@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Date: Sun, 21 Jan 1996 From: David <•••@••.•••> [Editor of New Dawn] /* Written Nov 15, 1995 by igc:twn in peg:twn.features */ /* ---------- "re-examining lexicon of development" ---------- */ RE-EXAMINING THE LEXICON OF DEVELOPMENT To understand how the institutions of dominance established by the North to control the South actually work, it will be necessary to re-examine the whole lexicon of development which has been evolved to obscure this reality. (First of a two-part article) By Jeremy Seabrook Third World Network Features All the governments of Europe express their resolve to fight racism. The shameful shadow of the holocaust still lies across a continent that once saw itself as the bearer of a mission to `civilise' the world. What is the remedy of those European governments in their struggle against racism? Economic growth and expansion, which alone, they believe, can guarantee social peace: a constantly rising standard of living, which is the only way to distract the people indefinitely from such dark cultural traditions of the West. How is this continuous process to be sustained? It is to be accomplished as it has always been - by diverting the wealth of the world towards the richest one-fifth of humanity. But the four-fifths from whose resources, labour and lands this wealth comes are overwhelmingly non-white. The pressures upon their resources, environment, lives and land to service debts contracted to the Western financial institutions - what is this, if not racism? But it is racism abroad. Not at home. Not in the heartlands of civilisation. It is, as it were, delayed racism, racism at a remove, racism as a consequence of economic forces: a racism that destroys without the ugly material apparatus of extermination deployed within the heart of Europe just half a century ago. Racism in Europe, it seems, can be `cured' only by exporting it. Racism, in this way, takes its place among a multitude of other `invisibles' that keep European trade in surplus with the rest of the world. To further this end, Europe, and the West, have evolved a seamless ideological justification for their actions, as well as a network of economic and social institutions to ensure that global forces work entirely to their advantage. The ideology is hidden in a treacherous vocabulary of benign intentions, a high-sounding language of universal harmony, which is now vigorously being promoted world-wide. It is worth looking at this lexicon of liberation, to discover its hidden (and real) meaning. `Development', in the name of which millions are uprooted, evicted from ancestral lands, removed from subsistence farming, fishing-grounds and forests, is a concept from the Cold War. It was a promise made by the West to its former colonial territories, as an alternative to the `Socialism' to which they naturally inclined after emergence from imperial dominion. In other words, development itself was always an alien project, grounded in the struggles of other, stronger powers, and serving a purpose quite different from the well-being of the countries on which it was willed. Development was never based upon indigenous values, cultures and civilisations. Indeed, these had to be sacrificed for it to `succeed'; a process that has become more evident now, with all former `deviant' countries, from Tanzania to Vietnam, now intoning the mantras of `the market' put into their mouths by officials from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, World Trade Organisation (WTO), Asian Development Bank (ADB), etc. Thus, even India renounces svadeshi and throws its 900 million people into the arms of a global doctrine that believes the only way for the poor to become a little less poor is for the already rich to become immensely more rich. Since the death of Communism, there is little resistance to `development'; its Cold War origins can be purged, and it now stands, cleansed, a shining example of the good intent of the `developed' towards the `developing': but without interrupting its work of filtering the wealth of the world from poor to rich, to the extent, according to Martin Khor of the Consumers' Association of Penang, of around $250 billion a year, including debt repayments, terms of trade, brain drain, and internal pricing mechanisms by transnational companies. Universal economic growth, whereby `development' is to be at- tained, is actually an ideological instrument for domination. It measures `wealth' in narrow monetary terms, which rigorously exclude most of the real costs: it must do so, for to include these within its paradigm would show that the global economic system is too expensive and that neither the planet nor its people can afford it. To conceal this, the immense costs to the health, well-being, the integrity of humanity and the human home, are inflexibly excluded from its cold calculus of cash. This can be to the advantage only of those who think that economic necessity and human need are one and the same thing. The real economic miracle of the West has been the achievement of prodigious wealth which nevertheless fails to relieve poverty, but, on the contrary, only produces strange new mutations and forms of misery and impoverishment. As for `aid' to the poor, it is clearly small-scale out- relief to the industries and professionals of the countries which bestow it in such scanty and self-serving quantities. The most prestigious project of the British Overseas Development Agency, the Western Ghats Reforestation Project in India, reserves almost one-third of its disbursements for consultancies within the United Kingdom, a country which, having successfully ruined its own forests 200 years ago, is now instructing the people of Karnataka, millennial guardians of their own jungles, how to improve on nature. Free trade means compulsory business on the terms of the strong and powerful. `Globalisation' means a single world economic order which seeks to replicate the `successes' of the rich countries in their homelands. But since these successes depended upon exploitation, plunder and extraction, it is difficult to see how this can be accomplished - where will Ghana or Thailand or Venezuela find the resources and the people to press into service of their adoption of a colonial economic model? `Interdependence' means the institutionalised subordination of the weak. `Population' and the concern to prevent the poor from `breeding' (the rich have children; only the poor breed) is a substitute for social justice, which is the most effective way of stabilising population. `Security' is the process of profligate arms expenditure to perpetuate the rights of the powerful to a disproportionate share of the world's resources. In a moment of rare candour, the Economist - house-journal of global capital - admitted soon after the collapse of Communism that `The democracies will want to make sure that they can keep on getting the raw materials their economies need ... To this end, soldiers must change. For the most part, their attention will be turned further afield, South and East, to wars they may have to fight in distant places ... The one country to which this will come as no surprise is Britain, whose armed forces spent the 19th century largely on non-European business.' `Integration' into the world economy means the disintegration of local ways of answering need, a dilution of variety and diversity, the human and social equivalent of the destruction of biodiversity on the planet: so that the extinction of the Yanomami and the decimation of the Penan become the parallel of the measureless loss of species in the ruined forests of Brazil and Sarawak. `Sovereignty' is nostalgia for an autonomy rendered archaic precisely by global forces which tend to the dissolution of the nation states that set them in train. As for the other big words - no matter how noble their original meaning - they have become devoid of substance, transformed into blunt instruments by the dominant powers to beat the rest of the world into submission. - Third World Network Features - ends - About the writer: Jeremy Seabrook is a freelance journalist and author based in London. When reproducing this feature, please credit Third World Network Features and (if applicable) the cooperating magazine or agency involved in the article, and give the byline. Please send us cuttings. @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ ~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~--~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~ Posted by Richard K. Moore (•••@••.•••) Wexford, Ireland •••@••.••• | Cyberlib=http://www.internet-eireann.ie/cyberlib Materials may be reposted in their entirety for non-commercial use. ~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~--~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~
Share: