Arno Tausch
Counsellor for Labor and Migration Affairs
Austrian Embassy Warsaw
and
Associate Visiting Professor of Political Science, Innsbruck University
Dear colleagues
We, a fairly passionate
discussion circle of economists, social scientists and theologians,
exchanging our views and papers, as they progressed, via electronic mail
around the world have reached a stage where we now finished a really
beautiful collection of essays on
„Global Capitalism, Liberation Theology and the Social Sciences.
An Analysis of the Contradictions of Modernity at the Turn of the
Millennium"
The collection of essays on this timely theme of economics, moral
philosophy, the social sciences and theology is to be edited by
Andreas Müller
Director, Missionary Centre of the Order of Saint Francis, Bonn
Arno Tausch
Associate Visiting Professor, Department of Political Science, Innsbruck
University
and
Paul Michael Zulehner,
Chairperson and Professor, Department of Pastoral Theology, Vienna
University
(Eds)
under collaboration of
Henry Wickens,
Strasbourg
The essays from North and South, Christian and non-Christian cultures, were
written by the following contributors:
List of contributors (original contributions, all written exclusively for
the volume)
Samir Amin is Director of the Forum du Tiers Monde in Dakar, Senegal, and
Porfessor at the Sorbonne in Paris, France
Steffen Flechsig lives as a writer and specialist on Latin American affairs
in Rostock, Germany. Before German Unification, he was one of the few Latin
Americanists in the GDR to write on such issues as the Church, the
Christian Democratic Parties, and, above all, the theory of Raul Prebisch.
His entire faculty was closed on the 12 of October 1992.
Jung Mo Sung is Professor of of Theology and Economics at the Theological
Faculty of Nossa Senhora de Assuncao in Sao Paulo, Brasil
Alberto Morreira is Professor of Philosophy at Universidade Sao Francisco
in Braganca Paulista, Sao Paulo, Brasil
Andreas Müller is a Franciscan Friar and Director of the Mission Center of
the Order of Saint Francis in Bonn, Germany
Mansoob Murshed is Lecturer in Economics at the University of Bradford, UK
Kunibert Raffer is Associate Professor of Economics at Vienna University,
Austria
Severin Renoldner is a social scientist working with the Catholic Church in
Linz, Upper Austria, and was a member of Parliament for the Austrian Green
Party
Robert J. Ross is Professor of Sociology at Clark University in Worcester,
Massachusetts, USA
Arno Tausch is Associate Visiting Professor of Political Science at
Innsbruck University, Austria
Krystyna Tausch is a writer, Spanish teacher and specialist on Peruvian
affairs, Salzburg, Austria
Henry Wickens is a translator and lives in Luxemburg
Paul Michael Zulehner is Professor of Theology at Vienna University,
Austria
The volume - as it is now already on a Word 6.0 and Excel 7.0 Microsoft
Windows 95 disc - has the following content:
Table of Contents
Introduction
Andreas Müller, Arno Tausch & Paul M. Zulehner
1 Introduction
Towards an ecumenical view of capitalism and the religions 'of the Book'
Samir Amin
2 Judaisme, Christianisme, Islam. Reflexions sur leurs specificites reelles
ou pretendues; vision d'un non-theologien
Formulating a Liberation Theology agenda of the 1990s and beyond
Jung Mo Sung
3 Economics and Theology. Reflections on the Market, Globalization, and the
Kingdom of God
Alberto Moreira
4 Saint Francis and Capitalist Modernity: A View from the South.
Krystyna Tausch
5 Feminism in the Country of Liberation Theology
Andreas F. Müller OFM
6. Ethical, biblical and theological aspects of the debt burden
The lessons of 'critical' development research and the contemporary
capitalist world system
Steffen Flechsig
7 The Heritage of Raúl Prebisch for a Humane World
Arno Tausch
8 Liberation Theology and the Social Sciences: Seven Hypotheses about the
World Capitalist System in Our Age
Appendix to Chapter 8
Mansoob Murshed
9 Development in the Light of Recent Debates about Development
Theory
Kunibert Raffer
10 New Forms of Dependency in the World System
The challenges of globalization and transnational integration
Severin Renoldner
11 Towards a Theology of the Democratization of Europe
Robert J. Ross
12 The Race to the Bottom
Paul Michael Zulehner
13 New departures. On the social positioning of the Christian Churches
before and after communism in Central and Eastern Europe
Statistical Appendix - Poverty, Dependency, Human Rights Violations and
Economic Growth in the World System
Literatur: An Attempt at an Ecumenical and Cross-Cultural Bibliography
Translation Jung Mo Sung: A. COSQUER
Translation Krystyna Tausch, Andreas Müller: H. WICKENS
On November 16th 1989, at the time of optimism connected with what then was
perceived to be the end-of-history, created by the Fall of the Berlin Wall
and the successful revolutions in Eastern Europe, 5 leading proponents of
liberation theology, among them the Jesuit Fathers Ignacio Ellacuria and
Juan Luis Segundo Montes, were assassinated in San Salvador together with
two Salvadorian employees of their University.
Far from participating in the optimism prevailing at that time, Ellacuria
even foresaw in his very last article (1989), the ever-larger emergence of
contradictions of the capitalist order on a world scale and the necessity
of Divinity studies to come to terms with a capitalist system that is a
world-wide system.
Liberation theology is not a theoretical exercise: as Jon Sobrino so aptly
writes in his introduction to the volume Sobrino and Ellacuria, 1993
(second edition 1996):
„It is only from amidst oppression, carried to its maximal expression in
martyrdom, that the theology of liberation can be understood (.), But what
continues to give life to this theology is the pathos of liberation that
pervades it, a pathos that not only stands at the origin but also
originates the theological reflection." (Sobrino in Sobrino and Ellacuria,
1993/96: x-xi)
Even in the secularized countries of the developed world, this pathos is
well understood, far beyond the social strata that, in one way or the
other, are active in the main ecumenical denominations. The life and death
of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero symbolizes the martyrdom of well over a
thousand clerics who paid their commitment to the cause of the poor with
their life since the Bishop's Conference of Medellin in 1968.
With social contradictions rising on a global scale and affecting more and
more the so-called developed countries as well, we think the time has come
to return once again to liberation theology and the question it posed - to
both the social sciences and Divinity studies. Many believed at the time of
the demise of communism in Eastern Europe, that dependency theory,
liberation theology, and the writings on periphery capitalism, of which
they were part, can safely be forgotten.
Liberation theology, especially for the development researcher, was and
continues to be an interesting meeting place between economics and
theology/social philosophy. It reminds the social scientific profession of
the origins of economic science in moral philosophy, and it also reminds us
that the great issues of the scriptures, like poverty and the struggle of
the poor for self-determination, are an ever-more important reality in the
contemporary world system. As the dictionary definition will have it,
'Liberation theology: a term covering various theological movements which
have developed since the mid-1960s and which are concerned to understand
the Christian Gospel in terms of current needs for establishing human
freedom. Four areas of oppression particularly treated by these movements
are the economic exploitation of the less-developed countries, sexual
prejudice against women (.), racial discrimination, and political tyranny.
The liberation theologies, which often adopt analyses of social situations
from Marxism, interpret redemption as liberation, see Jesus Christ as
identified with the oppressed, and challenge the male-dominated concepts of
theology and culture' (Hinnells, 1984)
Starting with Karl Polanyi in 1944, a number of authors - among them Samir
Amin, Christopher Chase-Dunn, Steffen Flechsig, Andre Gunder Frank, Folker
Froebel, Juergen Heinrichs, Otto Kreye, Kunibert Raffer and Immanuel
Wallerstein - have taken up the challenge of the analysis of capitalism as
a world system. While imperialism theories were mainly fixed at the
centers, and dependency theories on the peripheries (more often than not,
Latin America), the world system school looked at the totality of
capitalism on a global scale. Polanyi's reading of the history of
capitalism as a single world economy is a continuation of the analysis of
capitalism as a world system, inherent in the third volume of Das Kapital;
yet Polanyi's social anthropology is definitively post-Marxist, leaving
behind much of the pre-totalitarian German philosophy that has daunted the
trajectory of Marxism since 1917. Polanyi, in addition, to be sure, was
among the early European socialists to re-discover the great spiritual
wealth of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and his anthropology assumes - in
the moving final chapter of his 'Great Transformation' - the concept of the
immortality of the human soul, so central for the Judeo-Christian tradition
and the religions of the 'Book' (Polanyi, 1944; Khoury, 1994, Amin's
contribution to the present volume). Polanyi was not a human being of books
alone - he was among the first to lay the intellectual foundations for the
joint resistance of Christians and Socialists against the rising tide of
fascism in Europe in the late 1920s and the 1930s, and he deeply believed
in a lively worker's democratic movement. A refugee from the totalitarian
forms of power of both the extreme left and the right, Polanyi led a
'world's life' that brought him to reflect early on such issues as
'globalization', 'international finance' and the instability of democracy
in periphery regions. Polanyi's theory is also much more sensitive to the
concerns of the world environment than classical Marxism all too often is;
thus overcoming the red/green divide.
In the light of a Polanyian anthropology, yes, dependency theory as a
critique of developmentalism in the 1960s might indeed be dead, and with it
the proper social scientific foundation of classical theologies of
liberation, but the contradictions of the world system have even deepened,
before, during and after the ominous year 1989. World systems theories can
provide a solid, even more encompassing theoretical frame of reference for
theology, while contemporary 'critical theology' poses some of the most
relevant questions for the social sciences in return. A fruitful, and
hopefully long dialogue might be ahead. However valid the reception of the
critique of 'developmentalism' in Latin America in the 1960s and early
1970s by dependency theory in the theological discourse of that time might
still be, new problems call for new comprehensive theoretical approaches.
Surveying some central recent theological publications (Brackley, 1996;
Fornet-Betancourt, 1991; Hessel, 1996; Sobrino/Ellacuria, 1994;
Schuessler-Fiorenza, 1996), one is led to the conclusion as a social
scientist, that the world systems approach as the legitimate successor to
dependency studies even ideally fits itself to become the future social
scientific basis of 'critical theological writing' in the 1990s, so heavily
involved in the debate about feminism, the ecology, inequality, and people
empowerment or - if you prefer Brackley's term - the non-violent Divine
Revolution.
The volume now takes up these issues and develops them in the course of the
debate.
I'd like to submit this present publication proposal to you all and would
like to ask you to respond to me by December 15th at the latest, indicating
to me possible publication avenues for that book.
Upon request, I'd be prepared to send you the entire book in the next few
days by electronic mail
Kind regards
Yours
Arno Tausch
Publications Arno Tausch (short list)
(1979a) 'Weltweite Armut' in 'Christliche Markierungen' (DOTTER F. et al.
(Eds.)) Europa, Vienna: 137-170
(1979b) 'Armut und Abhaengigkeit. Politik und Oekonomie im peripheren
Kapitalismus'. Studien zur österreichischen und internationalen Politik,
Bd. 2 (Eds. P. GERLICH und A. PELINKA) W. Braumueller, Vienna
(1980a, together with O. HÖLL) Austria and the European Periphery in
'European Studies of Development' (J. de BANDT J./MANDI P./SEERS D. (Eds.))
Macmillan, London: 28-37
(1991a) 'Jenseits der Weltgesellschaftstheorien. Sozialtransformationen und
der Paradigmenwechsel in der Entwicklungsforschung'. Grenzen und Horizonte
(Eds. G. AMMON, H. REINWALD, H.A. STEGER) Eberhard, Muenchen (second
printing)
(1991b) 'Rußlands Tretmühle. Kapitalistisches Weltsystem, lange Zyklen und
die neue Instabilität im Osten'. Eberhard, Muenchen
(1993a) 'Produktivkraft soziale Gerechtigkeit? Europa und die Lektionen des
pazifischen Modells'. Eberhard, Muenchen
(1993b; coauthor: Fred PRAGER) 'Towards a Socio-Liberal Theory of World
Development'. Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's Press
(1997) 'Schwierige Heimkehr. Sozialpolitik, Migration, Transformation, und
die Osterweiterung der Europaeischen Union' Munich: Eberhard
(1998) 'Transnational Integration and National Disintegration' electronic
publication at World Systems Electronic Archive (Coordinator: Christopher
K. Chase-Dunn, John Hopkins University),
http://csf.colorado.edu/wsystems/archive/papers/tausch.htm
Work in progress:
Globalization and European Integration
The Imperative of Social Transformation (with Elizabeth de Boer, University
of Limerick, Ireland)