21st Century Vision

The revolt of the South

What has the West most to fear today? Is it the credit crunch which has become a recession fast deepening into a full-blown slump? Or is it the spectre of renewed pressure on scarce resources when recovery comes: if oil can drop from $147 a barrel to nearer $50 in three months, it can do the opposite and more when demand revives. Then there is the monster of climate change, put on the back burner (to coin a phrase) for the duration of the economic crisis but none the less a clear and present danger. As if that were not enough the world is sliding towards uncontrolled nuclear proliferation, in large part because of the hypocrisy of nuclear powers with no intention of honouring their commitments under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. But there is something more, an issue to which Jean Ziegler draws vivid attention in his new book*.

We have often noticed here the declining respect for Western human rights rhetoric: practise what you preach (in Palestine, Guantanamo, Iraq or New Orleans, for example, or as regards Saudi executioners and Burmese generals) is very often the response. What Ziegler does is to demonstrate the increasing coherence of the reaction to Western pretentions, its historical depth and growing confidence. Nor is it just a matter of brushing aside the self-interested waffle that so often passes for the will to implement humanitarian principles; there is an increasing understanding of the mechanisms of economic domination. Endlessly presented as essential to poor country development, the mantras of free trade and open markets are more and more seen for what they are, levers to open doors to Western economic penetration and control.

For Ziegler - until last year a special rapporteur for the UN Food Programme - what drives this awakening is an increasing consciousness not only of present day exploitation but also of the stupefying violence of the colonial period. In Algeria the enfumades, the practice of stifling the populations of whole villages by herding them into caves and lighting fires at the mouth, has been forgotten only on the side of the perpetrators. The exploits of George Arthur in Tasmania are no better known in his native Britain. Convicts, soldiers - any white man - was good enough to join his "black lines", equipped with guns and dogs and up to 75 miles in length, which swept across the country killing every aboriginal in their path. Likewise the treatment of Indians on latifundias and in the Spanish American mines, and the abominable torture of any who resisted.

Today, open violence is mostly outsourced to carefully corrupted local elites - Ziegler describes in detail the brutal oppression of the peoples of the Niger delta in the interests of a handful of oil companies. Instead the colonists themselves are now represented by officials of the World Bank or IMF. Ziegler reserves particular contempt for the former EU trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson. Negotiator of numerous bilateral free trade agreements (EPAs) aimed primarily at securing privileges for European companies, Mandelson is described as an elegant and smooth-tongued product of the London liberal left. "His arrogance is legendary", says Ziegler.

But the picture is changing. UNESCO's 2001 Durban Conference against Racism was a complete failure for the simple reason that delegates including heads of states from the global South demanded not only recognition of the horrors of the colonial past but a measure of repentance and reparation. The US delegation walked out. Meanwhile in Latin America the election in 2006 of the first president of Indian origin in 500 years has radically shifted perspectives. Evo Morales has set the goal of transition in Bolivia from the colonial state to the national state, combining nationalization and land reform with an appeal to the identity and ancient traditions of the Andean communities.

As with Chavez in Venezuela, powerful forces are ranged against him, not least the European communities descended from fleeing Nazis and Ustashi backed by the usual corporate interests. For the global South a good deal depends on the success of Morales and like-minded leaders in the region.

* "La Haine de l'Occident" (Albin Michel 2008): click here for an interview with Ziegler.

Spend, spend, spend

In the topsy turvy world of an economic downturn, it is interesting to see that the leaders of the major economies are turning to the poor to save them from the consequences of their incompetent management. Thus the G8 morphs into the G20, and countries such as Mexico, Indonesia, Turkey and Argentina suddenly find themselves placed solicitously at the top table. Are they being offered a free lunch?

Far from it. The Titanic has hit the iceberg that wasn't supposed to exist, and what the newly cosseted guests are asked to do is provide fuel for the engines needed to refloat it. That means a massive splurge of spending - delicately called an economic "stimulus" - to create the demand that will turn the mighty engines of global production once more, and with them the somewhat less tangible components of the financial system. As if debt were not already a big enough problem, they are being asked to take on more, and the cure for the world's financial problems looks very much like more of the behaviour that caused it in the first place.

All this affects the poorer participants in the global economy, in two ways. First, the countries which are being asked to take the strain are themselves massively unequal, which large populations living at the margins of subsistence in India, Brazil, South Africa and many others. Secondly, within the rich countries, policymakers have woken up to the Keynesian wisdom that putting money into the hands of the have-nots generates more immediate demand than putting it into the hands of the wealthy, who don't need to spend it immediately: our good old friend a differential "marginal propensity to consume".

In the UK increased state spending is seen as too slow a method of increasing demand - it takes several years to plan and build a school or hospital. Even tax cuts for the poor won't do, because they won't get the money until next financial year. No, the poor have got to get on with the job of saving the economy immediately, meaning a hike in benefits and pensions. Of course that sounds like generosity - nothing to repay - until you consider that it is in fact the state which is proposing to take on the debt on everyone's behalf. Later on, when it comes time to repay the state's debt, the economy will be motoring again, and the rich will be claiming they can't be taxed for fear of destroying their incentives. Meanwhile those public sector goods like schools and hospitals will not have been built, and given the state of the government's finances are never likely to be.

And therein lies the point. As Bush, Brown and the others appeal to the second and third tier economies to save the day, and promise to reform the IMF to improve stability and revive the WTO negotiations on freeing trade yet further, and as they impose consumption on their own poor in the interests of economic normal service, who will make the simple points in return?

From the states being asked to help: Yes, we will co-operate, on condition of permanent democratisation of the management of the world economy, with fair representation in the IMF, World Bank and WTO. And from the poor themselves, the condition of a permanent shift to a more equal pattern of income distribution, within nations and worldwide, including the construction of the sustainable public goods which only the state can provide.

Old gods, new heroes

Two recent news items tell us something is afoot. The Yorkshire-based furniture chain Roseby's has collapsed with the loss of 1,200 jobs, but its Indian avatar is launching four Rosebys Interiors stores in Punjab. Meanwhile the Indian firm Tech Mahindra is opening a call centre with 500 jobs in South Tyneside. Even two years ago the talk was of the booming UK consumer economy fuelled by ever more house-price driven borrowing, while outsourcing service jobs to the Far East was seen as a major threat to British employment. What a difference a crash makes.

But perhaps the time has arrived to peer into the impact of a fracturing economy not just on mortgages and dole queues but on the way people react to frightening changes in what until recently had seemed the natural order. Part of the problem is that an unprecedented period of expansion has undermined every form of authority, as markets appeared to demonstrate that they were the only reality. Nearly 50 years ago That Was the Week That Was shocked the establishment by presenting religious faith as a consumer choice, concluding if memory serves that Buddhism was the "best buy". Today, only evangelicals and fundamentalists seem to regard faith as a guide to public conduct, and are treated as cases of overstated brand loyalty.

In a world dominated by technology, it is even more startling to contemplate the weakening of the scientific outlook. The more that is learned about the history of the universe, the physics of our own planet and the mechanisms of heredity based on DNA, the less of it penetrates public understanding. Space exploration is reduced to "Is there water on Mars?", the Large Hadron Collider to "Will it create another Big Bang?", and heredity to "Are there genes for obesity?". Meanwhile climate change denialists have flourished and academy schools are handed over to wealthy individuals interested in promoting creationism. No doubt the Royal Society has a good deal to answer for, but how was it or anyone to foresee that commercially-funded modern media would reduce the physical world to the realms of magic?

Now the authority even of markets has gone: not only has their brutality been revealed (it should never have been forgotten), but it is still only vaguely understood that they are the creature of society, which can trim them or to a large extent dispense with them if it wishes. We get the markets we vote for (and therefore deserve).

So the world is on the lookout for new sources of certainty. Part of the rapturous response to the election of Barack Obama is his articulation of an intelligent discourse founded on human values; though in truth it is not easy to discern what practical break he proposes with the past. In the UK the Glenrothes byelection win is represented as Gordon Brown's Obama moment, notwithstanding airport expansion, nuclear power and immigration crackdowns. Something of much greater substance is required if democracy is to be refounded.

The risk is that disenchantment with the old gods will trigger a flight to new and nastier ones. We are already seeing a semi-fascist resurgence in Europe. Stefan Zweig, observing a parallel moment in the Austria of the 1920s, remarked that Austrians had never paid so much attention to art as during the hyperinflation: "seeing that money was betraying us, we felt that only the eternal within us was truly to be relied upon". The Anschluss followed some years later.