
emphasising the intrinsic link between under development and dependency with
globalisation of capitalism. The dependency theorists contended that the
distinction between un-development and underdevelopment was due to the
mercantilist and capitalist expansion of the European powers. What followed
was a unity of interests among the developed countries while the
under-developed regions re-mained disunited. Since then the unequal
relationship bet-ween the developed and underdeveloped regions continued
with calamitous consequences for the latter.
The dependency theorists located the problem of under-development in the
very nature of contemporary capitalism and recommended the erstwhile Soviet
model of industrialisation, in which the state rather than the consumer
decided priorities as the only way out of the limitations of bourgeois
reforms. A leap towards socialism would guarantee both a balanced growth and
total national control over production and allocation of its resultant
surplus. However they ignored one important historical fact that the
socialist countries in the developing world suffered as much from the
phenomenon of dependency as their own non-socialist counterparts. A good
example was Cuba whose economy was paralysed and dependent on subsidy from
the former Soviet Union to the tune of four billion dollars a year, half of
Cuba's national income. Both Ethiopia and Vietnam in the early 80's faced
virtual famines and had to be helped by the West to tide over the crisis.
The Communist nations in the developing world were as much dependent on the
developed socialist countries, as were the non-communist ones on advanced
capitalist countries.
The crux of the argument of the dependency theorists was that countries with
a high deg-ree of dependency would have very low rates of economic growth.
The growth rate in the satellites would be highest when their link with the
centre is at the weakest. For instance Frank cited the examples of the two
World Wars and the period of the Great Depression when the Latin American
economies did very well. Another caveat of the argument was that within the
dual economy an augmented foreign investment led to greater inequality in
incomes and attenuated foreign indebtedness. Dependency theorists dismissed
the argument of the conventional economists that foreign trade and capital
could be beneficial. However they did not satisfactorily deal with the
problem of isolationism.
GROSS FALLACIES
The erstwhile socialist society pursued an isolationist economic policy with
aims of self-sufficiency and independent development as demonstrated by the
fact that they produced little less than 25 per cent of World GNP yet their
share of world exports were merely 14 per cent. This also meant that they
were out of the prevailing trend towards internationalisation of the
production process and membership of financial institutions. The
exclusiveness meant that the three important components of modern business
organisation, increased efficiency, product quality and consumer choice did
not be-come a part of their economic processes. In not dealing with these
important issues the dependency theory ignored some of the very key issues
of modern organisational structure and the role of scientific and
technological innovations and in that sense is pre-modern.
In course of testing the hypothesis of the dependency theory in the context
of Latin America Kaufman, Cheronosky and Geller took into account the
relationship between the dependency economies and economic growth. They
incorporated variables like degree of trade partner concentration, degree of
concentration of commodities and flow of foreign capital and investment and
found gross fallacies in the dependency theory. The majority of indicators
pointed to the fact that the more dependent countries grew faster rather
than slowly as contended by the dependency theorists. This was important for
it falsified one of their core assumptions about dependency and economic
growth. Furthermore, Kaufman, Cheronosky and Geller also established the
fact that though dependency produced income inequality yet there was a
strong negative link between dependency and land inequality, disproving
another major contention of the dependency theorists.
(To be concluded)
All Material Subject to Copyright
Copyright 2000: The Statesman (India). All Rights Reserved. 
Quellen:ASIA INTELLIGENCE WIRE 
THE STATESMAN 28/12/2000 
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
28Dez2000 JAPAN: THE STATESMAN (INDIA) - COLUMN ONE - DEPENDENCY THEORY-I -
History's Verdict Against It. 
By SUSHILA RAMASWAMY.
IN the immediate aftermath of World War II, as a consequence of
decolonisation, many new nations emerged and became full-fledged sovereign
members of the world community. Their utmost consideration was economic
development, eradicating poverty and raising the standards of living of
their people. They understood that political independence alone was not
enough unless they could achieve economic power and self-reliance. They
carved out a distinct place in the world and styled themselves as the Third
World with a definitive ideology that provided a radical critique of
existing world order, one marked by sharp inequities and disparities. They
questioned the rationale for their poverty and backwardness, which was in
sharp contrast to the affluence of Europe, North America and Japan. Their
emphasis was on the role of governments and controlling markets to bring
about accelerated national economic growth.
To find a solution to this problem many intellectuals began to question the
proposition of classical economists like Adam Smith and Ricardo that growth
in free world trading would abolish poverty and backwardness. There were two
basic objections to this proposition. First that poverty was not inevitable
and second, world market in itself was not adequate to tackle it.
Governments in the developed countries played a central role by regularly
intervening and regulating the market.
NEOCOLONIALISM
Raul Prebisch understood that the 19th century paradigm of free trade was
inoperative and disadvantageous to these new raw materials exporting nations
in the middle of 20th century. He stressed a solution that had both national
and international ramifications. Internationally the centre ought to help
the peripheries through foreign aid and technical assistance. It ought to
give special treatment to raw materials exporting countries and aid the
third world governments trying to reform domestic industry till a point when
the nation consumed its own locally produced manufactured goods irrespective
of the costs. Such an effort at import substitution would lessen dependence
on imports and reduce the need to export simultaneously increasing domestic
employment and income. This would result in an expanded domestic market
accelerating the process of industrialisation. The dependency theory was
Marxist in orientation but intellectually drew its sustenance from the
non-Marxist analysis of Prebisch. It originated among the radical social
scientists of Latin America. Using the Latin American experiences they
developed their formulations. By giving a twist in the neo-Marxist direction
to Prebisch's formulations dependency theory became a critique of the
modernisation theory. Moderni-sation theory combining economic,
psychological and sociological factors understood modernity to include value
systems, individual motivation and capital accumulation. It emphasised
considerably the role values, norms and belief-structures played in the
transformation of a traditional society into a modern one.
Dependency theorists rejected the modernisation theories both with regard to
analysis and prediction. They associated under-development to the linkage
under-developed countries had with the developed countries. Unlike Prebisch
who suggested remedies both national and international, the depen-dency
theorists analysed the problem of under-development within the framework of
international structures and pro-cess. They followed the Leni-nist legacy of
Marxism and connect the continued impoverishment and under-development of
the periphery to the sustained unequal exchange with the developed West.
While Lenin regarded imperialism as the last stage of capitalism the
dependency theorists gloomily considered imperialism as the basis of
perpetuating inequality and dependency.
Unlike the development theorist for whom domestic factors were crucial to
explaining poverty and backwardness the dependency theorists attributed the
poverty of the poor countries to the affluence of and exploitation by the
rich ones. They pointed to historical antecedents when the colonial powers
deliberately thwarted the indigenous development of their colonies. For most
of the newly independent countries political freedom remained meaningless
since advanced countries through multinational corporations, foreign aid and
technological and cultural dependence economically dominated them. This was
established and perpetuated through a policy of collaboration bet-ween
foreign and local capital with the help of the support base of a new class.
GRAND NARRATIVE
Andre Gunder Frank developed dependency theory into a grand one by
emphasising the intrinsic link between under development and dependency with
globalisation of capitalism. The dependency theorists contended that the
distinction between un-development and underdevelopment was due to the
mercantilist and capitalist expansion of the European powers. What followed
was a unity of interests among the developed countries while the
under-developed regions re-mained disunited. Since then the unequal
relationship bet-ween the developed and underdeveloped regions continued
with calamitous consequences for the latter.
The dependency theorists located the problem of under-development in the
very nature of contemporary capitalism and recommended the erstwhile Soviet
model of industrialisation, in which the state rather than the consumer
decided priorities as the only way out of the limitations of bourgeois
reforms. A leap towards socialism would guarantee both a balanced growth and
total national control over production and allocation of its resultant
surplus. However they ignored one important historical fact that the
socialist countries in the developing world suffered as much from the
phenomenon of dependency as their own non-socialist counterparts. A good
example was Cuba whose economy was paralysed and dependent on subsidy from
the former Soviet Union to the tune of four billion dollars a year, half of
Cuba's national income. Both Ethiopia and Vietnam in the early 80's faced
virtual famines and had to be helped by the West to tide over the crisis.
The Communist nations in the developing world were as much dependent on the
developed socialist countries, as were the non-communist ones on advanced
capitalist countries.
The crux of the argument of the dependency theorists was that countries with
a high deg-ree of dependency would have very low rates of economic growth.
The growth rate in the satellites would be highest when their link with the
centre is at the weakest. For instance Frank cited the examples of the two
World Wars and the period of the Great Depression when the Latin American
economies did very well. Another caveat of the argument was that within the
dual economy an augmented foreign investment led to greater inequality in
incomes and attenuated foreign indebtedness. Dependency theorists dismissed
the argument of the conventional economists that foreign trade and capital
could be beneficial. However they did not satisfactorily deal with the
problem of isolationism.
GROSS FALLACIES
The erstwhile socialist society pursued an isolationist economic policy with
aims of self-sufficiency and independent development as demonstrated by the
fact that they produced little less than 25 per cent of World GNP yet their
share of world exports were merely 14 per cent. This also meant that they
were out of the prevailing trend towards internationalisation of the
production process and membership of financial institutions. The
exclusiveness meant that the three important components of modern business
organisation, increased efficiency, product quality and consumer choice did
not be-come a part of their economic processes. In not dealing with these
important issues the dependency theory ignored some of the very key issues
of modern organisational structure and the role of scientific and
technological innovations and in that sense is pre-modern.
In course of testing the hypothesis of the dependency theory in the context
of Latin America Kaufman, Cheronosky and Geller took into account the
relationship between the dependency economies and economic growth. They
incorporated variables like degree of trade partner concentration, degree of
concentration of commodities and flow of foreign capital and investment and
found gross fallacies in the dependency theory. The majority of indicators
pointed to the fact that the more dependent countries grew faster rather
than slowly as contended by the dependency theorists. This was important for
it falsified one of their core assumptions about dependency and economic
growth. Furthermore, Kaufman, Cheronosky and Geller also established the
fact that though dependency produced income inequality yet there was a
strong negative link between dependency and land inequality, disproving
another major contention of the dependency theorists.
(To be concluded)
All Material Subject to Copyright
Copyright 2000: The Statesman (India). All Rights Reserved. 
Quellen:ASIA INTELLIGENCE WIRE 
THE STATESMAN 28/12/2000 
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
27Dez2000 JAPAN: THE STATESMAN (INDIA) - COLUMN ONE - DEPENDENCY THEORY-I -
History's Verdict Against It. 
By SUSHILA RAMASWAMY.
IN the immediate aftermath of World War II, as a consequence of
decolonisation, many new nations emerged and became full-fledged sovereign
members of the world community. Their utmost consideration was economic
development, eradicating poverty and raising the standards of living of
their people. They understood that political independence alone was not
enough unless they could achieve economic power and self-reliance. They
carved out a distinct place in the world and styled themselves as the Third
World with a definitive ideology that provided a radical critique of
existing world order, one marked by sharp inequities and disparities. They
questioned the rationale for their poverty and backwardness, which was in
sharp contrast to the affluence of Europe, North America and Japan. Their
emphasis was on the role of governments and controlling markets to bring
about accelerated national economic growth.
To find a solution to this problem many intellectuals began to question the
proposition of classical economists like Adam Smith and Ricardo that growth
in free world trading would abolish poverty and backwardness. There were two
basic objections to this proposition. First that poverty was not inevitable
and second, world market in itself was not adequate to tackle it.
Governments in the developed countries played a central role by regularly
intervening and regulating the market.
NEOCOLONIALISM
Raul Prebisch understood that the 19th century paradigm of free trade was
inoperative and disadvantageous to these new raw materials exporting nations
in the middle of 20th century. He stressed a solution that had both national
and international ramifications. Internationally the centre ought to help
the peripheries through foreign aid and technical assistance. It ought to
give special treatment to raw materials exporting countries and aid the
third world governments trying to reform domestic industry till a point when
the nation consumed its own locally produced manufactured goods irrespective
of the costs. Such an effort at import substitution would lessen dependence
on imports and reduce the need to export simultaneously increasing domestic
employment and income. This would result in an expanded domestic market
accelerating the process of industrialisation. The dependency theory was
Marxist in orientation but intellectually drew its sustenance from the
non-Marxist analysis of Prebisch. It originated among the radical social
scientists of Latin America. Using the Latin American experiences they
developed their formulations. By giving a twist in the neo-Marxist direction
to Prebisch's formulations dependency theory became a critique of the
modernisation theory. Moderni-sation theory combining economic,
psychological and sociological factors understood modernity to include value
systems, individual motivation and capital accumulation. It emphasised
considerably the role values, norms and belief-structures played in the
transformation of a traditional society into a modern one.
Dependency theorists rejected the modernisation theories both with regard to
analysis and prediction. They associated under-development to the linkage
under-developed countries had with the developed countries. Unlike Prebisch
who suggested remedies both national and international, the depen-dency
theorists analysed the problem of under-development within the framework of
international structures and pro-cess. They followed the Leni-nist legacy of
Marxism and connect the continued impoverishment and under-development of
the periphery to the sustained unequal exchange with the developed West.
While Lenin regarded imperialism as the last stage of capitalism the
dependency theorists gloomily considered imperialism as the basis of
perpetuating inequality and dependency.
Unlike the development theorist for whom domestic factors were crucial to
explaining poverty and backwardness the dependency theorists attributed the
poverty of the poor countries to the affluence of and exploitation by the
rich ones. They pointed to historical antecedents when the colonial powers
deliberately thwarted the indigenous development of their colonies. For most
of the newly independent countries political freedom remained meaningless
since advanced countries through multinational corporations, foreign aid and
technological and cultural dependence economically dominated them. This was
established and perpetuated through a policy of collaboration bet-ween
foreign and local capital with the help of the support base of a new class.
GRAND NARRATIVE
Andre Gunder Frank developed dependency theory into a grand one by
emphasising the intrinsic link between under development and dependency with
globalisation of capitalism. The dependency theorists contended that the
distinction between un-development and underdevelopment was due to the
mercantilist and capitalist expansion of the European powers. What followed
was a unity of interests among the developed countries while the
under-developed regions re-mained disunited. Since then the unequal
relationship bet-ween the developed and underdeveloped regions continued
with calamitous consequences for the latter.
The dependency theorists located the problem of under-development in the
very nature of contemporary capitalism and recommended the erstwhile Soviet
model of industrialisation, in which the state rather than the consumer
decided priorities as the only way out of the limitations of bourgeois
reforms. A leap towards socialism would guarantee both a balanced growth and
total national control over production and allocation of its resultant
surplus. However they ignored one important historical fact that the
socialist countries in the developing world suffered as much from the
phenomenon of dependency as their own non-socialist counterparts. A good
example was Cuba whose economy was paralysed and dependent on subsidy from
the former Soviet Union to the tune of four billion dollars a year, half of
Cuba's national income. Both Ethiopia and Vietnam in the early 80's faced
virtual famines and had to be helped by the West to tide over the crisis.
The Communist nations in the developing world were as much dependent on the
developed socialist countries, as were the non-communist ones on advanced
capitalist countries.
The crux of the argument of the dependency theorists was that countries with
a high deg-ree of dependency would have very low rates of economic growth.
The growth rate in the satellites would be highest when their link with the
centre is at the weakest. For instance Frank cited the examples of the two
World Wars and the period of the Great Depression when the Latin American
economies did very well. Another caveat of the argument was that within the
dual economy an augmented foreign investment led to greater inequality in
incomes and attenuated foreign indebtedness. Dependency theorists dismissed
the argument of the conventional economists that foreign trade and capital
could be beneficial. However they did not satisfactorily deal with the
problem of isolationism.
GROSS FALLACIES
The erstwhile socialist society pursued an isolationist economic policy with
aims of self-sufficiency and independent development as demonstrated by the
fact that they produced little less than 25 per cent of World GNP yet their
share of world exports were merely 14 per cent. This also meant that they
were out of the prevailing trend towards internationalisation of the
production process and membership of financial institutions. The
exclusiveness meant that the three important components of modern business
organisation, increased efficiency, product quality and consumer choice did
not be-come a part of their economic processes. In not dealing with these
important issues the dependency theory ignored some of the very key issues
of modern organisational structure and the role of scientific and
technological innovations and in that sense is pre-modern.
In course of testing the hypothesis of the dependency theory in the context
of Latin America Kaufman, Cheronosky and Geller took into account the
relationship between the dependency economies and economic growth. They
incorporated variables like degree of trade partner concentration, degree of
concentration of commodities and flow of foreign capital and investment and
found gross fallacies in the dependency theory. The majority of indicators
pointed to the fact that the more dependent countries grew faster rather
than slowly as contended by the dependency theorists. This was important for
it falsified one of their core assumptions about dependency and economic
growth. Furthermore, Kaufman, Cheronosky and Geller also established the
fact that though dependency produced income inequality yet there was a
strong negative link between dependency and land inequality, disproving
another major contention of the dependency theorists.
(To be concluded)
All Material Subject to Copyright
Copyright 2000: The Statesman (India). All Rights Reserved. 
Quellen:ASIA INTELLIGENCE WIRE 
THE STATESMAN 27/12/2000 
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
27Dez2000 JAPAN: THE STATESMAN (INDIA) - COLUMN ONE - DEPENDENCY THEORY-I -
History's Verdict Against It. 
By SUSHILA RAMASWAMY.
IN the immediate aftermath of World War II, as a consequence of
decolonisation, many new nations emerged and became full-fledged sovereign
members of the world community. Their utmost consideration was economic
development, eradicating poverty and raising the standards of living of
their people. They understood that political independence alone was not
enough unless they could achieve economic power and self-reliance. They
carved out a distinct place in the world and styled themselves as the Third
World with a definitive ideology that provided a radical critique of
existing world order, one marked by sharp inequities and disparities. They
questioned the rationale for their poverty and backwardness, which was in
sharp contrast to the affluence of Europe, North America and Japan. Their
emphasis was on the role of governments and controlling markets to bring
about accelerated national economic growth.
To find a solution to this problem many intellectuals began to question the
proposition of classical economists like Adam Smith and Ricardo that growth
in free world trading would abolish poverty and backwardness. There were two
basic objections to this proposition. First that poverty was not inevitable
and second, world market in itself was not adequate to tackle it.
Governments in the developed countries played a central role by regularly
intervening and regulating the market.
NEOCOLONIALISM
Raul Prebisch understood that the 19th century paradigm of free trade was
inoperative and disadvantageous to these new raw materials exporting nations
in the middle of 20th century. He stressed a solution that had both national
and international ramifications. Internationally the centre ought to help
the peripheries through foreign aid and technical assistance. It ought to
give special treatment to raw materials exporting countries and aid the
third world governments trying to reform domestic industry till a point when
the nation consumed its own locally produced manufactured goods irrespective
of the costs. Such an effort at import substitution would lessen dependence
on imports and reduce the need to export simultaneously increasing domestic
employment and income. This would result in an expanded domestic market
accelerating the process of industrialisation. The dependency theory was
Marxist in orientation but intellectually drew its sustenance from the
non-Marxist analysis of Prebisch. It originated among the radical social
scientists of Latin America. Using the Latin American experiences they
developed their formulations. By giving a twist in the neo-Marxist direction
to Prebisch's formulations dependency theory became a critique of the
modernisation theory. Moderni-sation theory combining economic,
psychological and sociological factors understood modernity to include value
systems, individual motivation and capital accumulation. It emphasised
considerably the role values, norms and belief-structures played in the
transformation of a traditional society into a modern one.
Dependency theorists rejected the modernisation theories both with regard to
analysis and prediction. They associated under-development to the linkage
under-developed countries had with the developed countries. Unlike Prebisch
who suggested remedies both national and international, the depen-dency
theorists analysed the problem of under-development within the framework of
international structures and pro-cess. They followed the Leni-nist legacy of
Marxism and connect the continued impoverishment and under-development of
the periphery to the sustained unequal exchange with the developed West.
While Lenin regarded imperialism as the last stage of capitalism the
dependency theorists gloomily considered imperialism as the basis of
perpetuating inequality and dependency.
Unlike the development theorist for whom domestic factors were crucial to
explaining poverty and backwardness the dependency theorists attributed the
poverty of the poor countries to the affluence of and exploitation by the
rich ones. They pointed to historical antecedents when the colonial powers
deliberately thwarted the indigenous development of their colonies. For most
of the newly independent countries political freedom remained meaningless
since advanced countries through multinational corporations, foreign aid and
technological and cultural dependence economically dominated them. This was
established and perpetuated through a policy of collaboration bet-ween
foreign and local capital with the help of the support base of a new class.
GRAND NARRATIVE
Andre Gunder Frank developed dependency theory into a grand one by
emphasising the intrinsic link between under development and dependency with
globalisation of capitalism. The dependency theorists contended that the
distinction between un-development and underdevelopment was due to the
mercantilist and capitalist expansion of the European powers. What followed
was a unity of interests among the developed countries while the
under-developed regions re-mained disunited. Since then the unequal
relationship bet-ween the developed and underdeveloped regions continued
with calamitous consequences for the latter.
The dependency theorists located the problem of under-development in the
very nature of contemporary capitalism and recommended the erstwhile Soviet
model of industrialisation, in which the state rather than the consumer
decided priorities as the only way out of the limitations of bourgeois
reforms. A leap towards socialism would guarantee both a balanced growth and
total national control over production and allocation of its resultant
surplus. However they ignored one important historical fact that the
socialist countries in the developing world suffered as much from the
phenomenon of dependency as their own non-socialist counterparts. A good
example was Cuba whose economy was paralysed and dependent on subsidy from
the former Soviet Union to the tune of four billion dollars a year, half of
Cuba's national income. Both Ethiopia and Vietnam in the early 80's faced
virtual famines and had to be helped by the West to tide over the crisis.
The Communist nations in the developing world were as much dependent on the
developed socialist countries, as were the non-communist ones on advanced
capitalist countries.
The crux of the argument of the dependency theorists was that countries with
a high deg-ree of dependency would have very low rates of economic growth.
The growth rate in the satellites would be highest when their link with the
centre is at the weakest. For instance Frank cited the examples of the two
World Wars and the period of the Great Depression when the Latin American
economies did very well. Another caveat of the argument was that within the
dual economy an augmented foreign investment led to greater inequality in
incomes and attenuated foreign indebtedness. Dependency theorists dismissed
the argument of the conventional economists that foreign trade and capital
could be beneficial. However they did not satisfactorily deal with the
problem of isolationism.
GROSS FALLACIES
The erstwhile socialist society pursued an isolationist economic policy with
aims of self-sufficiency and independent development as demonstrated by the
fact that they produced little less than 25 per cent of World GNP yet their
share of world exports were merely 14 per cent. This also meant that they
were out of the prevailing trend towards internationalisation of the
production process and membership of financial institutions. The
exclusiveness meant that the three important components of modern business
organisation, increased efficiency, product quality and consumer choice did
not be-come a part of their economic processes. In not dealing with these
important issues the dependency theory ignored some of the very key issues
of modern organisational structure and the role of scientific and
technological innovations and in that sense is pre-modern.
In course of testing the hypothesis of the dependency theory in the context
of Latin America Kaufman, Cheronosky and Geller took into account the
relationship between the dependency economies and economic growth. They
incorporated variables like degree of trade partner concentration, degree of
concentration of commodities and flow of foreign capital and investment and
found gross fallacies in the dependency theory. The majority of indicators
pointed to the fact that the more dependent countries grew faster rather
than slowly as contended by the dependency theorists. This was important for
it falsified one of their core assumptions about dependency and economic
growth. Furthermore, Kaufman, Cheronosky and Geller also established the
fact that though dependency produced income inequality yet there was a
strong negative link between dependency and land inequality, disproving
another major contention of the dependency theorists.
(To be concluded)
All Material Subject to Copyright
Copyright 2000: The Statesman (India). All Rights Reserved. 
Quellen:ASIA INTELLIGENCE WIRE 
THE STATESMAN 27/12/2000 
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
27Dez2000 JAPAN: THE STATESMAN (INDIA) - COLUMN ONE - DEPENDENCY THEORY-I -
History's Verdict Against It. 
By SUSHILA RAMASWAMY.
IN the immediate aftermath of World War II, as a consequence of
decolonisation, many new nations emerged and became full-fledged sovereign
members of the world community. Their utmost consideration was economic
development, eradicating poverty and raising the standards of living of
their people. They understood that political independence alone was not
enough unless they could achieve economic power and self-reliance. They
carved out a distinct place in the world and styled themselves as the Third
World with a definitive ideology that provided a radical critique of
existing world order, one marked by sharp inequities and disparities. They
questioned the rationale for their poverty and backwardness, which was in
sharp contrast to the affluence of Europe, North America and Japan. Their
emphasis was on the role of governments and controlling markets to bring
about accelerated national economic growth.
To find a solution to this problem many intellectuals began to question the
proposition of classical economists like Adam Smith and Ricardo that growth
in free world trading would abolish poverty and backwardness. There were two
basic objections to this proposition. First that poverty was not inevitable
and second, world market in itself was not adequate to tackle it.
Governments in the developed countries played a central role by regularly
intervening and regulating the market.
NEOCOLONIALISM
Raul Prebisch understood that the 19th century paradigm of free trade was
inoperative and disadvantageous to these new raw materials exporting nations
in the middle of 20th century. He stressed a solution that had both national
and international ramifications. Internationally the centre ought to help
the peripheries through foreign aid and technical assistance. It ought to
give special treatment to raw materials exporting countries and aid the
third world governments trying to reform domestic industry till a point when
the nation consumed its own locally produced manufactured goods irrespective
of the costs. Such an effort at import substitution would lessen dependence
on imports and reduce the need to export simultaneously increasing domestic
employment and income. This would result in an expanded domestic market
accelerating the process of industrialisation. The dependency theory was
Marxist in orientation but intellectually drew its sustenance from the
non-Marxist analysis of Prebisch. It originated among the radical social
scientists of Latin America. Using the Latin American experiences they
developed their formulations. By giving a twist in the neo-Marxist direction
to Prebisch's formulations dependency theory became a critique of the
modernisation theory. Moderni-sation theory combining economic,
psychological and sociological factors understood modernity to include value
systems, individual motivation and capital accumulation. It emphasised
considerably the role values, norms and belief-structures played in the
transformation of a traditional society into a modern one.
Dependency theorists rejected the modernisation theories both with regard to
analysis and prediction. They associated under-development to the linkage
under-developed countries had with the developed countries. Unlike Prebisch
who suggested remedies both national and international, the depen-dency
theorists analysed the problem of under-development within the framework of
international structures and pro-cess. They followed the Leni-nist legacy of
Marxism and connect the continued impoverishment and under-development of
the periphery to the sustained unequal exchange with the developed West.
While Lenin regarded imperialism as the last stage of capitalism the
dependency theorists gloomily considered imperialism as the basis of
perpetuating inequality and dependency.
Unlike the development theorist for whom domestic factors were crucial to
explaining poverty and backwardness the dependency theorists attributed the
poverty of the poor countries to the affluence of and exploitation by the
rich ones. They pointed to historical antecedents when the colonial powers
deliberately thwarted the indigenous development of their colonies. For most
of the newly independent countries political freedom remained meaningless
since advanced countries through multinational corporations, foreign aid and
technological and cultural dependence economically dominated them. This was
established and perpetuated through a policy of collaboration bet-ween
foreign and local capital with the help of the support base of a new class.
GRAND NARRATIVE
Andre Gunder Frank developed dependency theory into a grand one by
emphasising the intrinsic link between under development and dependency with
globalisation of capitalism. The dependency theorists contended that the
distinction between un-development and underdevelopment was due to the
mercantilist and capitalist expansion of the European powers. What followed
was a unity of interests among the developed countries while the
under-developed regions re-mained disunited. Since then the unequal
relationship bet-ween the developed and underdeveloped regions continued
with calamitous consequences for the latter.
The dependency theorists located the problem of under-development in the
very nature of contemporary capitalism and recommended the erstwhile Soviet
model of industrialisation, in which the state rather than the consumer
decided priorities as the only way out of the limitations of bourgeois
reforms. A leap towards socialism would guarantee both a balanced growth and
total national control over production and allocation of its resultant
surplus. However they ignored one important historical fact that the
socialist countries in the developing world suffered as much from the
phenomenon of dependency as their own non-socialist counterparts. A good
example was Cuba whose economy was paralysed and dependent on subsidy from
the former Soviet Union to the tune of four billion dollars a year, half of
Cuba's national income. Both Ethiopia and Vietnam in the early 80's faced
virtual famines and had to be helped by the West to tide over the crisis.
The Communist nations in the developing world were as much dependent on the
developed socialist countries, as were the non-communist ones on advanced
capitalist countries.
The crux of the argument of the dependency theorists was that countries with
a high deg-ree of dependency would have very low rates of economic growth.
The growth rate in the satellites would be highest when their link with the
centre is at the weakest. For instance Frank cited the examples of the two
World Wars and the period of the Great Depression when the Latin American
economies did very well. Another caveat of the argument was that within the
dual economy an augmented foreign investment led to greater inequality in
incomes and attenuated foreign indebtedness. Dependency theorists dismissed
the argument of the conventional economists that foreign trade and capital
could be beneficial. However they did not satisfactorily deal with the
problem of isolationism.
GROSS FALLACIES
The erstwhile socialist society pursued an isolationist economic policy with
aims of self-sufficiency and independent development as demonstrated by the
fact that they produced little less than 25 per cent of World GNP yet their
share of world exports were merely 14 per cent. This also meant that they
were out of the prevailing trend towards internationalisation of the
production process and membership of financial institutions. The
exclusiveness meant that the three important components of modern business
organisation, increased efficiency, product quality and consumer choice did
not be-come a part of their economic processes. In not dealing with these
important issues the dependency theory ignored some of the very key issues
of modern organisational structure and the role of scientific and
technological innovations and in that sense is pre-modern.
In course of testing the hypothesis of the dependency theory in the context
of Latin America Kaufman, Cheronosky and Geller took into account the
relationship between the dependency economies and economic growth. They
incorporated variables like degree of trade partner concentration, degree of
concentration of commodities and flow of foreign capital and investment and
found gross fallacies in the dependency theory. The majority of indicators
pointed to the fact that the more dependent countries grew faster rather
than slowly as contended by the dependency theorists. This was important for
it falsified one of their core assumptions about dependency and economic
growth. Furthermore, Kaufman, Cheronosky and Geller also established the
fact that though dependency produced income inequality yet there was a
strong negative link between dependency and land inequality, disproving
another major contention of the dependency theorists.
(To be concluded)
All Material Subject to Copyright
Copyright 2000: The Statesman (India). All Rights Reserved. 
Quellen:ASIA INTELLIGENCE WIRE 
THE STATESMAN 27/12/2000 
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
01Aug2000 USA: Development studies and comparative education - Context,
content, comparison and contributors. 
By Little, Angela.
ABSTRACT This article reviews Comparative Education over the past 20 years,
explores the parallel literature of development studies, and identifies
future directions and challenges for comparative education. Using Parkyn
(1977) as a benchmark, an analysis of articles published between 1977 and
1998 suggests that only a small proportion appear to meet his criteria for
comparative education. Parkyn's purpose for comparative education, to
increase our understanding of the relationship between education and the
development of human society, is shared by development studies. Educational
writings within development studies have explored the meanings of
development and underdevelopment and have raised important questions about
the unit of analysis for comparative education. Several reasons are advanced
to explain the separate development of these literatures. The contemporary
challenge of globalisation presents fresh opportunities and challenges for
both literatures. A shared commitment to understanding the role of education
in the globalisation process and the reasoned response to it could form the
heart of a shared effort in the future. Globalisation also highlights the
need for more effective dialogue between comparative educators in different
corners of the globe.
Introduction
The purpose of this article is three-fold: to provide a brief review of the
journal over the past 20 years in terms of criteria it has set for itself;
to identify concepts which have emerged from development studies over the
past 20 years which can contribute to and enhance comparative education; and
to conclude with suggestions about the future development of the field of
comparative education.
Review of the journal
The benchmark for this review is Parkyn's (1977) contribution to the Special
Number, entitled 'Comparative Education Research and Development Education'
(Grant, 1977). Parkyn reflects on an issue which exercised a number of
academics in the 1970s, the similarities and differences between comparative
education and development education, and the potential contribution of the
former to the latter. For Parkyn, the purpose of comparative education was:
... to increase our understanding of the relationship between education and
the development of human society by taking into account factors that cannot
adequately be observed and understood within the limits of any particular
society, culture, or system, but that transcend particular societies and
have to be studied by comparative methods applied to societies, cultures and
systems ... (p. 89)
Parkyn uses the term `development' to refer to all societies that are
undergoing change. He does not confine the use of the term `development' to
`developing' countries. The purpose of development education [1], by
contrast, was:
... education aimed at the modernisation of ... technological activities in
order to provide better for their material and cultural needs, and at the
adaptation of their political machinery and other societal institutions in
such a way as to make possible the most effective use of this modernisation
in the satisfying of those needs. (p. 89)
Despite the association in the minds of many of the term `development
education' with `less developed' countries, Parkyn was at pains to point out
that the fundamental distinction between comparative education and
development education was not one of geography. The distinction was one of
purpose. The purpose of comparative education was understanding and
analysis, the purpose of development education was action and change.
Comparative education could and should be undertaken in the countries of the
North and the South. Wherever it is practised, development education should
rest on a foundation of comparative education.
Wherever in the world it was undertaken, the purpose of comparison was to
explore the influence of system-level factors on the interaction of
within-system variables. This definition of intellectual purpose in turn led
to Parkyn's critique of comparative education in the 1970s.
The inadequacy of many studies purporting to be comparative, and
superficially appearing to be comparative, is, in the last analysis, to be
found in the fact that those which concentrated on within system variables
or cultural contexts have often lacked infor-mation on across-system
variables, while those which have dealt with across-system variables have
often failed to show their different interaction with within-system
variables in different countries. (Parkyn, 1977, p. 90)
So how has the field, as represented by studies published by Comparative
Education, fared over the past two decades? Does the journal include a good
representation of so-called `developing countries', in support of Parkyn's
proposition that geography is not a defining characteristic of comparative
education (context)? Does the journal include a good representation of
articles addressing the fundamental question of comparative education, the
relationship between education and the development of human society
(content)? Does the journal demonstrate an understanding of the intellectual
purpose of comparison (comparison)?
The review classifies the titles of articles published by Comparative
Education between 1977 and 1998 (Volumes 13-34). A total of 472 articles
were classified by country context (Table I), content (Table II) and
comparison (Table III) by the author and Dr Felicity Rawlings, working
independently. While acknowledging that a title is only an indicator of an
article's content, a classification based on a full reading of all 472
articles fell beyond the scope of the present review.
Context
Table I indicates the countries mentioned in the titles of articles. The
authors of some 68% (320/472) of articles made explicit reference to one or
more countries in the titles of their articles. Seventy-six countries were
mentioned, just over one-third (34%) of the 224 countries listed in UNESCO's
Statistical Yearbook 1998. A few countries have featured in the titles of a
large number of articles, for example the UK (43), China (31), Japan (28),
Germany (21), the USA (20), France (20) and Australia (16). Some 34
countries warrant mention in the title of only one article in 20 years.
The number of countries that have at least one title published was compared
with the total number of countries in the same region, as listed in UNESCO's
Statistical Yearbook 1998. In Africa, some 17 countries appeared in the
title of at least one article, compared with some 56 countries in the Africa
region, or 30%. Asia, South America and Oceania achieved similar
percentages. The countries of Europe achieved the highest representation of
56%, while those of North America were under-represented, at 16%. The
apparent under-representation of titles from North America may be accounted
for by the propensity of authors on North American education to contribute
to our important sister journal, Comparative Education Review, based in
North America. The similar levels of representation of countries in the
other four continental blocs-Africa (30%), South America (36%), Asia (35%)
and Oceania (30%)-is a significant achievement for a journal established in
London and run from the UK, and publishing (currently) only in English.
A comparison of the number of articles whose titles refer to one or more
countries, by continent, presents a different picture. The total number of
countries referred to in titles is 362. Just over half of this total refers
to countries in Europe or North America (Europe 40.1%; North America 10.5%).
A further 29.6% refer to Asia. Articles focusing on countries in Africa,
South America and Oceania account for 11.3%, 1.9% and 6.6% respectively. If
one excludes Australia and New Zealand from the Oceania bloc, the percentage
falls to 1.6%.
A classification by `developed' and `developing' country, using the 1998
UNESCO classification, presents an even sharper picture. UNESCO's
Statistical Yearbook 1998 classifies 53 (24%) countries as `developed' and
the remaining 171 (76%) as `developing'. Some 224 (62%) of our articles
refer to `developed' countries, and 138 (38%) to `developing countries'.
To the extent that a large number of developed and developing countries
attract the attention of authors, Parkyn's proposition that geography is not
the essential characteristic of comparative education appears to be borne
out. At the same time, it is clear that over the past decades comparative
educators have attended disproportionately on educational issues in the
countries of Europe, North America and, to a degree, Asia.
Content
Table II presents the content of articles, as indicated by title, using the
classification of journal aims published in 1978.
The relationship between education and the development of human society,
education and development for short, appears to lie behind 44 of the
articles, or 13% of the articles classified by the 1978 scheme. Titles here
include, for example, Blinco on 'Persistence and Education: a formula for
Japan's economic success' (Blinco, 1993) and Morris on 'Asia's Four Little
Tigers: a comparison of the role of education in their development' (Morris,
1996). These titles appear to address one aspect of Parkyn's definition of
comparative education purpose, the relationship between education and the
development of human society. Whether, simultaneously, they account for
'factors that cannot adequately be observed and understood within the limits
of any particular society' (Parkyn, 1977, p. 89) requires a more careful
reading of the text than has been possible in this brief review.
A further 17.6% of articles address educational reform, including the
internal problems of reform and the influence of societal development on the
reform of education. The latter may be viewed as the inverse of the category
noted above, the relationship between education and the development of human
society. Titles here include Gu Mingyuan (1984) on 'The Development and
Reform of Higher Education in China', La Belle & Ward (1990) on `Education
Reform When Nations Undergo Radical Political and Social Transformation',
and Mitter (1992) on `Educational Adjustments and Perspectives in a United
Germany'.
TABLE I.
Around 10% of articles may be classified under the heading `significant
aspects of comparative research'. This has been interpreted to include
discussions of (i) comparative method; (ii) comparative theory; and/or (iii)
comparisons drawn across a set of individual country papers. More than 100
articles could not easily be classified under the 1978 headings. Of these,
12 addressed cultural diversity and pluralism, 11 pedagogic and
philosophical theory, 11 the education of minorities and 5 language policy.
Comparison
Table III presents the geographic scope of comparisons made. It
distinguishes titles that refer to single countries, two or more countries,
regional groups, the 'world', and those from which such reference is absent.
This classification does not enable us to judge whether studies have
identified the interaction between system-level and within system level
factors, Parkyn's intellectual purpose of comparison. However, the very
large number of studies, some 248 (58%), that focus on single countries,
would suggest that Parkyn's criterion has not been met in more than half the
cases. A smaller number, some 72 (15%), explicitly make comparisons across
two, and less often, three, four or five countries. A further 11% indicate
in their titles that the study draws on/makes reference to countries within
a particular region (e.g. `developing' countries, `Europe', the Pacific,
Africa). A very small number, some 3%, focus on globalising or
internationalising trends, or on agencies (e.g. the World Bank) which have a
global remit. Some 18% of titles omit reference to country focus.
TABLE II.
Among those which focus explicitly on a single country, some 145 (58%) focus
on `developed' countries and 103 (42%) on developing. Of the titles that
indicate comparison across one or more countries, the majority involves
two-country comparisons. Of these, 42 (68%) are comparisons between two
developed countries, 12 (19%) are comparisons be tween two developing
countries, and the remaining eight (13%) make comparisons between developed
and developing countries. The fairly sizeable percentage of articles that
omit a reference to country (18%), are of many types. They include articles
of the kind included in this Special Number, reviewing generally the state
of the field and/or raising theoretical or methodological questions. Or they
may focus on a particular country, but do not consider this focus to be
sufficiently important to mention in the title.
TABLE III.
Among those that draw explicit comparisons across countries, the majority do
so across developed countries. The majority of studies drawing comparisons
across two countries, and all those across three and four, focus on
developed countries. Those that draw comparisons across five countries
include four developed countries and Singapore. The studies whose titles
make a regional or global reference are difficult to classify further
without detailed analysis of the content of the articles.
It would appear then that only a small percentage of articles published by
Comparative Education since 1977 have adopted an explicitly comparative
approach. The majority of articles focus on single countries. Authors are
contributing to a body of educational knowledge drawn from diverse
educational settings. This is not to imply that the studies lack a
comparative `dimension'. Many authors locate their studies in relation to
the more general comparative education literature, and indeed are encouraged
to do so by the journal. However, the primary focus of the study is a single
country context.
Context, Content and Comparison
The above analysis indicates that the articles published in Comparative
Education cover a very broad range of context, content and comparison.
Parkyn's criteria are met by only a small proportion of articles. Geography
is clearly not the defining characteristic of comparative education,
although the representation of articles on countries in the `South' is not
yet as high as it should be. The breadth of content areas covered goes well
beyond Parkyn's prescription. And the `comparative' approach adopted by
authors varies considerably.
Breadth has the considerable advantage of bringing together readers with
different and shared foci. Several of the Special Numbers of Comparative
Education take a single country as their theme. Within this shared focus,
authors address the specific issues of curriculum, teachers, management and
employment. Other Special Numbers focus on a single topic, for example,
post-compulsory education (Williams, 1994). Authors address this issue from
a range of countries. Both of these approaches are valid, and encourage a
two-stage approach to comparative education knowledge. In the first stage,
country or topic specialists presented contextualised knowledge. In the
second stage, comparative specialists synthesised and located context. The
guest editor of the Special Number usually executes this second stage. In
principle, if not always in practice, the guest editor can identify the
interaction between system and within system factors, thus meeting Parkyn's
definition of `comparative' purpose. Indeed, Parkyn's criterion of
comparative purpose may be best handled through this two-stage approach.
Well-contextualised knowledge about education is a necessary, and complex,
first step in the process of comparison. Much comparison neglects context
and renders itself superficial and meaningless.
However, breadth of context, content and comparison has the disadvantage of
dilution and a loss of focus for a field of study. In view of the number of
articles that can be published each year, and the invitation for
contributions from several disciplines, the potential for a loss of overall
focus for the field of study increases greatly.
Development Studies
I turn now to the field of development studies and explore the impact it has
had on comparative education. Development studies emerged in the 1950s and
1960s, in the wake of the processes of reconstruction and de-colonisation
after World War II Key questions for development studies include: What does
is mean to say that a society is developing or developed? What is the role
of societal processes and institutions (such as education) in the process of
development? What are the social and economic conditions that facilitate or
impede the development of society? Thus, the fundamental questions of
development studies with respect to education and those of comparative
education, following Parkyn's definition, converge.
Modernisation
Theories of economic and social modernisation became central frameworks for
the analysis of economic growth and societal development, and became
influential also in determining national economic and social policy and
policy implementation, as countries asserted their economic and political
independence. Education was a central pillar of post-colonial social policy
as countries sought to `modernise' and to replace expatriate highly skilled
labour. Theories of development in developing countries, formulated largely
by social scientists from the developed countries (although often working in
developing countries), emerged alongside policies for development. From the
outset economic goals formed the essential character of the `development
project'.
Education played an important part in development theory. The theory of
`modernisation' presented an optimistic model for development of those
societies that were not yet modern and industrialised. Modernisation theory
attracted the attention of researchers from several social science
disciplines. Economists focused attention on the application of technology
to produce growth in economic production per unit of input. Sociologists
focused on the process of social differentiation that characterise societies
which use technology to promote economic growth. Demographers focused on
patterns of settlement that accompany urbanisation, the impact of
modernisation on population size, growth and density. Political scientists
focused on nation-building, on the bases for power and how power is shared,
how nation-states achieve legitimacy and the extent and depth of national
identity.
Research on the relationship between education and the modernisation of
society was also pitched at the level of the individual. For example,
McClelland (1961) focused on the values held by the majority of people in a
society and the implications of these for economic and technological growth.
The value attached to and the motivation for achievement, were central to
McClelland's explanation of modernising societies. Where Max Weber (1930)
had focused attention on the role of ideas and religion in setting the
conditions for the rise of capitalism, McClelland focused on early
socialisation and child rearing practices. Inkeles & Smith (1974) drew from
both sets of ideas. They accepted the logic of modern values leading to
modern behaviour, modern society, and economic development. In contrast to
McClelland, however, they stressed the role of modern institutions such as
the formal school and the factory in the formation of modern values and
attitudes.
Human Capital
Education was also a central part of theories of development that focused on
the economic imperatives and conditions for development. In one of the most
influential writings on the role of education in development in the 20th
century, Theodore W. Schultz explored the idea of education as a form of
capital and introduced the notion of education as a form of human capital
(Schultz, 1961). The propositions of `human capital' theory were that the
skills and knowledge which people acquire are a form of capital. This
capital was a product of deliberate investment and had grown in Western
societies at a rate faster than `conventional' (non-human) capital. Its
growth has been the most distinctive feature of the economic system of the
mid-20th century. Human capital theory formed an important part of the
development studies discourse about the relationship of education to the
development of countries in the South from the mid-1960s. It emerged much
later, from the late 1970s, as part of the discourse about education in the
countries of the North.
The role of education in modernisation was the subject of several well-known
collections. For example, the collection on `Education and Economic
Development', edited by Anderson & Bowman (1965), drew together historians,
economists, sociologists, educators and geographers. It explored the role of
education in economic development in Russia, India, America, Ghana, Chile,
England and Japan. Another, edited in the same year by Coleman, entitled
`Education and Political Development' (1965), focused on the political
dimension of modernisation. Drawing on cases from the `developing areas'
(former French Africa, Indonesia, Nigeria, Tunisia, Egypt and Brazil) and
from countries where educational development has been `polity-directed'
(Soviet Union, Japan, the Philippines), the book addresses the questions:
What part can and does education play in the process of modernisation? What
is the real (sic) relationship between political policy and the educational
process?
Dependency
By the late 1960s and early 1970s the conceptual frameworks of both
modernisation and human capital theory were coming to be challenged by a set
of ideas which came to form the school of `dependency'. Marxist ideas on
exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, and Lenin's writings on
imperialism, were developed by Andre Gunder Frank (e.g.1967) and Galtung
(e.g.1971). Dependency theory addressed the extent to which poor countries
were dependent on rich countries and the mechanisms through which economic
dependency was maintained.
The dependency perspective focused on under-development rather than
development, viewing it as a necessary outcome of systematic exploitation
and manipulation of peripheral economies by central economies (Frank, 1967;
Cardoso, 1972; Dos Santos, 1973). Poor countries are conditioned by their
economic relationships with rich economies to occupy a subordinate and
dependent role that inhibits development by expropriating investible
surplus. Indigenous elites, firmly wedded to the international capitalist
system and rewarded handsomely by it, have no interest in giving up these
rewards. Dependency theory accords overriding importance to the historical
conditions that provide a context for development and to the international
system of `global exploitation' managed by developed capitalist countries.
Wallerstein (1974) presented an early formulation of a globalised economic
system structured by world capitalism. The `dependency' perspective
encouraged economists, political economists and sociologists to abandon the
national economy, nation-state and national society as their central unit of
analysis and to focus instead on the nature of relations between economies,
states and societies.
Dependency was conceived as a cultural phenomenon also. The structure of
dependent economic relations was asserted to create a `cultural alienation'
in which values, norms, technology, concepts and art forms were inspired
externally rather than internally (Carnoy, 1974). Formal schooling in
dependent economies played a key role in the furtherance of a cultural and
economic dependency of peripheral upon central economies. Carnoy's thesis
focused largely on schooling in the `Third World'
Western formal education came to most countries as part of imperialist
domination. It was consistent with the goals of imperialism: the economic
and political control of the people in one country by the dominant class in
the other. The imperial powers attempted, through schooling, to train the
colonised for the roles that suited the coloniser (Carnoy, 1974, p. 3).
The dependency school altered the discourse on education and development in
a number of ways. It drew attention not only to the post-colonial or
neo-colonial relations between countries which persisted long after
so-called political independence, but it also focused attention on the
analysis of the constraints on development, on stasis and decline in economy
and society. It focused on the role of education for domination rather than
for development. It provided answers to the question: How does education
impede the process of development? It focused on the `negatives' of
development. These included increasing disparities of income between social
groups and countries, the continuing and increasing role of multi-national
economic interests, the formation and co-option of transnational elite
social groups, the divergence of values of different social groups, the
creation and maintenance of underclass countries and groups. Education
played a role in this through many social and cultural processes. These
included the legitimation of elite social and economic status, through
qualification systems, through curriculum and learning materials developed
through international publishing projects, and through cross-national and
inter-national professional networks (e.g. Mazrui, 1975; Altbach & Kelly,
1978; Watson, 1984; Lewin & Little, 1984; McClean, 1984).
For those in the North, the dependency perspective was as challenging as it
was uncomfortable. While it bore an intellectual relationship with emerging
analyses of the role of education in the development of the US capitalist
economy (e.g. Bowles & Gintis, 1976), it resonated most with those
intellectual interests that lay in the colonised countries of the South or
in the internally-colonised communities resident in countries in the North.
As a set of ideas it bore closer links with the broader school of economic
dependency than it did with the discourse of comparative education dominant
at that time. It was substantially influenced by writers who appealed to
notions of social equity in the perspectives they took on the processes of
education and development. Thus, Carnoy acknowledges his particular
intellectual debt to Raskin and Memmi, who wrote on colonialism and to
Illich who promoted de-schooling in the developing countries and in the
impoverished areas of developed countries.
Comparative Education and Development Studies Compared
Whereas the dependency perspective emerged as an intellectual response to
modernisation theory and the questions it posed about the role of education
in development (defined as modernisation), debates in comparative education
in the late 1960s and 1970s concerned the methodology of comparative
education. Questions included: What is the purpose of comparison? What types
of question and evidence provide a legitimate basis for comparison? What is
the appropriate focus for comparisons, as between systems and classrooms?
What is the relative role of theory and practice in the generation of
research questions? How is the comparative education method different from
that of comparative sociology, comparative politics, comparative religion
and philosophy, economic and social history, cross-cultural psychology?
White much of this debate was conducted with considerable vigour and
intellectual sophistication, it had the unintended effect of distracting
attention away from the content questions that could usefully be addressed
by using the methods) of comparative education. Method is valuable to the
extent that its application provides new insights into a problem. What new
insight could the comparative education method offer which comparative
sociology, comparative social history, comparative politics or comparative
social psychology could/did not?
The methodological debates of the 1970s passed many people by and had little
lasting impact, with a handful of exceptions. While a number of articles in
Comparative Education adopted an explicitly comparative approach, few
justified or explained their comparative approach in relation to those set
out in the earlier debates. Interchange with comparative educators from many
countries suggests that these debates have had little impact on the
understanding or use of the so-called Comparative Education research method.
A similar view was reached recently and independently by Rust et al., (1999)
who reviewed almost 2000 articles appearing in Comparative Education
(1964/95), Comparative Education Review (1957/ 95) and the
International,journal of Educational Development (1981/95).
The fundamental question of comparative education, according to Parkyn
(1977), is the relationship between education and `development'. This
question was fundamental also to those who wrote about modernisation and
dependency. However, questions of method and country context distinguished
the two literatures. Those who engaged most actively in the modernisation
and dependency debates largely ignored the methodological debates in
comparative education. Those who engaged most actively in the comparative
methodological debates, drew their knowledge of educational context largely,
although not exclusively, from the education systems of the North. Even
those who designed the early IEA studies and drew inspiration from Noah &
Eckstein's (1969) approach to comparative education addressed education
mainly in the `developed countries'. In the first round of the International
Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) studies of
21 countries, only four, Chile, India, Iran and Thailand were, at that time,
classified as `developing countries'. The driving question and problem
behind the massive IEA research endeavour must be seen in the context of the
Cold War and the race for supremacy in space. `Development' in this sense
meant progress and world supremacy. It did not mean what it means for many
of the `developing' countries-catch up, staying in the game, and basic
survival. In short, the literatures addressing the fundamental question of
the relationship between education and the development of human society have
not been as integrated as they might have been. Two reasons for this less
than optimal integration, suggested above, were the pre-occupation of
comparative education, through much of the 1970s and 1980s, with debates
about method, and the tendency for contributors to the field to focus their
intellectual efforts on particular groups of countries. Three further
reasons for the parallel rather than integrated development of the
literatures of comparative education and development studies include
differences in (i) the scope of analysis; (ii) the practice of development;
and (iii) the emphasis on economic and cultural goals of society and
development.
Scope of Analysis
The dependency approach suggested that national systems of education did not
necessarily provide the most appropriate point of comparison for comparative
studies. The scope of analysis needed to include contemporary and historical
relations (of domination and dependency) between countries. This was
especially so in the case of the former colonies. In principle then
comparisons between countries needed to include their contemporary and
historical relations of influence with other countries. Although the call
for an historical approach in comparative education is familiar, it did not
resonate with those who, at that time, were stressing comparisons of a
contemporary nature. Nor did it resonate with those who sought comparisons
across nations. The national system, economy and society remained for most
comparative educationists the focus or unit of analysis. The notion of a
national system of education sitting within a national economy and national
society provided a clear focus for research that was within grasp. The
implication of dependency theory-to include an analysis of education within
international economic and political relations-was largely ignored by those
whose knowledge of educational contexts drew largely from `developed'
countries whose education systems, with some notable exceptions (e.g. see
Phillips in this issue), had been largely immune from external influence.
Practice
The emergence of the education and development `business' contributed
further to the parallel development of literature. Much of the early work on
modernisation and its economic parallel, human capital theory, was used by
development agencies and international banks to justify financial
investments in education in developing countries. Schultz's (1961) work was
especially influential in the 1960s and 1970s among those who allocated
money to development programmes and those who promoted the growth of formal
education world-wide. Significantly, many of these actors and agencies were
external to the emerging states of the countries to be `assisted' or
`aided'. The production of an educated labour force was perceived by both
economists and development planners as a means to the end of the growth of
the national economy, and hence, development.
Not only did these ideas and writings bring the concepts and theories of
economics to the centre stage of thinking about the relationship between
education and development, but they did so in a way which smoothed (and
sometimes ignored) the intellectual transition from analysis to advocacy,
from description to prescription, from single cases to universal trends.
Thus, many wrote of the relationship between education and development and
ignored the multiplicity of possible relationships conditioned by variations
in economic, cultural, social and political contexts and histories. These
writings were oriented towards policy recommendations for the present and
the future. In other words the writings were guided as much by the need to
generate advocacies for education, as by the need to generate an
understanding of why and how education was related to development in
specific settings. The project of development, buttressed by financial
resources and controlled by agencies external to the `developing' countries,
encouraged a definition of development as economic growth and a discussion
of the role of education in achieving that end. It encouraged a concern with
immediate policies and practices and a tendency to seek policy
recommendations of a `one size fits all' nature.
Economic and Cultural Goals of/for Development
The relative emphasis on economic and cultural definitions and explanations
of development also distinguished the literatures. Human capital theory
promoted the idea of education as a form of economic capital in the quest
for development, defined as economic growth. It rendered subordinate
supplementary and alternative ideas about the goals of learning and
education-education as empowerment, education as citizenship, education as
enculturation, education as liberation.
The emphasis on economic development was accompanied by the notion that
culture was separate from economy and impeded economic development. Culture
was often invoked as an explanation of past failure rather than success, of
present problems rather than achievements and of likely future difficulties
rather than possibilities. Culture was treated frequently as a fixed and
enduring endowment responsible for continuities and inhibiting change. This
view was at odds with much that had been written on education and change in
the `developed' countries of the North, where cultural analysis was more
prominent.
The Way Forward
Aspects of the context of education and development in the so-called
developed and developing countries have changed in ways which would have
been unrecognisable to those who contributed to and read the 1977 Special
Number of Comparative Education (Grant, 1977). These changes in turn present
us with a fresh opportunity to reconstruct comparative education in ways
that integrate rather than separate knowledge about education and
development among the richest and the poorest social groups and countries.
Already, there are signals that many of the old divisions apparent in the
literatures could be breaking down. In developed countries the discourse on
education, modernisation and economic competitiveness chimes uncannily with
the discourse on human capital theory and modernisation in developing
countries two or three decades ago. The `business' of development is
arguably also influencing the discussion of education and development in the
North as the work of universities becomes more commercialised and more
driven by the needs of short-term policies and practices. The interest in
`lessons from abroad' on the part of education policy-makers in developed
countries increased markedly in the 1990s as the East Asian Tiger economies
of the 1990s, themselves developing countries of the 1960s and 1970s,
demonstrated enviable rates of economic growth [2]. There is a growing
awareness that many of the jobs which educated young people in `developed'
countries have done in the past will, in the future, be taken over by
educated young people in `developing' countries. The marginalisation of
large numbers of future generations-'social exclusion'-is a growing problem
on the doorstep. Poverty is not confined to `developing' countries.
Globalisation
Underlying these signs is an economic and technological process we term
`globalisation'. As Giddens notes:
The term may not be a particularly attractive or elegant one. But absolutely
no-one who wants to understand our prospects and possibilities at century's
end can ignore it (Giddens, 1999a, p. 1)
Writers in Comparative Education are already addressing it and many
comparative education conferences have adopted it recently as a central
theme (e.g. Comparative Education Web Page www.carfax.co.uk/ced-ad.htm,
Watson, 1996; Cowen, 1996; Little, 2000a). The literature attracts
'sceptics' and 'radicals'.
The sceptics dispute the whole thing ... Whatever its benefits, its trials
and tribulations, the global economy isn't especially different from that
which existed at previous periods. The world carries on much the same as it
has done for many years ... (the radicals, by contrast argue) ... that not
only is globalisation very real, but that its consequences can be felt
everywhere. The global marketplace, they say, is much more developed than
even two or three decades ago, and is indifferent to national borders.
(Giddens, 1999, p. 1)
For the radicals, the manifestations of so-called globalisation are
economic, political or cultural. The economic include stateless financial
markets, a massive expansion of world capital and finance flows, a rising
proportion of global trade and investment in developing countries accounted
for by transnational companies; the domination of international technology
flows by transnational corporations (Wood, 1994; Stewart, 1996). The
political manifestations of globalisation include a decline in state
sovereignty (Ohmae, 1990); the reduced control of national governments over
money supply and regulation of exchange rates; an increase in the power of
global, sometimes stateless, organisations over national organ-isations; a
definition of local issues in relation to the global as well as the local;
and an increase in the ability of national and local issues to be played out
on a world-stage. In the cultural arena the manifestations include a
convergence of lifestyle and consumer aspirations among the better off, and
the widespread distribution of images, information and values (Waters,
1995). The educational manifestations include the phenomenal growth in the
flows of educational goods and services, in the revolution in modes of
delivery of educational services, and in the definition of policy goals and
curricula for education in developed and developing countries.
The manifestations of globalisation are not the same as its underlying
causes. For some (e.g. Wood, 1994) a major reduction of obstacles to
international economic transactions constitutes the essential definition of
globalisation. Hitherto, these obstacles have included transport and
transaction costs, trade barriers, financial regulation, and speed of
communication. Their reduction, a function of both economic policy and
technological advance, has led to a major increase in the volume of
international financial transactions. At the same time, the technological
advances that have increased the speed of communication have facilitated
connections not only between financial markets world-wide, but also between
people worldwide. This is why the manifestations of globalisation are not
simply economic; they are also political, social and cultural. They are
personal as well as impersonal; they are `in here' as well as `out there'
(Giddens 1999, p. 12).
However, among those who acknowledge the phenomenon and consequences of
globalisation, are the `optimists' and the `pessimists'. The optimists, like
the development modernisers before them, concentrate on the positive
consequences. The `pessimists', like the dependency theorists and the
Marxists before them, concentrate on the negative.
Development Studies
For Grindle & Hilderbrand (1999) the heart of the mission of development
studies has two aspects. Firstly, an understanding of the impact of
globalisation, and secondly, a response to this understanding in ways that
advance the positive and ameliorate the negative consequences of
globalisation. Some of the current and projected `positives' and `negatives'
of globalisation between and within developed and developing countries are
presented in Table IV.
The extension of these themes to education is inviting. The following
questions, among others, emerge. How will different of forms of education,
especially those supported by new information technologies, attain
legitimacy and contribute to the improvement of living standards? How will
education contribute to a heightened awareness of the need to provide
economic, political and social opportunities for women and marginalised
minorities? How will education contribute to democratic decision-making at
national and local levels? How will education contribute to the functioning
of international movements to improve institutions of governance, to counter
corruption in public life and to adopt environmentally sound practices? How
will differential access to education provision and quality contribute to
the further marginalisation of young people? How will sanctions for
countries that fail to adapt economic policies affect educational provision,
especially for the poorest? How will different forms of education serve to
legitimate and reproduce social and economic stratification? What will be
the balance between local, national, international and global forces for
educational decision-making?
But to these should also be added a number of questions that emerge from
conditions only weakly connected with globalisation, or from contexts where
its particular effects are strongest. In many situations local and national
influences will continue to be the most powerful in determining educational
curriculum, control, resources, provision and outcomes. This requires
sensitivity to and understanding of local and national contexts, and
reinforces the earlier point about the need for comparative education to be
grounded in an understanding of particular contexts. Such understanding will
also generate issues common to regions and sub-regions. For example, at a
recent Sub-Saharan Conference on Education for Ali, educators and
researchers identified a number of priorities for research and action common
to the Africa region and sub-region. These included the contribution of
education to the alleviation of poverty, the impact of the HIV/AIDS pandemic
on education and of education on its slow down, the provision of education
in the context of emergency and post-conflict, and the contribution of
education to the reduction of gender inequity and cultures of peace
Johannesburg Declaration, 1999).
Development studies captures the twin objectives of understanding and
action, of analysis and advocacy, of policy analysis and policy
prescription. It embraces the divide between `thinkers' and `do-ers'. It
places on those who reflect, analyse, theorise about and study a
responsibility to act, to advocate, and to prescribe. Simultaneously it
places on those who act, do, advocate, and prescribe a responsibility to
think about and question their own actions and the advice they give to
others, especially in situations where power relations are unequal, within a
broad scheme of global, national and local influence. Understanding and
action are both important and valuable. Each requires overlapping but
separate skills. While each benefits from the other, neither can be reduced
to the other (Little, 2000b).
The understanding of the role of education in the globalisation process
within the framework presented in Table IV and the reasoned response to it
could form the heart of the both the development studies and comparative
education effort over the next few decades in both the developed and the
developing countries.
TABLE IV
The Challenges
Marginalisation, communication and access to information are key themes in
the globalisation discourse. As editors of Comparative Education we
frequently discuss how to encourage contributors and contributions from a
larger number and wider range of 'developing countries'. If we are to
encourage a better understanding of the relationship between education and
'development', both in terms of national and international development, then
we need to find more effective means of promoting dialogue between
comparative educators in different corners of the globe.
At the beginning of this article I provided a review of context, content and
type of comparison employed in Comparative Education articles published
between 1977 and 1998. A review of the authors' 'address for correspondence'
provides an indication of the communication and information challenge ahead.
It also provides the final theme of the subtitle of this article. While
'address for correspondence' is a perfect proxy for neither nationality nor
country of residence or domicile, it does indicate authors' current location
in non-virtual space. Some 609 authors contributed to 472 published
articles. While the total number of countries mentioned explicitly in the
title of articles was 76, the number of countries in which contributors were
based was 50. Some 85% of the contributors were based in developed
countries. Only 15% were based in developing countries. In other words, the
country base of authors is more concentrated than the countries they study,
and the under-representation of authors based in developing countries is
even more marked than the under-representation of articles based on them.
Those of us who wish to inhabit a truly global and comparative field of
study which can, in turn, make its own modest contribution to the cause of
human progress, must create virtual and non-virtual space to encourage the
participation of and exchange between educators from a much greater
diversity of educational culture than hitherto. We must be sensitive to the
diversity of educational and other contexts world-wide, achieve consensus on
the fundamental questions of comparative education, and embrace in our
comparisons local, national, regional, international and global spheres of
influence. This is our collective challenge.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for assistance and comments on an earlier draft of this paper
from Jane Evans, Felicity Rawlings, Chris Williams and members of the
Editorial Board of Comparative Education.
NOTES
[1] It should be noted that Parkyn's use of the term 'development education'
reflected common usage in the USA at that time. In England the term
'development education' usually referred to the curricula of teaching
courses, largely at school level, which aimed to increase school-children's
knowledge and understanding of the problems of poverty in the countries of
the South. In the 1970s the equivalent of Parkyn's usage in England might
have been the practice (as distinct from the study) of education in
developing countries.
[2] The waning of interest in the wake of the end of the century crisis in
those same economies illustrated the perils of cherry-picking and the
importance of serious comparative analysis.
REFERENCES
ALTBACH, P.G. & KELLY, C.P. (Eds) (1978) Education and Colonialism (London,
Longman).
ANDERSON, C.A. & BOWMAN, M.J. (Eds) (1965) Education and Economic
Development (Chicago, Aldine Publishing Company).
BLINCO, P.M.A. (1993) Persistance and education: a formula for Japan's
economic success, Comparative Education, 29(2), pp. 171-183.
BOWLEA, S. & GINTIS, H. (1976) Schooling in Capitalist America (New York,
Basic Books).
CARDOSO, F. (1972) Dependency and development in Latin America, New Left
Review, 74.
CARNOY, M. (1974) Education as Cultural Imperialism (London, Longman).
COLEMAN, J.S. (Ed.) (1965) Education and Political Development (Princeton,
New Jersey, Princeton University Press).
COWEN, R. (Ed.) (1996) Comparative education and post-modernity, Comparative
Education, Special Number (18), 32(2).
DOS SANTOS, T. (1973) The crisis of development theory and the problem of
dependence in Latin America, in: H.BERNSTEIN Underdevelopment and
Development: the Third World today, pp. 57-80 (Harmondsworth, Penguin).
FRANK, A.G. (1967) Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New
York, New York Monthly Review Press).
GALTUNG, J. (1971) A structural theory of imperialism,,Journal of Peace
Research, 8(2), pp. 81-117.
GIDDENS, A. (1999) Runaway World (Cambridge, Polity).
GRANT, N. (Ed.) (1977) Comparative education-its present state and future
prospects, Comparative Education, Special Number, 13(2).
GRINDLE, M.S. SC HILDERBRAND, M.E. (1999) The Development Studies Sector in
the United Kingdom: challenges for the new millennium, Report to the
Department for International Development, UK.
INKELES,, A. & SMITH, D. (1974) Becoming Modern (London, Heinemann).
JOHANNESBURG DECLARATION OF EDUCATION FOR ALL ( 1999) Draft document tabled
for discussion at the Sub-Saharan Africa Conference on Education for All,
6-10 December, (Johannesburg, EFA Regional Technical Advisory Group).
LA BELLE, T.J. & WARD, C.R. (1990) Education reform when nations undergo
radical political and social transformation, Comparative Education, 26(1),
pp. 95-106.
LEWIN, K.M. & LITTLE, A.W. (1984) Examination reform and educational change
in Sri Lanka, 1972-1982: modernisation or dependent underdevelopment, in:
K.WATSON Dependence and Interdependence in Education: international
perspectives, pp. 47-94 (Beckenham, Croom Helm).
LITLE, A.W. (Ed.) (2000a) Globalisation, qualifications and livelihoods,
Assessment in Education, Special Issue (forthcoming, 7(3)).
LITTLE, A.W. (2000b) Post Jomtien models of educational development:
anlaysis vs advocacy, in: L-E. MALMBERG, S-E. HANSEN & K. HEINO (Eds) Basic
Education for All: a global concern far quality (Vasa, Abo Akademi
University).
MAZRUI, A. (1975) The African university as a multi-national corporation:
problems of penetration and dependency, Harvard Educational Review, 45,
pp.199-210
McCLEAN, M. (1984) Educational dependency: two lines of enquiry, in:
K.WATSON Dependence and Interdependence in Education: international
perspectives, pp. 21-29 (Beckenham, Croom Helm).
MCCLELLAND, D. (1961) The Achieving Society (New York, The Free Press).
MINGYUAN, G. (1984) The development and reform of higher education in China,
Comparative Education, 20(1), pp. 141-148.
MITTER,, W. (1992) Educational adjustments and perspectives in a united
Germany, Comparative Education, 28(1), pp. 45-52.
MORRIS, P. (1996) Asia's Four Little Tigers: a comparison of the role of
education in their development, Comparative Education, 32(1), pp.95-109.
NOAH, H. & ECKSTEIN, M. (1969) Toward a Science of Comparative Education
(New York, Macmillan). OHMAE,(1990) The Borderless World power and strategy
in the global marketplace (London, Harper Collins).
PARKYN, G.W. (1977) Comparative education research and development
education, Comparative Education, 13(2), PP-87-94.
RUST, V., SOUMARE, A., PESCADOR, O. & SHIBUYA, M. (1999) Research strategies
in comparative education, Comparative Education Review, 43(1), pp. 86-109.
SCHULTZ, T.W. (1961) Investment in human capital, American Economic Review,
51, pp. 1-17.
STEWART, F. (1995) Globalisation and education. Keynote address, UKFIET
Conference on Globalisation and Learning, New College, Oxford.
STEWART, F. (1996) Globalisation and education, International Journal of
Educational Development, 16(4), pp. 327334.
UNESCO (1998) Statistical Yearbook 1998 (Paris, UNESCO).
WALLERSTEIN,,STEIN, I. (1974) The Modern tm World System: capitalist
agriculture and the origins of the European world economy in the sixteenth
century (London, Academic Press).
WATERS, M. (1995) Globalisation (London, Routledge).
WATSON, K. (1984) Dependence and Indpendencein Education: international
perspectives (Beckenham, Croon Helm).
WATSON, K. (Ed.) (1996) Globalisation and Learning, Special Issue of
International J - ournal of Educational Development, 16(4).
WEBER, M. (1930) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London,
Allen & Unwin).
WILLIAMS, V. (Ed.) (1994) Edmund King's contribution to post-compulsory
education: an international review and appreciation, Comparative Education,
Special Number (16), 30(t).
WOOD, A. (1994) North-South Trade, Employability and Inequality: changing
fortunes in a skill-driven world (Oxford, Clarendon Paperbacks).
Correspondence to: Angela Little, Educational and International Development,
Institute of Education, University of London, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H
OAL, UK. E-mail: a.little@ioe.ac.uk
ANGELA W. LITTLE is Professor of Education (with special reference to
Developing Countries), and Head of the International and Educational
Development Group, at the Institute of Education, University of London. She
was formerly a Fellow of the Institute of Development Studies at the
University of Sussex, England. She is currently directing research
programmes on Globalisation, Qualifications and Livelihoods in Sri Lanka and
Zimbabwe; and on Multi-grade Teaching in Peru, Sri Lanka and Vietnam.
Correspondence: International and Educational Development, Institution of
Education, University of London, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H OAL, UK. Email:
a.little@ioe.ac.uk
This article reviews Comparative Education over the past 20 years, explores
the parallel literature of development studies, and identifies future
directions and challenges for comparative education. Using Parkyn (1977) as
a benchmark, an analysis of articles published between 1977 and 1998
suggests that only a small proportion appear to meet his criteria for
comparative education.
Copyright Carfax Publishing Company Aug 2000 
Quellen:UMI 
COMPARATIVE EDUCATION 08/2000 
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
10Mai2000 AUSTRALIA: Getting to know our place. 
By Paul Monk.
Australia's relationship with its neighbours turns not only on economic ties
but also on the idea of the difference of Asia, writes Paul Monk ENGAGEMENT:
Australia Faces the Asia-Pacific
Paul Keating
Macmillan,
$40 hb, 310pp
ASIAN VALUES, WESTERN DREAMS: Understanding the New Asia
Greg Sheridan
Allen & Unwin
$29.95 pb, 326pp
`THE POST-COLD WAR ERA never happened," Paul Bracken wrote last year. "It
was a western conceit ... The world now is going through ... what is not a
post-Cold War era but a post-Vasco da Gama one ... China, India and Persia
were once the great civilisations of the world ... What is now taking place
is a reassertion of these societies, with a capitalist economy and the
modern technology of atomic bombs and missiles. Seen this way, the end of
the Vasco da Gama era - which began in the late 16th century - has the most
profound implications for the world, far more than the end of a communist
state established in 1917." Bracken's Fire in the East: The Rise of Asian
Military Power and the Second Nuclear Age (HarperCollins) is one of a number
of dramatic and provocative books of the 1990s that heralded the eclipse of
western global dominance and the coming of what Andre Gunder Frank called
the "Asian age". Perhaps the best known of these books is Samuel
Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
(Simon & Schuster, 1996). Fear that something such as this could be coming,
confusion about what it all means and lack of clarity about what "western"
means in the global scheme of things generated the great debate of the 90s:
is there a new, post-western form of capitalism and is it based on "Asian
values" that are radically different from and even inimical to "western
values"? If so, how do we rise to the challenge of Asia, now that it has
risen to our challenge?
No "western" country is more clearly challenged by these questions than
Australia. We are the most substantial, and now the only remaining, da
Gama-era western enclave in Asia. We may tell ourselves that we do not have
to choose between our history and our geography, but our geography has been
encroaching on our history for many years, like rising seas in an epoch of
global warming, and whatever betide, our future will differ from our past
because of our geography. It is vital, therefore, that we confront the fear
and confusion about Asia and "Asian values" that have marred public debate
and policy in this country for many years; and that we overcome the lack of
clarity about "western values" that seriously impedes our efforts to come to
terms with "Asian values". If we can do these things, then even in a
worst-case scenario, we shall be able to conduct ourselves with honour and
courage. If we do not, then, even in the best state of affairs, we shall
continue to quarrel with one another, bemuse or irritate our neighbours and
forfeit the considerable opportunities our circumstances present to us.
Has Asia pioneered a new form of capitalism that is set to out-compete the
West? The Asian economic crisis of the late 90s and the continuing
stagnation of Japan might reasonably be seen as casting serious doubt on
such a claim. Across Asia, in the wake of the crisis, the most thoughtful
individuals declared that it had showed just how far Asia still has to go in
understanding contemporary capital markets and establishing public
accountability standards that will put an end to pseudo-capitalism, crony
capitalism and corruption. While International Monetary Fund and World Bank
handling of the crisis has been widely criticised, it has been criticised
primarily from the point of view that new, better and more sensitive
instruments for equilibrating the uncertainties of the global economy need
to be developed. There have, of course, been some indications of
defensiveness in parts of Asia, but these have been expressions or symptoms
of vulnerability, not the war cries of a rampant new way of doing business.
And, encouragingly, rapid growth has resumed in many parts of Asia, most
spectacularly in South Korea, well ahead of what was expected in the
tumultuous months of 1998. Above all, however, it is the US and to some
extent Europe that are setting the trend in innovation and economic
integration, with Asia still looking to get fully into the game. In brief,
the evidence of the past few years would appear to suggest it is not a new
capitalism we are seeing, but a large number of new capitalists and the
rapid mutation of the global capitalist economy. The danger is not of Asia,
in any corporate sense, overrunning the West, but of the global set of rules
that make the high-stakes game of capitalism possible at all breaking down.
Ensuring this does not happen is the active concern of Asian and western
thinkers and leaders.
How, then, do they converse: in the language of "western values" or the
language of "Asian values"? Those who still see the West as imperialist and
as dominating Asia, or attempting to do so, might respond by saying that the
process verges on a dialogue of the deaf, with the West (principally
Washington) shouting in "western values" at Asia and the latter making
blurred or sullen replies in Asian values. But isn't this a bit like
suggesting that such international dialogue is conducted by one side
shouting in English and the other answering in Mandarin or Hindi or
Japanese? In reality, what has been happening ever since da Gama is that a
long process of interpretation and translation has been going on, in which
the substance of things at stake - means of exchange, methods of
technological innovation, uses of force and wonders of cuisine - has
gradually overcome barriers of natural language and immemorial custom.
That's why Bracken's Asian states have converged on capitalist methods of
running their economies. That's why his Asian states have learned how to
develop and use modern weaponry and experimental science. That's why, at the
beginning of the Chinese Republic, Sun Yat-sen announced the abolition of
the old lunar calendar and its replacement with the western solar calendar -
bowing not to colonial power but to superior accuracy and utility.
Bracken and Huntington notwithstanding, the great secular trend has not been
simply western colonialism followed by Asian revival, but the global
breakthrough into rationalism and empiricism. That breakthrough profoundly
altered the West and is now altering the human and natural world as a whole,
as human beings everywhere discover the freedom and productivity these
methods make available. Is this to imply that old Hindu or Confucian ways of
seeing the world are erroneous and epistemologically inferior to western
critical rationalism and empiricism? Yes, it is; just as it is to say that
Catholic medieval scholasticism or proto-scientific alchemy are inferior to
such methods. That was the contention of Francis Bacon some 400 years ago.
And it is the contention of all those who now seek and strive for a global
human civilisation. It is not anti-Asian, but it does radically challenge
insular and inward-looking traditions, for the same reason that it tells us
the earth is not flat and the sun does not revolve around our planet and
there are countless worlds in the universe. This is not a matter of "western
values" versus "Asian values", but of universal cognitive humanism versus
archaism and authoritarianism, wherever and in whatever form they present
themselves.
It is against this background that we should, I suggest, think through what
is at stake for Australia in the debate over the rise of Asia, "Asian
values" and the future of this country, given its geography. If we do not,
if we try to think it through in terms of post-colonial guilt or postmodern
relativism, of the calculus of raw power or the conceit of irreducible
cultural uniqueness, we shall flounder. No physical science can be built on
such foundations. No economic science can be developed from such premises.
No principles of moral, ethical or political conduct, no norms as regards
human rights, can coherently be developed on such a basis, but only on the
testable basis that as humans we have more in common, including an
investigable material reality, than our cultures tell us set us apart. It is
this assumption that makes possible translation between natural languages,
scientific method and transmission of knowledge. It also enables us to
create international institutions and promulgate intelligible principles of
human rights.
It is with such an assumption in mind, I suggest, that one should read Paul
Keating's Engagement: Australia Faces the Asia-Pacific. Keating, as prime
minister, declared before the House of Representatives in Canberra, on his
return from the APEC summit in Bogor at the end of 1994: With Bogor ...
Australians can say for the first time that the region around us is truly
`our region'. We know its shape, we have an agreed institutional structure,
we share with its other members a common agenda for change ... Just as the
Bretton Woods agreements after World War II established structures in the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which enabled the world to
grow and prosper, so in APEC we have established a model which will serve
the interests of the post-Cold War world. The only way to make sense of
these propositions is by seeing them as grounded in the sort of universalist
perspective I have just outlined. Agreed institutional structures and common
agendas for change are necessarily grounded in principles that transcend
particular or insular values and interests. Just to the extent that the
reasons for creating such agreement and such a common agenda are clear and
compelling, the principles on which they are based will have a logical and
moral force that will transcend and, in the end, reshape the disparate
values and interests out of which the initial agreement and agenda were
hammered. The possibility of such agreements and common agendas, not the
dominance of western power over "Asian values", is what civilisation and the
civilising process are about. "Progress" is about already established
civilisations being open to the renewal and extension of prior agreements
and agendas, on the basis of deepened awareness of what is universally true
and/or good. And this holds for folk customs, religious beliefs, political
principles and moral prejudices as much as it does for claims about nature
or the negotiation of economic interests. This is the way forward and
Keating was surely correct to hail Bogor as the right sort of step in the
right sort of direction.
What is impressive and even inspiring about Keating's book is that he has
come close to articulating a specifically Australian set of interests and
concerns against the background of an at least implicit universalist
humanism. There is in his reflections throughout the book a vigour, an
urgency and a freshness of vision that would, in themselves, be something of
an education for many an inward-looking and philistine Australian and which,
if read abroad, not least in Asia, would reflect well on Australia. Those
who considered Keating, the treasurer and prime minister, arrogant and out
of touch with "Australian values" would do well to read this book. They
might find themselves becoming engaged by his energy, his commitment to
Australia's prospects and his worldly optimism. Keating writes: Here we sit,
19 million of us, drawn from more than 120 countries, on the edge of Asia,
and with all the resources of a continent to draw on. What an astonishing
bequest it is. We cannot turn away and we cannot turn back. It is the most
exhilarating and promising prospect. And this does not come across as empty
rhetoric. It comes across, in the context of his sustained reflections, as
something passionately felt and actively lived for. It truly is a memoir of
hope that Keating has written and the allusion to the memoirs of Charles de
Gaulle is deliberate. The difference is chiefly this: that de Gaulle was 20
years older when he wrote Memoires d'espoir: Le Renouveau (1970) than
Keating is now and had more completely retired. De Gaulle's reflections were
more fully considered, his prose more polished and his immersion in his
native culture more secure than one could say of Keating. Engagement:
Australia Faces the Asia-Pacific has something of the character of Keating's
prime ministership about it: something composed in haste and improvised with
elan and force, but left incomplete and lacking, therefore, in the style and
durability that make a political life or a book a classic. Yet even in
offering us these hurried reflections he has gone further than has any
Australian prime minister before him. Just think how profound an impression
might be made on the minds of Australians by a really great book, written
with the scope and magnanimity the subject deserves, rather than with the
impatience and self-consciousness that are so characteristic of our
contemporary way of being.
It is, I think, the better efforts by Asian writers to articulate social
experiences of upheaval and transformation with just such scope and
magnanimity that chiefly moves Greg Sheridan to the reflections he has
offered in Asian Values, Western Dreams: Understanding the New Asia.
Sheridan celebrates the novels of Asian writers of his generation, such as
Vikram Seth (India), K.S. Maniam (Malaysia), Yi Munyol (South Korea) and
Francisco Sionil Jose (The Philippines), that attempt to dramatise their
people's struggle with western-prompted modernisation. He is stirred by the
spectacle of Asian idealists and democratic activists striving for reform,
as well as by the spectacle of Asian technocrats and strongmen driving their
nations into modernisation of one sort or an-other. He urges empathy with
the difficulties and as-pirations of Asians and a greater effort to try to
see the world (and ourselves) through their eyes. Like Keating, Sheridan
passionately believes that Australia's best hopes and necessary destiny lie
in creating a new history grounded in both our priceless western heritage
and the challenges of our geography on the edge of Asia. His energy and his
search for a workable renovation of Australia are also evident. All this is
admirable. Yet his book is less intellectually satisfying or likely to make
an enduring impression than Keating's. It is a book of anecdotes and
impressions, but one searches in vain for a systematic argument that would
make sense of its title. It is very readable and perhaps many people will
read it and pick up vignettes from it that will add to their capacity to
converse about Asia, but it is both confused and confusing as regards the
underlying issues, including the nature of "Asian values".
Sheridan declares that there are Asian values and that the West generally,
and Australia in particular, needs to take greater cognisance of them. He
never clearly distinguishes, however, between there being states of affairs
called Asian cultures, or diverse ethical traditions, or folk customs, or
political regimes, or even literary traditions and vernacular languages, so
that "Asian values" comes to mean everything and nothing. At the end of
nearly 300 pages of reflections and anecdotes, he confesses that he is
"unable to state precisely, in a neat formula, what Asian values are", but
that "the idea that there is no such thing as Asian values must mean that
Jose Rizal, Kim Dae-jung and the rest are not Asians". But it is not
anything specifically Asian for which either of those two individuals is
famous. It is for standing up within an oppressive context (Spanish
colonialism and South Korean military dictatorship, respectively) and
insisting that as a matter of reason and principle the oppressors should
"let my people go". Filipinos do not revere Rizal because he was "Asian",
nor even because he was Filipino, but because he stood for their freedom.
And we can all admire him for exactly this reason, just as we admire Martin
Luther King jr, or Nelson Mandela, Mohandas Gandhi or Andrei Sakharov not
because they were black, or brown, African, Indian or Russian, but because
they stood for principles that we can all recognise and applaud. Sheridan
more or less knows this, but he fails to think through its implications with
any consistency.
"There are, of course, universal values of good and evil," he remarks very
early in his book, "but different societies and different traditions mediate
them in vastly different ways." There are two problems here that he does not
address. First, he never attempts to explain how he feels able to state
flatly that there are "of course" universal values of good and evil. Second,
he doesn't explain what precisely he means by "mediated in vastly different
ways". Suppose, for example, I were to state that there is of course only
one physical reality, but it is mediated by different cultures and
traditions in vastly different ways. Would it not be reasonable to ask:
"Sure, but then how is any objective knowledge or scientific research
actually possible?" Or suppose I was to state that there are of course
linguistic universals, but languages mediate them in vastly different ways.
Would it not be reasonable to respond: "Perhaps, but then how do we know
that there are such universals and how is good translation possible?" The
intellectual problem with Sheridan's approach to Asian values is that he
never seems to have asked himself these elementary analytical questions. The
consequence is that he is unable to offer a coherent account of how values
come about, are sustained and may be critically evaluated. Very broadly, he
suggests more than once, Asians value authority, whereas the West has become
rather antinomian. Well, perhaps, but where do we go from there? He seems to
have no real idea.
Quite a few of his Asian interlocutors seem to be far less confused about
the matter and it is a wonder that this did not set him thinking more
systematically. Amien Rais, the prominent Indonesian Muslim leader, told him
with refreshing candour: "Asian values are a kind of protection for Asian
leaders, to justify behaviour which is not democratic. To me, democratic
values are universal. Asian values were really a ploy to defend undemocratic
actions ... No political system is perfect, but democracy is best."
It is characteristic of Sheridan, I think, to quote Rais on this matter
uncritically, but to pour scorn on Christopher Patten for saying exactly the
same thing in his East and West: China, Power and the Future of Asia
(Macmillan, 1998). He ridicules Patten for an "immensely unsophisticated
dismissal of Asian values", but when Asian leaders declare in favour of
universal values, he seems to allow that they are being thoughtful and
magnanimous. Conversely, he asserts that Singapore is attractive to
"mainland Chinese" because it is authoritarian and does not suffer from
"what Beijing used to see as a sort of moral anarchy in Hong Kong and
Taiwan". Pardon me? "Beijing" has to mean the Chinese Communist Party. Moral
anarchy? One can only guffaw at the idea that the Chinese Communist Party is
in any position to decry the moral conduct of government or society in Hong
Kong or Taiwan. "Often you get the feeling," writes Sheridan, "that western
opinion leaders who comment on Asian values just don't like having Asians
talk back to them." Perhaps, but what is rather more obvious is that Asian
leaders who talk of Asian values have exhibited to a marked degree an
unwillingness to have their own citizens talk back to them, and that is the
fundamental point at issue in the Asian values debate.
It was none other than Hu Yaobang, while secretary-general of the Chinese
Communist Party's central committee, who declared to European interlocutors
in 1986 that China needed to get rid of the "outdated" ideas of Marx,
embrace the achievements of all humanity and adopt the ideas of political
freedom advocated by Montesquieu. That is to say, principles of government
that would moderate and divide the exercise of state power and explicitly
place checks on possible despotic use of it. Why? Not because Hu felt
intimidated by the West, but because he had thought his way through China's
experience, as Rais had Indonesia's, and arrived at something he saw as
true. Australia's role in Asia and in the world at large is - more than
ever, and in our own interests - to stand up for and to further that sort of
thinking. Our engagement with Asia can and should be grounded in thinking at
that level of clarity. It isn't a matter of imperialism, but a matter of
reality and a measure of our common humanity. Keating's vision hints at
this. Sheridan's reflections blur it, though with the best of intentions. If
Bracken's century unfolds, we shall badly need to keep a grip on that
reality, using it to steer ourselves through stormy seas. If, instead, Bogor
was the harbinger of a more benign future than Bracken fears, it will be
because universalist principles enable us to build agreed institutions and
fruitful common agendas with our diverse, energetic and creative Asian
neighbours. *.
(c) Nationwide News Proprietary Ltd, 2000. 
Quellen:AUSTRALIAN (THE) 10/05/2000 
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
01Apr2000 AFRICA: Globalization, regionalism and democracy - An interview
with Samir Amin. 
By Anonymous.
Samir Amin heads the Third World Forum in Dakar, Senegal, where he is
leading an effort to strengthen regional ties among African nations. He is
the author of many books, including: Capitalism in the Age of Globalization,
Delinking: Toward a Polycentric World and Unequal Development.
Multinational Monitor: What do you mean when you say that the world
capitalist system is facing stagnation?
Samir Amin: After World War II, we had very high rates of growth for three
decades in the three parts of the world: the capitalist world (the West),
the socialist world (the East), and most parts of the Third World (the
South). Three decades of high growth and investment, which had never been
achieved in the history of capitalism before.
This is precisely because the markets were regulated - that is, because
there was a balance of forces between capital on the one hand, and the
working or popular classes on the other hand. This balance was less in favor
of capital than it had been for a long time before, and was the result of a
double victory - the victory of democracy over fascism and the victory of
the people of Asia and Africa over colonialism.
These two popular victories created the conditions which compelled capital
to adjust to the social demands of working people. The adjustment of capital
to those demands is the meaning of the market being regulated. Capital was
unable to unilaterally impose the logic of profit maximization. That was the
basis of high growth and accelerated rates of accumulation and development.
Gradually, the balance of forces has been eroded to the benefit of capital
for a variety of reasons. If we look at the West in the capital centers, the
pattern is that welfare states and democracy have been gradually eroded by
the pressures of globalization - the opening of national economies to the
pressures of the global system.
In the East, it is because of the internal limits of so-called socialism and
the lack of democracy. In the South - especially in Asia and Africa there
was a period of strong national unity which started to be eroded by internal
social conflicts.
This erosion of the regulation of the market which dominated after World War
II led to a change in the balance of forces to the benefit of capital. We
can say that Reagan and Thatcher were the announcement of that. But it was
not just under Reagan and Thatcher. It was also due to the loss of
legitimacy of most national radical popular regimes of the South, as well as
the stagnation of the Soviet system.
That led to a comeback of the utopian capitalist dream of ruling the world
as a market and reducing whole societies to just market-based relations.
Which means the unilateral domination of capital.
MM: And removing regulations on capital undermined growth?
Arvin: According to the so-called neoliberal view, "deregulation" of the
market - which meant oppressing other social interests - should have led to
higher growth. Instead, it led to the opposite.
Since the early 1970s, it led to a slowing of the rates of growth, to about
half of what they had been in previous decades. This happened not only in
the West, but also in the East after high growth rates during the Soviet
period of industrialization. It also happened in the South. In the 1960s,
the rates of growth in Africa were roughly twice as high as they have been
in the 1980s and 1990s during the current period of structural adjustment.
Simultaneously, rates of investment and the expansion of the productive
system went down.
That led to a new kind of crisis characterized by a surplus of capital which
does not find an outlet in the expansion of the productive system in the
West, East and South.
In order to avoid this problem, the owners of capital are designing rules in
order to open alternative financial outlets for capital. This is not leading
to higher growth but to relative stagnation of growth. There is no absolute
stagnation, but rates of growth in OECD countries are half of what they had
been in the 1950s and 1960s.
There is deepening inequality. You have growing inequality everywhere in the
world, within each nation state and at the global level between nations. It
is more and more politically and socially unbearable and unacceptable to
people.
The reason for the deep crisis of capital is precisely the utopian effort to
realize the unilateral rule of capital. The system cannot function according
to the unilateral rule of capital.
MM: There has been a renewal of growth in the last couple of years in the
United States at much higher rates. Do you think that the new communications
technologies might revitalize the global economy?
Amin: No. We should separate the eventual effect of the technological
revolution and particularly communications on the one hand, and the specif
is effects of that revolution and other technologies on the relative
achievements of the various partners - the U.S. vis-a-vs Europe, for
instance.
With respect to the effects of the technological revolution, every period of
deep structural crisis of capitalism has also been a period of industrial
revolution. For example, take the deep structural crisis which happened from
1873 to 1896. That was also a period of the second industrial revolution,
the first one occurring in the early nineteenth century. The second
industrial revolution involved electricity, petroleum, the automobile and
the airplane. These are the technologies that dominated industrial
development in the twentieth century.
The current crisis started in 1971 with the end of Bretton Woods and the
floating of the dollar. Along with the crisis, we have had a third
industrial revolution, the basis of which is infomatics and biogenetics with
all the dangers that it represents, as well as nuclear and space technology.
By themselves those technologies are not enough to create the conditions of
high growth, because growth depends on an equilibrium between the various
social forces.
During each of these periods, capital interests have exploited the
industrial revolution to their own unilateral benefit.
Because an industrial revolution also means that old industries are
decaying, labor loses the advantages of collective stability and becomes
more vulnerable. Therefore capital is in a position to erode whatever rights
the working classes have conquered in the previous period.
That's what's happening now. Along with an industrial revolution there is
growing brutality, inequality - not just between capital and labor, but
between a variety of workers - and an overall vulnerability of the working
classes. As long as capital is able to mobilize unilaterally and use the
industrial revolution to its exclusive benefit, it is not able to move out
of the crisis.
We can also compare the atmosphere now to the atmosphere during what was
called the belle epoch at the beginning of the twentieth century. That
15-year period was after a long crisis and before World War I. During the
course of that time the discourse was exactly what we hear today - that the
unilateral rule of capital is going to benefit everybody. It was a period of
the weakening of the working classes. The movement of the socialist parties
to the right - like Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder, etc. - is exactly
similar to the move to the right of the socialist parties at the beginning
of the 20th Century. For exactly the same reasons.
Nairobi slum.
I am not suggesting that the industrial revolution per se is or is not the
basis of growth. It could be if social and political conditions established
a better balance of forces - less unilaterally favorable to capital. That is
one dimension.
Another dimension is how it works in different parts of the world.
Particularly, for example, the U.S. vis-a-vis Europe and Japan. It is true
that today's discourse, especially in the United States, stresses the
relatively higher rates of growth. But this growth is socially unbearable in
the longer run. It goes along with a growing inequality and with a growing
vulnerability that the American working class will not accept indefinitely.
It is also artificial and at the expense of others. The success of the U.S.
is proportionate to the lack of success elsewhere, particularly in Europe
and Japan. This means that the so-called U.S. hegemony is very vulnerable.
In the nineteenth century, Britain, which was hegemonic at that time, had an
enormous export surplus which was the counterpart of its ability to export
capital. It was financing railways in Argentina and India, etc. If we look
at the pattern of current globalization and U.S. hegemony, we find exactly
the opposite. The U.S. balance of trade is in an enormous deficit, which
means that hegemonic power is (draining) capital from other parts of the
world. Who is funding that? The whole world, but especially the Europeans
and Japanese. I don't think that they will accept that indefinitely. This
doubles the vulnerability of the so-called high growth in the United States.
MM: Andre Gunder Frank has argued that developing countries may benefit most
when there is stagnation or contraction in the center countries. What is
your perspective on that in the current period?
Arvin: I am a friend of Andre Gunder Frank and we agree on many things, but
I am cautious about those kind of sweeping generalities. I think everything
depends on class struggle and not on whether we are in an A phase or a B
phase. Development changes are unequal throughout the world, because the
balance of social and political forces are not similar from one place to
another.
During the current period of crisis, not all of the countries of the Third
World have suffered. Major countries, including China, to a lesser degree
India, southeast Asia, Korea and Taiwan and if you add up their populations,
you get more than half of the world - have not suffered from the crisis.
They have had high rates of growth because they were less subject to the
rule of globalization than others. They have controlled their own move into
the global system. We could discuss whether they have been democratic or
not, but the domestic ruling class has, to a certain degree, been in
control.
We saw the exact opposite in Africa, the most vulnerable part of the Third
World, where the local ruling classes do not control anything and where as a
result the rates of growth are zero if not negative in some cases. Therefore
we see that the differences in the same period depend on the capacity of the
local ruling class - bourgeois capitalists in various shapes and forms - to
control its relation to the global system.
MM: You write that structural adjustment is not misguided but a part of the
management of the crisis in the rich countries. What do you mean by that?
Arvin: Structural adjustment as it is imposed by the World Bank and IMF on
most countries of the South and on the former socialist countries in eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union is unilateral. That is, adjustment of the
economies of those countries is to the needs of dominant capital. That means
the needs of the triad - the U.S., the European Union and Japan - and
nothing more.
This structural adjustment is not structural but a conjunctural adjustment.
It is one of the tools of crisis management - that is, finding an outlet for
the surplus of financial capital. That is the root of the external debt of
the Third World and former socialist countries.
The effects are disastrous, as we can see in any part of the world other
than in the dominant triad. What we need is another pattern of globaliza
tion. The issue is not globalization or withdrawing from the world and going
to the moon. There are many alternatives.
Globalization could be conceived as a pattern of regulated expansion of the
markets at the international level, of channeling the surplus of capital
towards productive investments. That would be a pattern of globalization
that I would call structural because it would help change structures. It
would also be multilateral rather than unilateral, an adjustment of each
part of the world to another pattern of globalization - what I call a
multipolar pattern of globalization.
MM: What is your perspective on calls for reforming the IMF to make it a
"good"global regulatory institution?
Amin: I think you cannot start from the top, by changing these international
institutions. That would be very naive, because the international
institutions reflect the imbalance of forces at that level. Things must
start from below, from national societies.
Again, it is the class struggle which is the key to understanding social
change. Things must change at that level to the benefit of the working
classes everywhere - in the U.S. as well as in Senegal.
That means reinventing new forms of organization, of action, of legitimate
targets, etc. It has deep social dimensions.
That should be supported or enlarged by regional organizations. One can
imagine that an average country in Latin America alone cannot go very far,
but Latin America on the whole can. Similarly, no African country can go
very far alone, but Africa as a whole could and can. Not to speak of India
or China.
To think about a move from the top is a little naive, as if there are no
interests behind the system as it is. There are interests, of course, and
they are the prevailing interests of transnational capital and the triad
states that are behind them, as well as compradors in the Third World.
MM: If developing countries were to form regional blocs, what would be the
institutional structure of region-wide economic management?
Amin: It must accomplished gradually. First, we must reinforce the
complimentarity between the industrial and agricultural developments of the
partners. And that needs much more than just a free trade area, because it
needs some degree of planning-a word that is not fashionable today - of
investment ot develop complimentarity with a view to reducing the monopolies
of the West - monopolies in technologies, in communications and media, in
the use of natural resources.
But it also has a political dimension. It must gradually reinforce the
capacity of those regions to ensure security, both internal and external
security - not only in the police sense, but a security based on legitimate
power, the whole question of democracy. It must also work toward regional
security, that is, reducing the causes of conflict. We'll never have a world
without conflict, but we can reduce the causes.
MM: How would you see the regions relating to external forces, especially
the rich countries?
Amin: That is where it would lead to institutional changes in the U.S. We
have had this in the past during the decade after World War 11, during that
period of high growth, when we had negotiations at the global level, however
weak. It was a time of UNCTAD [the United Nations Conference on Trade and
Development]. There were negotiations on the transfer of technologies, etc.
We need not have a remake of that, but a revival of its spirit. This would
give back a role to the UN in serious international negotiations on those
issues.
I don't want to be overly optimistic, but I think the last meeting of UNCTAD
in Bangkok is indicative of a move in this direction. We heard there a
majority of states, most from the Third World, speaking against
globalization as it is.
MM: What would be the regional approach to capital flows from outside the
region or trading outside the region?
Amin: There are a number of principles. One is that so-called hot money
flows - capital that wants to get a quick profit - should bi forbidden and
countries should be allowed to establish exchange controls against that.
Second, we should look at productive investment, including that by
transnationals, on a caseby-case basis. Getting certain technologies is
difficult without accepting private investment of foreign capital. But that
could be negotiated. There we come back to a series of old questions, such
as the control over the export of profit, control over the degree of using
local inputs, the transfer of technology, property rights, etc. These are
important points of the agenda. It's not fashionable today to speak of that,
but these are objectively needed.
During an interview, Samir Amin, the head of the Third World Forum in Dakar
Senegal, discussed the stagnation of the world capitalist system, the
renewal of growth in the US at much higher rates, and region-wide economic
management.
Copyright Multinational Monitor Apr 2000 
Quellen:UMI 
MULTINATIONAL MONITOR 04/2000 
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
01Apr2000 USA: PAUL M. SWEEZY AT 90 A CELEBRATION.(surge of corporate
profits through 1999 and into 2000). 
Ricardo Alarcon, Samir Amin, Nicholas Baran, Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall, Grace
Lee Boggs, Anne Braden, Paul Buhle, Pablo Gonzalez Casanova, Noam Chomsky,
Doug Dowd, Richard DuBoff, Barbara Ehrenreich, Bill Fletcher, Jr., John
Bellamy Foster, Andre Gunder Frank, John Kenneth Galbraith, Martha Gimenez,
Joan Greenbaum, Robert Heilbroner, Edward Herman, Michael Lowy, Harry
Magdoff, Istvan Meszaros, Leo Panitch, Frances Fox Piven, Robert Pollin,
Lukin Robinson, Annette Rubenstein, Pete Seeger, John J. Simon, Daniel
Singer, William Tabb, Shigeto Tsuru
Kalecki, teach things that Marxist political economists should view as
essential? Another disagreement is over the role of monopoly and
competition. How central is the concentration and centralization of capital
to our understanding of the workings of capitalism today-a full century
after Marxists and other radicals first raised the question of monopoly
capitalism? Whatever one's abstract theory is-and all theories by definition
rely on a degree of abstraction-its usefulness lies in its capacity to make
sense of everyday reality, while providing the strategic analysis necessary
for practical revolutionary solutions.
Throughout its history, MR has advanced a theoretical view known as monopoly
capital or stagnation theory. This perspective, outlined in Baran and
Sweezy's Monopoly Capital, argued that Marx's "law of the tendency of the
rate of profit to fall" was no longer directly applicable to the monopoly
capitalist economy that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century,
and had to be replaced by a "law of the tendency of surplus to rise"-where
surplus was defined as the difference between the wages of production
workers and total value added. A key contradiction of capitalism in its
monopoly stage is therefore that of rising surplus and the associated
problems of surplus absorption. [1]
Rising surplus and the accumulation of a mountain of surplus means that
capitalist firms are faced with the problem of how to employ all of it,
i.e., how to use the piled-up cash to make more profit. True, capitalists
can use or waste some of this surplus for personal pleasure. But that is
peanuts compared to the size of the growing surplus. So the problem remains
one of how to absorb all of the surplus actually and potentially available.
Generally, the answer is sought in new investment, but that expansion of
capital comes up against consumption limits imposed by the distribution of
income: who will buy the increased volume of output? New epoch-making
innovations-resembling the steam engine, the railroad, and the automobile in
the overall effect on accumulation-could conceivably provide sufficient
profitable investment outlets, but such epoch-making innovations are
historical rather than economic factors that cannot be counted on to appear
when needed or on the scale necessary in terms of surplus absorpti on. Even
the astounding new field of computer/digital technology has so far absorbed
only a small part of the massive economic surplus hanging over the economy.
Foreign investment, which once provided an outlet for surplus, has become an
efficient device for the transfer of surplus from the periphery to the core
of the capitalist system, thereby further compounding the problem. All of
this means that the system has a powerful tendency towards stagnation,
arising from an inability to find outlets for all of the surplus actually
and potentially generated at the level of production-a problem partly (but
only partly) compensated for by the rise of various countervailing factors,
such as the growing sales effort, military spending, and financial
expansion.
Like all theoretical perspectives this one has to be put to the harsh test
of reality, and modified where necessary to explain changing historical
conditions. In what follows, I will attempt to show concretely, by focusing
on current historical developments, why I believe this general approach is
vital to the explanation of economic conditions today-at the beginning of a
new millennium.
The Party
The first thing one notes, in turning to those accounts that dominate
today's business news, is that corporations are awash in rising profits. In
the final months of 1999, the business press was euphoric as it became clear
that "the party"-referring to the current period of extraordinarily high
profits-would continue past the millennial turning point into the year 2000.
In its quarterly profits scoreboard in mid-August, Business Week declared
that "Corporate America's profits are cruising at warp speed [ldots] Profits
for the 900 companies on Business Week's Corporate Scoreboard rose a merry
28% during this year's second quarter, the best performance since 1996's
final period." What was fueling the expansion in the late recovery phase of
the business cycle, the same magazine had declared two weeks before, was the
fact that corporations were awash in cash, with 851 billion dollars in
retained earnings. In December 1999, word was out in the business community
that the U.S. economy was exiting "the millennium with an unprecedented
bang." [2]
Needless to say, the big bash occurring at the economic pinnacle of the
society is an exclusive affair. The growth of wealth at the top, as Business
Week told its corporate readers, has been accompanied by a relative decline
in income and wealth shares at the bottom-with little in the way of any real
income gains among wage earners at present. A Harris poll at the end of 1999
showed that most of the U.S. population believe that they have not
benefitted from what is now, according to the National Bureau of Economic
Research, the longest business cycle upswing in the nation's history,
ongoing since March 1991-hardly a surprising result, with real wages still
"barely budging," and only about a fifth of the population owning stock
market assets outside of retirement funds. "The biggest fault line,"
Business Week declared in its December 27, 1999 issue,
[ldots] seems to be between Americans who are getting an extra income boost
from the stock market or a dot.com employer, and everybody else. Indeed, the
most striking development in the New Economy for many has been the end of
the 40-hour week: Americans now log more hours on the job than workers in
any other industrialized nation. But growth in real hourly compensation has
dropped from a 4.3% annual rate in the third quarter of 1998 to 2.3% this
year [ldot] This may explain why 51% of Americans feel cheated by their
employer, according to a new study from Opinion Research Corp.,
International.
Indeed, Business Week warned its corporate readers, the 52 percent of the
population who, in the same Harris poll, registered sympathy with the
protesters in Seattle were responding to real economic grievances, and the
protests could soon migrate in a big way from streets to workplaces.
Monopoly Capital and the Tendency of Surplus to Rise
The contradictions of the economy, however, are far more acute than a mere
perusal of the business press would lead one to believe, and relate to the
entire development of accumulation under monopoly capitalism. One way in
which to begin to understand the conditions now confronting the U.S. economy
is to look more concretely at the economic surplus being generated by the
society.
An item-by-item accounting of total economic surplus, incorporating all of
the relevant components from official government estimates of national
income and output, is a difficult undertaking which obviously cannot be
attempted here. Nevertheless, in a extremely simplified version of such an
analysis, corporate profits plus depreciation plus net interest can be taken
as a first approximation of the actual economic surplus-one which, however,
leaves out many elements that properly belong to surplus, such as
expenditures on marketing, now running at more than one trillion dollars a
year. [3] When we look at the trends in economic surplus, measured in this
limited way, we discover that the share of surplus in total output is
increasing. The average annual percentage of profits plus depreciation plus
net interest of corporate business in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) rose from
14.2 percent between 1946 and 1973 to 14.7 percent between 1974 and 1998.
Further, corporate profits plus depreciation plus net interest a s a
percentage of GDP soared to their highest level ever in 1997 at 16.6
percent-rising for the first time since the Second World War above 16.1
percent, the level reached in 1929 (the year of the Great Crash), and
surpassing the Second World War peak of 16.5 percent in 1942. [4] This
strongly suggests that the problem of rising surplus has in no way lessened
in recent decades, and remains endemic to monopoly capitalism as it enters
the new millennium.
The strength of the tendency of surplus to rise can be traced historically,
as we have seen, to changes that occurred as the system evolved from its
freely competitive to its monopoly phase-that is, to the shift from an
economy consisting largely of small family-based firms to one dominated by
large monopolistic (or oligopolistic) enterprises. Competition begets
monopoly and monopoly begets competition-but in an historically evolving
pattern. Competition, rather than simply disappearing under monopoly
capitalism, became in some ways more intense. Competition over productivity
and innovation-the drive to obtain the low cost position-only stepped up its
pace. New dominant forms of competition also arose, especially those
associated with marketing-targeting, product development, advertising, and
sales promotion.
Yet, in areas of price, output, and investment, modifications took place in
the nature of competition as a result of the concentration and
centralization of capital-sharply distinguishing monopoly capitalism from
the freely competitive age that preceded it. With the rise of the giant
firm, price competition ceased to take place in any significant sense within
mature monopolistic industries-as opposed to new industries in which a
shakedown process is occurring (such as computers and digital technology in
general), and industrial sectors that resemble the firms of the earlier
competitive stage. [5] Megacorporations tend to price corespectively, as
Joseph Schumpeter said, in a process of indirect collusion, acting as
price-makers rather than price-takers. Prices for manufactured products in
mature monopolistic markets tend to go only one way: up. Hence, inflation
(whether double-digit or at more moderate levels) has come to characterize
monopoly capitalism. Price deflation, once fairly normal for capitalism, l
argely disappeared in mature industries and at the aggregate level in the
system as a whole with the rise of the regime of big business. [6] And this
is true despite the fact that prices for raw materials, particularly from
the third world, have had a tendency to be depressed (indeed to be caught up
in deflationary spirals)-a function of the workings of the imperialist
system.
The decline of price competition in the system as a whole has its
counterpart in the change in the way in which output and investment are
determined. Rather than lower prices in the face of a shortfall of demand as
in a freely competitive economy, the typical giant firm tends to take up the
slack by lowering its output and increasing its level of excess productive
capacity in order to protect profit margins (the mark-up on prime production
costs). As a result, investment, which is governed by expectations, tends to
be regulated much more by the level of excess capacity-and by expected
profits on new investment in plant and machinery if this capacity were to be
expanded-than by anything else. Empirical studies have consistently shown
that it is only when capacity utilization rises to 85 percent in the economy
as a whole that national investment is spurred; but this process is a
self-limiting one, since new investment means the growth of additional
manufacturing capacity, which must find a market-investment itself then
tends to lead eventually to idle capacity.
In this strange, semi-regulated world of monopoly capital, there is no
longer a life-or-death competition threatening the survival of the mature
capitalist enterprise (though mergers in search of greater monopoly power
are a common occurrence). Rather, the giant corporations that dominate the
contemporary economy engage primarily in struggles over relative market
share. Although conventional economics textbooks still tell us that the
existence of a perfectly competitive economy guarantees that economic
profits are short-lived or nonexistent, in the real world of late
capitalism, large firms not only obtain persistent profits, but there is a
hierarchy of profit rates between firms. It remains a competitive world for
corporations in many respects, but the goal is always the creation or
perpetuation of monopoly power-that is, the power to generate persistent,
high, economic profits through a mark-up on prime production costs. [7]
The Generation and Absorption of Surplus
Since the intent here is to explain how the growth of monopoly capital is
related to such fundamental tendencies as rising surplus and economic
stagnation, and how this generates various distortions in the way the
capitalist economy is supposed to work (according to its own ideal
conception), it is useful to turn to the work of the post-Keynesian
economist Myron Gordon, who has developed an empirical analysis of the
underlying pattern of accumulation, focusing on the ratio of value added to
the wages of production workers. [8] Gordon shows that, while over the years
1899 to 1949 the ratio of value added to the wages of production workers in
manufacturing in the United States fluctuated around 2.50, between 1949 and
1994 it rose fairly steadily to 5.25, more than double its 1949 value. [9]
What this means is that there is a growth in the ratio of surplus to the
wages of production workers as determined at the level of production.
The shift in the employment structure of manufacturing firms, from one that
was geared primarily to the employment of production workers to one in which
production workers are vastly outnumbered by nonproduction workers, is
closely associated with this rising surplus within production and with the
pursuit of monopoly power and profits. At the beginning of the twentieth
century, Gordon notes,
manufacturing firms [ldots] were engaged primarily if not solely in
production. By the end of the century their primary activity had become the
pursuit of monopoly power. The large modern corporation incurs the costs of
a wide range of nonproduction activities for the purpose of maintaining and
increasing its monopoly power. Hence, they may be called monopoly
activities. The objective of monopoly power is to increase the margin of
price over production cost for the firm's products and to increase the sale
of the products at these prices. These activities include research and
development for the purpose of improving existing products, discovering new
products, and reducing production costs. They include selling and
advertising to increase sales and the markup of price over production costs.
They include labor relations to persuade or intimidate workers to produce
more or accept lower wages. They include political contributions, lobbying
and corruption of government officials in order to obtain natural resource s
on favorable terms and other favors of government. They include the
employment of lawyers, accountants, and financiers to avoid and evade taxes
and to influence tax legislation. I could go on. These activities may be
harmless apart from their cost and their consequences for the distribution
of income. They may be beneficial to the degree that productivity is raised,
or they may be malignant in their consequences for society. In any event,
what they all have in common is the pursuit of the profits to be gained from
monopoly power. [10]
In addition to expenditures on the pursuit of monopoly power as such, there
are also of course expenditures which can be seen as disguised profits-such
as the enormous income (including reserves for severance and pensions) set
aside for top management. Although treated as "cost deductions" before
profits are calculated, these returns are obviously part of the economic
surplus-indeed the lavish rewards to top corporate officers and their
hangers-on may be largely returns for the successful pursuit of monopoly
power, the immediate goal of today's "strategic management."
"Monopoly workers" are defined by Gordon as all employed workers minus
production workers, and thus are equivalent to nonproduction workers. [11]
Between 1899 and 1949, the number of monopoly workers increased at more than
twice the rate of that of production workers. From 1949 to 1994, the growth
of production workers was stagnant (falling at the end of the period), while
the average annual growth rate for monopoly workers was around 2 percent.
A concrete example of the radical changes taking place in this respect in
large corporations can be seen in the case of Microsoft. In fiscal year
1997, Microsoft had a total sales revenue of 11.4 billion dollars, while its
labor and material costs of production were only 1.1 billion dollars.
(Research and development was 1.9 billion dollars, sales and marketing 2.9
billion dollars, general administration 362 million dollars, and gross
profits before taxes 5.3 billion dollars.) Prime production costs (the labor
and materials costs of production) thus accounted for less than 10 percent
of sales revenue, while profits made up 47 percent of sales revenue. The
remainder was accounted for by the costs of the pursuit of monopoly power.
The 5.3 billion dollar profit was earned with a total investment in
equipment, inventory, and buildings of less than 2 billion dollars. [12]
Microsoft may seem like an extreme example-but as the leading high-tech
corporation in the world, it also reflects the extreme direction that
capital is taking in general. Moreover, the phenomenon is not simply
confined to computer software firms or dot.coms. Nike, to take an additional
case, subcontracts nearly all of its production to owners of factories in
China, Indonesia and Vietnam. Tens of thousands of workers in Asia employed
by these subcontractors produce the shoes sold by Nike, which is thus free
to devote almost its entire paid employment to the pursuit of monopoly
power. In 1992, Nike's payroll included eight thousand people globally,
almost all of whom were in management, sales promotion, and
advertising-geared to Nike's swoosh label products.
The economic surplus generated by these means is enormous, as are the costs
of Nike's pursuit of monopoly power. In 1992, Michael Jordan received twenty
million dollars from Nike for promoting its shoes. This was as much as the
entire payroll of the four Indonesian factories involved in the production
of Nikes, where the mainly female workers sometimes earned as little as
fifteen cents an hour while working eleven hour days. By 1996, conditions
for these workers had improved only slightly; twenty-five thousand workers
produced seventy million pairs of shoes annually (each of which sold for
between forty-five and one hundred dollars in North America) and received an
average of 2.23 dollars per day, while often being compelled to work six
hours overtime. In Vietnam, where Nike was subcontracting much of its
production by the late 1990s, conditions were even worse. In 1997, most of
the thirty-five thousand workers in Vietnam producing Nikes were women who
worked twelve hour days for a labor cost of two dollars per pair of shoes.
Under attack for the labor conditions in the factories that make its shoes,
Nike has responded that it is simply a marketing company, uninvolved in
production. In the words of its vice-president for Asia, "We don't know the
first thing about manufacturing. We are marketers and designers." [13]
Nike is an extreme example, mainly because of the extent of its outsourcing
and subcontracting of production. In most manufacturing, direct investment
in production is deemed vital, since the capacity to generate economic
surplus is rooted in production, and in innovations occurring at this level.
Nonetheless, the general shift in the overall economic emphasis of firms
from production to marketing and finance has been central to the evolution
of the large firm throughout the past century. As early as 1939, in a
Federal Trade Commission Inquiry, General Motors revealed that a Chevrolet
selling for 950 dollars had production costs of around 150 dollars while the
remainder went to marketing, distribution, and profits. [14]
Mergers and Financial Speculation
The economic surplus generated by firms, according to the foregoing
analysis, is enhanced by the pursuit of monopoly power and the pursuit of
monopoly power generates its own costs, which increasingly dominate the
balance sheets of firms. The expenditures associated with the pursuit of
monopoly power are not reducible to the sales effort, but also include the
absorption of surplus through such means as corporate mergers and financial
speculation. As economic surplus expands, so do corporate mergers, which
have as their object the pursuit of higher degrees of monopoly power through
the concentration and centralization of capital. Hence, economic surplus
that could be used for investment is instead used up in the buying and
selling of firms-a competitive race that takes on more and more urgency as
it becomes more global in character. The two greatest merger waves in
history are those associated with the opening and the close of the twentieth
century. "Measured relative to the size of the economy," according t o the
Economic Report of the President, 1999, "only the spate of trust formations
at the turn of the century comes close to the current level of merger
activity," with the value of mergers and acquisitions in the United States
in 1998 alone exceeding 1.6 trillion dollars. Corporate mergers and
acquisitions grew at a rate of almost 50 percent per year in every year but
one between 1992 and 1998. Globally, more than two trillion dollars worth of
mergers were announced in the first three quarters of 1999. [15] The leading
sectors in this merger wave have been in high technology, media,
telecommunications, and finance but mega-mergers are also occurring in basic
manufacturing.
It is not simply the quantitative extent of mergers and acquisitions that
matters but also their type and purpose. Many of these mergers, as noted in
the Economic Report of the President, are "synergy-seeking mergers" in which
large corporations are seeking to take advantage of "economies of scope" by
moving into closely related markets. Further, while the great merger wave at
the beginning of the twentieth century was directed mainly at control of an
overwhelming share of domestic markets by three or four firms, the merger
strategy of today has shifted to consolidating a substantial share of
international markets through: (a) establishing production facilities in
other industrialized countries (where the biggest markets are to be found),
and (b) cross-border buyouts and mergers.
The merger in 1998 of Daimler Benz and Chrysler to form a 130 billion dollar
company, DaimlerChrysler, which Business Week called "the first global car
colossus," is a case in point. It was an attempt to consolidate a global
market position in an industry where there "there is plant capacity to build
at least 15 million more vehicles each year than will be sold." According to
McGraw-Hill business analysts, such consolidation within the auto industry
worldwide is inevitable, with the number of leading auto companies in the
world expected to drop by half, from forty to twenty, in the opening decades
of this century. [16] The DaimlerChrysler merger was followed last year by
Ford's acquisition of Volvo. Moreover, the globalization of monopoly capital
in the auto industry is stepping up its pace. According to The Wall Street
Journal of February 14, 2000,
The world's two biggest auto companies are about to enter a bidding war for
an insolvent South Korean car maker-and the outcome could determine who will
be No. 1.
Ford Motor Co. intends to take on General Motors Corp. in the auction of
Daewoo Motor Co., Ford Chairman W. Wayne Booker confirmed over the weekend,
ending weeks of speculation about
Ford's plans. GM set the auction in motion when it offered around $6 billion
for most of Daewoo's assets. People close to the situation say
DaimlerChrysler AG also is seriously considering jumping in. A
DaimlerChrysler spokesman wouldn't comment.
Why are the world's biggest car makers so keenly interested? At first
glance, Daewoo Motor seems hardly worthy of such attention. It owes sixteen
billion dollars it can't repay, has car factories in some of the world's
oddest corners, and its American marketing arm even publishes a brochure
that opens with the question, "Dae-who?"
But the contest is one for world domination. Ford's string of 1990s
acquisitions-capped by its purchase a year ago of Volvo Cars Ltd.-has
positioned it to overtake GM for global auto-making leadership. Whichever
company gets Daewoo Motors' annual worldwide capacity of about two million
cars will have the potential to be the biggest.
Despite the fact that the current merger frenzy, as the above example
dramatically demonstrates, is directed at global rather than national
markets, the underlying aim remains a familiar one. As Michael Mandel,
economics editor of Business Week, declared in October 1999, "The old market
verities apply: As concentration increases, it's easier for remaining
players to raise prices. In the copper industry, the prospect of
consolidation helped drive up future prices by more than 20% since the
middle of June." [17]
What is now the greatest merger wave in capitalist history is rapidly
transforming the global competitive environment. Already by the mid-1990s,
the largest three hundred corporations in the world accounted for 70 percent
of foreign direct investment and 25 percent of world capital assets. The top
ten telecommunications firms now control 86 percent of a 262 billion dollar
world market-and analysts expect the number of giant telecommunications
firms controlling that world market to be halved early in this century. The
rivalry between giant firms is being intensified at the transnational level
as corporations seek to carve out larger and larger world market
territories. [18]
The underpinnings of the current massive merger wave can be understood much
more fully by examining the way they are financed. Although it is still
frequently claimed in textbook economics that the main purpose of both the
issue of new stock and borrowing by nonfinancial corporations is to finance
investment in productive capacity, this is far from the case. In the 1980s,
U.S. corporations borrowed heavily, not in order to finance real investment
(which they continued to pay for out of gross profits), but for the purpose
of stock buybacks (to boost the value of their shares) and takeovers. This
borrowing was thus geared to the speculative purchase of existing assets
with the expectation of expanding capital gains, and, in the case of
takeovers, the creation of new monopolistic positions through "synergy." In
the 1990s, the diversion of corporate funds to Wall Street has intensified,
but firms have relied on their own profits increasingly for this purpose
rather than debt (though also continued to borrow as a defensive strategy
against hostile takeovers). The speculative bubble associated with the
internet and the Nasdaq in particular had created such an out-of-this-world
situation, by the opening month of 2000, that the digital giant America
Online (AOL) was able to purchase Time Warner, in a 183 billion-dollar deal
that constituted the biggest (though still pending) merger in all of
history. And AOL was able to do so despite the fact that it had only 20
percent the annual revenue and 15 percent of the workforce of Time Warner.
[19]
Increasingly, we are faced with a world economy governed by financial
speculation and the attempt to create global monopoly (or oligopoly)
power-led by media and telecommunications and fanning out through all
sectors of production. In this shift to a more global playing field, there
is the likelihood of increasing currency and trade wars between capitalist
blocs, even as core capital attempts to head off trouble by establishing new
rule-making bodies at the international level, such as the World Trade
Organization (WTO). Real power, however, lies not with such transnational
rule-making bodies (which can never become an "international of capital"),
but with the actual states and corporations.
The United States and World Competition
In this age of globally expanding circuits of capital, the United States has
for the most part been able to set the pace. The source of this U.S.
advantage resides not simply in the special role of the dollar; its military
power; the ability of its corporations to position themselves strategically
in global markets so as to obtain spectacular mark-ups (evidence of monopoly
power); or its position as a haven for foreign capital-but also in the low
rate of increase in unit labor costs (i.e., nominal hourly compensation per
unit of output) of U.S. manufacturing relative to manufacturing in the other
capitalist states. This can be seen in Table 1 (below). With exception of
the United States and Canada, all of the G-7 countries had double-digit
rates of increase in exchange-rate adjusted unit labor costs from 1985 to
1990. Moreover, in the 1990 to 1998 period, the exchange-rate adjusted rate
of increase in unit labor costs in the United States remained lower than
those of its two biggest competitors: Japan and Ge rmany.
Unit labor costs are a more comprehensive indicator of international
competitiveness than labor productivity growth rates, which they partly
reflect. Hence, it is the relatively slow growth of unit labor costs in the
United States, Bureau of Labor Statistics analysts tell us, that point to
the decisive advantage gained by the United States in overall competitive
position over its major competitors in the period after 1985. [20] There can
be little doubt about where the ultimate source of this advantage lies: in
the effectiveness of the class struggle against labor in the United States.
According to one study, real after-tax hourly compensation of production
workers in the U.S. economy dropped by almost 14 percent between 1977 and
1995. [21] The present expansion has been accompanied by increasing attacks
on unions; growth of "nonstandard employment" (in which part-time and other
contingent employment constitutes a bigger and bigger portion of total
employment); longer work hours; and cutbacks in state spendi ng for human
welfare. In this battle to lower the floor, U.S. capital has played the
leading role and its major competitors are increasingly moving in the same
direction.
The same general process taking place in the U.S. economy is occurring
globally on a much larger, more polarized scale. What Harry Magdoff noted in
The Age of Imperialism as far back as 1969 is even more apparent today
(though it now applies to the giant firms of numerous states): "It is the
professed goal of these international firms [U.S. multinationals] to obtain
the lowest unit production costs on a world-wide basis. It is also their
aim, though not necessarily openly stated, to come out on top in the merger
movement in the European Common Market and to control as large a share of
the world market as they do of the United States market." In fact there is
an "essential oneness" to the U.S. economy and its foreign economic policy.
According to the dominant corporate consensus, the struggle against domestic
labor is at one with the struggle with other capitalist blocs, and with the
struggle against already superexploited third-world labor. In each and every
case, the goal is a narrow pursuit of low producti on costs, widening profit
margins, increased capital gains, and global monopoly power-at the expense
of all other interests and values. [22]
It goes without saying that this "essential oneness" in the accumulation
drive of the system at all levels at the beginning of the twenty-first
century conceals its own internal antagonisms. The anti-WTO protests in
Seattle may signal the fact that the "party" for capital at this historical
juncture is nearly over-in more ways than one.
NOTES
(1.) Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly
Review Press, l966), p. 125. It should be emphasized that in referring to
"the tendency of surplus to rise" Baran and Sweezy had no intention of
presenting this as an iron law, i.e., one not subject to countervailing
factors that modify or mitigate its effect. Rather they invariably
emphasized that this was a mere tendency (or tendential law), which could
not be examined apart from such countervailing factors.
(2.) Business Week, August 16, 1999, pp. 88-90, August 2, 1999, pp. 28-31
and December 27, 1999, pp. 52-55.
(3.) Kevin J. Clancy and Robert S. Shulman, Across the Board (October 1993),
p. 38, and Marketing Myths that are Killing Business (New York: McGraw Hill,
1994), pp. 140, 171.
(4.) National Income and Product Accounts of the United States, vol. 1,
Tables 1.1 and 1.16; and U.S. Commerce Department, Survey of Current
Business, vol. 79, no.8 (August 1999), pp. D2 and D5. I would like to thank
my friend and colleague Michael Dawson for the initial analysis of this
data. It should be noted that depreciation is sometimes seen as a cost to be
deducted before arriving at net profits, but in practice depreciation (the
amount of which is enormously increased by accelerated depreciation
allowances) is part of the social accumulation fund (or total economic
surplus) available to capital and hence needs to be included in the surplus.
In other words, the appropriate categories for analysis of accumulation are
gross profits, gross savings/surplus and gross domestic product (all of
which include depreciation) rather than net profits, net savings, or net
national product. For more detailed discussion of these issues as well as a
far more comprehensive empirical treatment of the tendency of the surp lus
to rise see Michael Dawson and John Bellamy Foster, "The Tendency of Surplus
to Rise, 1963-1988," in John B. Davis, ed., The Economic Surplus in Advanced
Economies (Brookfield, Vermont: Edward Elgar, 1992), pp. 42-70. A heavily
abridged version of this research was published under the same title in
Monthly Review, vol. 43, no. 4 (September 1991), pp. 37-50. For a graph of
this data showing the tendency of the surplus to rise, see Michael Dawson
and John Bellamy Foster, "Is There an Allocation Problem?: Accounting for
Unproductive Labor," Science & Society, vol. 58, no. 3 (Fall 1994), p. 323.
(5.) Both monopolistic and competitive sectors of the economy continue to
exist side by side, but the giant corporation, able to control to a
considerable extent its level of price, output, and investment, is the
typical firm in a dynamic sense in the monopoly capitalist economy. Noting
the difference in price structure in monopolistic and competitive
industries, the Natural Resources Committee report, The Structure of the
American Economy (1939), directed by Gardiner Means, observed that the term
"monopoly" could be "used on the whole to refer to situations in which
sufficient control would be exercised over price by an individual producer
or by a colluding group of producers to make possible monopoly profits,
i.e., profits above the rate necessary to induce new investment in other
industries not subject to monopoly control." Conversely, "a situation was in
general classified as competitive if there was insufficient control over
price to make monopoly profits possible." Gardiner Means, ed., The Structure
of the American Economy, Part I (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1939), p. 139.
(6.) See Harry Magdoff, "A Note on Inflation," in John Bellamy Foster and
Henryk Szlajfer, ed., The Faltering Economy: The Problem of Accumulation
Under Monopoly Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984), pp.
118-23. The Great Depression was of course an exception to the inflationary
tendencies under monopoly capitalism.
(7.) Competition, which has as its main goal the development of monopoly
power (entailing surplus profits or monopoly rents) through the
monopolization of particular technologies and markets, is sometimes known as
"Schumpeterian competition" and closely corresponds with how the term
"competition" is used within business today. See James Galbraith, Created
Unequal: The Crisis in American Pay (New York: The Free Press, 1998), pp.
40-42.
(8.) Myron Gordon, "Monopoly Power in the United States Manufacturing
Sector, 1899 to 1994," Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, vol. 20, no. 3
(Spring 1998), pp. 323-25. Gordon's analysis is inspired by Michal Kalecki's
concept of the "degree of monopoly," defined as the price mark-up over
average prime production costs. On the relation of Kalecki's analysis to
that of Baran and Sweezy see John Bellamy Foster, The Theory of Monopoly
Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986).
(9.) Gordon, "Monopoly Power," pp. 323-25. The production workers category,
upon which much of Gordon's analysis depends, is described in the Census of
Manufactures as follows: "This item includes workers (up through the
line-supervisor level) engaged in fabricating, processing, assembling,
inspecting, receiving, storing, handling, packing, warehousing, shipping
(but not delivering), maintenance, repair, janitorial and guard services,
product development, auxiliary production for plant's own use (e.g., power
plant), recordkeeping, and other services closely associated with production
operations at the establishment covered by the report. Employees about the
working-supervisor level are excluded from this item." General Summary,
Census of Manufactures, 1992, p. A-1. Like most economic statistics there
are some conceptual issues raised by the production workers category, which
have to he taken into account in its application, such as the fact that it
excludes all of those managers supervising production above t he
line-supervisor level (including these among nonproduction workers).
Nevertheless, it draws an important distinction between those production
workers directly engaged in the process of producing use values and those
nonproduction workers primarily geared to management, marketing and finance,
etc.
(10.) Gordon, "Monopoly Power," pp. 326-27.
(11.) There are some theoretical difficulties in equating the "nonproduction
workers" category with the concept of "monopoly workers." For one thing,
monopoly power is normally rooted in production, so that production workers
are also, in a sense, monopoly workers. But Gordon's intention is clearly
one of emphasizing that production workers are caught up in the stringent
capitalist logic of increasing productivity, and at the same time keeping
down unit labor costs-in other words raising the rate of exploitation-in
contrast to nonproduction (or "monopoly") workers who have as their main
task the increase of the mark-up.
(12.) Ibid, pp. 327-28.
(13.) Richard J. Barnet and John Cavanagh, Global Dreams (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1994), pp. 325-28; Walter LaFeber, Michael Jordan and the New
Global Capitalism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), pp. 106-07, 147-48; David
Korten, The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism, 1999), pp. 77-78.
(14.) On General Motors see Douglas Dowd, The Waste of Nations (Boulder:
Westview Press, 1989), pp. 65-66. This example of course doesn't take
account of the fact that the sales effort had actually penetrated into the
production process of such large firms, as Veblen and later Baran and Sweezy
were to argue, so that incorporated into production costs themselves were
the costs associated with frequent model changes-accounting for perhaps a
third of all production costs in automobile production by the middle of the
last century. See Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, pp. 131-38.
(15.) Economic Report of the President, 1999, p. 39; Korten, The
Post-Corporate World, p. 42; New York Times, January 19, 1998, p. A1;
Michael J. Mandel, "All These Mergers are Great But[ldots]," Business Week,
October 18, 1999, p. 48.
(16.) "The First Global Car Colossus," Business Week, May 18, 1998, pp.
40-41.
(17.) Mandel, "All These Mergers," p. 48.
(18.) Michael Dawson and John Bellamy Foster, "Virtual Capitalism," in
Robert W. McChesney, Ellen Meiksins Wood and John Bellamy Foster, ed.,
Capitalism in the Information Age (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998),
pp. 53-54; United Nations, Human Development Report (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999), p. 3.
(19.) Doug Henwood, Wall Street (New York: Verso, 1997), pp. 72-75; Business
Week, January 24, 2000, p. 37.
(20.) U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, A BLS Reader on
Productivity, Bulletin 2474 (April 1996), p. 12.
(21.) Eric A. Nilsson, "Trends in Compensation for Production Workers,
1948-1995," Review of Radical Political Economics, vol. 31, no. 4 (December
1999), pp. 133-63.
(22.) Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1969), p. 200. On the concept of the "essential oneness" of U.S.
accumulation see Harry
Magdoff, Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1978), p. 239.

Average Annual Rates of
Change of Unit Labor
Costs in Manufacturing,
G-7 Countries:
U.S. Dollar Basis
1985-1990 1990-1998
U.S.              1.6       0.2
Japan            10.8       1.3
Germany (West)   15.9       0.3
France           11.6      -2.0
United Kingdom   11.4       1.8
Italy            14.4      -2.3
Canada            7.1      -2.3


Source: United States Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics,
"International Comparisons of Manufacturing Productivity and Unit Labor Cost
Trends, 1998," News, August 27, 1991, Table B, p. 11. The employment
compensation component of unit labor costs includes both direct and indirect
payments to employees. Direct payments include wages and salaries (also
encompassing compensation to corporate executives), vacation pay, tips,
bonuses, etc. Indirect payments include employer contributions to legally
required insurance programs and contractual and private benefit plans,
including social insurance funds, private pensions, and health and welfare
plans, and workers' compensation for injuries.

Monthly Review, Vol.51, No.11
COPYRIGHT 2000 Monthly Review Foundation, Inc.
(c) 2000 Information Access Company. All rights reserved.
This article may only be stored on a computer network for a maximum of 30
days. 
Quellen:IAC MAGAZINE DATABASE 
MONTHLY REVIEW 01/04/2000 P1 
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
18Jan2000 INDIA: THE STATESMAN (INDIA) - The Raj Effect. 
Essays on Colonialism, By Bipan Chandra, Orient Longman
The monograph under review comprises a number of essays dealing with various
aspects of colonialism, primarily in the context of India's historical
experiences. Though a number of essays had previously been published in a
number of well known international journals, it does not diminish the
importance of the monograph. The author at the very outset has reminded his
readership that the analysis of colonialism and its impact generally had a
bearing on policy making in matters related to developmental issues in post
colonial societies.
Bipan Chandra convincingly argues that there is hardly any dearth of
historical data, which would refute the view of some well known pundits that
underdevelopment of colonial societies was primarily a direct fallout of
pre-colonial backwardness. The author negates the views of some well known
intellectuals, who look upon colonialism as an agent of modernisation.
Chandra, in a number of essays, has attempted to interpret colonialism from
the stand point of domination, exploitation and underdevelopment of one
society by another. More importantly, he is inclined to hold the view that a
discussion on colonialism need not necessarily devote much attention to
pre-colonial social structures, since colonialism inevitably transforms it
into an essential part of a new colonial structure which in turn is subsumed
by the world capitalist system.
The author lucidly narrates the development and popularity of coherent
critiques of colonialism, as developed by Indian nationalists particularly
in the last decades of the previous century. However, it was in the early
decades of the twentieth century that colonialism as a discipline of study
attracted the attention of Western academics. In India, several nationalist
minded economists such as Kumar Ghoshal, K T Shah, O N Vakil, Bal Krishna
Wadia, along with some others, were amongst the first to approach the issues
related to colonialism on the basis of both theoretical and empirical
approaches. Significant contributions also came from Marxist intellectuals,
like Rajani Palme Dutt, the author of the well known India Today and then by
A R Desai in his Social Background of Indian Nationalism. But, throughout
the twentieth century, much of the Western intellectual exercises on
colonialism betrayed a cynicism towards the Marxian understanding on the
subject. The 1950s witnessed a spurt of publications on the subject and the
researches of Clifford Geertz on Indonesia and Mohammad Husain's work on
Egypt attracted world wide attention. However, the high point of researches
on colonialism was still to arrive. The Cuban revolution, the national
liberation struggles in Algeria and Vietnam, and the spread effect of
anti-imperialist and popular movements in Latin America, heralded a new dawn
for academics well versed in Marxist theories on the subject. Several
academics, both leftists as well as centrists by conviction made important
contributions particularly in the realm of "dependency theory". Men like
Andre Gunder Frank, Celso Furtado and Paul Baran inspired intellectuals like
Amiya Bagchi, Hamza Alavi, Samir Amin, Jairus Banaji, to mention a few, to
carry out high quality researches on colonialism.
The author has strongly argued that the development of agrarian relations in
th colonies notably in Indonesia, Egypt and in parts of Latin America
provide interesting examples of transformations or changes set in motion by
colonialism. Chandra in this context argues that the semi-feudal structure
of agrarian relations that prevailed in 19th century India was not a carry
over from the Mughal period. In essence, it was the result of two gigantic
attempts to transform the pre-colonial agriculture into a capitalist one.
However, since this was done under colonial conditions, it inevitably
resulted in a semi-feudal agriculture dominated by the colonial state, world
capitalist market, landlords, merchants and money lenders. Thus, alongside
semi-feudal features of an agrarian society bourgeois property relations,
commercialisation and other elements of capitalist agriculture came to
co-exist.
The author has consistently argued that the Marxian explanations of the
impact of colonialism on non-Western societies suffered from a few
weaknesses. While on one hand there had been little effort to study the
colonial reality in depth, on the other, the contradictions within the
societal frameworks dominated by industrial capitalist metropolises were
also not brought to the surface. In other words, Chandra reaches the
conclusion that Marx and many of his latter day followers failed to realise
that though capitalism was a single world system and colonies were its basic
constituents, the latter did not become capitalist in the same way the
metropoles did.
In the first and third essays of the monograph, Chandra has succinctly
argued that the colonial state was a mechanism that hardly granted a space
for the accommodation of the interests of indigenous social classes. The
colonial state, therefore, subordinated the indigenous social categories to
the whims of the metropolitan capitalist class. As a result, the upper
sections of the dominated society were denied an opportunity to share
political power with the ruling alien elite.
In one of the essays entitled "A Colonial India: British versus Indian Views
of Development", Chandra dwells extensively on the nationalist critique of
the economic drain resulting from the colonial policies in India. In the
critique developed by men like Dadabhai Naoroji, Chandra argues, the drain
was defined as the unilateral transfer of funds from India or that part of
transfer of wealth or commodities from India to England, for which India
received no equivalent economic, commercial or material returns in any form
whether in the present or in the future. The drain in the opinion of the
nationalists, thus resulted in a major loss of capital for India. On the
other hand, it was a major source of capital accumulation for Great Britain
and played a large part in the rapid industrialisation of that country.
Therefore, Chandra points out, it was not surprising to find men like MG
Ranade and GV Joshi placing strong demands for tariff protection for India's
infant industries. At the same time they pleaded for direct government
support to industry and agriculture. In brief, the nationalists had reached
the conclusion that there was a contradiction between the logic of
colonialism as propounded by the British and the interest of the Indian
masses.
The author has dealt with several other important issues. For instance
Chandra has distinguished three district stages, during which the forms and
patterns of subordination and surplus extraction underwent changes in
consonance with the development of capitalism as a world system. Chandra has
also dealt with the transition of India from a colonial to an independent
postcolonial economy. The author makes it clear that no real development is
possible in the third world, unless the former colonies break away from the
world capitalist system and embrace socialism. However, since Chandra has
limited his discussion till the early 1980s, he stands in no position to
evaluate the changes set forth by privatization and globalization in the
context of the developing and underdeveloped economies. At the same time,
his emphasis on the "independent capitalism" as pursued by Congress in the
decades following the independence, also leaves a few questions to be
answered. While the Congress role in eliminating semi-feudal conditions in
the agrarian sector could be doubted, the radicalism of the left remained
out of tune, at times, with historical and economic developments.
Despite such mild criticism it has to be conceded that the monograph brings
together a priceless collection of essays, displaying the author's
intellectual expertise. Chandra provides strong evidence that the Indian
economy since the colonial period, by virtue of a number of linkages, was
steadily appropriated into the world capitalist model. The author's
contribution is immensely significant as in recent times, transnational
corporations are aiming to establish a new type of subordination which
strengthens the logic of world capitalism.
RAJ SEKHAR BASU
All Material Subject to Copyright
Copyright 2000: The Statesman (India). All Rights Reserved. 
Quellen:ASIA INTELLIGENCE WIRE 
THE STATESMAN 18/01/2000 
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
01Jan2000 GUATEMALA: Guatemala in the global system. 
By Chase-Dunn, Christopher.
With the signing of peace accords in 1996 ending Latin America's longest and
bloodiest civil war, Guatemala opened a new chapter in its history, one in
which a new and inclusive political community might finally emerge. For
scholars, such an era of potential societal normalization and
democratization is a propitious opportunity to reconsider how a more
inclusive and multiethnic national community could emerge and how
Guatemalans might respond to the changing forces of economic, ideological,
and geopolitical globalization. The end of the Cold War, powerful global
market forces, changing foreign policies in the developed countries, the
emergence of stronger multilateral agencies at the world level, and the
current hegemony of neoclassical policy prescriptions emanating from
powerful global agencies-all these factors pose significant challenges as
well as possible opportunities for Guatemalan democratization and
development.
Guatemala is the largest country in Central America and was the last to
negotiate an end to civil war. In many ways, Guatemala's social problems are
representative of those in many other parts of the Third World. Poverty and
discord among ethnically different populations appear in many developing
countries. Guatemala is not among the world's poorest countries; on the
basis of gross national product per capita, it falls into the category the
World Bank terms "low-to middle-income countries." But among countries in
this category, Guatemala has one of the highest economic disparities between
rich and poor. It has valuable national resources but also unusually high
un-and underemployment. The tax rate relative to the gross domestic product
is very low.
In this context, the peace process created an important opening. Formerly
excluded groups have ostensibly been invited to participate in legal and
institutional processes for formulating policies of development and
democratization. The prospect of a new, multiethnic nation that recognizes
the cultural, political, and economic rights of its poorest and least
powerful citizens is more of a real possibility now than it has been for
many decades. Guatemala's accord on Identity and Rights of Indigenous
Peoples, one of the peace accords, for example, is a conceptual breakthrough
that many other countries should emulate.
Comparing the social changes in developing countries of Asia, Africa, and
Latin America is important for understanding particular countries such as
Guatemala, as well as for comprehending the global system as a whole. The
situation of a developing country emerging from a long period of strife
suggests comparisons with other specific countries-El Salvador and
Nicaragua-but also South Africa and the countries of the Middle East. These
cases of struggle and partial reconciliation need to be compared and placed
in the historical context of decolonization and national liberation
movements (see Arnson 1999).
Along similar lines, democratization and development policies in Guatemala
cannot be adequately understood without considering the worldwide waves of
democratization (Markoff 1996), as well as important changes in the world
economy. The trajectory of the East Asian economies raises the question of
whether development models that have worked there would be entirely
appropriate for Guatemala. It also suggests possibilities for eventual
Guatemalan involvement in Pacific Rim linkages.
Guatemalan economic, political, and cultural change has long been
importantly affected by the actions of powerful states and firms in the
developed countries, especially the United States. The actions of U.S.-based
firms and political-military interventions at important historical points
have had a major impact on Guatemalan society, as well as on other Central
American countries.
The demise of the Soviet Union and the emergence of global patterns of
economic restructuring have produced a hegemonic consensus regarding the
necessity of producing for the global market and courting foreign
investment. This ideological perspective has been reinforced by the policies
of powerful multilateral agencies, such as the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund (IMF). But economic and ideological
globalization have also been accompanied by a long-term trend toward greater
international and transnational political organization and integration and
the slow emergence of global governance (Murphy 1994). The United Nations
has played an important role in the Guatemalan peace process. International
organizations of indigenous peoples, labor unions, women's movements, and
movements for environmental protection have begun to play important roles in
the politics of every country. These movements are part of a process of
political and social globalization that is emerging in tandem with, and in
response to, economic and cultural globalization.
The problem of Guatemalan development in context thus requires that we
understand the current period in long-term perspective and in wide
geographical circumstance, both nationally and globally. The possible
results for Guatemala could be not only part of, but potentially active in
shaping, the future of the larger world society. How the relationship
between the developed and the developing countries is worked out in the next
decades will be a major determinant of the nature of the twenty-first
century world-system. Guatemala is a node for our understanding of these
emerging structures.
The theoretical perspective that is best suited to such a temporally deep
and spatially broad analysis is the world-systems perspective (Shannon
1996). The world-systems approach looks at human institutions over long
periods of time and employs the spatial scale necessary for comprehending
whole interaction systems. It is neither Eurocentric nor core-centric, at
least in principle.
The main idea is simple: human beings on Earth have been interacting with
one another in important ways over broad expanses of space since the
emergence of oceangoing transportation in the fifteenth century. Before the
Americas were incorporated into the Afroeurasian system, many local and
regional world-systems (intersocietal networks) held sway (see Blanton et
al. 1992). These were inserted into the expanding European-centered system
largely by force, and the surviving populations of indigenous Americans were
mobilized to supply labor for a colonial economy that was repeatedly
reorganized according to the changing geopolitical and economic forces
emanating from the European and, later, North American core societies.
This whole process can be understood structurally as a stratification system
composed of economically and politically dominant core societies (themselves
in competition with one another) and dependent peripheral and semiperipheral
regions. Some of these have succeeded in improving their positions in the
larger core-periphery hierarchy, while most have simply maintained their
relative positions.
This structural perspective on world history allows us to analyze the
cyclical features of social change and the long-term trends of development
in historical and comparative perspective. We can see the development of the
modern world-system as driven primarily by capitalist accumulation and
geopolitics, in which businesses and states compete with one another for
power and wealth. Competition among states and capital is conditioned by the
dynamics of struggle among classes and by the resistance of peripheral and
semiperipheral peoples to domination from the core. In the modern
world-system, the semiperiphery is composed of large and powerful countries
in the Third World (for example, Mexico, India, Brazil, China) and smaller
countries that have reached intermediate levels of economic development
(such as the East Asian newly industrialized countries). It is impossible to
understand the history of social change in the system as a whole without
taking into account both the strategies of the winners and the strategies
and organizational actions of those who have resisted domination and
exploitation.
It is also difficult to understand how innovative social change emerges
without a concept of the world-system as a whole. As with most earlier
regional intersocietal systems, new organization forms that transform
institutions and that lead to upward mobility most often emerge from
societies in semiperipheral locations. Thus, all the countries that became
hegemonic core states in the modern system had formerly been semiperipheral.
This is a continuation of a long-term pattern of social evolution that has
been called "semiperipheral development" (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997). Earlier
semiperipheral conquest states and semiperipheral capitalist city-states
acted as the main agents of empire formation and commercialization for
millennia. The pattern includes the semiperipheral communist states and
probably will also comprise future organizational innovations in
semiperipheral countries that may transform today's global system.
The world-systems approach requires that we think structurally. We must be
able to abstract from the particularities of uneven development the
structural continuities. Today, the core-periphery hierarchy remains, though
some countries have moved up or down (see Chase-Dunn and Grimes 1995). The
interstate system also remains, though the internationalization of capital
has perhaps further constrained states' ability to structure national
economies. States have always been subjected to larger geopolitical and
economic forces in the world-system, and, as is still the case, some have
been more successful at exploiting opportunities and protecting themselves
from liabilities than others.
In this perspective, many of the phenomena that have been called
globalization correspond to recently expanded international trade, financial
flows, and foreign investment by transnational corporations and banks. The
globalization discourse generally assumes that until recently there were
separate national societies and economies, and that these have now been
superseded by an expansion of international integration driven by
information and transportation technologies. Rather than a wholly unique and
new phenomenon, however, globalization is primarily international economic
integration, and as such it is a feature of the world-system that has been
increasing for centuries (Chase-Dunn et al. 1999).
The Great Chartered Companies of the seventeenth century were already
playing an important role in shaping the development of world regions.
Certainly, the transnational corporations of the present are much more
important players, but the point is that "foreign investment" is not an
institution that has become important only since 1970 (or since World War
II). Giovanni Arrighi (1994) has shown that finance capital has been an
important component of the commanding heights of the world-system since the
fourteenth century. The current floods and ebbs of world money are typical
of the late phase of very long "systemic cycles of accumulation."
TYPES OF GLOBALIZATION
The discourse about globalization has used the term to mean several
different things. For some writers, globalization means a new stage of
global capitalism that is qualitatively different from an earlier stage that
recently ended, though how it allegedly differs varies from author to author
(Chase-Dunn 1998, chaps. 3, 4). This essay will distinguish between two main
meanings of the term globalization: international integration and the
political-ideological discourse of global competitiveness.
Globalization as international integration needs to be further denoted as
international economic integration, international political integration, and
international cultural and communicative integration. Of course, each of
these subtypes has many aspects; but the point is that international
integration relates to the extent and intensity of links in a set of global
networks of interaction. We can determine empirically how economically
integrated were the societies on Earth in the late nineteenth century and
how "economically globalized" the world economic network is now (Chase-Dunn
et al. 1999). This question is separable from people's sense of their
linkages with one another.
Economic globalization is both a long-term trend and a cyclical phenomenon.
If we calculate the ratio of international investments to investments within
countries, the world economy had nearly as high a level of "investment
globalization" in 1910 as it did in 1990 (Bairoch 1996). Similarly, if we
calculate the ratio of total world international exports to the sum of all
the country GDPs, there was a very high peak of "trade globalization" just
before World War I, with a rapid decrease thereafter until 1950 and then a
slow rise to the current very high level of trade globalization.
Globalization as international economic integration therefore should be
understood as part of a long-term set of processes that have characterized
the world-system for centuries and, arguably, continue to describe the
system in the current period of global capitalism (Chase-Dunn 1998,
xiv-xvi).
The cyclical trend of international economic integration needs to be
understood in the context of those other cycles and trends. They imply that
future struggles for economic justice and democracy need to learn from
earlier struggles in the world-system context. While some populists have
suggested that progressive movements should again employ the tools of
economic nationalism to resist the powers of the "global princes of capital"
(Moore 1996; Mander and Goldsmith 1996), others contend that political
globalization of popular movements will be required to create a democratic
and collectively rational global commonwealth (Robinson 1998-99).
THE GLOBALIZATION PROJECT
The term globalization has been used in a different way to refer to "the
globalization project"-the abandonment of Keynesian models of national
development and a new emphasis on deregulation and opening national
commodity and financial markets to foreign trade and investment (McMichael
1996). This use points to the ideological aspects of the most recent wave of
international economic integration. The term I prefer for this turn in
global discourse is neoliberalism. The worldwide decline of the political
left may have predated the revolutions of 1989 and the demise of the Soviet
Union, but it was certainly also accelerated by these events. The structural
basis of the rise of the globalization project is the new level of
integration reached by the global capitalist class.
The internationalization of capital has long been an important part of the
trend toward economic globalization, and many claims to represent the
general interests of business have been made-indeed, by every modern
hegemon. But the real international integration of interests of the
capitalists in all parts of the system has reached a level greater than ever
before.
This is the part of the model of a global stage of capitalism that must be
taken most seriously, though it can certainly be overdone. The world-system
has now reached a point at which both the old interstate system, based on
separate national capitalist classes, and new institutions representing the
global interests of capitalists simultaneously exist and wield power. In
this light, each country can be seen to have an important ruling class
fraction that is allied with the transnational capitalist class.
Neoliberalism began as the Reagan-Thatcher attack on the welfare state and
labor unions. It evolved into the IMF's structural adjustment policies and
the triumphalism of global business after the demise of the Soviet Union. In
U.S. foreign policy, it has found expression in a new emphasis on "democracy
promotion." Rather than propping up military dictatorships in Latin America,
the emphasis has shifted toward coordinated action between the CIA and the
U.S. National Endowment for Democracy to promote electoral institutions
there and in other semiperipheral and peripheral regions (Robinson 1996).
Robinson points out that the kind of "low-intensity democracy" that is
promoted is really best understood as "polyarchy," a regime form in which
elites orchestrate a process of electoral competition and governance that
legitimates state power and undercuts more radical political alternatives
that might threaten their ability to maintain their wealth and power by
exploiting workers and peasants. Robinson convincingly argues that polyarchy
and democracy promotion are the political forms most congruent with a
globalized and neoliberal world economy in which capital is given free rein
to generate accumulation wherever profits are greatest. Globalized capital,
moreover, has been explicitly constructed to out-maneuver the institutional
contraints that had emerged from labor unions, socialist parties, and
welfare states, as well as economic nationalism and socialist institutions
in the periphery and semiperiphery.
Certainly, new incarnations of those older strategies will emerge in the
future as marginalized, dominated, and exploited peoples learn to resist the
new globalized forms of control. Indeed, some older ideas that may have been
ahead of their time may now come into their own. For example, labor
internationalism had become a tired phrase used as a fig leaf for Soviet
imperialism; but a new wave of labor internationalism will probably be the
only rational response to the latest wave of the globalization of capital.
The women's movement and the environmental movement have already developed
new transnational organizational structures, and such an approach is also
emerging among the indigenous peoples of the world (Wilmer 1993).
These new transnational "antisystemic movements" (Amin et al. 1982; Arrighi
et al. 1989) can be described as globalization from below. Alliances among
different groups can organize together across borders based on their common
desire to confront neoliberalism and global capital. Thus global capital
creates, for the first time, the real historical possibility for an
Earthwide antisystemic political alliance that can build a more humane and
sustainable world society.
THE SPIRAL OF CAPITALISM AND SOCIALISM The interaction between expansive
commodification and resistance movements can be denoted as "the spiral of
capitalism and socialism" (Boswell and Chase-Dunn 2000). The spiral metaphor
describes how capitalism and socialism feed each other's growth and
organizational forms. Capitalism spurs socialist responses by exploiting and
dominating peoples, and socialism spurs capitalism to expand its scale of
production and market integration and to revolutionize technology.
The historical development of the communist states can be explained as part
of a long-term, spiraling interaction between expanding capitalism and
socialist counterresponses. The Russian and Chinese revolutions were
socialist movements in the semiperiphery that intended to transform the
global logic of capitalism but ended up using socialist ideology to mobilize
industrialization for the purpose of catching up with core capitalism.
Defined broadly, socialist movements are those political and organizational
means by which people try to protect themselves from market forces,
exploitation, and domination, and to build more cooperative institutions.
The several industrial revolutions, by which capitalism has restructured
production and reorganized labor, have stimulated a series of political
organizations and institutions created by workers to protect their
livelihoods. This happened differently under different political and
economic conditions in different parts of the world-system. Skilled workers
created guilds and craft unions. Less-skilled workers created industrial
unions. Sometimes these coalesced into labor parties that played important
roles in supporting the development of political democracies, mass
education, and welfare states (Rueschemeyer et al. 1992). In other regions,
workers and peasants were less politically successful, but managed at least
to protect access to rural areas or subsistence plots for a fallback or
hedge against the insecurities of employment in capitalist enterprises. To
some extent, the burgeoning contemporary "informal sector" in both core and
peripheral societies provides such a fallback.
The mixed success of workers' organizations also had an impact on the
further development of capitalism. In some places, workers or communities
successfully secured higher wages or protected the environment in ways that
raised the costs of production for capital. When this happened, either
capitalists displaced workers by automating them out of jobs, or capital
migrated to places where fewer constraints allowed cheaper production.
The process of capital flight has been an important force behind the uneven
development of capitalism and the spreading scale of market integration for
centuries, as capitalism has grown ever more international and the size of
firms has increased. International markets became more and more important to
successful capitalist competition. Fordism, the employment of large numbers
of easily organizable workers in centralized production locations, was
partially supplanted by "flexible accumulation" (small firms producing
small, customized products) and global sourcing (the use of substitutable
components from broadly dispersed competing producers). These new production
strategies made traditional labor organizing approaches much less viable.
Socialists were able to gain state power in certain semiperipheral states
and to create political mechanisms for protection against competition with
core capital. This was not a wholly new phenomenon; capitalist
semiperipheral states had done similar things. But the communist states
claimed a fundamentally oppositional ideology, in which socialism was
allegedly a superior system that would eventually replace capitalism.
The content of the ideology may make some difference for the internal
organization of states and parties, but every contender must be able to
legitimate itself in the eyes and hearts of its cadre. The claim to
represent a qualitatively different and superior socioeconomic system is not
evidence that the communist states were ever able to become structurally
autonomous from world capitalism.
The communist states severely restricted the access of core capitalist firms
to their internal markets and raw materials, and this constraint on the
mobility of capital was an important force behind the post-World War II
upsurge in the spatial scale of market integration and a new revolution of
technology. In certain areas, capitalism was driven to further revolutionize
technology or to improve living conditions for workers and peasants because
of the demonstration effect of propinquity to a communist state.
U.S. support for state-led industrialization in Japan and Korea (in contrast
to U.S. policy in Latin America) is only understandable as a geopolitical
response to the Chinese revolution. The existence of "two superpowers"-one
capitalist and one communist-in the period since World War II provided a
fertile context for the success of international liberalism within the
"capitalist" bloc. This was the political-military basis of the rapid growth
of transnational corporations and the latest round of "time-space
compression" made possible by radically lowered transportation and
communication costs (Harvey 1989). This technological revolution has once
again restructured the international division of labor and created a new
regime of labor regulation called "flexible accumulation." The communist
states' long reintegration into the capitalist world-system took place
because they could not compete with the new form of capitalist regulation.
Thus capitalism spurs socialism, which spurs capitalism, which spurs
socialism again in a wheel that turns and turns while getting larger.
As trends in the last two decades have shown, austerity regimes,
deregulation, and marketization in nearly all the communist states occurred
during the same period as similar phenomena in noncommunist states. The
synchronicity and broad similarities between Reagan-Thatcher deregulation
and attacks on the welfare state, austerity socialism in most of the rest of
the world, and increasing pressures for marketization in the Soviet Union
and China are all related to the B-phase downturn of the Kondratieff wave,
as were the moves toward austerity and privatization in most semiperipheral
and peripheral states.1 The trend toward privatization, deregulation, and
market-based solutions among parties of the left in almost every country has
been thoroughly documented by Lipset (1991). Nearly all socialists with
access to political power have abandoned the idea of doing anything more
than buffing off the rough edges of capitalism.
The pressures of a stagnating world economy may affect national policies
differently from country to country, but the ability of any single national
society to construct collective rationality is limited by its interaction
with the larger system. The most recent expansion of capitalist integration,
termed "globalization of the economy," has made autarchic national economic
planning seem anachronistic. Yet political reactions against economic
globalization are now under way in the form of revived ex-communist parties,
economic nationalism, and a growing coalition of popular forces that are
critiquing the ideological hegemony of neoliberalism (see Mander and
Goldsmith 1996).
IMPLICATIONS FOR GUATEMALA
From the ground in Guatemala, it must appear that most of the global view as
described above is a dream of someone who lives on the moon.
The enormous problems of everyday life for the vast majority of Guatemalans
and the hectic pace of political events in the struggle to implement the
peace accords make it hard to consider the broad sweep of history or the
possibilities for constructing a more egalitarian and sustainable
world-system. Nevertheless, a historical understanding of the dynamics of
global capitalist development is necessary to comprehend current
developments and future possibilities.
What can we expect of the world-system in the next 50 years that will be
relevant to Guatemala? Having been in in a K-wave downswing (B-phase) since
the late 1960s, the world economy is now entering an upswing, or A-phase, in
which relative rates of economic growth will generally be higher. The fiscal
pressures on states will ease; labor will be in demand. The possibilities
for mobilizing workers and peasants to demand higher wages and better
working conditions should be greater than heretofore because firms and
states will be more willing to make compromises to keep business running
smoothly.
There is also a downside to this trend. The rate of ecological degradation
will increase as more resources are used in production. Late in K-wave
upswings, when states have abundant resources, is the point when wars occur
among core states (Goldstein 1988). If the economic hegemony of the United
States continues to decline in comparision to competing core powers
(Germany, Japan, China), the world will enter a dangerous window of
vulnerability to core warfare in the 2020s (Chase-Dunn and Podobnik 1999).
Catastrophic environmental disaster could be another possibility. These
portents should concern progressive movements everywhere.
The slow emergence of a world state will create the possibility for the
democratization of global political institutions. Popular movements could
act to block global state formation, but they might alternatively struggle
to build democratic and collective rationality into the new global
institutions. The hypothesis of semiperipheral development suggests that the
most transformative institutional innovations and the most powerful
challenges to capitalism will come from semi-peripheral regions in the
world-system. Mexico is the most obvious candidate that has direct relevance
for the Guatemalan situation. This said, a country such as Guatemala, with
its human and natural resources, could also be a fertile ground for
transformational action, especially in an age of global politics. In many
ways, the smaller countries have a greater interest in the unexplored
terrain of "globalization from below."2
Most recent interpretations of Central American history paint a picture of
each country with its own complicated and tumultuous experience, leading by
different paths to the same happy result: democracy (for example, Paige
1997). A world-systems perspective produces a different portrait. The
Central American countries have all been repeatedly restructured by world
market forces and geopolitics. The landed colonial patricians were displaced
by the agroexporters (who ruled in alliance with the military), and these,
in turn, have been partially supplanted by a new transnational elite of
neoliberals who seek to link the national economies more tightly with core
capital and global markets. It is fascinating to compare the
nineteenth-century liberal ideology and policies of the Central American
agroexporting elites (science, reason, privatization of communal resources)
with more recent neoliberal ideology and policies-competitiveness, fiscal
austerity, deregulation, and privatization. Both liberalism and
neoliberalism in Central America were and are combinations of imported ideas
and local adaptations that justify and facilitate new forms of exploitation
and outmaneuvering of rivals.
Popular movements emerged during the twentieth century in Mexico and Central
America in response to authoritarian rule, agrarian restructuring, and
grinding poverty, but the timing of these movements has varied from country
to country, depending on the shifting coalitions of elites and the changing
nature of agrarian class relations in different regions. The actions and
reactions of local rulers and the interventions of the United States have
been influenced by the sequencing of rebellions and revolutions in Central
America, Latin America, and the rest of the world. The Guatemalan
nationalist movement after World War II and the U.S. intervention to
overthrow the elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 (Gleijeses 1991)
was distinctive in its timing. The other Central American countries had
their popular upsurges and repressions in the late 1920s and 1930s.
John Markoff's 1996 and 1998 studies of waves of democratic movements and
institutional inventions show that these occurred on an interactive world
stage rather than in isolation in each country. This also needs to be said
of the revolutions of the twentieth century. Both the rebels and the forces
that sought to defeat them learned much from previous efforts elsewhere. The
world-systems perspective encourages us to see both the uniquenesses of
particular political situations and the overall picture of twentieth-century
resistance and repression. One irony of the differing sequences is the
current situation in southern Mexico and the quite different situation
across the border in Guatemala. After 30 years of civil war, Guatemalans are
tired of killing and want to make the peace work, while in southern Mexico a
long-dormant situation, the Chiapas struggle for land ownership, has heated
up.
William Robinson (1996, 1998, and in this issue) sees the emergence in each
Central American country of a new ruling class fraction of the domestic
elite that represents the interests of global capitalism; this transnational
elite promotes neoliberal policies and openness to global investment.
Robinson contends that the outcome of the 1980s struggles was a system of
elite-controlled elections in which this transnational elite gained the
greatest share of power.
This analysis is substantially accurate, but the Central American countries
have important differences that must be considered. One is the difference in
movement-repression sequences. More significant, as Robinson points out, is
that the strength of the neoliberal fraction varies substantially from
country to country, and is perhaps weakest in Guatemala. It is also
important to realize that the neoliberal domestic elite may sometimes have
interests that contradict the policies of the neoliberal international
organizations, such as the World Bank and the IMF. On these issues, the
domestic neoliberals may join the older landed elites in a common cause to
defend Guatemalan "sovereignty" against the meddling of the international
financial institutions (IFIs) and the UN. Nevertheless, although it now
controls the presidency, Guatemala's neoliberal transnational elite is not
very powerful against the older agroexporters and the military, at least in
comparison with the other Central American countries and Mexico. The
original Guatemalan "liberals"-the agroexporting elite-are reluctant to pay
income taxes, so the Guatemalan government must fund itself mainly by
extracting revenues from the poor by means of consumption taxes. The old
ruling families have found enough allies to prevent a tax reform that would
put the state on a firmer fiscal basis. Without such a reform, even
neoliberal development projects have little hope of success.
The issue of tax reform is one in which at least some of the domestic
neoliberals may have more in common with the landed elites than with their
transnational class allies as represented by the IFIs. On a visit to
Guatemala in 1997, then IMF director Michael Camdesus explicitly stated the
need for tax reform in Guatemala to put the state on a sound fiscal
foundation. The Consultative Group (a subcommittee of the Group of Seven,
the elite club of most-developed core countries) has used its financial
leverage (based on a huge commitment of loans and grants for development
projects) to try to move the implementation of the peace accords forward
(Ruthrauff 1998).
The Guatemalan case bears other important distinctions. The existence of
both poor ladinos (mestizo or culturally hispanic) and a large group of
indigenous people (indeed, a majority of the population) has added a strong
ethnic dynamic to intra-and interclass relations. This ethnic division among
the poor has made it easy for the rulers to pit exploited groups against one
another. This element also operates in southern Mexico, but it is much less
important in the other countries of Central America. The prospect for a
cross-border (Guatemala-Chiapas) Mayanist alliance that coordinates and
cooperates with the global indigenist movement (Wilmer 1993) could be a
powerful force in regional politics; but the importance of a strong working
alliance between indigenous and ladino popular groups cannot be
overemphasized. Indigenous identity needs to include a class analysis so
that common interests between ladinos and Maya can be conceptualized and
organized.
The need for this reconciliation of sorts is underscored by the current
upsurge in domestic crime. The Guatemalan revolutionary armed struggle that
began in the 1960s was never strong enough directly to threaten the power of
the central government, but it did stimulate a huge repressive effort
supported by the CIA, in which the official armed forces received massive
resources and recruited large numbers of poor young men from both the ladino
and Mayan regions. This method of suppressing the revolt provided an avenue
of employment and security that is, ironically, contracting since the peace
accords. This is probably the most important cause behind the current
outbreak of kidnapping and robbery.
GLOBALIZATION FROM BELOW, OR DELINKING?
Labor movements in Guatemala have already partially succeeded in forging new
implementations of the old notion of labor internationalism and in
mobilizing support from the United States and other core countries based on
concerns about human rights and the labor provisions of international trade
agreements (Frundt 1987; Armbruster 1998). The problems of cross-border
labor organizing and international labor solidarity are great, but the new
organizational terrain of global capitalism requires new strategies (Stevis
1998).
Because the globalization project has abrogated social compacts between
business and labor in core countries, especially the United States, there
are new possibilities for cooperation among Latin American and U.S. workers
and their organizations. John Sweeney, the president of the AFL-CIO, visited
the leaders of independent unions in Mexico City in 1997. This willingness
to look at new alliances is a welcome relief from the longstanding Cold War
approach to labor internationalism that was AFL-CIO practice until Sweeney's
reform group took the leadership. Armbruster (1998) reports that help from
the AFL-CIO was an important factor in the organizing success of the workers
at the Phillips-Van Heusen plant in Guatemala.
Women's movements in El Salvador have made important efforts to link their
struggles with sympathetic groups in other Central American countries and in
the United States. In Mexico, the resurgent electoral left, the agrarian
movements in Chiapas and Guerrero, and independent trade unions have found
that common opposition to neoliberalism is a uniting force. Some of Mexico's
popular leaders have made an effort to mobilize support from the United
States, but as yet, not many see this as part of a larger effort to
democratize both Mexico and the global system.
The emerging popular responses to globalization and neoliberalism face an
important and potentially divisive issue. One possibility for mobilizing
against global capitalism is "delinking" and self-reliance. Another, very
different approach is to respond to global capitalism by building global
democracy. The world-systems perspective has much to offer in considering
the value of these options.
The neoliberals have pronounced withdrawal from the capitalist world economy
as unthinkable, and many popular leaders seem to agree. The wonders of
technology and communications are alleged to be the highest prizes, and only
by playing the game of competitiveness can a developing country have access
to these. But some critics are now questioning whether the "necessity" of
openness to the global economy is worth the costs. This is a healthy
response because it unmasks many of the ideological presuppositions of
neoliberalism. People need housing, clean water, and healthy food; it is not
necessary to be able to program the microwave oven from the car radio.
Still, new information technologies can make it easier than ever to organize
transnational movements. Maximum advantage needs be made of these while
holding the light to justifications of submission based on alleged economic
necessity.
The notion that self-reliance is an anachronism needs to be examined in
historical perspective. Protectionism and national mobilization of
development have been useful and successful strategies in the past. The
semiperipheral national societies that later became hegemons in the
Eurocentered world-system (England, the United States) all utilized tariff
protectionism and state-sponsored mobilization to move themselves up the
value-added hierarchy. The communist states used self-reliance and socialist
ideology to try to establish a new mode of accumulation, though they ended
up trying hardest to catch up with core capitalism. The demise of the
communist states is also alleged to prove the worthlessness of state
planning and self-reliant economic nationalism. But the successful practice
of upward mobility in the world-system demonstrates the value that state
intervention and protection of certain activities can have (Evans 1995).
These strategies in the communist states did indeed "work" in terms of
industrialization and urbanization, though the utopias they were intended to
forge did not actually result. Instead, capitalism expanded and
reincorporated these semiperipheral challengers. Today, this picture of
challenge and response needs to take in the higher degree of economic and
political integration of the current world-system. It is undoubtedly
costlier to drop out of a more integrated system than to drop out of a less
integrated one, so the costs of going it alone have increased. These costs
have always been higher for small countries, such as those in Central
America. This is why small countries have a greater interest in cross-border
cooperation among popular movements. But the institutions of nationalism and
the existing rules of the interstate system make such cooperation difficult.
Popular movements in Guatemala face the dilemma of whether to focus on local
and national-level institutions and alliances or on international and global
ones. Would it be more productive to gain a voice in the national state and
to use national sovereignty to provide protection from global market and
geopolitical forces, or to try to reform the world-system by promoting
popular democracy? The national route has a long history and is supported by
the existing institutions, while the international route is little
understood and in great need of imagination. Global democracy can be defined
abstractly, but what would it mean in practice?
Globalization from below would mean choosing the international alternative.
In practice, neither a purely national strategy nor a purely global one
would work for Guatemala, or any other country in the contemporary context.
So the real problem is to decide on the mix and to pursue coordinated and
complimentary approaches.
POLYARCHY AND BEYOND Robinson's analysis raises another issue in the
Guatemalan situation. Guatemala has not yet really achieved polyarchy, let
alone real democracy. Polyarchy, while it may be largely a smokescreen for
continued domination and inequality, is undoubtedly better than rule by the
military. The implementation of the peace accords has gone very slowly; some
observers have wondered if the current government is seriously committed to
the process (for example, Jonas, this issue). The main problem, though, is
that the weak neoliberal elite fraction cannot afford to push too hard on
the military or the agroexporting elite families.
Opposition to neoliberal policies should also serve as a unifying strategy
for different kinds of popular movements in Guatemala. Globalization from
below, in concert with popular forces in other Central American countries
and Mexico, would most naturally be organized around opposition to
neoliberal policies and institutions.
In Guatemala, however, it might make tactical sense for the popular forces
to ally themselves with the transnational neoliberals and the IFIs in the
short run, so as to obtain concessions from the agroexport dynasties
regarding the fiscal strength of the state and demilitarization. The
implementation of the peace accords has at least the possibility of
establishing the trappings of an electoral democracy with popular
participation. Under these conditions, the campaign against neoliberalism
might need to be postponed.
This does not mean that popular movements should keep quiet. I agree with
Robinson that strong popular movements in Guatemala can provide the support
that the global and local neoliberals need to push through peace accord
implementation. Once electoral democracy with popular participation is
firmly in place, the campaign against neoliberal policies can commence in
earnest. In the meantime, the popular movements need to learn about the
history of the world-system and the globalization project. This, and the
pursuit of further international popular alliances, will make it possible
for Guatemalans to benefit from, and contribute to, globalization from
below. Global democracy begins at home.
NOTES
An earlier version of this article was presented at the National Science
Foundation-sponsored conference on Guatemalan Development and
Democratization: Proactive Responses to Globalization, March 26-28, 1998,
Universidad del Valle, Guatemala. Thanks to Patricia Landolt, Susanne Jonas,
John A. Booth, and Bill Robinson for their suggestions.
1. The Kondratieff wave (K-wave) describes a worldwide economic cycle with a
period of 40 to 60 years in which the relative rate of economic activity
increases (during "A-phase" upswings) and then decreases (during "B-phase"
periods of slower growth or stagnation).
2. What is needed here is a strong linkage between the trajectory of the
world-system and the situation in Guatemala today. The theoretical
perspective presented above would be much more useful if it were combined
with a world-system history and formal comparative analysis that looks at
the last two hundred years in local, regional, continental, and global
frameworks from the focal point of the Guatemalan people. This research
needs to be done. In its absence, I present a commentary on the current
situation that uses insights from the longterm, large-scale perspective
presented above.
REFERENCES
Amin, Samir, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
1982. Dynamics of Global Crisis. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Armbruster, Ralph. 1998. Cross-Border Labor Organizing in the Garment and
Automobile Industries: The Phillips Van-Heusen and Ford Cuautitlan Cases.
Journal of World-Systems Research 4: 20-41. http://csf.colorado.
edu/wsystems/jwsr.html>
Arnson, Cynthia J. 1999. Comparative Peace Processes in Latin America.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Arrighi, Giovanni. 1994. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the
Origins of Our Times. London: Verso.
Arrighi, Giovanni, Terence K. Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1989.
Antisystemic Movements. London: Verso.
Bairoch, Paul. 1996. Globalization Myths and Realities: One Century of
External Trade and Foreign Investment. In States Against Markets: The Limits
of Globalization, ed. Robert Boyer and Daniel Drache. London: Routledge.
173-92.
Blanton, Richard, Stephen A. Kowalewski, and Gary Feinman. 1992. The Meso-
american World System. Review 15, 3 (Summer): 418-26. Binghamton, NY: State
University of New York, Fernand Braudel Center.
Boswell, Terry, and Christopher Chase-Dunn. 2000. The Spiral of Capitalism
and Socialism: Toward Global Democracy. Boulder: Lynne Rienner.
Chase-Dunn, Christopher. 1998. Global Formation: Structures of the
World-Economy. 2d ed. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
Chase-Dunn, Christopher, and Bruce Podobnik. 1999. The Next World War:
World-System Cycles and Trends. In Bornschier and Chase-Dunn 1999. 40-65.
Chase-Dunn, Christopher, and Peter Grimes. 1995. World-Systems Analysis.
Annual Review of Sociology 21: 387-417.
Chase-Dunn, Christopher, and Thomas D. Hall. 1997. Rise and Demise:
Comparing World-Systems. Boulder: Westview.
Chase-Dunn, Christopher, Yukio Kawano, and Benjamin Brewer. 1999. Economic
Globalization Since 1795: Waves of Integration in the Modern World-System.
Paper presented at the International Studies Association annual meeting,
Washington, DC, February 20. http://csf.colorado.edu/
wsystems/archive/papers/c-d&hall/isa99b/isa99b.htm>
Evans, Peter. 1995. Embedded Autonomy. States and Industrial Transformation.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Frundt, Henry J. 1987. Refreshing Pauses: Coca-Cola and Human Rights in
Guatemala. New York: Praeger.
Gleijeses, Piero. 1991. Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the
United States, 1944-1954. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Goldstein, Joshua. 1988. Long Cycles: Prosperity and War in the Modern Age.
New Haven: Yale University Press.
Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge, MA:
Blackwell. Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1991. No Third Way: A Comparative
Perspective on the Left. In The Crisis of Leninism and the Decline of the
Left: The Revolutions of 1989, ed. Daniel Chirot. Seattle: University of
Washington Press. 183-232.
Mander, Jerry, and Edward Goldsmith, eds. 1996. The Case Against The Global
Economy, And For a Turn Toward the Local. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.
Marer, Paul, Janos Arvay, John O'Connor, and Dan Swenson. 1991. Historically
Planned Economies: A Guide to the Data. Washington, DC: International Bank
for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank), Socioeconomic Data Division
and Socialist Economies Reform Unit.
Markoff, John. 1996. Waves of Democracy Social Movements and Political
Change. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.
-.1998 From Center to Periphery and Back Again: The Geography of Democratic
Innovation. In Extending Citizenship, Reconfiguring States, ed. Michael
Hanagan and Charles Tilly. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. 229-46.
McMichael, Philip. 1996. Development and Social Change. A Global
Perspective. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.
Moore, Richard K. 1996. On Saving Democracy: A Contribution to a
Conversation About Global Praxis on the World-Systems Network (WSN).
http://csf.Colorado.edu:70/00/wsystems/praxis/globprax>
Murphy, Craig N. 1994. International Organization and Industrial Change:
Global Governance Since 1850. New York: Oxford University Press.
Paige, Jeffery M. 1997. Coffee and Power. Revolution and the Rise of
Democracy in Central America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Robinson, William I. 1996. Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S.
Intervention, and Hegemony. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
-.1998. Neo-liberalism, the Global Elite, and the Guatemalan Transition: A
Critical Macrosocial Analysis. Paper presented at the conference "Guatemalan
Development and Democratization: Proactive Responses to Globalization,"
Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, Guatemala City, March 26-28.
-.1998-99. Latin America and Global Capitalism. Race and Class 40, 2-3:
111-31.
Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens. 1992.
Capitalist Development and Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ruthrauff, John. 1998. The Guatemala Peace Process, the World Bank, and the
Interamerican Development Bank. Paper presented at the conference
"Guatemalan Development and Democratization: Proactive Responses to
Globalization," Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, Guatemala City, March
26-28.
Shannon, Thomas R. 1996. An Introduction to the World-System Perspective.
Boulder: Westview Press.
Stevis, Dimitris. 1998. International Labor Organizations, 1864-1997: The
Weight of History and the Challenges of the Present. Journal of
World-Systems Research 4: 52-75. http://csf.Colorado.edu/wsystems/jwsr.html>
Wilmer, Franke. 1993. The Indigenous Voice in World Politics. Newbury Park,
CA: Sage.
Christopher Chase-Dunn is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and director
of the Institute for Research on World-Systems at the University of
California, Riverside. His Global Formation: Structures of the World-Economy
was republished in 1998. He is coauthor (with Terry Boswell) of The Spiral
of Capitalism and Socialism: Toward Global Democracy (2000). His current
research examines the trajectories of economic and political globalization
over the past two hundred years.
Chase-Dunn presents a short summary of the world-systems perspective on
globalization as relevant to considering the possibilities and probabilities
of Guatemala's prospects for democracy and development. Guatemala's
structural position in the larger global political economy is examined.
Copyright Journal of Interamerican Studies Winter 2000 
Quellen:UMI 
JOURNAL OF INTERAMERICAN TUDIES AND WORLD AFFAIRS 01/2000 
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
21Aug1999 SINGAPORE: The advantage of economics. [CORRECTED] 
By Ho Kwon Ping.
I OWE my degree in Economics to the Internal Security Department (ISD). When
I completed my National Service in 1975 I decided to apply to the then
University of Singapore (SU) as a mature student, since I had already
studied three years in two other universities - Tunghai in Taiwan and
Stanford in California. But I had to start all over as a freshman, which was
rather boring, so I hardly attended classes and did only what was necessary
to pass the exams.
When I was detained by the ISD in 1977 just before the second-year exams, I
was a pretty mediocre student, spending little time in lectures and most of
my time as the Singapore correspondent of the Far Eastern Economic Review
(as well as courting my then girlfriend and now wife, Claire Chiang).
I half-expected to fail the upcoming exams. But the ISD intervened. I
discovered that solitary confinement for two months focuses one's mind very
well, and the ISD was kind enough to allow me to prepare for the exams. I
ended up not only passing the exams but winning the Singapore Employers'
Federation Medal for my scores.
I would not, however, recommend this rather unorthodox way to do well in
exams.
Ever since my student activism days I had felt that economics was the
solution to the problems of poverty, underdevelopment and exploitation. In
Stanford, I was influenced by Prof John Gurley, a neo-Marxist economist who
introduced me to the writings of Baran and Sweezy with their notions of
monopoly capital, and Andre Gunder Frank and the dependency theorists.
After I was thrown out of Stanford for my student activities, did my stint
of National Service and enrolled in the Economics Department of the SU, I
was a little older and wiser, but I still saw development economics as the
panacea for the world's problems. I wanted to be an international civil
servant working for the UN Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad) or
similar pro-development institutions or writing on development issues. So I
sent unsolicited articles to the Far Eastern Economic Review and eventually
became its Singapore correspondent.
I again landed into trouble, and after release from detention, just focused
on my last year in SU. I chose not to do my Honours, and instead left
Singapore with my new bride to be the economics editor of FEER in Hongkong.
The four years in Hongkong, just-married but still childless and travelling
all over the region writing on issues related to development economics, was
one of the happiest periods of my life. I could examine the practice - or
malpractice - of economics in real life. I even considered an academic
career, and had actually accepted an offer to be a research fellow at
INSEAD, the European business university. But my father suffered a stroke
and I left journalism and a possible academic life to be a businessman.
I have always felt that a grounding in economics is fundamental to
understanding the world. One (perhaps the only!) of the few concepts which
Marx got right, I think, is the notion that the economic substructure
ultimately determines the shape of the socio-cultural-political
superstructure. I would not advocate every young person to aspire to become
an economist, but I would urge every student to study and understand basic
economics.
Unfortunately, I find that much of the teaching of economics in our junior
colleges and universities is highly technical, and turns off young people
before making them understand the "big picture" of the role of economics in
world history and current events, and how economics underpins virtually
every relationship - micro or macro, personal or institutional,
international or global.
Economics is actually an exciting subject - I was first drawn to it by
Gunnar Myrdal's appropriately titled seminal book The Asian Drama - and look
at the still unfolding political upheavals caused by arcane economic issues
such as exchange rates and capital flows. But somehow economics lecturers
and textbooks are very successful at making it into a dry and obscure
subject which young people like my JC-age son find very heavy plodding.
Hopefully, some of the excitement and drama - and indeed the inherent
idealism behind the dismal science - of economics will be captured in the
more creative pedagogy which should soon infuse our classrooms. In the new
Singapore Management University which I chair, we hope to introduce to all
business students compulsory courses in economics which will be less
technical and more conceptual.
In my own work today, most of the technical theories I learnt have been
forgotten. But I have retained, almost as a way of thinking, fundamental
economics concepts such as opportunity costs and trade-offs. They and other
basic economics concepts shape the way I view the world.
And it has been extremely useful - with an economics background and a
regional journalistic experience, I find that wherever I consider making an
investment in a new country, I first zero in on the macro-economic
performance of the economy. That gives me a good feel of the investment
climate before considering the specific project.
If I had a choice to start all over again, would I still choose Economics as
my degree subject? my son asked me the other day as we discussed his post-JC
future. My answer was "yes".
My life has taken me from aspiring to be an international civil servant or
an academic, to actually becoming a journalist and then a businessman - but
I know now that regardless of whatever I wanted to be or have become, my
background in economics has given me a perspective with which to observe,
analyse and understand the world around me.
Properly taught, economics makes us understand the underlying relationships
behind human behaviour and events. And armed with this understanding, we
embark on any future career with an advantage.
Mr Ho is president of the Wah Chang/Thai Wah Group. He is also chairman of
Singapore Power, Singapore Institute of Management and Singapore Management
University.
(c) 1999 Singapore Press Holdings Limited.
CORRECTION - AN article by Ho Kwon Ping headlined "The advantage of
economics", reproduced in BT on Aug 21, omitted to mention that it first
appeared in the July issue of Economics Newsletter, published by the
National University of Singapore's Department of Economics. Mr Ho wrote it
for the Distinguished Alumnus column. We are sorry for the omission.
(STBT, 25/08/99) 
Quellen:BUSINESS TIMES (SINGAPORE) 21/08/1999 
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
01Jul1999 USA: Looking back - Radical criminology and social movements. 
By Shank, Gregory.
THE LAUNCHING OF CRIME AND SOCIAL JUSTICE (NOW SOCIAL JUSTICE) IN 1974 WAS a
logical extension of the creation of alternative - some thought
revolutionary - institutions that had their roots in the period spanning the
late 1960s to 1975: the free universities, cultural expressions like the San
Francisco Mime Troupe, the Bay Guardian, and research groups like the North
American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) that bridged the academic and
off-campus "Movement" worlds (the civil rights, Black and Chicano Power,
antiwar, gay liberation, and feminist impulses that gave such research its
political poignancy). 1 In that sense, even though Crime and Social Justice
was the first radical criminology journal in the United States, it began
appropriately without much fanfare. Yet the year itself was anything but
unremarkable. In the popular culture, the jazz world lost Duke Ellington,
Bob Dylan was "Tangled up in Blue" on his Blood on the Tracks album,
Muhammad Ali danced like a butterfly and stung like abee, and Hank Aaron
eclipsed Babe Ruth's home run record. Although the Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS) had already self-destructed by splintering into a group
promoting symbolic violence and another intent on democratic-centralist
oblivion, college campuses were still highly politicized due to the war in
Indochina. Nonetheless, academic repression was beginning to take its toll
(disrupting the livelihoods of faculty members who were among the founders
of the journal). The Black Panther Party had split over whether to achieve
their goals via a peaceful electoral strategy promoted by Bobby Seale and
Huey P. Newton or through Eldridge Cleaver's last-gasp revolutionism (before
he opted for reactionary politics), and the Black liberation movement had
become polarized between Marxist and cultural nationalist positions. The
Native American armed occupation of Wounded Knee began in 1973, but FBI
repression at Pine Ridge remained intense through 1976. Meanwhile, the
anti-rape movement had made significant progress as part of the larger
women's movement, and prison reform was still a serious topic.
The Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), who like some early radical
criminologists romanticized prisoners, stormed onto the scene and kidnapped
Patricia Hearst from a home near the journal's Berkeley office. It was not
long before SLA members were incinerated on real-time TV. This episode
helped to undermine much of the remaining public support the prisoner
movement enjoyed and reinvigorated right-wing countersubversive forces that
had run perilously short of genuine Communists to persecute. They seized
upon the "international terrorism" issue by making spurious links between
the SLA, the Weather Underground, Germany's Baader-Meinhof group, the
Italian Red Brigades, the Angry Brigade (a British terrorist group founded
on the principles of the Enrages of 1968 France), and the PLO, even though
from 1965 to 1976 a substantial number of incidents involving political
violence were attributable to right-wing and racist sources. The grand jury
had become a police state instrument during its heyday between 1970 and
1974. Domestic government spying was intense; Francis Ford Coppola's movie,
The Conversation, dramatized the Watergate-era paranoia over wiretapping,
invasion of privacy, and the apparent absence of conscience at the highest
levels of government. Between 1957 and 1974, the FBI's COINTELPRO operation
kept files on nearly 500,000 Americans whom J. Edgar Hoover and other FBI
officials considered to be subversives or potential "national security
risks" and infiltrated organizations such as the Medical Committee for Human
Rights and the National Lawyers Guild, not to mention the Black Panther
Party and the American Indian Movement.
Federal intervention in the 1970s transformed U.S. law enforcement into the
largest, most expensive, and most punitive system of justice in the world. A
"police-industrial complex" was created through enormous subsidies and an
integration of military expertise, command and control techniques, and
weapons, communications, and data collection technology. By 1974, the police
received nearly 60% of the nation's $15 billion criminal justice budget -
eight times the amount allocated a decade earlier. The number of police
officers in this country nearly doubled in the decade between 1965 and 1975.
Police helicopters hovered over barrios and housing projects; paramilitary
SWAT units learned team policing concepts that adapted Vietnam-era armed
responses. African American, Latino, and left organizations opposed these
trends and called for civilian review boards and "community control," but to
little avail. In the end, the U.S. became even more insecure about crime and
was readied for the prison explosion of the 1980s and 1990s.
Articles of impeachment were drafted against President ("Tricky Dick") Nixon
in 1974 during the political and constitutional crisis known as the
Watergate scandal. Having lost the confidence of U.S. ruling circles, Nixon
was forced from office. In Vietnam, fighting escalated and the United States
would soon be forced to exit in disarray. Rightist dictatorships collapsed
in Portugal (1974), Greece (1974), and Spain (with Franco's death in 1975).
With this came the precondition for united European democracies to coalesce
into a future economic superpower, but it also unleashed liberation
movements in Africa as Portugal undertook immediate decolonization. In
France and Italy, the balance of forces had swung substantially to the left.
The end of the great postwar economic boom of 1945 to 1973 was punctuated by
the OPEC oil price hike. A world economic recession ensued. The 1974
recession under President Ford was perhaps the deepest cyclical downturn
since the 1930s and was exacerbated by a military slowdown under conditions
of deescalation and detente that deprived the U.S. economy of a defense
against recession that had been relied upon in the 1960s. Globalization had
entered a new monetary and financial regime in response to "stagflation" -
low growth due to an absence of profitable investments, low productivity,
and rising prices. Japan's economy showed zero growth from 1974 to 1975 and
state managers in Europe's industrial powers were overwhelmed by high
unemployment and the ineffectiveness of traditional Keynesian remedies.
Corporate power had attained a global reach, first as multinationals and
then as transnationals, and in 1973 the corporate-political elite created a
corresponding policy-making institution, the Trilateral Commission, with the
"ungovernability of democracies" high on the agenda.
Within such an ambiance, a progressive criminology movement emerged
primarily at U.C. Berkeley's School of Criminology to challenge the
traditional guardians of order and to begin the work of transforming the
self-crippled discourse of technicians (to use Alvin Gouldner's phrase).
With its commitment to combining radical analysis with political organizing,
it is perhaps miraculous that the enterprise survived at all in what is
probably the most reactionary field in the social sciences. The progressive
criminology movement was international in scope: it was not confined to one
national culture, but varied in its cultural and political origins. It was
conditioned by the events of 1968 - the French May, the Italian "Hot
Autumn," the German 68er "cultural revolution" and student movement, and the
year of the barricade in the U.S., in short, the worldwide student rebellion
together with the My Lai massacre and Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the Soviet
occupation of Czechoslovakia, and Martin Luther King's assassination. In
1968, the School of Criminology at Berkeley had a radical presence that
actively promoted student power, antiwar and anti-imperialist politics, and
was close to the Black Panthers in Oakland. We were active in the
campus-wide strike led by the Third World Liberation Front in 1969, the
massive community and student struggle known as "People's Park," the
struggle against the use of behavioral modification and brain surgery in
prison, as well as the campaign for community control of the police in 1971.
The Bay Area Women Against Rape came into existence in 1971. In the summer
of 1972, the Union of Radical Criminologists (URC) was formed by a small
group of students and teachers at the Berkeley School of Criminology with
the aim of becoming a national organization, promoting radical ideas and
community projects, as well as supporting the victims of academic
repression.
The URC was not long lasting, but it served as an important transitional
organization. It had a hand in the anthology, Policing America, edited by
Tony Platt and Lynn Cooper. In 1973, the URC and NACLA jointly initiated the
Center for Research on Criminal Justice. Its research on repression and
national trends conducted for the purpose of serving organizations
struggling against the criminal justice system - culminated in the 1975
classic, The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove: An Analysis of the U.S. Police.
Crime and Social Justice began as a task group within URC and commenced
publication in 1974. Its founders saw the need for a publication that would
"bring together the analyses and programs of people working to build a
movement to overcome the oppressive criminal justice system and the system
of exploitation it supports." A global perspective was built into the
initial issues because we saw that the U.S. government was involved in
developing and legitimizing repressive criminal justice systems around the
world. Indeed, to reduce criminology to domestic issues was to unnecessarily
restrict our understanding of repression and resistance. The journal has
endured, independent of institutional support, under various titles ever
since. Some publishing know-how carried over from staff members who had also
worked on Issues in Criminology (1965 to 1975), a publication of the
graduate students at Berkeley's School of Criminology that was an outgrowth
of the Free Speech Movement.
The editorial mandate of Social Justice has expanded over the years beyond
issues of crime, punishment, and social control to encompass globalism,
international human rights and civil rights domestically, border and
immigration issues, environmental victims and health and safety issues,
critiques of the state and welfare reform strategies, as well as analyses of
gender-and ethnicity-based inequalities. The journal remains true to its
initial task of debunking and transforming agency-determined criminal
justice research, but it has also incorporated elements of world-systems
analysis, which took shape in the 1970s as a form of critique capable of
explaining America's imperial role in the global system known as historical
capitalism. Articulate world-systems theorists, Immanuel Wallerstein and
Chris Chase-Dunn, belong to our advisory board, and Andre Gunder Frank
remains a valued contributor and at-large adviser. Incorporation of the
worldsystems perspective preceded, but was also reinforced by, the 1988
merger of Crime and Social Justice and Contemporary Marxism (1980 to 1987).
Many on the latter staff had been members of NACLA's West Coast office,
which accounts for much of the rich "Americanist" perspective that would
appear in the pages of Social Justice. Before the merger, the two journals
were projects of Global Options, a nonprofit institute in San Francisco
committed to research and advocacy on world affairs that was founded in
1986.
Uncommon Wealth:
The Contribution of Great Britain, Canada, and Australia
European critical criminologists established the largely academic,
left-ofcenter European Society for the Study of Deviance and Social Control,
whose first conference was organized by Mario Simondi, Stan Cohen, Ian
Taylor, and Karl Schumann in September 1973. Members of the Crime and Social
Justice Collective participated. The British component emerged in 1968 - a
year of student occupations in Britain, the emergence of Tariq Ali as a
student leader, an antiVietnam demonstration in London that turned into a
battle with police outside the U.S. embassy, and Enoch Powell's prediction
of "rivers of blood" in an impending race war - from a group consisting of
left activists Laurie Taylor, Stan Cohen, Mary McIntosh, Ian Taylor, Paul
Walton, and Jock Young. In 1973, the latter three, who became Contributing
Editors to our journal, published The New Criminology. This influential work
was an ironically titled critique, as it was a return to European grand
sociological theory, although some at the time would have preferred its
focus to be beyond criminology. A collective work, it had its origins in the
National Deviancy Conference, which was formed by the 1968 group and grew to
some 400 members who shared a dissatisfaction with European social democracy
and a desire to expose the criminogenic nature of British capitalism. This
United Kingdom-based body of sociologists and individuals involved in social
action (on behalf of squatters, radical social workers, and the prisoners'
union) did its best to support the group of radicals under attack at
Berkeley's School of Criminology.
Many of the original participants are still active, along with newer faces.2
From this group and others working along similar lines flowed a rich
literature, ranging from those of Stuart Hall and his associate's work at
the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies to "realist"
criminology, social control theory generally, and variants on postmodern
theory. Hall, long one of our Contributing Editors, was a major figure in
the revival of the British Left in the 1960s and 1970s and remains a
visionary race theorist in the 1990s. The work of this British group
resonated with that being done in the U.S. since the U.K. also experienced a
massive shift to coercion in the 1970s, with the "birth of the `law and
order' society," as Stuart Hall, Charles Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John
Clarke, and Brian Roberts argued in Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State,
and Law and Order. The Labour government then in power presided over a
deteriorating economy, an annual inflation rate above 25%, unrest in
Northern Ireland, countercultural drug use, squatters, nonwhite immigration,
and a general "crisis of hegemony." The term "mugging" was imported from the
U.S. in the 1972 to 1973 period into British culture as an image and set of
relationships already condensed in U.S. law enforcement ideology - crime,
black youth, fear of social disorder, and the conviction that society had
become too permissive toward crime and criminals. Policing the Crisis made
good use of Marxist cultural theory inflected through Gramsci's theory of
hegemony and an Althusserian conception of the media as an ideological state
apparatus largely concerned with the reproduction of dominant ideologies.
Another important theorist, Paul Gilroy, also discussed the evolution of
"race" as a policing problem and the transformation of urban disturbances in
the 1970s into a race problem. Tony Bunyan made a significant contribution
with his The Political Police in Britain, through his work on the
now-defunct State Research, and through police monitoring units, including
that of the Greater London Council. Another critical approach came from
Christopher Williams, whose Environmental Victims (Vol. 23, No. 4) we
published in 1996. Currently, despite Prime Minister Tony Blair's
tough-on-crime stance, the British are even less secure in terms of
environmental and criminal victimization, and in terms of the workplace.
The Canadian movement, which was strongly influenced culturally and
politically by Europe and the U.S., began to congeal in 1975. Marie-Andr6e
Bertrand was a Contributing Editor to our journal at the time its first
issue appeared. She had experienced the wave of neoconservatism that
engulfed the Universite de Montreal in reaction to the 1968 uprisings before
coming to Berkeley asa visiting professor in 1973. 'Another early
participant, Yvon Dandurand, noted in 1975 that attempts to create a radical
criminology periodical had failed and that radical approaches to criminology
appeared in the community at large and in struggles for social justice (such
as Claire Culhane's work with the Prisoners' Rights Group, First Nations
struggles, and those concerned with police surveillance), rather than in
academia. Over 10 years later, when we published Canada and the U.S:
Criminal Justice Connections (CSJ No. 26, edited by R.S. Ratner), Canada
still lacked a radical criminology journal. That changed with the
inauguration of the Journal of Human Justice (1989-1995), spearheaded by
Chuck Reasons, Tulio Caputo, Brian MacLean, R.S. Ratner, Paul Havemann, and
others. (In 1996, that title continued as Critical Criminology: An
International Journal, a publication of the Critical Criminology Division of
the American Society of Criminology.)
In 1974, the Bathurst riot occurred in Australia, destroying the prison and
leading to aperiod of reform in the prison system. Gang violence and street
assaults were media and popular concerns in the mid-1960s and early 1970s, a
decade of relative affluence. Mass Vietnam protests, opposition to the 1972
South African rugby tour, and the rise of Koori (aboriginal) protest and
militancy generated a physical contest over public space, the streets, and a
volatile ideological climate into which issues of crime, especially "street
crime," were inserted. In this climate, the Alternative Criminology Journal
(1975 to 1981), edited by David Brown, sought to radicalize criminology by
ending its separation as a separate discipline, divorced from political
theory and political economy. Writing in Law in Context: A Socio-Legal
Journal (Pat O'Malley and Kit Carsen served on it Editorial Board), Adrian
Howe argued, as had Elliott Currie in 1974, that the point, however, was to
get out of criminology and to reconceptualize the whole terrain as a
sociology of law, crime, and criminalization. Although Australia had been
incorporated as a new subsystem in the world-system through the "Pacific Rim
Strategy," it has resisted some of the more punitive responses to a law and
order culture, such as "three strikes" legislation and the death penalty,
which American crime policy embodies. Some of this resistance comes to
Australia via Europe. In an "Australian response" to the theme of "Law and
Order for Progressives?" in our journal, Gill Boehringer, Dave Brown,
Brendan Edgeworth, Russell Hogg, and Ian Ramsay argued in favor of
broadening the debate over crime to include domestic violence, health and
safety, and the practices and control of state agencies such as the police.
Later, Pat O'Malley guest edited an issue of Social Justice entitled The
Politics of Empowerment in Australia (Vol. 16, No. 3, 1989) that fulfills
that objective while exploring Australia's role in the global system.
Italian Critical Currents
Events in Italy during our founding years paralleled many experienced in the
U.S., with several major exceptions. One was the amazing sea of red banners
during huge mobilizations of the Italian Communist Party, the labor
movement, and an insurgent extra-parliamentary Left I had witnessed during
Italy's "Hot Autumn" in 1969. Such wide-scale support for the "Italian Road
to Socialism" equally impressed members of Crime and Social Justice
Collective who attended the European Society for the Study of Deviance and
Social Control in Florence in 1973. Public confidence in the government had
plummeted and, by 1974, Italy briefly lacked a government altogether. The
Red Brigades emerged in the early 1970s, a time of worsening economic
problems and great political turbulence, with saber-rattling on the Right,
kidnappings, bombings of major Italian cities, and selective shootings,
especially of law enforcement officers. The CIA poured in millions of
dollars to prevent the Communists from coming to power (also a goal of the
Red Brigades) and trained the Italian security services to confront
disorders and student demonstrations, to prepare dossiers, and make use of
bank data and the tax returns of individual citizens. An aggressive Italian
judiciary and law-enforcement apparatus made innovative use of repentant and
confessed criminals turned state's witnesses, first to quell the Red
Brigades and then to take on the Mafia.
There was some exchange between the extra-parliamentary opposition (Lotta
Continua, Il Manifesto, and Potere Operaio) and intellectual circles and the
student movement. Lotta Continua was active in the prisoners' movement. At
the time, prisons were at the boiling point in Britain, the U.S., Australia,
Canada, and Italy. Not surprisingly, Dario Melossi and Massimo Pavarini
focused their work on the origins of the penitentiary system. Their The
Prison and the Factory builds on Marx' concept of primitive accumulation.
They reintroduced Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer's Punishment and Social
Structure and later offered a critique of Michel Foucault's Discipline and
Punishment, which was influenced, like many of the works developed in that
milieu, by the theoretical work of Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser.
Melossi was a kindred spirit to our journal group and we had the pleasure of
meeting him during his brief research sojourn in Berkeley. He was a founder
and member of the Bologna School, which was responsible for the publication
of La Questione Criminale: Rivista di Ricerca e Dibattito su Devianza e
Controllo Sociale up to the 1980s and of Dei Delitti e delle Pene in the
1990s. Alessandro Baratta and Massimo Pavarini recently resuscitated Dei
Delitti e delle Pene (under the auspices of the Italian National Research
Council) after a three-year hiatus, with the aim of interpreting the changes
in crime and the social order within the processes of European integration
and economic globalization, of analyzing discourses on crime and punishment,
and of theorizing on issues such as the needs for safety and its relation to
constitutional and human rights. Others from the early period, including
Tamar Pitch, Vincenzo Ruggiero, and others, still work together through that
journal.
In 1989, members of the Social Justice Editorial Board would work with the
International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples to compile an
issue entitled Human Rights and People's Rights: Views from North and South.
The League was founded in 1976 by an Italian member of Parliament, Lelio
Basso, who before his death in 1978 made clear his belief that socialism
without democracy was not possible, just as a democratic order without
activism was not possible. We knew of Basso's work in the early 1970s, when
he presented a paper in Santiago, Chile, on the use of legality in the phase
of transition to socialism, as well as that of Giovanni Arrighi, who has
made an important contribution to the world-systems literature.
The Critical Legacy in Germany
In the Federal Republic of Germany, the SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher
Studentenbund) became the core of a widespread student rebellion against
reactionary regimes in the Third World, against U.S. policy in Vietnam, and
against long-standing government attempts to supplement the constitution
with emergency laws that would confer dictatorial powers on the government
in the event of a political crisis at home or abroad. In 1968, the Young
Socialists - the organization of the younger members of the Social
Democratic Party - declared its opposition to the emergency legislation; the
student rebellion, increasingly under the banner of revolutionary socialist
slogans, also called for its immediate rejection. In April 1968, after a
right-wing attempt to assassinate SDS leader Rudi Dutschke (following
incitements especially in the reactionary Springer Press), riots erupted.
Berlin and other cities in West Germany saw the heaviest street fighting
since the Weimar Republic, and students and young workers throughout West
Germany invaded Springer's offices and burned its vans in protest. In a
major setback for the student movement, the government passed the emergency
legislation with only minor modifications. The over-escalation of radical
direct action tendencies that followed soon destroyed the SDS and led to the
disintegration of the nascent alliance between core groups in the
working-class trade union movement and the intellectual opposition.
This was the Germany I encountered in the summer of 1969, when I was working
in Libri Buchhandlung's Frankfurt warehouse and studying sociology part time
at the University of Mainz. An older factory worker who had quit the
Communist Party in disgust over Stalin's policies tutored me in "scientific
socialism" to offset my fascination with the ideas of the French
Situationist International ("All power to the imagination!"). It was not
until I returned to the U.S. that I became familiar with German critical
criminology.3 Much of that early work hadbeen organized under the banner of
the Arbeitskreis Junger Kriminologen (Working Party of Young
Criminologists). They began publishing Kriminologisches Journal in 1969 and
the journal continues to be associated with the University of Hamburg. Fritz
Sack, a central figure, was a visiting professor at the University of
California, Berkeley, in the mid-I960s and has been a contributor to Social
Justice. Another journal, Kritische Justiz, launched in 1968, survives today
with an editorial mandate to analyze the law and its practical application
in its social, economic, and political contexts. Similar to other countries,
there was serious contention over whether the new criminology should be
critical, radical, or Marxist. An article by Falco Werkentin, Michael
Hofferbert, and Michael Bauman that appeared in our second issue is entitled
"Criminology as Police Science or `How Old Is the New Criminology?"' (CSJ
No. 2, 1974). It reflects a Marxist perspective that distinguished itself
from an early critical approach of Fritz Sack, a "Marxist-interactionist
theory of criminology." Helmut Janssen, an editor of Radikale Kriminologie,
an anthology of primarily U.S.-based radical criminologists published in
German in 1988, claimed that a radical or Marxist criminology was never able
to develop in the Federal Republic of Germany because of the prohibition on
the German Communist Party (KPD), the Berufsverbot-a purge mandated by the
Right of the professions, including the civil service and education - the
fragmentation of the Left, and the absence of a university-level Marxist
school.
Yet critical criminology has deep roots in the "critical" social theory of
the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research (the "Frankfurt School").
Theorists like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse (a group
forced into exile in 1933 and then only reluctantly readmitted in 1945)
generated powerful critiques of structures of inequality, authority, and
power, as well as of ideological hegemony. Important for the 1968 movement
were theories drawing on the Frankfurt School, among others, that argued
that the working classes of the West had lost their revolutionary vocation,
and that the focus of such activity had shifted to the peoples of the Third
World and to marginalized sectors in the West, including immigrants, women,
and youth. The Frankfurt School also accomplished what Foucault's panopticon
theory of social control did not: it linked the concept of discipline (and
what this means culturally) with changes in the capitalist management of
work. Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer's Punishment and Social Structure,
which was introduced by Horkheimer and ironically only appeared in German
translation in 1974, is a product of the Frankfurt School and was
repopularized during the crisis of the late 1960s and early 1970s after
years of neglect. The School has had other lasting impacts. Sebastian
Scheerer and Henner Hess, in their recent defense and reformulation of the
social control thesis against the steady encroachment of the concepts of
"discipline" and "social exclusion" draw on Marcuse's One Dimensional Man to
link his notion of "repressive tolerance," the harmless and sometimes
illusionary satisfaction of real or artificially induced needs, with social
control. After the events of 1989 (e.g., the collapse of the GDR), Jirgen
Habermas (once Adorno's assistant) cautioned the state-supporting legal
establishment that a constitutional state cannot be maintained without a
radical democracy.
Another aspect of Germany's new criminology is Falco Werkentin's work with
the Berlin-based Biirgerrechte and Polizei (Civil Rights and the Police,
CILIP). Since the mid-1970s, he has produced diverse research projects and
publications on German police history and on the politics of internal
security. As the anti-authoritarian revolts of the 1960s peaked, sectors of
the German New Left devolved into a wave of bombings, kidnappings, and
murders by groups such as the Baader-Meinhof/Red Army Faction. Beginning in
the 1970s, this triggered an unprecedented enlargement and reconstruction of
police and secret services in the Federal Republic. No federal police force
like the FBI existed in Germany before the Red Army Faction terrorist
campaign of the 1970s. To allay fears that another Hitler might arise, West
Germany's post-World War II constitution had established a very loose
confederation of states (Lander), each with its own police. The terrorist
threat was a pretext for the Lander to cede some of their power and
strengthen the federal border police (BKA) into an FBI-like institution.
After unification with East Germany, the basis for expansion of police power
shifted from the terrorism of the 1970s to the dangers of atomic technology
and the destruction of the environment to the drug trade and right-wing
extremism.
In 1986, I returned to Frankfurt to participate in a symposium organized by
Heinz Dieterich on "State Terrorism in the Third World." Papers by Noam
Chomsky and James Petras (both members of our Editorial Advisory Board) as
well as by Edward S. Herman were eventually published in our special issue,
Contragate and Counterterrorism: A Global Perspective (CSJ 27-28, 1987). I
reconnected with Falco Werkentin in Berlin as well as with the delightful
editor of Das Argument, Wolfgang F. Haug, at the Freie Universitat Berlin. I
was also fortunate to meet world-systems theorists at the Starnberg
Institute for Research on Global Structures, Developments, and Crises.
Folker Frobel, Jorgen Heinrichs, and Otto Kreye had just published Umbruch
in der Weltwirtschaft (which can be translated as reorganization of or
revolutionary change in the world economy), an exploration into the new
international division of labor and the crisis of the capitalist world
system. That April of 1986 truly felt like a crisis, if only because
radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl disaster was raining down on Germany,
on me, and, by coincidence, on Pat O'Malley, the Australian theorist.
In 1974, the architect of Ostpolitik, the Social Democrat Willy Brandt, had
been forced to resign because of a spy scandal involving East Germany and
was succeeded by Helmut Schmidt. That year, rapid inflation was accompanied
by rising unemployment and was exacerbated by the presence of four million
guest workers and their families. The crisis passed, but a more
revolutionary event would later envelop the East. Just months beforluence,
though, was a brief interlude in which some policies of the former Soviet
Union were at times uncritically accepted.
7. The Critical Criminology Division has 320 members (under 190 faculty
members and under 90 students and other researchers), although I have also
seen a total figure of over 400. Both the Marxist section and the Political
Economy of the World-System (PEWS) section of the American Sociological
Association struggle each year to reach 400 members.
GREGoRY SHANK is the Managing Editor of Social Justice (GregoryS9 @aol.com).
He was a member of the original Crime and Social Justice Collective.
Shank describes what was happening in 1974 in terms of the
political-economic conditions and social movements that propelled the
unlikely emergence of a radical criminology around the world.
Copyright Social Justice Summer 1999 
Quellen:UMI 
SOCIAL JUSTICE 07/1999 
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
22Jun1999 USA: Latin America and the World Economy Since 1800.(Review). 
By Engerman, Stanley L.
Edited by John H. Coatsworth and Alan M. Taylor. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1998. xiv + 484 pp. Tables, notes, references, and index.
Cloth, $49.95. ISBN 0674512804; paper, $24.95. ISBN 0674512812.
Reviewed by Stanley L. Engerman
This collection of 15 papers on the last two centuries of Latin American
history is based upon two conferences held in southern Europe, with the
editors and publishers being from the United States. And while the majority
of authors are also from the United States, there are several from Latin
America and from Europe. Most are young scholars, several of the essays
being based on dissertations still in progress, and others being extensions
of recently completed doctoral work. The volume is interdisciplinary in its
authorship, although there are more economists than historians. This is not
surprising given the volume's purpose as described by the editors.
According to Coatsworth and Taylor, a primary goal of the book was to
illustrate the applications of neoclassical economic theory and quantitative
methods to the study of Latin American economic history, and to demonstrate
the value of such techniques in explaining the relative backwardness
(compared to the United States) of the Latin American economies. To use
these techniques, as they indicate, does not necessarily mean that the only
acceptable answers are economic. Bather, the data and economic analysis are
used to determine which non-economic factors might prove to be important in
explaining the past. The essays do draw heavily upon economic analysis and
quantitative methods (there are 85 tables and 26 figures), as well as the
frequent usage of regression analysis and total factor productivity
measurement. The volume is quite successful in applying its methods to
questions long central to Latin American history, such as the causes of
relative backwardness, the role of financial institutions, the impact of
various legal changes, and tariff policy. It also makes important
contributions to these debates, even with only limited footnotes to such
earlier stalwarts as Andre Gunder Frank, Celso Furtado, and Raul Prebisch,
and with barely a full comment on dependency theory. The geographic coverage
is also rather traditional, with Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico being the
most studied nations, by articles if not by pages (articles varying in
length from 16 to 48 pages).
Coatsworth and Taylor provide a broad definition of the "new economic
history," including its early stage with reliance on economic theory, the
application of quantitative methods, and the collection of primary data from
archives. Also included are essays reflecting more recent developments, such
as the study of institutions and welfare aspects of growth, as well as of
individual businesses and the link between economic history and business
history. The book is divided into five sections that reflect the main topics
of the "new economic history": International Comparisons, Patterns of
Investment and Growth, Measuring National and International Integration,
Institutions and Economic Growth, and Government Policies and the External
Sector.
The first set of essays takes up comparisons between Latin America and other
countries, as well as between nations within Latin America. The first essay,
by John H. Coatsworth, compares the GDP per capita in the U.S. from 1700 to
1994 with that of other countries. His estimates indicate that Latin
America's relative decline set in between 1700 and 1800, and that the
twentieth century saw some closing of the gap. He briefly examines the roles
of factor endowments, trade, and taxes in these patterns. Lee J. Alston,
Gary D. Libecap, and Bernardo Mueller contrast land policy in the United
States in the nineteenth century with that in contemporary Brazil, arguing
that the ability to enforce property rights was central to the greater
United States economic success. Andre A. Hofman and Nanno Mulder's
comparison of productivity performance between 1950 and 1994 in Brazil and
Mexico indicates that increased capital stock was important in accounting
for growth in both countries. However, the largest sectoral differences
between the Latin American nations and the United States in value-added per
hour worked were in agriculture, due to differences in capital intensity,
and in the level of output per unit of input.
In a study of the Sao Paulo Bolsa between 1876 and 1917, Anne Hanley argues
for the overall importance of domestic capital formation, showing that
foreign capital was important only in a few sectors. Gerardo della Paolera
and Taylor claim that the financial structure of interwar Argentina was
poor, with domestic banks weaker than foreign banks. Michael J. Twomey's
study of foreign investment in Latin America in the twentieth century points
out, not unexpectedly, the importance of railroads and infrastructure as
well as high capital inflow levels in the first part of the century.
The studies of market integration include regional incomes in Argentina,
money markets in Brazil, and Argentine financial markets. Carlos Newland,
using various proxies, indicates some of the differences between the
Littoral and the Interior in Argentina between 1810 and 1870. Gail D.
Triner, on the basis of considerable primary data collected for Brazilian
banks between 1889 and 1930, shows that there was some convergence in money
markets that helped contribute to economic development. And Leonard I.
Nakamura and Carlos E. J. M. Zarazaga, on the basis of estimates of returns
on stocks and bonds in Argentina between 1900 and 1930, demonstrate a
similarity in returns compared to those in the United States and the United
Kingdom, suggesting there was a world-wide capital market at that time.
The institutions analysed in relation to economic growth include laws
respecting incorporation and the contracts between sugar mills and colonos
in Cuba. Stephen Haber uses primary sources relating to cotton textile
manufacturing in Brazil to assess the impact of the legal changes that took
place around 1890 regarding limited liability and mandatory disclosure for
corporations. Haber argues these changes led to an increased growth in the
industry, with the new firms having higher productivity than those formed
earlier. Alan Dye analyzes cane grower contracts in Cuba for the first four
decades after the end of slavery and claims that these contracts were less
coercive and exploitative than had been earlier assumed on the basis of
considerably less evidence. The essay by Aurora Gomez-Galvarriato provides
new data on real wages in Mexico between 1900 and 1920. Gomez-Galvarriato's
figures reveal that this was probably a period of declining standard of
living, at least for those workers at the cotton textile mill that provided
the wage data.
The last section includes a concise summary of William R. Summerhill's work
on various aspects of Brazilian railroads between 1854 and 1889. Summerhill
estimates a benefit of this innovation higher than for any of the developed
nations, but comparable to that for Mexico. Graciela Marquez's detailed
measurement and description of Mexican tariffs during the period of
manufacturing expansion from 1892 to 1909 argues that growth occurred in a
period of falling tariffs, but not because the government lowered tariff
rates. Rather, the decline was the result of a combination of unchanged
specific tariffs and rising world prices. The final essay, by Daniel Diaz
Fuentes, is concerned with interwar monetary issues for Argentina, Brazil,
and Mexico, examining their varying successes in returning to the gold
standard, as well as their differences in meeting external financial
obligations. In describing these differences in policy as well as in the
timing of introducing central banks, he claims that the influence of the
so-called "money doctors" has been greatly exaggerated.
The essays in Latin America and the World Economy Since 1800 are generally
of high quality, with a very useful blend of historical and economic
concerns. They deal with important issues and their explanations of both the
positive economic growth of these nations and the changing relative
backwardness compared to the United States are worth further study. The book
will be useful reading for all interested in the economic history of Latin
America.
Stanley L. Engerman is John H. Munro professor of economics and professor of
history at the University of Rochester. He is currently working with Stephen
Haber and Kenneth Sokoloff on a project dealing with the economic growth of
North and South America.

Business History Review, Vol.73, No.2
COPYRIGHT 1999 President and Fellows of Harvard College.
(c) 1999 Information Access Company. All rights reserved.
This article may only be stored on a computer network for a maximum of 30
days. 
Quellen:IAC TRADE AND INDUSTRY DATABASE 
BUSINESS HISTORY REVIEW 22/06/1999 P341 
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
01Mai1999 USA: An indigenous view of the New World Order.(a book's portrayal
of Somalia) - Part 2 of 2. 
By Lauderdale, Pat and Toggia, Pietro.
Doornbus, Martin 1993 "Pasture and Polis: The Roots of Political
Marginalization of Somali Pastoralism." In Conflict and the Decline of
Pastoralism in the Horn of Africa, edited by John Markakis. London:
Macmillan Press.
Fitzpatrick, Peter 1992 The Mythology of Modern Law. London: Routledge.
Foucault, Michel 1984 "What is Enlightenment?" Pp. 32-49 in The Foucault
Reader, edited by P. Rabinow. New York: Pantheon.
1988 Politics, Philosophy, Culture. New York: Routledge.
Frank, Andre Gunder 1998 ReOrient. Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press.
French, James Strange 1836 Elkswatawa: or, The Prophet of the West. New
York: Harper and Brothers.
Gills, Barry and Andre Gunder Frank 1992 "World System Cycles, Crises, and
Hegemonial Shifts, 1700 B.C. to 1700 A.D." Review 15: 621-687.
Gills, Barry and Joel Rocamora 1992 "Low Intensity Democracy." Third World
Quarterly 13:501-523.
Goldberg, David T. 1993 Racist Culture. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Gurr, Ted Robert 1994 "Peoples Against States: Ethnopolitical Conflict and
the Changing World System." International Studies Quarterly 38: 347-377.
Harvey, David 1989 The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Blackwell.
Hollinger, Robert 1994 Postmodernism and the Social Sciences. Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage.
Hunt, Michael 1987 Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Inverarity, James, Pat Lauderdale and Barry Feld 1983 Law and Society.
Boston, MA: Little, Brown.
Josephy, Alvin M. Jr. 1984 Now That The Buffalo's Gone. Norman, OK:
University of Oklahoma Press.
Kinietz, W. Vernon 1965 The Indians of the Western Great Lakes, 1615-1760.
Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press.
Krasner, Stephen 1994 "International Political Economy: Abiding Discord."
Review of International Political Economy 1: 13-19.
1985 Structural Conflict: The Third Worm Against Global Liberalism.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lauderdale, Pat 1997 "Indigenous North American Jurisprudence."
International Journal of Comparative Sociology 38:131-148.
1994 "Indigenous North American Alternatives to Modern Law and Punishment:
Lessons of Nature." Pages 133-156 in Herren-los: Herrschaft, Erkenntnis, und
Lebensform, edited by Claudia von Werlhof, Anne Schweighofer and Werner
Ernst. Paris: Peter Lang.
Lauderdale, Pat and Randall Amster (eds.) 1997 Lives in the Balance:
Perspectives on Global Injustice and Inequality. Leiden: The Netherlands:
Brill.
Lauderdale, Pat and Michael Cruit 1993 The Struggle for Control: A Study of
Law, Disputes and Deviance. New York: SUNY Press.
Lefebvre, Jeffrey 1991 Arms for the Horn. Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press.
Lewis, I.M. 1998 "Doing Violence to Ethnography: A Response to Catherine
Besteman's 'Representing Violence and Othering." Cultural Anthropology 13:
100-109.
Maine, Henry Sumner 1909 Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History
of Society and its Relation to Modern Ideas. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul
Ltd.
Makinda, Samuel 1992 "Somalia." In Security in the Horn of Africa. Adelphi
Paper, No. 269. London: The International Institute for Strategic Studies.
1993 Seeking Peace from Chaos. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
Maxted, Julia and Abebe Zegeye 1997 "State Disintegration and Human Rights
in Africa." International Journal of Comparative Sociology 38: 64-86.
Nagel, Joane 1997 American Indian Ethnic Renewal. New York: Oxford
University Press.
O'Donnell, Guillermo 1987 "Forms of State and Socio-economic Change." Pages
200-219 in The Political Economy of Law, edited by Yash Ghai et al. Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Oliverio, Annamarie 1998 The State of Terror. New York: SUNY Press.
Oliverio, Annamarie and Pat Lauderdale 1990 "Indigenous Jurisprudence." Pp.
59-78 in The Implementation of Equal Rights for Men and Women, edited by
Fanny Tabak. Onati: The Onati International Institute for the Sociology of
Law.
Pearce, Roy Harvey 1953 The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and
the Idea of Civilization. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press.
Perelman, Michael 1983 Classical Political Economy: Primitive Accumulation
and the Social Division of Labor. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld.
Rodney, Walter 1982 How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington, D.C.:
Howard University Press.
Samatar, Abdi Ismail 1992 "Destruction of State and Society in Somalia:
Beyond the Tribal Convention." The Journal of Modern African Studies 30:
625-641.
1989 The State and Rural Transformation in Northern Somalia, 1884-86.
Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Samatar, Said 1991 Somalia: A Nation in Turmoil. London: A Minority Rights
Group Report.
Samatar, Said and Leitin, David 1987 Somalia: Nation in Search of a State.
Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press.
Seidman, Robert 1987 "Contract Law, the Free Market and State Intervention."
In The Political Economy of Law, edited by Ghai, Yash et al. Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
Smyth, Frank and Stephen Goose 1994 "Arming Genocide in Rwanda." Foreign
Affairs 73: 86-96.
Tar, Zoltan 1977 The Frankfurt School. New York: John Wiley.
Thomas, George et al. (eds.) 1987 Institutional Analysis: Studies of State,
Society, and the Individual. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Thompson, E. P. 1987 "Capitalism and the Rule of Law." In The Political
Economy of Law, edited by Ghai et al. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Thornton, Russell 1987 American Indian Holocaust and Survival. Norman, OK:
University of Oklahoma Press.
von Werlhof, Claudia 1991 Was haben die Huhner mit dem Dollar zu tun?
Munich: Verlag Frauenoffensive.
Wallerstein, Immanuel 1986 Africa and the Modern World. Trenton, NJ: Africa
World Press.
Wolde-Mariam, Mesfin 1977 Somalia: The Problem Child of Africa. Addis Ababa:
Artistic Printing Press.
Woodward, Peter 1996 The Horn of Africa: State Politics and International
Relations. New York: Martin's Press.

Journal of Asian and African Studies, Vol.34, No.2
COPYRIGHT 1999 E.J. Brill (The Netherlands).
(c) 1999 Information Access Company. All rights reserved.
This article may only be stored on a computer network for a maximum of 30
days. 
Quellen:IAC TRADE AND INDUSTRY DATABASE 
JOURNAL OF ASIAN & AFRICAN STUDIES 01/05/1999 P157 
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
01Mai1999 USA: An indigenous view of the New World Order.(a book's portrayal
of Somalia) - Part 1 of 2. 
By Lauderdale, Pat and Toggia, Pietro.
Introduction
In the "New World Order" Somalia is characterized as a deviant society,
especially by Western countries. This characterization is magnified by
focusing upon armed conflicts among different groups in Somalia and is
marked by a neglect of global forces and history, including indigenous
perspectives. The benchmark for judging the nature and scale of the crisis
in Somalia is the condition of statelessness, measured by the absence of a
central political authority and the modern claim to an ostensible universal
rule of law. The creation and efficient operation of a central state is
considered a universal measuring scale for stability, a yardstick employed
by the New World Order (cf. Gills and Rocamora, 1992; Hollinger, 1994).
The New World Order can be traced to the breakup of the bipolar
configuration of power some twenty years ago, and the Gulf "War" was touted
as an implementation of that Order. The early 1990s often are viewed as the
watershed for the emergence of the New World Order, especially the rhetoric
of the Gulf "War." The Order is characterized by global hegemony, the
increasing role of the United Nations in advancing foreign policy, military
interventions under the guise of peacekeeping, and the acceleration of a
market economy ostensibly directed by global forces such as the World Bank
and the International Monetary Fund. The global hegemony touts Western
values and typically suggests that the world today is faced with a choice
between homogenous globalization (vulgarized as McWorld) and secessionist
self-determination (vulgarized as Jihad), despite the enormous complexity
belying this false dichotomy (Lauderdale and Amster, 1997; Frank, 1998).
Since its independence in 1960, Somalia also has been identified as a
deviant society by countries throughout Africa. This negative dismissal, in
part, stems from its defiance of The Organization for African Unity (OAU)
charter that sanctifies the existing borders of African countries. In the
recent past, Somalia's nation state also has made territorial claims over
all the neighboring territories inhabited by the Somali people, notably,
against Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti.
Ethiopian scholars such as Wolde-Mariam (1977) portray Somalia as deviant
even in their book titles, e.g., Somalia: A Problem Child of Africa
(following the war with Ethiopia in the Ogaden region). Somalia is not only
defined as deviant but also its people are depicted as incapable of solving
their own problems. The people are identified with the "old" world - the
world of tribalism and clans, disorder and continual conflict - rather than
the new world - the world of radical and atomistic individualism, and the
modern state, ordered through the rule of law and conflict resolution (cf.
Lauderdale and Amster, 1997).
External intervention into a country such as Somalia is legitimated in part
by such discourse, for example, by the United States officially sanctioned
via the United Nations. While this intervention has enabled relief food for
the hungry to be delivered in the short run, it also has expanded the
pervasive image of Somalia as a barbarian nation and led to long term
problems that have exacerbated human survival, freedom, and
self-determination. As Abdi Samatar notes:
The logic of the traditionalist discourse leads to the conclusion that the
trouble with Somalia is the nature of its culture, grounded in the clan
system, with cruel individuals, proving divisive for projects of modern
nation-building. However, this approach offers no answer to the following
question: Since the lineage system has been part of Somali social
organisation for centuries, why has this society not engaged in nihilistic
fratricide before? Surely, there must have been power-seeking individuals in
the past? (Samatar, 1992: 629).
In essence, as the New Word Order puts Somalia on trial, along with Eritrea,
Bosnia-Herzegovina, Afghanistan, Rwanda, and Haiti among others, and becomes
enmeshed in their crises, historical and word system factors largely have
been ignored. At least, the New World Order and its reliance on one version
of the Enlightenment Project that focuses upon the dogmas rather than the
ethos of the Project, is largely responsible for the characterization of
Somalia as demonic and its clan leaders as devils.[1] The Order ignores, for
example, the Enlightenment's search for honesty, probity, criticism, and
analysis as it homogeneously imposes its control through facades of
democracy, and often by economic blackmail or military force (yon Werlhof,
1991; Hollinger, 1994). While postmodern and poststructural analyses have
been useful in explicating both the advantages and disadvantages of
enlightenment doctrine (Hollinger, 1994), they suffer from two distinct
problems. First, the analyses have focused upon symbolic considerations
often to the exclusion of political economic factors. Second, discourse
analyses typically are scathingly critical of elites and/or exclusion by
elites, yet the analytical language employed has become for the most part
itself exceedingly elite and exclusive. In the following discussion, we
examine the dominant view of the Somali people and the sources of the
problem in Somalia. We attempt to clarify and extend previous critiques of
the dominant perspective, and suggest an alternative view that implies a
different response to such a crisis. We suggest that comments and calls for
action on crises such as the one identified and amplified by the New World
Order in Somalia need to be considered in light of similar attempts to
"normalize or develop" other indigenous peoples, e.g., the experiences of
and reactions to some North American Indians and their impact on dominant
world view and policy (Deloria, 1973; Nagel, 1997). In general, New World
Order maintains an ostensible commitment to formal and abstract equality and
another to substantive identities such as national ones whereby forms of
exclusion and inequality are produced for diverse indigenous peoples (Maxted
and Zegeye, 1997).
The New World Order through the Enlightenment
The New World Order, employing only part of Enlightenment discourse,
continues stressing sameness and similarity rather than diversity across the
human condition. Under the rubric of rationality there is the claim that the
Order will pull in those who have traditionally been excluded, leading to an
eventual melting pot where identity maintenance is minimal, since identity
transformation is archaic or unrecognized. "Emancipation," and "rational
social order" are central and interrelated concepts of the project with an
undefined or varying concept of democracy touted as essential. Democracy for
the Order typically is a rhetorical device for maintaining or gaining power.
Often the reality is "elite democracy" as local elites compete with one
another for power while attempting to service local capital and the
requirements of international agencies such as the International Monetary
Fund and the World Bank. Or, the imposition of external control is imposed
without local participation. Democracy was ignored by the Order for
"economic and strategic self-interest" in Iraq and Kuwait (Gills and
Rocamora, 1992: 523).
Despite overtures to the strength of "difference" from organizations
presented as universal such as the United Nations, the original meaning of
diversity contained and practiced within indigenous cultures of the world,
for example, usually has been damned to the specter of deviance often shaded
with demonic labels such as "savage" or "tribal." This domination of
diversity can not be ignored by introducing dialectical nuances into the
scheme or being "for" or "against" The New World Order or the Enlightenment
(Foucault, 1984: 43; Foucault, 1988).
Domination of nature, and derivatively domination of humans and their
behavior, was not the end objective of the Enlightenment. Rather, a means
for "human emancipation" from scarcity and the eradication of the supposed
"arbitrariness" of nature were central goals. An unintended consequence of
the Enlightenment's "emancipation" scheme, however, was that it opened the
possibility of the self-alienation of humans from nature, from their own
labor and from other human beings, the oppression and exploitation of human
by human, and the destruction of what is now called the natural environment.
(Tar, 1977). Despite these severe setbacks under modernity, progress was
proclaimed through the sleight of hand of powerful new technologies that
purport to free up more time for humans. Yet, many cultures with the most
"leisure" time have had the lowest levels of technology. Similarly, the
claim that human conflict was being resolved appears to be conflict
management or denial (cf. Gurr, 1994, especially pages 365-367). In such
presumption of progress, no one seems to be certain (including Enlightenment
optimists) whether humans are encapsulating themselves in light or darkness.
Blind faith in the dogmas of enlightenment, rather than a focus upon its
ethos, is taken as an antidote to darkness and uncertain apocalypse.
The homogenous agendas and practices of social and policy sciences and a
hegemonic emergence of law are seen as instrumental to the creation of
"rational order" in society. The myth of law, in Gramscian terms a "civil
religion" under Enlightenment, is substituted for religious rituals. We now
find atheists practicing the religious rituals of science as they
simultaneously attempt to kill any and all god(s) or substitute the rational
order of egoism and its sacred ceremonies for those religious ones they view
as profane. The creation of "rational order" entails the construction of
homogeneous nation-states, national identities, centralized bureaucracies,
unified legal systems with a set of formal laws, and the
institutionalization of market capitalism as "the" rational economic system
(Thomas et al., 1987). Under The Order's criteria these indices presumably
measure the stability and orderliness of a society. They are contrived to
represent "civilized society" yet, the definition of civilized is usually a
polemical device that ignores internal and external violence. The existence
of a state that centrally enforces all these features under a "rule of law"
is considered an active agent of The Order, and "in modernity, social and
political stability is viewed as a result of 'law and order'" (Lauderdale,
1994:4). Therefore, one of the primary functions of the state is to maintain
this political stability and enforce "law and order." The New World Order
operates to enforce an idealized conception of law and order over all of the
states within the political economy of the world system. Even in legal
discourse, which acknowledges the politics of law and trials, the "rule of
law" is presented as if it is value-free, neutral, and transcending
institutionalized power relationships (Christenson, 1986). The "rule of law"
is elevated tacitly as a universal benchmark to identify and classify
deviance and trials in all societies, regardless of specific traditional
polities. Balibar, albeit in a social class tone rather than mode of
production analysis, notes that:
the law is a system of rules, i.e., of material constraints, to which
individuals are subjected. Legal ideology interprets and legitimizes this
constraint, presenting it as a natural necessity inscribed in human nature
and in the needs of society in general.... The legal ideology proves that
the social order is not based on the existence of classes but precisely on
that of individuals to which the law addresses itself. Its highest point in
the legal representation is the state." (1987:739-740; cf. Thompson,
1987:64-67).
A central problem with the concept of the "rule of law" is that it does not
explain change in law or the differential application of law. The
relationship between changes in modes of production and legal rules remains
obfuscated by simply invoking the sacredness of the rule of law. The rule of
law does not explain how concepts of legal equality have changed, e.g.,
legal status based on gender, ethnicity, race, age, or how exogenous factors
will change it (Inverarity et al., 1983). Also, it does not inform us
regarding, for example, such issues as discretion in enforcement or
punishment, rather than to tell us about the form of the legal framework.
The rule of law which requires that law simply be applied prospectively
conflicts with natural law which "requires moral responsibility which cannot
be excused through compliance with immoral positive law" (Adams, 1993: 312).
The supposed new discovery of things and historical meanings by The Order,
ironically, is usually only "rediscovery" (Lauderdale, 1994). Indigenous
people long ago implemented "principles of confederation" and practiced
"civil law" long before the late "discovery" of them by modernity
(1994:10-11). Moreover, brazenly propagated is "the discovery" of indigenous
people, whose existence and civilization long predated modernity, as
"history." Their ancient civilization and history also were viewed either as
"primitive" or "prehistory." Most importantly, despite being enmeshed in
"endless internal ruptures and fragmentations," the New World Order
endeavors to establish "universal order," a presumed "order" which it itself
inherently lacks. The catastrophic conflicts among the various alternative
systems (Democracy, Fascism, Socialism) attest to these "ruptures and
fragmentations," as was manifested tragically in the two world wars, social
and national revolutions, and state repressions against dissidents. The
tragic consequences of these handful of events are unprecedented in the
history of the whole world. The two world wars, which claimed some 57
million lives, began as European wars that were "universalized" throughout
the globe. At the world level, the rule of law is suspended in debates over
just versus unjust wars, and at the nation-state level the rule of law
becomes a chimera as it variously labels dissidents as terrorists and
deflects most serious accusations and analyses of state terrorism, i.e., the
state's creation, control and use of terrorism for its own ends (Oliverio,
1998).
Such actions raise serious questions about the ability of the New World
Order to satisfy its commitments. Ironically, the agents of the New World
Order view non-European traditional societies not only as "barbarian and
primitive," but as also living in perpetual chaos and disorder. Vine Deloria
observes that "in the [ostensibly] appalling indices of social disorder of
the tribal peoples Westerners see only continued disruption and, being
unaccustomed to viewing life as a totality, cannot understand the
persistence of the tribal peoples in preserving their communities, lands and
religions" (1973:300). This indigenous view includes not simply tolerance,
but respect for diversity (which often is redefined as disorder). The
indices, based upon Western ethnocentric construction of the concepts of
disorder rather than diversity, now are being employed by the New World
Order as justifications for extermination under the facade of progress.
Similarly, Walter Rodney argues in his analysis of how Europe underdeveloped
Africa that:
tribalism is understood by Europeans to mean that each tribe still retains a
fundamental hostility towards its neighboring tribes ... their accounts
suggest that Europeans tried to make a nation out of the tribes, but they
failed, because the various tribes had their age-long hatreds; and, as soon
as the colonial power went, the nations returned to killing each other. To
this phenomenon, Europeans often attach the word 'atavism', to carry the
notion that Africans were returning to this primitive savagery. Even a
cursory survey of the African past shows that such assertions are the exact
opposite of the truth (1982:227).
Somalia: A Nation Conceived for Crisis
The Somalis are indigenous people in the Horn of Africa who have lived in
part of the region since 500 B.C.; their name is derived from "Samaale," who
was the legendary founder of the major pastoral clan families. Their
population is estimated around 6 million, currently residing in Somalia
"proper," Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, and Djibouti.
Two-thirds of Somalis are pastoralists, who herd camels, goats, cattle, and
sheep to support their lives. Their pastoral occupation is influenced by the
dry land, hot climate, and scarcity of water in the region. Except along the
banks of the two main rivers (Juba and Shebelle), the soil is not suitable
for agriculture and therefore hardly cultivable. The Somali pastoralists
follow their annual migratory cycles, they remain with their herds in the
pasture of the hinterland during the rainy season(October-November) and
spend the remaining months in the proximity of the Red Sea shores, where
water holes are located. Said Samatar and David Leitin note that:
in this land of hardy vegetation, steaming sand dunes, and sun-baked coastal
plains, the Somalis have evolved during the centuries a way of life
peculiarly suited to their demanding environment: on the one hand a
trans-human pastoralism designed to maximize the meager resources of water
wells and pasturelands for the pastoralists and their herds and, on the
other, a social organization that encourages collective action and mutual
aid (Samatar and Leitin, 1987:22).
Somali's pastoral life is symbolized by the camel; the camel holds a central
place not only in the economic sphere but in the cultural expressions of the
Somalis. Somalis use the camel as a term of reference in their poetry,
songs, and political vocabularies. Moreover, camels are used as a medium of
exchange, e.g., as a form of payment for "blood money." Somalis call the
camel the "mother of man." Two milch-camels support a family of ten with
their nutritious milk. The "place" of the camel is understandable from the
practices of diversity in other cultures. For many North American Indians
the buffalo was central to their symbolic and ceremonial life often having a
place in creation traditions (Thornton, 1987). Josephy (1984: 89) notes
that, for example, in 1978, various Plains tribal members still needed
buffalo meat for specific religious feasts: "Some ceremonies require the
presence of a live buffalo among the participants."(2)
Unlike many African indigenous peoples, whose differences and conflicts stem
from ethnic segmentation and the struggle for power, the Somalis are people
of the same ethnicity. They speak the same Somali language and
preponderantly have followed Islam as a religious faith since the twelfth
century. However, the Somalis are segmented among lineages, which is an
organizing principle of clan life. There are six major clans (Dir, Hawiye,
Isaaq, Darood, Digil, and Rahanwayan) and approximately 56 sub-clans.
Samatar and Leitin observe that "genealogy constitutes the heart of the
Somali social system and is the basis of the Somali collective predilection
to internal fissions and internecine sectionary conflicts as well as of the
unity of thought and action among Somalis - a unity that borders on
xenophobia" (1987:29). The Somalis' primary allegiance is to their
respective clans and sub-clans; and their identities are also derived from
such clan affiliation. An individual is identified as a Somali only after
becoming a member of a certain clan. The clan system has its own defense
mechanisms based on clan solidarity or exclusivity from outside threats or
penetration (cf. Samatar and Leitin, 1987:31). In contrast, focusing upon
the relevance of the household economy and its connection to the concepts of
community and kinship rather than simply clan, Abdi Samatar states that:
The significance of the household economy in pre-colonial Somali social life
rested, at least to a great extent, on the fact that very few were not
engaged in productive activity, and they certainly did not dominate the
affairs of the community. In fact, those who were not productive, and
consequently unable to care for their households, had no standing in the
community, let alone the ability to command any authority. In other words,
being a competent pastoral manager or good peasant was a necessary
prerequisite for any leadership position (1992: 639).
The "Old" New World Order was introduced directly to Somalia via European
colonialism in 1889. The introduction included forceful occupation of the
region and subjugation of the people by armed force. First the Italians (in
1889), and subsequently the British (1899) and the French (1900) carved the
region into four pieces and began their colonization, a process which was
euphemistically termed as "the civilizing mission" of the "primitive
natives." That decade was a period when the colonizing project by European
powers continued under the rubric of "the Scramble for Africa" following
their conference in Berlin in 1884.
Sir Henry Maine in his study of the development of law discusses how Roman
law in its concept of "occupatio" developed into a law to justify and
preserve the acquisition of private property, such as land. According to
this legal principle, every thing must have an owner; if anything does not,
it may be claimed by the first occupant (Maine, 1909). However, when it came
to "acquiring" (colonizing) colonies, the colonizers needed an expediting
fiction, or a "legal fiction," which manifested itself in the contrived
hierarchization of "civilized citizens" and "primitive natives" (Lauderdale,
1994:15). The mythology of modern law was reinforced by portraying "the
primitive, to take a figure of the other, [as] uncontrolled, fickle,
irresponsible, of nature... The European is disciplined, constant,
self-responsible, of culture, and so on" (Fitzpatrick, 1992: 30). Variation
in positive or stigmatizing identity was also contingent upon numerous forms
of economic organization, labor control, and symbolic concern. Consider the
instance of primitive accumulation of indigenous food:
The British did not own the means of propagating such crops. This
technicality did not deter them. They simply refused to recognize any
proprietary rights of the people or even of the rulers of these peripheral
lands. The plant explorers were charged with obtaining the plants by any
means possible... (Perelman, 1983: 17).
Grazing land that was communally owned was considered devoid of legal titles
and indigenous peoples were left without any entitlement to ownership.
Moreover, under such classification, the dispossession of territories from
the indigenous people was justified as liberating the land for productive
use that otherwise was perceived as lying fallow and being valueless under
the hands of "lethargic primitives." Thus, colonial acquisition and
capitalist privatization of land and other natural resource were "legally"
sanctified while forcefully instituted to be commodified as any other
product, mediated only through the fetishism of money.
Land and its sacred identity of place was negated by the colonists with
propriety of ownership and production becoming the central concept. On the
contrary, indigenous people, as Vine Deloria notes, have "spiritual unity"
with the land they inhabit and honor its sacredness (1973: 295). In this
century we find liberation theologians primarily in Central America calling
for land to revert to those people who work it, rather than simply own it,
and subsequently we find peasants and indigenous people suggesting that
their work "with" the land is sacred (Lauderdale, 1994; 1997). Yet, in Haiti
where Aristide spoke of a similar theology of liberation in the early 1990s,
the theology typically was rationalized away by the New World Order and
reduced to a communist identity, despite the obvious conundrum of the spirit
of communism. Aristide's religious work often was identified as
undemocratic, rather than communitarian or spiritual. As the Order tried to
impose its dogma and "develop" the North American Indians and the Central
American Indians and peasants, it now returns to other places such as Haiti
with hopes of transforming the identity of Aristide and the Haitians. Yet,
land, especially the relationship of its meaning to social identity in
places such as Haiti and Somalia, remains unresolved.
The control of the definition of land also is central to other concepts such
as discovery or development. For example, Benjamin Franklin, who often is
resurrected as a paragon of the Enlightenment vision, "rationalized"
colonization by asserting that colonialists who acquire land, even by
forcefully removing "the natives" if necessary, "may be properly called the
fathers of the nation" (Hunt, 1987: 47). This so-called development process
is one way the legendary European "founding fathers" were concocted, who
otherwise, in the eyes of the indigenous people, were often exploiters or
demolishers of traditional societies. And, the British colonial powers
projected onto their "civilizing mission" an ironic feature when they
proclaimed that their colonial presence in Somalia induced an industrial
revolution. Yet, the facade of an immaculate implanting of an "industrial
revolution" was nothing more than the production of candles, matches, bottle
corks, wine, and mm (British Military Administration, 1944: 62).
Regional partitioning by European colonialism and the implantation of a
colonial state engendered the perpetual disruption of the normal economic
cycle and social life of the Somali pastoralists. During colonial role the
Somalis were considered colonial subjects, and were racially segregated from
the Europeans. The majority of Somalis, not having contact with the colonial
administration, became increasingly alienated. Only an elite portion had
access to modern formal education and administrative positions. Elite
implementation of the institutionalization of private property directly
negated their traditional communal land ownership system. Under the
traditional "economy" of the Somalis, the "household was a basic unit of
(livestock) ownership; whereas the grazing lands and water resources were
collectively utilized by the members of the clan" (A. Samatar, 1989: 16). In
general, the fertile agricultural land and the grazing land with the water
holes fell under the control of the colonial administration or was
designated as an enticement for European colonial settlers. Similarly, once
the livestock export began to generate revenue for the colony, this
commodification process pulled the self-sufficient pastoralists into a
dependent relationship with the domestic and international market (cf. von
Werlhof, 1991). Economic dependency was compounded by the demarcation and
enforcement of international borders that inhibited the free movement of the
pastoral people and so disrupted their occupation. Wallerstein cogently
remarks that:
the political boundaries were drawn primarily to include as much territory
as could be conquered or negotiated diplomatically. Since the lines were
established by each European power essentially out of fear of a claim of
sovereignty by another European power, they were frequently arbitrary in
terms of the previous lines drawn by the African states now enclosed or
divided." (1986:16).
There was not only conquest (called "pacification"), but there was also the
deliberate disruption of existing social organizations similar to the
disruption and conquest of American indigenous people by European
colonialists. Hunt observes that "white Americans had not inherited the
fabled empty continent, rather by their presence and policies, they had
emptied it" (1987:53).
Justification for colonialism was claimed by identifying the Somalis as
people with "inherent lawlessness," and with a benign racist label, in
strikingly similar fashion to the characterization of North American Indians
by Europeans as "noble savages." The characterization of a "handsome,
unreliable race" was imputed to the Somalis (British Military
Administration, 1944: 49-50). The colonial period in Somalia was marked by
the resistance of the indigenous people. Somalis notably struggled under the
leadership of a religious leader and a famous poet, Hassan Abdille, from
around 1900 until 1920. Abdille resisted the British and the Italian
colonialists through armed struggle. The British referred to him as the "mad
mullah." The label seemed to originate in view of how "primitive" indigenous
people could resist a "benevolent civilizing mission" unless they are
totally psychotic, much as the European labeling of indigenous North
Americans as "savages" stemmed from indigenous resistance (Deloria, 1973;
Nagel, 1997). Part of the resistance was directed at the manner in which
Europeans identified what type of order was the defining criteria of
civilization.(3) A central component of the new order is the separation of
humanity from nature with human identity constructed as capable of order and
nature as naturally disordered. Vine Deloria observes that Europeans could
not understand the persistence of the indigenous people and their insistence
on the preservation of land and a traditional way of life (1973).
Nonetheless,
Despite numerous attempts of holocaust proportion to destroy these
indigenous people, they have persisted. Their social organization and
cultural values based on thousands of years of learning the lessons of
nature are central to this persistence. These lessons were ignored and
suffocated by colonizers who prefer to be called modern people (Lauderdale,
1994:15).
Somalis also incessantly resisted the political, economic, and cultural
domination of Europeans and their claims to homogenous order (see, Samatar
and Leitin, 1987:42). The Somalis opposed, for example, all forms of Italian
and British rule, including colonial legal systems that held individuals as
culpable and defined political resistance as a crime. Under indigenous law,
individuals were not culpable for their offenses, rather the "dia-paying"
group was collectively accountable, and political resistance was a civil
matter to be mediated by elderly councils. When Somalia finally achieved its
independence as a nation in 1960, there were only a few Somalis who were
able to work successfully in the centralized bureaucratic administration,
inherited from colonialism. The construction of a unified Somali nation,
organized under a central state, and its continuation in the post-colonial
era was the work of colonial powers. The colonial powers, however, did not
differentiate between the commitment to formal and abstract equality, and
the one to homogenous substantive identities such as national citizenship
that resulted in the licensing of exclusion with varying degrees of stigma.
Family loyalty, for example, was redefined negatively as non-rational
attachment to kin-ship and then amplified by proclaiming that kinship, often
defined as clan, worked against national interests.
Somali nationalism seemed more a product of the Enlightenment's dogmas than
the concern of Somali aspiration. After an experience of two elections and a
parliamentary state of eight years, Somalia fell under General Siad Barre's
military dictatorship in 1969. Siad Barre ruled Somalia with an iron-fist
through his ruling party, the Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party, for the
ensuing 22 years until he was overthrown in January 1991.
Consider the characterization of "Third World" states as the vehicle of
nation-hood by O'Donnel (1987) as it applies to Somalia's state under
General Siad Barre. "The state in the 'Third World' is a profoundly
unrepresentative entity (to its colonial origins) whose historical mission
is to be the agent that produces a synthesis of what is a heterogeneous
civil society. It has meant a creation of a nationhood" (1987: 213). In
short, the central state in Somalia with its homogenizing mission through
crushing people into the "national" mold is incompatible with the
freedom-loving and heterogeneously kin-based Somalis. Inversely, what had
been witnessed in post-independence Somalia was the utilization of the state
as a center vying for power and resources among the different clan leaders.
The extension of the traditional rivalry among the different clans within
the centralized state creates conflict over the allocation of political
power and the use of national resources (Doornbus, 1993). In the late 1990s,
security for the affluent and expatriates in the era of the dismantling of
state police and the army has led to the Mooriyaan (gunpersons) and the
"technicals" (e.g., using machine-gun-mounted trucks) who provide armed
escort for money. Clearly, the leadership of the clans have been transformed
from organized kinship groups led by traditional elders into the new
leadership assumed by former state military and bureaucratic elites.
General Barre's rule in the 1970s and 1980s usually was characterized as
stable from the perspective of the Western core countries. This view
emanated from the middle of the cold war period with considerable military
assistance from the former U.S.S.R. and the U. S. and was based upon Barre's
shift of alliances between the two military super-powers. The Soviet Union,
for example, was a strong ally and major supplier of arms to General Barre
until 1977. Between 1967 and 1976 Somalia imported $181 million worth of
arms from the U.S.S.R. (Lefebvre, 1991: 44). However, when the U.S.S.R.
shifted its alliance to Ethiopia, Somalia turned to the U.S. and found an
ally whose preoccupation was to check the influence of the U.S.S.R. in the
Persian Gulf region. In 1980, the U.S. signed an agreement with the same
dictator, General Barre, an accord based on access-arms exchange. Over the
next seven years Somalia purchased $500 million worth of arms from the U.S.
(Lefebvre, 1991: 241). Smyth and Goose (1994) present a relevant analysis of
how the United Nations fails to restrain its members states from engaging in
lucrative arms trade, especially the process by which some of the member
states supply weapons to conflicting groups in Somalia, the Sudan, and
Rwanda.
Barre maintained his power, domestically, by brutally silencing his
opponents and relying on his Darod clan, and its Marehan sub-clan. In 1988
10,000 people were killed and 110,000 fled to Ethiopia as the conflict
escalated between Barre's regime and the opposing clans. In the late 1980s,
however, his military disintegrated into different clan militias, the civil
service was in disarray, and his cabinet vied for fragmented power and
depleted resources. Despite promises for constitutional review, elections,
and legalization of parties between 1989 and 1990, General Barre was
overthrown in January 1991. Subsequently, a civil war intensified among the
different clan-based political factions. During this civil war, from May
1988 to December 1989, according to Africa Watch, between 50,000 and 60,000
civilians died (Makinda, 1992).
Currently, political parties in Somalia are based on new clan allegiances.
The conflict among the different political parties is the reflection of
tension among the different clans and novel economic interests and political
views engendered by the New World Order. There is infighting within the same
clans among the fragmented army units and their respective political
parties. For instance, the Hawiye clan-based United Somali Congress party
took power in Somalia's capital, Mogadishu, in the wake of General Barre's
flight. The Hawiye clan has six sub-clans in central Somalia, two of which
(Abgal and Habr Gedir) are bitter enemies. General Aideed leads the Habr
Gedir sub-clan and Mohammed "Bod" the Abgal one. The Northern part of
Somalia under the Isaaq clan-based Somali National Movement formed its own
separate state in May 1991. The large scale conflict was an eruption of the
hidden and gradual crisis emerging from the inception of the unified and
repressive nation state.
The crisis in Somalia was conceived within the formation of the centralized
nation-state under which all the different clans were forcefully enclosed.
The gradual build-up of the crisis was not detected by the chevaliers of The
Order (including the foreign policy makers of the U.S. and the former
U.S.S.R.) due to their overriding concern with world hegemony, geopolitical
domination, and larger market forces. It is ironic that the ostensibly
united Somalia of 1960 under one central state was deserted by all foreign
powers when it exploded in the crisis of 1991.
Initially, the United Nations and the U.S. minimized their public
involvement in Somalia and the U.S. did not fully enter the conflict until
December of 1992 when it announced that U.S. troops would arrive to protect
food convoys sent to the starving nation. The U.S. approach to resolve the
conflict had been within the New World Order, a scheme re-constructed by the
Reagan and Bush administrations. The re-packaged New World Order, designed
under such ??? as "the rule of law," "peace," "stability" "world democracy,"
and "equal sovereignty rights," is "a crusading movement" to promote world
hegemony (cf. Augelli and Murphy, 1988). This new form of (post Cold War)
global expansion intends to recreate the world after the images of the New
Order's system of governance and open market economy. International
institutions such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the IMF are
part of the global hegemony working as instruments of rationalization to
realize these two basic interests (Lauderdale and Amster, 1997; see
Lefebvre, 1991:275 regarding international financial institutions,
bi-lateral development assistance, and the policing role of the U.N.). More
generally, core countries that strive for world hegemony continue to attempt
to use the U.N. as the peace keeper or social control agent, e.g., note the
attempt of the U.S. to influence the U.N. in the 1998 bombings of its
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania). Under such a New World Order the notion of
"equal sovereignty rights" of states is designed at least to console Third
World countries, or at most is simply a hegemonic facade, to help veil
domination (Krasner, 1985: 62).
As the world turns, so does the hegemony created by world powers. Whether
economic and political control at the world level has been largely in the
hands of the Chinese, the Spanish or the English, or other countries and
confederations at other times (cf. Frank, 1998; Gills and Frank, 1992), such
control has been a central factor in obscuring the multifaceted impact of
globalization. The claim that globalization, touted as a primary force in
the new world order, is new or that it will develop the underdeveloped
nations is misleading (Abu-Lughod, 1989; Woodward, 1996). The enlightenment
hegemony of Europe employed by various nations has shed little light, but
much friction upon Somalia and the new world disorder. This (dis)order is
reflected in Gramsci's observation that the old order is dead, but the new
order cannot yet be born (also, see Seidman, 1977).
Closing Argument: Is the New World Order Culpable?
A conceptual scheme that ignored diversity underscored the formation of a
central state in Somalia. The internal conflicts among the segmented clans
are now concentrated and amplified in the arena of the pervasive state, a
conflict that was engendered mainly by competition over resources and power,
and exacerbated by the intrusion of the homogenous demands of the New World
Order. The conflict intensified in a short span of time into a larger scale,
involving virtually all of the clans in Somalia. The problem continues today
as, for example, fighters loyal to Hussein Aidid, who is the son of deceased
General Aidid and his successor, fight the Reewin Resistance Army around the
southwestern regions of Bay and Bakool. Such conflicts and ensuing crises
are
unprecedented in the history of the Somali people. The Order facilitated
chaos in Somalia. In this respect, we clearly disagree with scholars who
attribute the cause of the crisis principally to the internal clan
segmentation itself. Similarly, Makinda's attribution of Barre's dictatorial
rule alone as the root of the tragedy is inadequate for explaining the
endemic crisis in Somalia; the argument does not explain why "there was no
mechanism
for resolving internal conflict" (Makinda, 1993: 12). Disregarding the
destruction of kinship, ignoring or minimizing the role of the world's
political economy, and under the cloak of homogeneity, diversity has been
reduced to the label of "deviance."
As with most of Africa, the cause of economic and financial crises in
Somalia usually is attributed to externally conditioned export-oriented and
export-based development policies. Or, in the words of the World Bank in
1994 the problem is "a massive loss of competitiveness." In other words,
because of the emphasis given to commodity exchange and austerity programs,
countries such as Somalia are not able to produce even enough food for their
own people. And, in 1998 Somalia faces its worst harvest in the past five
years. Clearly, economic marginalization continues to contribute to the
escalation of the conflicts (Bestman and Cassanelli, 1997).
Second, The introduction of The "Order" via large scale military technology
with attendant institutionalized violence (e.g., via standing armies),
directly contributed to the intensification and magnification of violence as
a modality of ostensible conflict resolution (Lauderdale and Cruit, 1993).
It also induced the destruction of human lives and impoverishment of people.
Moreover, Smyth and Goose (1994) explicate the reasons why the U.N.
continues to fail to restrain core member nations from supplying weapons to
conflicting groups in Somalia, the Sudan, and Rwanda.
Third, Somalis could not turn to their traditional institutions or
associations such as the "gurti" (a network of elders from diverse kinship
groups) to negotiate their conflict peacefully and administer their lives
self-sufficiently, since their policies have been incapacitated by the
domination of the central state and its bureaucracy. The basis of
"pre-colonial social justice was the self-reliance of the household, coupled
with systemic checks on those who wanted to aid the resources of others" (A.
Samatar, 1992: 640). Moreover, during the past hundred years, the authority
of the informal social contract called "heer," which binds each member of a
clan to one another and regulates relationships with other clans,
increasingly has been eroded. Similarly, the all-adult assembly, called the
"Shir," which is accessible to the participation of all clan members and
peacefully mediates conflicts among clans, was emasculated. The traditional
justice system that holds groups culpable (which rendered collective social
responsibility and deterrence) was centrally challenged by the system of
individual liability, thereby diminishing its significance and effectiveness
(cf. Oliverio and Lauderdale, 1990).
Finally, the Somali political and military leaders increasingly are modern
elites who emerged from alien political, military, and economic institutions
that were transplanted by Enlightenment dogmas. As they are formally
educated, trained and acculturated individuals, they are the products of
Enlightenment's culture and soldiers of the New World Order. Their concern,
and the modalities they employ, to identify Somali problems and the
management rather than resolution of crises is within the Order's paradigm -
the central state, military violence, and the market economic framework of
the world system. It should be remembered that:
At no time in the recent history of Somalia has nearly one-third to one-half
of the population died or been in danger of perishing due to famine caused
by civil war (A. Samatar, 1992: 625).
In the summer of 1993, the fifteen Somali political factions were involved
in the process of negotiation in Addis Ababa, with the United States as the
principal mediator. However, claims of conflict resolution began fading over
the summer of 1994. The Security Council of the United Nations decided on
September 30, 1994, to leave its troops in Somalia only one more month, but
the U.S. refused to support the latest extension of the Order. The Security
Council set a condition that unless the warring clan factions ceased their
fighting, the U.N. would abandon Somalia entirely.(5) This abrupt resolution
again challenged the Order of the New World, especially in the face of the
seemingly continual eruption of crises throughout the world. And, to the
extent that the U.N. represents the New World Order, it may be impossible to
keep the Order on trial as it positions itself once again to move to other
jurisdictions, or claims that no current law covers its current
jurisdiction.
In December of 1997, three of the faction leaders, Ali Mahdi, Hussein Aidid,
and Osman Atto signed a peace agreement in Cairo. Although over a dozen
similar pacts have been created in the past, there was some hope that a
meeting in Mogadishu would implement this one. Those meetings were governed
by Egyptians who had important insight into the deeper problems but once
again peace was short lived. Sporadic fights emerged from other factions and
the Somaliland Republic in the North did not endorse the peace agreement.
Another convention was planned for early 1998 in Baidoa to plan for a
national government; however, before the meeting took place fighting broke
out over which faction would gain leadership of the convention. In addition,
despite the efforts of organizations such as the War-torn Societies Project
(a joint project of the U.N. and the Programme for Strategic and
International Security Studies in Geneva) to provide international advice,
the assistance does not appear to address the underlying problems. By late
1998, the meeting in Baidoa had been postponed for the third time.
The traditional kinship groups in Somalia turned to traditional elders for
advice and assistance but currently their role also is usurped by former
state military and bureaucratic elites.
The politicalization of "clan" differences by such elites continues to
amplify clannish sentiments (e.g., as they fight over control of the six
newspapers and radio stations in Mogadishu) and intensify conflicts.
The attempted replacement of sacred place and kinship identity of Somalis
with the identity of the New World Order that emphasizes rational
(self-interested) and egoistic (self-maximizing) individuals, i.e., Western
individualism (Thomas et al., 1987) has led not to a melting pot, but a
boiling pot. It appears, once again, that most Somalis do not identify with
the concept of an atomistic individual or highly abstract general terms such
as the state or national citizen. The Somalis, as with many other ethnic and
indigenous groups throughout the world, do not find a meaningful sense of
life by being defined as a modern individual via the state. Sustenance,
solidarity, and security, for example, are located and identified with
sacred places and extended families for many diverse groups such as the
Somalis. Any viable alternative to disentangling Somalia from its current
and future crises would benefit from recognition and accommodation to the
traditional way of life and system of governance. Otherwise, the ostensible
conflict resolution will be, at best, short-term and partial and, at worst,
a facade.
NOTES
1 Our names are listed alphabetically. We would like to thank Fausto
Oliverio for providing us with his oral history regarding the relationship
between Italy and Somalia. We thank Randall Amster, David Goldberg, Jody
Lameman, Bin Liang, and Annamarie Oliverio for their incisive comments on a
number of drafts of this work and Andre Gunder Frank for providing essential
background information. We also appreciate the useful critique by Raymond
Corrado who attempted to define the limits on our criticisms of the
Enlightenment Project.
2 Any analysis of the Enlightenment runs the risk of pandering to histories
of the feudal period with pictures of crude struggles over scarce resources
or the prattle of histories of the period with portrayals of simple but
honorable lives. We accept the varying and clearly more formidable
challenges provided by texts such as A Distant Mirror and In the Absence of
the Sacred in this discussion.
We suggest that Enlightenment through the New World Order has two major
inherent self-negations in its conception. The first is that it has been
imposing its monolithic conceptual scheme in every part of the world, on
societies with radically different social systems. This imposition
principally takes the use of naked force or technologically bolstered
mega-power violence, including and up to committing genocide. Or, it imposes
itself hegemonically through diffusion of ideas and educational training
(ideological), and through indirect rule by the cooptation of indigenous
"modern elites," albeit in what Goldberg (1993: 104) terms a "universal
reductionist" mode. Regardless of the way it imposes itself, the dogmas of
the Enlightenment Project enforced by the Order has brought agonizing
oppression and chronic disruption in the traditional lives of indigenous
people. Secondly, Enlightenment via the Order not only has no respect for
non-European traditions but neither for its own (Harvey, 1989:11-12).
3 For numerous North American Indian Nations on the Great Plains, the
buffalo was the source of clothing, housing, eating utensils, sleds,
parfleche as a carryall, musical instruments, cosmetics, jewelry, armor,
masks, and dung for fuel (cf. Thornton, 1987). Skins sometimes were used to
record the events of a person's life in pictorial form. Some oral history
suggests that the animal provided everything, except water and poles for
housing.
The most glaring example of animal reduction-probably the one most
destructive to American Indians was the near extinction of the buffalo,
which culminated during the last half of the 19th century, especially to the
Plains Indians (Thornton, 1987: 51-52). For some of the Nations the sacred
bundle was made of buffalo skin. Buffalo Gap in the southeastern part of the
Black Hills now of South Dakota is the place where the buffalo came in
spring which began the ceremonial year of the Plains Indians. Buffalo Gap
has been seen as the starting point of the Great Race that determined the
primacy between two legged and four legged creatures at the beginning of the
world. Spiritual relationships with other animals and persons were
associated with physical places such as Buffalo Gap (Deloria, 1973: 273).
4 The use of deviant or demonic labels is a common device for marginalizing
or excluding protest. Calling a leader the "Mad Mullah" in Somalia or the
"Red Devil" in Indian Country, U.S.A., is but one attempt. And, the demonic
label often is attached to leaders who are perceived as having spiritual
characteristics. In Elkswatawa or The Prophet of the West (1836), for
example, as James Strange French tries to present the last stand of the
Indian in Ohio country he reveals the demonization of the "spiritual"
leaders and the ascription of savage in contrast to civilized identities.
The practice also applies to the pejorative identification of entire
cultures. North American history is replete with examples of attempts to
identify Indians as savages (cf. Pearce, 1953; Kinietz, 1965). Yet, as
Dennis Banks explained in his defense following criminal charges in "The
Wounded Knee Trial," he was a Lakota. Lakota means "allies," while the word
"Sioux" is French meaning "cut throat" (Christenson, 1986).
The power to control identity may constrain or otherwise direct action in
areas where there are a number of possible courses of identification. The
fight over an accurate historical record brings a variety of perspectives
into the picture, including those people who are more concerned that
indigenous people do not glorify their history. Baxter (1994: 174), for
example, in commenting on the Oromo and political activists states that "it
would be remarkable in the circumstances if a romanticized, primordial past
were not fabricated."
5 In 1992, United Nations Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali chastised
the U.N. Security Council for devoting disproportionate levels of attention
and resources to the former Yugoslavia while paying little attention to the
growing crisis in Somalia. He remarked that their focus was upon the rich
people's war. His comment also has led to an examination of the issue of
"race" in the U.N.'s varying response to such crises.
REFERENCES
Abu-Lughod, Janet 1989 Before European Hegemony. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Adams, Kif Augustine 1993 "What is Just? The Rule of Law and Natural Law in
the Trial of Former East German Border Guards." Stanford Journal of
International Law 29:271-291. Augelli, Enrico & Murphy, Craig 1988 America's
Quest: For Supremacy and the Third World. London: Printer Publishers.
Balibar, Etienne 1987 "What is State Power?" In The Political Economy of
Law, edited by Ghai, Yash et al. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Baxter, P.T.W. 1994 "The Creation and Constitution of Oromo Nationality."
Pp. 167-186 in Ethnicity and Conflict in the Horn of Africa, edited by
Katsuyoshi Fukui and John Markakis. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
Bestman, Catherine, and Lee Cassanelli (eds.) 1996 The Struggle for Land in
Southern Somalia: The War Behind the War. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
British Military Administration 1944 The First to be Freed. London: His
Majesty's Stationery Office.
Christenson, Ron 1986 Political Trials. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
Deloria, Vine Jr. 1973 God is Red. New York: Grosset and Dunlap.
(c) 1999 Information Access Company. All rights reserved.
This article may only be stored on a computer network for a maximum of 30
days. 
Quellen:IAC TRADE AND INDUSTRY DATABASE 
JOURNAL OF ASIAN & AFRICAN STUDIES 01/05/1999 P157 
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
08Dez1998 INDIA: Rural uplift - Case for state help (1041). 
By SAMIT KAR.
An International Workshop in Bangkok this month will find ways of making
decentralised rural development self-reliant - villagers should make do
without "support from above". Though "rural development" has no universally
accepted definition, the term is often used to define a government-aided
strategy to enable a specific group of people - poor rural men and women -
to gain for themselves and their children, more of what they want and need.
It involves helping the poor in the rural areas to demand and control more
of the benefits of rural development.
As a result, the process of rural development should represent the entire
gamut of change by which a social system moves towards an all-round "better"
quality of life. But how will the rural poor become self-supporting without
help from above? This is the focal point of discussion of this workshop.
Meanwhile, when governments of the Third World are shedding their age old
social commitment to alleviate mass poverty, a new set of catchwords has
emerged. These terms have little relevance to the process of grassroot
governance. Expressions like "participatory rural appraisal", "community
participation", "entitlements" and "development from below" are now
fashionable in the realm of development planning but considering the nature
of the "clientele", i.e., the takers, what do "participation" and
"opportunity" mean to them?
The donor agency-induced model of development with stress on PRA was
interpreted by one such scholar as follows. Development can be richer and
meaningful only through the participation of the clientele of development.
It is a challenge for all those who act as facilitators of development right
from a policy-maker down to a village-level worker.
But in the process of development in a deprived society who is the
clientele? What are its basic attributes? An average Indian villager
represents one of the worst forms of human resources in terms of earning,
education, health, calorie intake and social opportunities. Without some
degree of government support, how can he survive? What does participation
mean to him? Yet development is now considered by donor agencies to be
meaningful only through peoples' participation.
PANCHAYATS
There had therefore been a growing impression that PRA techniques are
nothing more than a hoax. That planning can only become real if the exercise
is done by the people, of the people and for the people. But in reality,
much is imposed from above at the behest of donor agencies.
In India more stress has been laid on internal resource mobilisation. This,
for example, partly motivated the 73rd Constitution (Amendment) Act, 1992,
better known as the Panchayati Amendment Act. Section 243I of the Act led to
the formation of State Finance Commissions, which were empowered to review
the financial position of the local bodies every five years. Section 243G of
the Panchayati Amendment Act says: subject to the provision of this
Constitution, the legislature of a state may, by law, give panchayats such
powers as may be necessary to enable them to function as institutions of
self-government. Such laws may contain provisions for the devolution of
powers and responsibilities upon panchayats at the appropriate level,
subject to certain conditions.
Section 243H states that the legislature of a state may, by law authorise a
panchayat to levy and collect taxes, duties, tolls and fees in accordance
with certain procedures and subject to prescribed limits. This section also
provides the scope for giving panchayats powers pertaining to grants-in-aid
from the consolidated fund of the state.
On the basis of these three Sections, SFCs have to address the issue of
identifying taxes, duties, toll and fees levied by the state government. The
net proceeds of these imposts may be divided between the state government
and the local bodies.
In such cases, the SFCs have to decide about the principles governing the
distribution, assignment and release of grants and the measures needed to
improve the financial position of the local bodies. The commissions also
have to give their recommendations on any other matter referred to it by the
state governments.
STUDY
Accordingly, the West Bengal Finance Commission was constituted on 30 May
1994 under the chairmanship of Dr Satyabrata Sen. The Commission submitted
its report to the state government on 27 November 1995, which was accepted
with the publication of a notification on 22 July 1996.
The report of the Commission cited a study by the Institute of Social
Sciences, New Delhi. According to the study, the average annual income per
gram panchayat - the lowest tier of local government - varies from a low of
Rs 1299 in Madhya Pradesh to a high of Rs 6.80 lakhs in Kerala, a very wide
distribution even allowing for local variations.
In most states, the gram panchayats were excessively dependent on government
grants. The exceptions being those in Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and
Kerala where the gram panchayats mobilised 30 per cent or more of their
revenue by their own efforts. In West Bengal, the average resource
mobilisation per gram panchayat was about Rs 12,000 which is only a small
fraction of the grants-in-aid inflow.
The West Bengal Finance Commission's recommendation explicitly underlined
the fact that such a lackadaisical approach will henceforth not be
tolerated. The publication of the reports of various SFCs highlighted the
policy desideratum of making the institutions of decentralisation
self-sufficient.
However, self-sufficiency or not, given that the bulk of the rural
population is poor and malnutrited, the government cannot abdicate its
social responsibility.
The experience of Latin American countries in the late 60s and early 70s
deserves mention in this context. Proponents of the Dependency School such
as Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank and Dos Santos criticised the programme of
the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America which recommended
the withdrawal of government support to the underprivileged.
Not too long after, Latin America experienced a protracted period of
recession and political repression. The same can happen in India. Ominously,
donor agencies are again repeating the catch phrase of "participatory
approach".
Copyright(C) 1998 THE STATESMAN (INDIA).
(c) 1998 Chamber World Network International Ltd. 
Quellen:ASIA INTELLIGENCE WIRE 
THE STATESMAN 08/12/1998 
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
02Nov1998 INDIA: Yet they have been the worst offenders of all. 
One might naively think that for the study of economic history as it really
was, the place to turn is to economic historians. Yet they have been the
worst offenders of all. The vast majority of self-styled `economic
historians' totally neglect the history of most of the world, and the
remaining minority distort it altogether. Most economic historians seem to
have no perspective - not even a European one - of the world at all.
Instead, their `economic history' is almost altogether confined to the
West...The rest of the world does not exist for them.
The author of one of the most note worthy examples of this kind of
Eurocentric economic history recently won the Nobel Prize for economics. The
Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History was written by the 1993
Nobel laureate in economics Douglass C North with Robert Paul Thomas
(1973)... They clearly state "the development of an efficient economic
organization in Western Europe accounts for the rise of West"... The rest of
the world and its demographic upturn as well was not there for them. What is
more serious is that the small minority of economic historians who do refer
to "the Rest" very seriously distort both "the East" and its economic
relations with "the West." Their perspective on the "world economy" is that
it emerged out of Europe and that Europe built a world economy around
itself....
Marxist economic history may seem different, but it is equally, indeed even
more, Eurocentric...The very existence of a world economic system was
explicitly denied by Marx and only belatedly acknowledged by Lenin.
Andre Gunder Frank in Re Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age.
(c) 1998 The Times of India Group. 
Quellen:ECONOMIC TIMES 02/11/1998 
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
25Okt1998 INDIA: Decline of the East. 
IN THIS book Andre Gunder Frank has turned received Eurocentric
historiography and social theory upside down by using a "globological"
perspective. the author asks us to ReORIENT our views away from
Eurocen-trism to see the Rise of the West as a mere blip in what was, and is
again becoming, an Asia-centric world.
Frank's thesis is that the West first bought itself a third-class seat on
the Asian economic train, then leased a whole railway carriage, and only in
the nineteenth century managed to displace Asians from the locomotive. He
argues that the industrial revolution and its eventual use by the Europeans
to achieve a position of dominance in the world economy cannot be adequately
explained on the basis only of factors "internal" to Europe. Frank explains
the rise of the West from 1400 onwards in world economic and demographic
terms, with a sweeping historical perspective that places it in clear
conjunction with the decline of the East around 1800. European states, he
says, used the silver extracted from the American colonies to buy entry into
an expanding Asian market, which already flourished in the global economy by
means of the very productive commercial and institutional mechanisms that
were supposedly unique to Europe. Then, as the East entered into a decline
phase of cyclical world economy, the nations of te West resorted to import
substitution and export promotion in the world market to become New
Industrialising Economies.
This is certainly an exciting reassessment of our global economic past and
anyone interested in economic and social history, and in Asia cannot afford
to ignore this work - Frank's "best book" if we are to go by his dedicatory
note.
(c) 1998 The Times of India Group. 
Quellen:ECONOMIC TIMES 25/10/1998 
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
25Mai1998 INDIA: A neither-here-nor-there account. 
By Prasun Sonwalkar.
It is common sense to assume that a book must tell the public a little more
than what is already well known. This is more so for books on current
affairs and by authors who are not read simply because they are great
stylists. Sadly, S S Gill does not add to the reader's knowledge of
corruption which is all-pervasive and obsessively discussed and commented
upon in democratic India. This is all the more disappointing because as a
former IAS officer, he has had a long stint in that great abode of
corruption in the country, the bureaucracy.
Any hope of discovering new facts or an insider's account of corruption in
the bureaucracy is dashed when Gill begs the question by asking somewhat
pompously and rhetorically: "Would it be permissible to infer that this
service (IAS) may not be as corrupt as it is generally presumed to be?"
Gill is even now right at the centre of an amazingly bureaucratic
organisation, Prasar Bharati (encompassing Doordarshan and All India Radio)
of which he is the CEO. Gill speaks from a pedestal when he observes that
"all this paraphernalia of pomp and pageantry costs a lot of money. But this
is a minor issue. What really matters is the feudal culture of privilege it
promotes, the damage it does to the growth of an egalitarian outlook, the
noxious example that this level of extravagance and high living sets before
the people..." This is odd, as the high priest of Indian broadcasting is
hardly known for his humility or lightness of touch.
For a person of many many summers who had to be accommodated in his latest
position by relaxing the age limit, Gill comes out quite strongly as an
angry man, whose heart is in the right place - as Andre Gunder Frank once
said about his father, in the upper half and slightly to the left.
Throughout the book, he pours venom and more on the corrupt of all hues even
though most of it reads like the angry letters to the editor by citizens
upset with the general degeneration of public life. Sample this:
n "Our politicians profess to live for the people, and swear by them in
every speech. But there is no other section of humanity which so flagrantly
robs the people and works against their interests";
n "Except for Lutyens' Delhi, the rest of the city now presents a picture of
total chaos. And the major credit for this situation goes to our politicians
who have dedicated their lives to the service of the people";
n "Thousands of crores of public money has been stashed in secret foreign
banks by corrupt politicians...Quite a few of these patriots take their vile
secret to the grave when they happen to die suddenly...And these are the
people whose statues are erected for public veneration".
There is little of the experienced bureaucrat in the book, less of a person
who claims in the preface of having `abiding academic interests'. For most
part, Gill has merely summed up what is already known about the known cases
of corruption in high places since the time of Jawaharlal Nehru. The rogues'
gallery evokes little interest, while there are no new insights into the
mega corruption cases like Bofors, HDW, Satish Sharma's predilections or the
Karsan deal.
One may perhaps argue that the subject and the times themselves are mundane,
and they turn tracts of the times into mere exercises in shorthand
scholarship, `bonsai academics', as it were. But then, had it not been for
the fact that Gill has been an `insider' in the system all these years,
there would have been little reason to pick up the book. One looked forward
to reading about the many ingenuous ways the system breeds corruption, with
juicy little known examples, but was disappointed.
In the event, the book falls between two stools, neither does it satisfy the
academic nor the lay reader interested in knowing the `unofficial official'
version of corruption. At the end of the exercise, the reader is left
wondering how the book can ever be described as `an incisive no holds barred
account of corruption in India', as the jacket claims.
(c)1998 Business Standard Ltd. 
Quellen:BUSINESS STANDARD 25/05/98 P11 
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
23Okt1997 PHILIPPINES: The View from Taft Reaching out. 
By Dante Sy.
The dependency theory - espoused by Celso Furtado, a Brazilian economist and
contributor to the Spanish and Portuguese literature on dependency theory,
and Andre Gunder Frank, a major dependency theorist from the USA - which is
used in economic development analysis, suggests that the poverty or misery
of third world countries (less developed countries) is generally the result
of their dependence on first world countries (developed countries).
Obviously, the premise of the theory is that transactions entered into by
third world countries (whether of the trade, loan, grant or assistance type)
with first world countries do not always result in their favor. This is so
as first world countries are positioned as to be able to sway or dictate the
terms of trade, loan, grant or assistance transactions in their favor.
The theory also implies that some first world countries, in their desire to
promote their own economic interests, may go to the extent of exploiting the
resources or facilities of third world countries more for the former's
benefit and less for the latter's.
What is true of countries may also be true of people.
It is not always absolute that people are poor because they opt to be so.
Sometimes, there is poverty or misery because there are some members of
society who take advantage of the poor or make use of their resources or
facilities only for their own good.
For instance, certain farm tenancy, household help or factory employment
contracts are so structured as to practically condemn the poor farmer,
domestic help or sweatshop hand to a life of penury.
The creation of the Educational Research and Development Assistance (ERDA)
Foundation, Inc. on September 19, 1974 is, therefore, a milestone,
particularly as its efforts and initiatives are designed to provide
self-help opportunities, specifically through the intervention of education
for the poor to improve on their economic status.
But more than providing these self-help opportunities, the ERDA is also a
medium through which well-meaning individuals and institutions are able to
make use of their resources and facilities no longer for their own good but
for the good of others.
That moneyed individuals and institutions can do so was underscored by the
testimonials of Alvin Tejada and Rowena Picardal, both scholars of ERDA who
were able to finish their architecture and political science courses through
the financial assistance of their benefactors.
As Alvin and Rowena put it on the occasion of the blessing and inauguration
of the ERDA Development Center on Sept. 19, 1997 which coincided with ERDA's
23rd foundation anniversary, they would not be what they are today were it
not for the scholarship program of the ERDA and the funding support extended
to said program by the many individuals and institutions who see in their
plentitude the need to reach out to the poor.
More than Alvin and Rowena and the other beneficiaries of ERDA's self-help
program, there are still many others who are just waiting for some
magnanimous individuals or institutions to reach out to them through ERDA so
that they may also overcome their financial hurdles and enhance their
economic status. Would that we could all reach out to those in need?
(C) Business World Publishing Corporation 1997. 
Quellen:BUSINESS WORLD (PHILIPPINES) 23/10/97 P4 
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>        
 <<...>>