Making Generosity Redundant
By George Monbiot
a ZNet Commentary
November 23, 2001
They thought it was all over. After civilisation's
victory in Afghanistan, where the lion now lies down with the lamb, there
was, almost all the newspapers agreed, nothing left to discuss. All that
needed to be done was to remind those who had questioned the war just how
profoundly wrong they were, and they would slip back under the stones from
which they had crept.
And yet, from all over the country, in coaches,
convoys and hired trains, they came. Theirs was not the trickle of cowed
dissenters which some had foreseen, but what may have been the biggest
anti-war march since Vietnam.
Those who had attended both demonstrations insisted
that this one was roughly twice the size of the protest held a month ago.
Far from assuaging public concern about the future of Afghanistan, the
capture of Kabul appears only to have roused it.
But the size of the demonstration was not its only
unexpected feature. It soon became obvious that the crowd was thinking
about more than just Afghanistan. To thunderous cheers, speaker after
speaker linked the war to the other means by which the rich world
persuades the poor world to do as it bids: namely its power over bodies
such as the World Trade Organisation.
It is not only the peace movement which hasn't gone
away, it seems, but also anti-corporate movement, whose death has been so
widely proclaimed since September 11. Just as the peace campaigners have
drawn strength from the internationalists, the internationalists are
building on the peace campaign. The battle against corporate power has
resumed.
This may seem like an unfortunate time to attack the
World Trade Organisation. At the trade talks in Qatar last week, the poor
nations evinced an unprecedented skill in forcing the rich to listen to
their demands. Despite the best efforts of Britain and Germany, the WTO
agreed that during public health emergencies, governments can override
corporate patents to provide their people with cheap drugs. The European
Union may be forced to start retracting subsidies which destroy the
livelihoods of farmers overseas.
The new trade declaration, moreover, radiates
goodwill. The WTO, it insists, wants to address "the marginalization
of least-developed countries"; reaffirm its "commitment to ...
sustainable development"; and "contribute to a durable
solution" to third world debt. These are fine words, but in the world
trade talks, as in Afghanistan, peace has been declared before the real
battles have begun.
The rich nations have so loaded the agenda with new
issues that, in the three years available for negotiation, the WTO may
never get round to discussing the topics the poor world has raised. Some
of these new issues, such as investment and competition policy, had
already been flatly rejected by the less developed nations.
The new resolutions on debt cancellation, economic
justice and sustainability, moreover, overlook one small but significant
obstacle. None of these reforms is in the WTO's gift.
Fifty-six years ago, the architects of the modern
world's economy recognised that issues like these would have to be
addressed if commercial freedom was to be accompanied by commercial
fairness. They proposed an "international trade organisation",
which, as well as working to reduce tariffs, would also transfer
technology to poor countries, protect the rights of workers and prevent
big companies from controlling the world economy. US corporations went
beserk and the proposal was postponed.
A temporary organisation, the general agreement on
tariffs and trade (GATT), was cobbled together to bring down tariff
barriers while the negotiators tried to build a proper trade body. It
never materialised. GATT turned into the WTO, and the poor were left to
rot.
One of the striking aspects of the debate about
globalisation is how little the defenders of the status quo know about the
history of the institutions they champion. It's not just the International
Trade Organisation which has been comprehensively forgotten, but also
another body proposed at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944.
In his recent pamphlet attacking the
internationalist movement, the journalist John Lloyd describes John
Maynard Keynes as "the most important theorist behind the
creation" of the IMF and the World Bank. Keynes, he suggests, saw
them as "conducive to peace and the relief of poverty". In
truth, Keynes bitterly opposed them.
He predicted that if the world economy was managed
by these means, the wealth and power of the creditor nations would be
massively enhanced, while the debtors would sink ever further into poverty
and dependency.
He called instead for an "international
clearing union" which would automatically redeem imbalances in trade
and cancel debt, by the ingenious means of forcing creditors to pay
interest on their international currency surplus at the same rate as
debtors.
Once again, the United States objected. It
threatened to withold its war loan if the British delegation, led by
Keynes, persisted with his proposal, and he was forced to back down and
agree to the formation of the bodies which later became the World Bank and
IMF.
In a letter to the Times soon afterwards, Keynes
conceded that the commercial policies the new bodies would permit may
prove to be "very foolish" and "so destructive of
international trade that, if they were adopted, Bretton Woods will have
been rather a waste of time."
The problem, in other words, is not the decisions
that bodies such as the WTO, World Bank and IMF make. The problem is that
they are constitutionally destined to fail. The WTO can set only maximum
standards for global trade, rather than the minimum standards which might
restrain big corporations. The Bank and the IMF, entirely controlled by
the creditor nations, exist to police the poor world's debt on their
behalf.
Yet, instead of recognising these inherent defects,
their backers choose to reproach the blind for having their eyes put out.
Last week, for example, the internet magazine Open Democracy published
interviews with Peter Sutherland, the former head of the WTO, and Maria
Cattaui, who runs the International Chamber of Commerce.
Sutherland asserted that it's "indisputable
that the real problem with the economies that have failed" is
"their own domestic governments". Cattaui insisted that the
"fault lies most of all at home with the countries concerned".
But, as several prominent economists warned in 1944, even if the indebted
nations of the poor world were governed by angels, the trade and financial
institutions launched at Bretton Woods would ruin their economies.
There can be no clearer sign of failure than the
call Gordon Brown made last week for a doubling of the rich world's aid to
the poor. We could dispute the wisdom of pouring aid into a country at one
end and extracting debt repayments at the other, but under present
circumstances the new money is clearly necessary.
But if the men who had planned the Bretton Woods
conference knew that in 2001 we would be arguing about how much aid we
should give to poor nations, they would have packed up and gone home. The
stated purpose of their meeting was to render generosity redundant.
There is no point in tinkering with this system. It
will destroy the lives of the poor until it is itself destroyed, and
replaced with benign institutions of the kind that Keynes envisaged. On
Sunday we may have begun to find the strength to do it.
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