Europe must come to terms with the contradictions of world cultures and world cultural conflict, global anarchy and global decay
Nationalism will continue to receive from the contradictions of globalization. One theory (Huntington) holds, that cultural dividing lines increasingly achieve relevance; and even could threaten to endanger the transformation project to build up a stable, market oriented western democracy on the ruins of communism. To those, accustomed to the dialogue about international politics as a 'dismal science' it will be no surprise to learn about recent international research results regarding genocide and mass murder in this century (Rummel, 1994, 1995). 218 repressive regimes (141 state regimes and 77 quasi-state and group regimes) from 1900 to 1987 have killed nearly 170 million of their own citizens and foreigners - about four times the number of people killed in domestic and international wars during that same period. Power kills; democracy is the general method of non-violence, says Rummel: but what happens, if democracy and non-violence are seriously undermined by ethno-politic!
al conflict? After the horrors of the Holocaust and the Second World War, the following victimisation of mostly civilians stand out in contemporary history:
Graph 6.1: War victims and victims of mass murder after 1945
Source: our own compilations from Stiftung Entwicklung und Frieden, 1996, based on Rummel, 1994 and other sources, quoted there
Who will be the groups that most violently are going to challenge the logic of accumulation on a global scale? Does capitalist globalization, that process of unequal and uneven development, in the end cause the cultural conflicts in the world system, as globalization theories would maintain (Axtmann, 1995)? A research effort at global, cross-national analysis of social integration and disintegration did not lead very far, perhaps because the research design was centred around too many variables and the number of countries included in the analysis makes the research findings very dependent on outlying cases (Klitgaard and Fedderke, 1995). But what emerged at least was that there are different types of social disintegration in the world system, and that - as the authors contend - stagnation is more detrimental than growth to the issue of social stability. This hypothesis might be contested in the light of new research results; but at any rate, that recent essay opens the way for!
the debate of these issues anew.
Ethno-nationalistic conflicts, terrorism and war were to break out along the real 'earthquake line' in today's international system, the great dividing line between the cultures. That is at least what Samuel Huntington, Harvard professor of political science and for many years one the closest advisers of successive United States governments on matters of international security and military policy, has maintained in his recent contributions. Huntington tries to offer a socio-cultural explanation to the question, where Europe's frontier will be finally drawn. Are there clear empirically observable tendencies in development performance according to the classification, suggested by Huntington, of the basic underlying socio-cultural patterns of a given country?
Professor Huntington's thesis is not at all abstract and has - however we view it - a vital importance for the future of the European Union. From Marseilles to Algiers, from Madrid to Rabat, from Rome to Tunis or Sofia, from Athens to Bucharest or Cairo, from Vienna to Kiev or Ankara or Teheran geographical distances are smaller or about equal as the distances from these European Union cities to the Canary Islands, the Irish Republic, northern Scotland or northern Scandinavia or other remoter parts of the already existing Union. The migration pressures from Eastern Europe and the population explosion on the southern rim of the Mediterranean will increase. In 30 years, the population balance on the southern rim of Europe will have dramatically shifted. The southern border of Europe already is and will even more so become a border between relatively wealthy developed societies and societies, that are threatened by overpopulation, scarcity of resources, and poverty. By the year 2!
000, 290 million people will live in the 19 countries of the Arab world alone. Today, less than three-fifths of the rural population have access to safe water, 80 million people are illiterate, 50 million of them females, 10 million people are underfed, 73 million Arabs live below the line of absolute poverty. Average life expectancy is still 61.9 years, 40 million people have no access to health services, while 50.4 thousand million $ were spent on armaments. Arms imports in the Arab world amounted to 3.5 thousand million $ in 1992 alone (our own compilation from UNDP, 1995). These tendencies are all the more notable, because eastward expansion of NATO and the EU is not synchronic, and the most probable outcome would leave open an entire geographical corridor from Russia and Belarus right through to Switzerland. The most likely future eastern boundary of Western Europe will take the following shape after NATO and EU-eastward extension:
Map 6.1: The eastern and southern border of western Europe
While Ireland, Sweden, Finland, and Austria are the four neutral EU members, the Slovak Republic - left out - would provide a corridor through the European heartland. The extension of the European Union will also pose some interesting questions regarding Northern Europe - where Norway belongs to NATO, but not the European Union. In terms of external and internal security, a more homogeneous territory would be the optimal answer, while socially, the Slovak Republic, Romania, and the Ukraine - as among the most important 'corridor' countries - will realistically not qualify for early European Union membership in the coming years:
The most realistic scenario is of course Huntington's borderline between western Christianity (Catholics and Protestants) on the one hand and Orthodox Christianity and Islam on the other hand in Europe. Huntington's border rather would look like the following:
Legend: Scandinavia, the Baltic States, Poland, the Czech and Slovak Republics, Hungary, Slovenia and Croatia are seen as part of the West; while the rest of Eastern Europe belongs to the Orthodox or Islamic heritage.
The migratory pressures from the South and the Southeast will certainly increase in the future, as the following map shows:
Legend: our own compilations from Fischer Weltalmanach, 1997 and EXCEL 7.0
The still existing high concentration of development problems and population dynamics in the immediate vicinity of Europe over the next 30 years will dramatically change the shape of international politics, economics and migratory pressures in the region. A dependency-oriented explanation of underdevelopment would hold, that the 'Huntington factor' is in reality disappearing, whenever we control for MNC penetration. The main result of our investigation will be that the Huntington factor only plays a certain role when we do not control for the amount of MNC penetration; however, if we do consider MNC penetration properly, the effects become weaker or are even the reverse.
The( in)validity of Huntington's culture conflict approach on a world level
However forceful Huntington's theory might seem to be at first sight, we can consider it to be falsified by our investigations. While Lipset and Weede seem to be inclined to regard Confucianism as a growth precondition, Huntington's theory is more pessimistic and foresees a joint rising world cultural challenge against the dominant centres by Islam and Orthodoxy. The important element in the test of Huntington's theory seems to be the joint interaction of societies, classified under his index. The Huntington-Index might be thus the mere reflection of this underlying geographical and world economic peripherization, that jointly affects the Orthodox and the Islamic world. This joint peripherization would cast a large shadow on the prospects for market-economic reform in Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, and the 'Federal Republic of Yugoslavia'.
Enough of ideologies. Let the hard facts speak. Substituting 'UN membership years' by the Huntington-index of the clash of civilisations (Huntington-Index countries = 1, other countries = 0), we get the following results on the level of world society from our Table 4.1:
Table 6.1: the influence of Huntington's index on development performance at the level of world society
MNC PEN73
Govex
Trade Dep
social sec
Huntington-I
Women Parl
Women %LF
ln PCI
ln PCI^2
ln(MPR+1)
Fertility Rate
Constant
adjustment
-0,761
-1,491
0,125
-3,538
0,048
-0,058
0,83
0,133
0,01
-0,024
-0,004
21,47
0,188
1,029
0,349
5,208
0,029
0,04
0,806
0,06
0,007
0,022
0,002
19,93
0,301
2,649
4,341
111
335,1
779,1
t-Test
-4,035
-1,449
0,359
-0,679
1,684
-1,46
1,03
2,193
1,353
-1,08
-1,989
MNC PEN73
Govex
Trade Dep
social sec
Huntington-I
Women Parl
Women %LF
social sec
ln PCI^2
ln(MPR+1)
Fertility Rate
Constant
growth
-0,944
-0,625
0,167
-4,228
0,021
-0,084
0,209
0,138
0,015
-0,038
-0,003
26,73
0,165
0,9
0,305
4,558
0,025
0,035
0,706
0,053
0,007
0,02
0,002
17,45
0,409
2,319
6,997
111
413,8
596,8
t-Test
-5,723
-0,694
0,546
-0,928
0,844
-2,426
0,296
2,616
2,311
-1,956
-1,645
LEX 1960
1 der e-funct
1 der pi-func
MNC PEN73
Viol Civ Rits
Trade Dep
Terms Trade
Huntington-I
Women Parl
Women %LF
ln(MPR+1)
Constant
DYN
0,811
-0,025
-0,038
0,984
0,013
0,001
-0,049
2E-04
-0,706
-29,49
-0,299
26,79
LEX
0,885
0,024
0,031
0,708
0,017
0,006
0,173
0,002
0,742
6,961
0,037
2,724
0,737
2,257
28,23
111
1582
565,3
t-Test
0,916
-1,054
-1,216
1,391
0,793
0,238
-0,282
0,147
-0,952
-4,237
-7,993
pol rights
MNC PEN73
Govex
Trade Dep
social sec
Huntington-I
Women Parl
Women %LF
ln PCI
ln PCI^2
ln(MPR+1)
Fertility Rate
Constant
violations
0,536
1,045
0,079
-1,473
0,02
0,06
1,002
-0,103
0,004
0,009
5E-04
5,987
0,108
0,588
0,199
2,976
0,016
0,023
0,461
0,035
0,004
0,013
0,001
11,39
0,576
1,514
13,68
111
344,9
254,4
t-Test
4,973
1,778
0,399
-0,495
1,193
2,663
2,175
-2,992
0,939
0,713
0,453
MNC PEN73
Govex
Trade Dep
social sec
Huntington-I
Women Parl
Women %LF
ln PCI
ln PCI^2
ln(MPR+1)
Fertility Rate
Constant
civil rights
0,354
1,21
-0,015
-0,074
0,002
0,037
0,571
-0,087
8E-04
-0,011
-9E-04
3,205
violations
0,086
0,468
0,159
2,372
0,013
0,018
0,367
0,028
0,003
0,01
8E-04
9,077
0,586
1,206
14,28
111
228,7
161,5
4,121
2,582
-0,093
-0,031
0,177
2,027
1,554
-3,15
0,244
-1,115
-1,041
HDI
MNC PEN73
Govex
Trade Dep
social sec
Huntington-I
Women Parl
Women %LF
ln PCI
ln PCI^2
ln(MPR+1)
Fertility Rate
Constant
-0,095
0,173
0,006
0,02
-5E-04
-0,003
-0,033
7E-04
-2E-04
7E-04
6E-05
0,488
0,008
0,043
0,015
0,217
0,001
0,002
0,034
0,003
3E-04
9E-04
8E-05
0,832
0,871
0,111
67,9
111
9,137
1,358
-12,04
4,018
0,392
0,092
-0,38
-1,72
-0,986
0,26
-0,598
0,736
0,808
MNC PEN73
Govex
Trade Dep
social sec
Huntington-I
Women Parl
Women %LF
ln PCI
ln PCI^2
ln(MPR+1)
Fertility Rate
Constant
-0,071
0,101
-0,006
0,16
6E-04
-0,002
-0,032
0,002
-1E-04
4E-04
8E-05
0,026
0,006
0,031
0,011
0,159
9E-04
0,001
0,025
0,002
2E-04
7E-04
6E-05
0,608
0,873
0,081
69,29
111
4,971
0,724
Gender Development Index
-12,38
3,232
-0,609
1,008
0,692
-2,021
-1,311
1,096
-0,58
0,568
1,401
MNC PEN73
Govex
Trade Dep
social sec
Huntington-I
Women Parl
Women %LF
ln PCI
ln PCI^2
ln(MPR+1)
Fertility Rate
Constant
-0,02
0,016
0,015
-0,184
0,001
0,005
-0,018
0,003
-2E-04
-6E-05
4E-05
0,866
0,004
0,023
0,008
0,114
6E-04
9E-04
0,018
0,001
2E-04
5E-04
4E-05
0,437
0,818
0,058
45,46
111
1,691
0,375
Gender Empowerment Index
MNC PEN73
Govex
Trade Dep
social sec
Huntington-I
Women Parl
Women %LF
ln PCI
ln PCI^2
ln(MPR+1)
Fertility Rate
-4,882
0,7
2,019
-1,606
1,868
6,039
-1,006
1,946
-0,958
-0,117
1,015
MNC PEN73
Govex
Trade Dep
social sec
Huntington-I
Women Parl
Women %LF
ln PCI
ln PCI^2
ln(MPR+1)
Fertility Rate
%agland
Constant
%forest
-0,391
-1,834
-5,294
-2,078
28,24
0,334
0,689
-10,99
-0,366
-0,082
0,107
0,008
-63,58
area
0,128
1,408
7,606
2,559
38,26
0,211
0,293
5,918
0,46
0,055
0,164
0,014
146,8
0,313
19,45
4,173
110
18940
41610
t-Test
-3,043
-1,303
-0,696
-0,812
0,738
1,584
2,353
-1,856
-0,797
-1,495
0,654
0,564
MNC PEN73
Govex
Trade Dep
social sec
Huntington-I
Women Parl
Women %LF
ln PCI
ln PCI^2
ln(MPR+1)
Fertility Rate
%agland
Constant
annual
0,015
0,091
-0,646
-0,22
3,273
0,008
0,001
0,278
-0,054
0,003
-0,004
3E-04
-11,53
deforest
0,006
0,07
0,377
0,127
1,898
0,01
0,015
0,294
0,023
0,003
0,008
7E-04
7,281
0,336
0,965
4,643
110
51,87
102,4
t-Test
2,324
1,306
-1,712
-1,732
1,724
0,748
0,099
0,946
-2,367
1,181
-0,511
0,511
MNC PEN73
Govex
Trade Dep
social sec
Huntington-I
Women Parl
Women %LF
ln PCI
ln PCI^2
ln(MPR+1)
Fertility Rate
%agland
Constant
ethno
0,009
0,098
0,218
-0,059
0,91
0,016
0,032
0,511
-0,032
-0,002
-0,02
-0,001
-3,323
warfare
0,011
0,118
0,638
0,215
3,207
0,018
0,025
0,496
0,039
0,005
0,014
0,001
12,3
0,109
1,63
1,116
110
35,59
292,4
t-Test
0,816
0,83
0,342
-0,275
0,284
0,884
1,292
1,031
-0,823
-0,391
-1,444
-0,985
MNC PEN73
Govex
Trade Dep
social sec
Huntington-I
Women Parl
Women %LF
ln PCI
ln PCI^2
ln(MPR+1)
Fertility Rate
%agland
Constant
destab./
0,002
0,029
0,073
-0,033
0,535
-6E-04
-0,002
-0,048
-0,008
-0,001
-2E-04
-4E-04
-1,938
war
0,003
0,028
0,153
0,052
0,771
0,004
0,006
0,119
0,009
0,001
0,003
3E-04
2,959
0,095
0,392
0,965
110
1,78
16,92
t-Test
0,885
1,02
0,477
-0,633
0,693
-0,151
-0,28
-0,399
-0,883
-1,078
-0,049
-1,55
Legend: our own calculations with EXCEL 4.0 and 5.0
The Huntington Index, under control for MNC penetration, is even significantly and positively related to adjustment and gender empowerment; and the only negative significant effect is the influence on deforestation. Traditional forms of globalization are responsible for the process of stagnation in the world periphery and semi-periphery. In the countries falling under the Huntington-index, environmental concerns should achieve greater attention in the future.
The return of dictatorship? Towards understanding the process of ethno-political conflict and the world-wide refugee problem
In 1989 we heard the prophecy of the 'end of history'.
Instead of talking about the end of history, we might be faced with the acceleration of history. Deadly ethno-political conflicts continue to beset the world. In the international system, wars are of course not new; 16 of all the 21 wars with more than a million deaths in history happened during the 20th century. From 1945 to 1992 more than 25 million people died in wars or as a direct consequence of wars (Stiftung Entwicklung und Frieden, 1993). Civilians have to pay an ever larger price for these wars; the tendency has been rising steadily and in 1990, already 90% of all war victims were civilians. The number of international refugees according to the most narrow definitions increased world-wide from 7.8 million in 1982 to 16.6 million according to the strictest criteria in 1991. To these numbers, one would have to add 3.4 million refugee-like situations of people in foreign countries and 23.5 million internal refugees. All together, there were at least 43 million refugees c!
lassified according to various categories around the world in 1991 (op. cit.: 184-185). But estimates of the real number of refugees reach as high as 500 million on a global scale (Datta, 1993). The 'official' data show furthermore, that according to UNHCR criteria, the number of refugees world-wide increased from 16.6 to 24 million people (Stiftung Entwicklung und Frieden, 1996).
Ethno-political conflicts are among the most vicious forms of international and domestic conflicts. Over 40% of the states of the world have more than 5 major ethnic groups within their borders, with at least one of them facing permanent discrimination (UNDP, 1994). There were 10 major ethnic conflicts in Europe, 6 in the Middle East, 28 in Asia, 23 in Africa, 3 in Latin America during the period 1993-94 (Gurr, 1994). These 50 lethal conflicts produced almost 4 million deaths and displaced 26.8 million people as refugees (Gurr, 1994: 351). It would be wrong, though, to assume that there are necessarily centrifugal tendencies in the international system as such that will still further extend these types of conflicts like bush-fires. Rather, Gurr in his far-reaching empirical work proposes to start from the hypothesis, that the collapse of the communist bloc is only partly to blame for the increase in ethno-political violence, since 54% of all ethno-political conflicts were star!
ted before 1987. Since the 1990s, already existing conflicts have tended to intensify, but the spreading of conflicts, Gurr argues, could be avoided. Contention for power, struggle for indigenous rights and ethno-nationalism were the main causes of these conflicts. Huntington's recent thesis about the clash of civilisations receives a considerable qualification from Gurr's empirical work: only 4 of the ethno-political conflicts correspond to the traditional left-right ideological struggle; while 18 are motivated by civilisational struggles (Gurr, 1994: 357). Although ethno-political conflict intensified after the end of the Soviet Union, it would be wrong to blame the first process on the second. The disintegration of the Soviet Union only increased an already existing tendency in world society. Power shifts, the emergence of new states, and revolutions still play an important role in the determination of conflict. But, according to Gurr, it would be wrong to assume, that the !
fragmentation tendency of the world system were to continue indefinitely. Rather, the most likely scenario will be an increase in communal contention about access to power in the weak and heterogeneous states in Africa. Secessionist conflicts outside Africa and the former communist bloc even declined in intensity over recent years (Gurr, 1994: 364). Map 6.2 shows the Gurr-Index on a world scale:
Map 6.2: ethno-political conflict in the world system
Legend: Gurr (1994) and EXCEL 7.0 map programme, as applied to Gurr's original data (Gurr, 1994: 369-375. The Gurr scale - magnitude of ethno-political conflict - is the squared root of the sum of deaths (in 10s of thousands) plus refugees (in 100s of thousands) from ethno-political conflicts 1993-1994
Macroquantitative evidence on these processes is very difficult to construct and collect, as long as data collection and data reporting is so deficient in many of the new states of the East and continues to be so in the South as well. Thus, our model can be called only a preliminary test of the Deutsch/Huntington approach to ethno-political conflict and had to start with a few available data series that render themselves at least partially to the testing of the general patterns of the new realities of ethno-political conflict around the world. Our predictors included indicators of dependency (aggregate net transfers, that is to say, inflows that are greater than outflows due to international exploitation), of the liberal approach to development (political and human rights violations versus respect), and of the social-policy approach (mean years of schooling, adult literacy rate, human development index, the fertility rate and its change as an indicator of the process of demogr!
aphic change). The Deutsch/Huntington school however regards alphabetisation as an indicator of social mobilisation, and hence as a threat to stability.
Our following analysis shows, that the threat to democracy in the semi-periphery and the periphery continues. Superficially, it seems to be, that similar conditions at different times produce similar theories and empirical results: during the emergence of the many new states in the 'Third World' in the early 1960s, more pessimistic versions of modernisation theory gained ground. With the contemporary problems of democracy in the former 'Second World', the stability question of the new recently emerged or liberated states cannot be separated from such modernisation theory dimensions anymore. In the model, that we propose, the chain of causation, underlying the empirical trends, is related to, but not completely patterned according to modernisation theories. For Huntington, instability always was determined by social mobilisation (SM), which works in the direction of instability (IST). This is at least the consistent interpretation, that Weede (1985) has proposed, and which we f!
ollow here.
Deutsch was even more radical than Huntington in expressing the idea that development is a threat to stability. His clearly formulated mathematical formula for political stability expects a positive trade-off between government sector size, income concentration and stability on the one hand and a negative trade-off between social mobilisation, level of development and stability on the other hand (Deutsch, 1960/66).
The tragedy in former Yugoslavia could be regarded in many ways as a paradigmatic case, to be explained at least in part by Deutsch's theory. The Deutsch/Huntington school would believe that, however legitimate the issue of transformation from the communist political and economic system in that country might have been, the strategy to cling to communist regional power while opening up the country to the world market was the real and final reason for the break-out of the conflict. In fact, Yugoslavia in the 1980s held many world or at least European records in economic and social policy, that seem to be forgotten more and more in the futile debate about early international recognition of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia as the alleged main cause for the subsequent tragedy. At first inspection, Yugoslavia should have become a real miracle of neo-liberal economic transformation in the 1980s after the ethno-heterogeneous state class model of the 1970s came to a grinding halt. Maliciou!
s social scientists might dig out some day these old journal and book contributions, praising the old leadership for what it had achieved in the name of the market, the international financial institutions, and in the name of economic theory. Amen. We refrain from that: errare humanum est. Yugoslavia attempted the most-far-reaching neo-liberal transformation strategy in the region; and for that reason alone its experience should be carefully studied elsewhere: (i) Yugoslavia had the most rapid urbanisation rate of all European countries from 1960 to 1990 (3.2% per annum). In fact, urban population doubled from 28% to 56% in just thirty years. This enormous potential and challenge of social mobilisation was coupled with (ii) a very rapid process of economic transformation and a disappearance of the central state. Yugoslavia recorded the highest rate of gross domestic investment of all countries of the world with complete World Bank WDR data for 1988 and also the highest gross d!
omestic savings rate for the same year. With a savings rate of 2/5 of the national income, Yugoslavia should have been well underway towards self-sustained growth. At the same time, however, the central government in Belgrade reduced in accordance with many international advisors and in a very radical fashion (iii) its role in national economic affairs to almost non-existence. Yugoslavia again holds a world record here, this time for having trimmed down the size of the national total government expenditure as percentage of GNP from 1972 - from 21.1% to 7.5% in 1988. It was the most radical economic transformation from socialism to dependent regional nationalism ever to have been recorded throughout the period of the end of communism in the world; because in no former communist country had there been such a deliberate attempt to reduce the share of the federal government below the 10%-mark. Not even in Pinochet's Chile such a radical cure has been attempted. In both relative an!
d in absolute terms, Yugoslavia was a megaperformer of a kind of regional post-communist IMF-adapted adjustment. The price of the strategy was very clear, but many will shrug their shoulders and ask: so what? The price of the medicine is well-known from many countries now and in a way was also paid in most of the other countries of the region: absolute poverty - according to World Bank World Development Report figures 1990 - increased in the crucial years between 1978 and 1987 from 17% of the population to 25% of the population, and earnings per employee fell by 1.4% annually from 1980 to 1987. Still, household income distribution (iv) was still relatively egalitarian, with the highest 20% controlling just 42.8% of total incomes, and thus not tying the rich closely enough to their political system, so that they would be prepared to fight and die for it, while at the same time impoverishing the poor in absolute terms. All the necessary preconditions for instability, as predicte!
d by Karl Deutsch more than 30 years ago, were present: and to complete the checklist for an absolutely assured crash in the light of Deutsch's nation-building theory, the country had recorded a fairly rapid economic growth rate in the period preceding the stagnation and disaster course of the 1980s; GDP growth stood at 6.0% in the period between 1965 and 1980 and was again in fact the highest economic growth rate in Europe.
The present study on the basis of a sample of 99 countries with complete data on transfers and ethno-political violence includes countries of the periphery and the semi-periphery, and nearly all newly-formed states of the former world of communism. There, the Gurr-Index of ethno-political conflict (EP) is significantly pushed upwards at the one hand by the degree of development of the productive forces. Lamentably enough, adjusted per capita income (PCI) increases, and not decreases ethno-political conflict in world society. This result confirms Deutsch's approach and rejects the still more optimistic vision of the trade-off between stability and development level, expressed by Huntington. The dialectic of the situation is further complicated by the fact, that countries, in order to avoid the stability trap of ethno-political conflict, have to undergo an early demographic and/or social and cultural transition; without that, the tendency towards ethno-political conflict even mo!
re increases. High fertility is related to high income concentration, low fertility to low income concentration (Tausch and Prager, 1993). With high fertility rates (FR) - or plausibly, a poorly developed mass communication system -, no reductions in the level of ethno-political conflict can be achieved. Deutsch furthermore believed, that especially in a crisis government sector size increases stability. Huge per capita aggregate net transfers, that is to say, inflows that are greater than outflows, decrease the level of ethno-political strife; while repressive states (REPRESS) are less prone to ethno-political conflict than full scale democracies. Thus stability-oriented 'Keynesianism' in the periphery is today being substituted by the 'Tiananmen formula': repression + capital inflows. There are some elements, that further qualify Deutsch's theory further: social mobilisation (alphabetisation) has no visible effect on instability:
Table 6.2: The determination of the Gurr-Index of ethno-political conflict in the periphery and semi-periphery
unstandardized regression t-value significant
coefficient at 5%-level
transfers per capita -0.74 -2.06 yes
political rights violations -0.60 -2.65 yes
human development index -0.51 -0.64 no
repressiveness of the security
apparatus +6.22 +0.59 no
population density^0.50 +0.04 +0.02 no
adult literacy rate -0.03 -0.87 no
mean years of schooling +0.02 +0.16 no
ln PCI +0.91 +3.65 yes
ln PCI^2 2.56 +0.25 no
historical fertility rate +0.34 +2.76 yes
failure of demographic
transition -0.00 -1.26 no
________________________________________________________________
n = 99 countries with complete data; R^2 = 32.5%; F = 3.81; 87 degrees of freedom. Legend: 32.5% of ethno-political strife is being determined by our model. n = 99 periphery and semi-periphery countries with complete World Bank data about aggregate net transfers, that is to say, inflows that are greater than the outflows due to international exploitation, and Gurr data about ethno-political strife.
We should go back here once more to our Yugoslav example. Yugoslavia, by all its strenuous efforts to achieve a capitalist transformation, produced little in terms of real foreign capital inflows. Net private direct investments were 0 for the year 1988; while it relied - like Jordan and Egypt - to a heavy degree on the earnings of its labour force abroad. Although fertility rates were reasonably low by overall standards in the 1980s, Yugoslavia still was a relatively traditional society especially in terms of media exposure, thus still weakening the link between 'modernity' and the 'state' on the hand and 'the village' and later on the urban misery on the other hand, precisely at a time, when mass communication would have been necessary to hold society together. Again, Karl Wolfgang Deutsch predicted how important mass communication can become for stabilisation, and how dangerous it is to neglect it. There were only 197 TV-sets per 1000 people in 1988-89; and only a daily news!
paper circulation rate of 100 per 1000 people at the end of the old Yugoslavia in 1988-89 was achieved. Thus, only Albania had a lower television density in Europe; and only Spain and Portugal had a worse newspaper circulation on the European continent. Combined, Yugoslavia had the worst media density in Europe. And do not forget, that the combined indices still hide the regional diversities between, say, Slovenia and the rural regions of Bosnia. Thus, traditional forms of communication were much stronger than the mass media, controlled by the party and the state, at a time, when great economic hardships hit the population and the state abandoned its role on the economic stage, thus unable to function politically in the end.
The frightening scenario emerging from this analysis is, that indeed a 'Yugoslavia' could re-appear at least under the following conditions in ethnically heterogeneous former communist countries
(i) a rapid urbanisation process preceding transformation
(ii) coupled with great efforts to redirect economic resources towards economic growth
(iii) under the condition of a neo-liberal programme to abolish large part of the former state economic influence on the economy
(iv) with little real resource flows coming in from the capitalist centres
(v) while at the same time, democracy only partially having been restored and
(vi) modern patterns of social behaviour and/or mass communication, typical for a Western developed democracy, not yet fully developed
To make perhaps matters worse still, Yugoslavia, by not being a member of the European Union, could not send entire families of guest workers abroad for residence; and hundreds of thousands of youngsters - including the fighting generation - were raised by the grandparents instead, who still kept alive the memories of the atrocities of the Second World War and the immediate post-war-periods, both characterised by repression and mass-murder. Yugoslavia again holds a European record - it was the European society with the highest worker remittances from abroad. The guest-worker generation, who in many ways could communicate much better with the other fellow Yugoslav nationalities than their parents, left their children to be raised in the villages, saving for private new homes later being bombarded and burnt systematically to ruins. The children, raised by their grandparents, must have missed their parents, who worked even in such far away countries as Sweden, the Netherlands or !
Belgium very much, and the children perhaps began to hate them for having them deserted. 'Our son always wept so terribly when we departed after the holidays', an unnamed Yugoslav mother told us once, standing here for hundreds of thousands of Yugoslav parents. But you hardly will hate your own parents, rather, you will project the hatred against others - 'them', the 'opponents', the Albanians, the Bosnian Muslim, the Croats, the Serbs (named alphabetically), et cetera, who stand in the way to fully grasp the fruits of modernisation'. The preconditions for the disaster were thus already present; to make matters worse, the reforms of the regime came too late and never stopped short of steering a middle-course between guided democracy and repression. Thus, condition (vii) for the repetition of the Yugoslav tragedy anywhere else in the region could be a future migration regime of the European Union, that continues to separate migrants from their families and leaves children alone!
abroad.
This is the answer to the first question of 'country risk' analysis, the causes of instability. The lack of an early demographic transition (FAILURE DEM) and the degree of development (LN PCI) increase, while political rights violations and capital transfers significantly decrease the Gurr-Index of ethno-political conflict on a global level. Other indicators of social or political mobilisation however fail to support other aspects of either Huntington's or Deutsch's theory. It should be noted, that there are insignificant predictors whose direction of influence still cannot be explained by the conservative aspects of the Deutsch/Huntington tradition to explain instability and conflict: the human development index and adult literacy rate, ceteris paribus, even decrease the level of ethno-political conflict, while mean years of schooling slightly increase the level of ethno-political conflict. The velocity of change in fertility rates also has no significant influence on the Gur!
r index.
In order to stabilise the newly-formed countries of the semi-periphery and the periphery, whose instability increases with the level of development, and which initially makes, say, Laos less prone to such conflicts as Russia or the Ukraine, the following significant processes intervene then:
* the real transfers from the centres of the world-wide market economy
* the continuing or newly formed power monopoly of a dictatorial group
* an early demographic transition
China received 11 thousand million $ of net foreign direct investment in 1992 alone. In relation to the practically predetermined conditions of the historical fertility rate and the size of the per-capita-income, a government unfortunately seems to be able to respond to the threats of ethno-political conflict by only two processes nowadays: by trying to attract foreign capital inflows and by preventing a further political democratisation. In one word, the 'Tiananmen strategy'.
Aggregate net transfers, that is to say, inflows that are greater than the outflows due to international exploitation, are lowest in countries with civil rights violations very much in excess of political rights violations and in countries with a high human development index; a relatively repressive state machinery in an environment of already begun political reforms and a high human development index are conducive to low inflows or even real outflows of capital.
The trap for the countries of Eastern Europe and the former USSR could not be worse in this context: they are low priority areas for transnational capital, because political reform has begun decisively even in countries, where civil rights violations are much higher than political rights violations, and because human development and thus also social expectations to the investor are higher than in the communist rest of Asia and in other (non-communist) dictatorships. Nothing, what has been written by political scientists in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s has to be revoked in this context: semi-repressive regimes are much more prone to instability than full democracies and full dictatorships; and international capital flows react accordingly.
For the moment, the world economy seems to prefer the environment of low human development, where political repression is still high enough not to warrant any 'excess repressiveness' of the state security apparatus to control via infringements on the level of civil rights the destabilisation, brought about by the lowering of the rate of political repression in heterogeneous countries. Net transfers, that is to say, inflows that are greater than the outflows due to international exploitation, in turn nowadays determine to a large extent the chances of a country in the semi-periphery and periphery for social development. The empirical relationship is drastic enough to be mentioned here: life expectancy, that single, best, and most reliable indicator of the social situation of a country, is being determined by the well-known e/pi-function on the basis of real income in purchasing power, introduced in Chapter 3, and net transfers. Almost 4/5 of life expectancy in the (semi)periphe!
ry are thus being determined; net transfers are the predictor of life expectancy, whose unstandardized regression coefficient is 5 times bigger than the standard error of the estimate.
Further support to our interpretations is given by the last two regression equations in Table 4.1. Thus, the countries of the periphery and the semi-periphery today are at the mercy of transnational capital flows: they are at the mercy of transnational capital politically, because inflows of capital stabilise ethno-political conflict potential, and they are the mercy of transnational capital socially, because inflows determine to a large extent and directly the life expectancy of the populations - from Wladiwostock to Hanoi, from Riga to Tirana.
As far as these research results are concerned, they are rather in the tradition of the gloomy description of the conditions of democracy in the semi-periphery in the 1920s, written by Karl Polanyi more than 50 years ago. Will - in contrast to then - the world-wide market economy save Eastern European democracy?
Transnational crime as a global actor
A cynic could say: an economically realistic staging of a G-7 conference would have to invite today the cupolas of transnational crime. In terms of world economic power, the international drug traffic alone is more powerful than states like Spain, Russia, or Canada (our own calculations from Raith, 1995, UNDP, 1994). International illegal flight capital prefers certain economic and social conditions; and in turn, it will contribute to changing the socio-economic conditions of its host countries. To investigate the effects of international capital flights on the host countries concerned, we have developed a simple macro-quantitative model. Using standard international economic indicators from Fischer Weltalmanach, we understand money laundering to be roughly the excess international currency reserves, which are unaccounted for by the following data in a multiple regression equation:
(6.2) money laundering =
population
GNP per capita
growth 80-93
dyn food production
food imports
raw material exports
fertiliser consumption
curr account
debt service
terms of trade
dyn energy production
dyn energy consumption
constant
prediction
687,85
1,38
-7,018
-6,349
-0,819
1,0837
1,7616
-12,26
1058,8
-98,17
1,6636
10,68
-1245
currency
335,4
107,28
56,63
37,213
0,2119
1,0991
34,449
127,9
536,44
447,15
0,4484
4,5276
6542,9
reserves
0,7034
5130,4
9,8829
50
3E+09
1E+09
t-test
2,051
0,0129
-0,124
-0,171
-3,86
0,986
0,0511
-0,096
1,974
-0,22
3,71
2,359
To assess, in turn, the effect of money laundering on growth, we worked with the following data matrix:
Table 6.3: Money-laundering and its destructive effects on the national economy:
population
GNP per cap
growth 80-93
dyn food prod
food imp
raw mat exp
fertiliser cons
curr account
debt service
terms trade
money laund
Egyp
56,4
660
2,8
1,3
24
67
3392
1566
14,9
99
6873,6
Algeria
26,7
1780
-0,8
1,2
29
97
123
361
76,9
95
-1638,2
Argen
33,8
7220
-0,5
-0,3
5
68
78
-7452
46
116
-1256,7
Ethio
53,6
100
-1,8
-1,2
6
96
95
-183
9
67
-1857
Bangla
115,2
220
2,1
-0,1
15
18
1032
243
13,5
94
-3065
Benin
5,1
430
-0,4
1,9
25
70
82
-52
5,9
133
1949,3
Boliv
7,1
760
-0,7
0,7
9
81
58
-495
59,4
78
-529
Braz
156,4
2930
0,3
1,2
10
40
608
-637
24,4
97
22358,5
Burun
6
180
0,9
-0,3
18
70
34
-26
36
52
-2734,3
Chile
13,8
3170
3,6
1,9
6
81
849
-2093
23,4
104
-524,2
China
1178,4
490
8,2
3
3
19
3005
-11609
11,1
101
-2670,6
Costa R
3,3
2150
1,1
0,7
8
67
2354
-470
18,1
94
-6627,4
Cote Iv
13,3
630
-4,6
-0,1
19
83
132
-1229
29,2
79
-790,3
Dom Rep
7,5
1230
0,7
-0,9
16
47
694
161
12,1
130
381,3
Ecuad
11
1200
0
0,6
5
92
380
-360
25,7
90
-1905,8
El Sal
5,5
1320
0,2
0,7
15
52
1073
-77
14,9
88
-3019,4
Gabon
1
4960
-1,6
-1,4
17
97
11
-269
6
106
-6344,3
Ghana
16,4
430
0,1
0,3
10
77
38
-572
22,8
65
-1217,9
Guatem
10
1100
-1,2
-0,5
11
70
833
-687
13,2
93
-1290,6
Hondu
5,3
600
-0,3
-1,3
11
86
210
-393
31,5
73
615,7
India
898,2
300
3
1,5
5
29
720
-315
28
96
-259,2
Indon
187,2
740
4,2
2,2
7
47
1147
-2016
31,8
90
1351
Jamaica
2,4
1440
-0,3
1
14
34
973
-182
20,1
109
-3438,7
Camer
12,5
820
-2,2
-1,9
15
86
30
-638
20,3
77
702,1
Kenya
25,3
270
0,3
-0,4
8
71
410
153
28
81
-200,5
Colom
35,7
1400
1,5
1
8
60
1032
-2220
29,4
68
246
Congo
2,4
950
-0,3
-1,5
19
97
118
-507
10,8
98
437,9
S-Korea
44,1
7660
8,2
0,5
6
7
4656
384
9,2
100
-693
Laos
4,6
280
2,1
-0,2
33
96
42
-13
9,6
90
387
Madag
13,9
220
-2,6
-1,5
11
81
25
-167
14,3
68
1371,7
Malaw
10,5
200
-1,2
-4,2
8
94
434
-143
22,3
86
4244,7
Malay
19
3140
3,5
4,3
7
35
1977
-2103
7,9
99
9940,5
Mali
10,1
270
-1
-0,9
20
92
103
-103
4,5
102
1200,2
Maroc
25,9
1040
1,2
2,3
17
43
326
-525
31,7
114
-1408,3
Mauri
1,1
3030
5,5
0
13
34
2512
-92
6,4
108
-6459,2
Mex
90
3610
-0,5
-0,9
8
47
653
-23393
31,5
99
-601,6
Nep
20,8
190
2
1,2
9
16
391
-195
9
97
-5203,7
Nica
4,1
340
-5,7
-2,7
23
93
246
-457
29,1
94
1695
Niger
8,6
270
-4,1
-1,8
17
98
4
-29
31
105
1819,7
Nigeria
105,3
300
-0,1
2,1
18
98
175
2268
28,9
99
311,2
Pak
122,8
430
3,1
1,2
14
14
1015
-3327
24,7
100
-7258,4
Pan
2,5
2600
-0,7
-1,2
10
84
476
70
3,1
87
-1382,5
Pap
4,1
1130
0,6
-0,2
17
89
308
495
30,2
91
-967,1
Para
4,7
1510
-0,7
1,3
11
83
96
-492
14,9
112
-5875,9
Peru
22,9
1490
-2,7
-0,4
20
83
216
-1768
58,7
90
2438,1
Philip
64,8
850
-0,6
-1,3
8
24
540
-3289
24,9
117
1732,6
Poland
38,3
2260
0,4
0,7
11
40
811
-3698
9,2
95
-1086,5
Port
9,8
9130
3,3
2,6
12
17
813
947
19,3
104
3197
Roman
22,8
1140
-2,4
-2,4
14
24
423
-1162
6,2
111
4733,1
Zambia
8,9
380
-3,1
-0,3
8
99
160
-471
32,8
98
2707,6
Zimb
10,7
520
-0,3
-3
18
64
481
-116
31,1
89
561,3
Sri Lank
17,9
600
2,7
-1,8
16
28
964
-381
10,1
86
2054,3
Sudan
26,6
400
-0,2
-2,2
19
99
72
-1446
5,4
91
-931,8
Tans
28
90
0,1
-1,3
6
85
137
-408
20,6
85
2134,4
Thai
58,1
2110
6,4
0
5
28
544
-6928
18,7
103
10516
Trinid
1,3
3830
-2,8
-0,6
15
66
801
122
23,8
92
-6794
Tunes
8,7
1720
1,2
1,5
8
25
223
-912
20,6
100
-5093,5
Turk
59,6
2970
2,4
0,3
6
29
702
-6380
28,3
109
-5097,7
Ugan
18
180
1,9
0,3
8
100
1
-107
143,6
49
-415,7
Hung
10,2
3350
1,2
-0,7
6
32
292
-4262
38,8
102
825,2
Urug
3,1
3830
-0,1
0,3
8
57
608
-227
27,7
114
-4631,9
Venez
20,9
2840
-0,7
0,2
11
86
874
-2223
22,8
93
6139,1
CAfriR
3,2
400
-1,6
-1
19
56
5
-21
4,8
91
0
population
GNP per cap
growth 80-93
dyn food prod
food imp
raw mat exp
fertiliser cons
curr account
debt service
terms trade
money laund
This yielded the following results, explaining almost 65% of economic growth:
(6.2) money laundering and economic growth
dyn food prod
food imp
raw mat exp
fertiliser cons
curr account
debt service
terms trade
money laund
lnGNP
ln GNP^2
constant
0,160315
-2,43436
1,86E-06
-0,00958
0,004269
-4,6E-05
0,001343
-0,02796
-0,02825
0,513553
11,36795
0,172427
2,366866
4,77E-05
0,01811
0,012305
6,88E-05
0,000313
0,010356
0,042082
0,164342
7,91605
0,6475
1,728365
9,552412
52
285,354
155,3368
0,929751
-1,02852
0,039072
-0,52907
0,346949
-0,66766
4,295231
-2,69961
-0,67126
3,124894
t-test
The Matthew's effect, terms of trade, and money laundering explain significantly economic growth in the world periphery and semi-periphery from the 1980 onwards. 64.8% of total variance is accounted for by our model. Contrary to the myth, that - however morally detestable, such a shadow economy is beneficial for economic growth, the opposite holds.