If we didn't have categories, we couldn't possibly organize our daily lives, much less write long reports. The categories we choose are, however, another matter. In Les Mots et les Choses, Michel Foucault led off with the classification of animals in Jorge Luis Borges' imaginary Chinese encyclopedia. In this (mythical) work, the categories of animals are
(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) those that from a long way off look like flies.
Foucault was trying to provoke in us the shock of recognizing the arbitrariness of our own categories, to bring us up against a totally alien way of organizing the world. This list induces vertigo, a sense of things falling apart. What if our own categories were as fragile, or as crazy? People become frightened when their systems of classification are threatened, and small wonder!
Here, now, is another system - this time a real one; the brainchild of the General Commissioner of the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1900. Monsieur Picard divided his exhibits into eighteen groups and 121 classes. He wrote that 'The objects must be on display to visitors in a logical order, their classification must correspond to a simple, clear and precise conception which carries in itself its philosophy and its justification, so that the basic idea [l'idee mere] is revealed without effort.' Picard's 'logical order' is the following (For Picard's classification, I am indebted to George Perec, 'Penser/Classer' in Le Genre Humain N. 2 (quarterly review published with the cooperation of the Maison des Sciences de 1'Homme, l'ficole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and the CNRS, Fayard, Paris, 1982). Perec, however, did not draw the political implications of this list):
1. Education and Teaching (because, 'through them, man enters life')
2. Works of Art (because they must keep their 'place of honour')
3. Instruments and Methods of Arts and Letters
4. Mechanics
5. Electricity
6. Civil Engineering and Transportation
7. Agriculture
8. Horticulture and Orchards
9. Forests, Hunting and Fishing
10 .Foods
11. Mines and Metallurgy
12. Decorations and Furnishings of Public Edifices and Private Houses
13. Threads, Textiles and Clothing
14. Chemical Industry
15. Various Industries: paper, cutlery, jewellery, goldsmithing, watchmaking, wickerwork, knick-knacks ('bibeloterie'), etc.
16. Social Economy, Hygiene, Public Health, Medicine and Surgery (this category is truly harrowing: here are displayed strait-jackets for the insane, beds for the handicapped, crutches and wooden legs, military surgeons' battlefield kits, Red Cross first-aid equipment, apparatus for resuscitating the drowned and the asphyxiated, etc.). Social Economy, according to Picard, 'should come naturally after the various branches of artistic, agricultural or industrial production because it results from them as well as being their philosophy'. (???) NB: The passage is no clearer in French: '... elle en est la resultante en meme temps que la philosophie'.
17. Colonization, a category which did not figure in the Universal Exhibition of 1889. This new category is 'amply justified by the need for colonial expansion felt by all civilized peoples'.
18. The Army and the Navy
This may seem a very roundabout route indeed to take towards our common pursuit, but, whatever the appearances, I am not merely trying to amuse you on a dull August day. Picard's way of ordering the world - remember that his exhibition was 'universal'-may seem at first glance almost as bizarre as the Chinese animals. I am prepared to award a handsome certificate to whichever of you proposes the best explanation of what his 'idee-mere' actually was. My own interpretation is that it is no accident that categories I to 16 lead us, however tortuously, to the 'need' to subjugate ignorant peoples through the use of military might, since this is obviously the only normal and civilized way to behave when one has electricity, horticulture and decorated public edifices. Picard's classification indeed follows a 'logical order', if only because he eventually arrives at the 'right' conclusions, i.e. the conclusions desired by the powerful elites of his own time. He provides them, as promised, with a 'philosophy' and a 'justification'.
The Brandt Commission showed a suitable concern for the problems of Third World peoples and I do not wish to impugn the motives of its Commissioners, least of all those of Brandt himself. The ICIDI was, nevertheless, a spin-off of the World Bank (proposed by McNamara, working under the direction of a former high World Bank official), and one may suppose that the Bank had something to say about the selection of the northern and southern participants.
When people share major assumptions - those categories which are to some degree prior to thought because they are simply given-their geographical origins matter very little. The power to decide what the categories are going to be, or to arrange things so that no real discussion about them even takes place (much the best method), is a very real power. Policing the borders of the classification system has been an important task of ruling classes since the beginnings of history, and I see no reason why the World Bank - which is just a metaphor for those who think like the Bank - should relinquish this power willingly.
ICIDI, like any individual or body, had its own prior assumptions and classification system, of which I will give just a few examples. One of the Commission's most revealing assumptions is its tacit rejection of history. Poverty and underdevelopment in the South are just there - no attempt is made to explain how such conditions may have come about, possibly because such an analysis would imply a recognition of the North's responsibility in this state of affairs (not only during the colonial period, but throughout the entire post-war era as well). So, to begin with, all the categories in the Brandt system are flat and two-dimensional at best, with no historical depth.
ICIDI also fully shares the general UN-system myth that all governments, especially those in the Third World, are representative of their people (i.e. their poor majorities) and can consequently be counted upon to act in their interests. Although Chairman Willy Brandt says in his introduction to North-South that 'We in the South and the North should frankly discuss abuses of power by elites ...' (p. 10, his emphasis), the Commission itself never proceeds to act on this suggestion. From its Report, one would never guess that governments represent, on the whole, the interests of those who keep them in power and that they themselves are interested in remaining in power. Thus the category of the benign State is also a constant.
From this assumed harmony at the national level, it is a natural step to assuming harmony - potentially anyway - at the international level. Of course there are problems between the North and the South, but 'none of [them] can effectively be solved by confrontation: sensible solutions can only result from dialogue and cooperation ... development means interdependence ...(pp. 22-3, my emphasis). Having gone to great lengths to point out what could be the happy consequences for all of a recognized interdependence, the Commission then asks, 'if these mutual interests exist, why have the measures that embody them not been implemented long ago? Are people and governments not aware of the mutuality of interests?' ICIDI's answer is essentially that there is not enough public knowledge of the facts; or that, in negotiations where both sides stand to gain, 'either may feel unwilling to give in because they are not gaining enough or because the other gains too much. This is especially true in negotiations between unequals ...' (p. 66).
In the Brandt world-view, then, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the global economic system: with a bit of goodwill on both sides (there are only two sides - North and South) it could be made to work for everyone in the South as it is assumed to have worked by now for everyone in the North. In fact, it is precisely because we must save this global economic system that common sense and cooperation are necessary.
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Thus in the course of Brandt's argument for 'massive transfers' (of money and other resources from North to South) we learn that the 'dynamic developing countries' are a 'new economic frontier' where investments will prosper because these countries have 'fewer of the ... social and political constraints operating in the North' (p. 67). What does this mean? No effective trade unions and a cheap, docile labour force? ICIDI doesn't say. One does, however, know from experience that northern investors do indeed prefer countries without such 'social and political constraints'.
In the same vein, trade should be expanded, protectionism is always wrong, even for infant industries; all countries should participate as fully as possible in world markets. Unfortunately, the discussion on access to those markets (p. 69), while deploring trade barriers, is quite separate from the discussion of transnational corporations (p. 73) which happen to control two-thirds of world trade. As to the TNCs, 'a very substantial mutual interest lies in harnessing the economic strength and experience of the multinationals for development'. We are not, however, told how this is to come about in a world where the TNCs are profit- seeking entities and actors on their own, not subject to the dictates of nations or of international bodies.
In the Bank's-eye, Brandt's-eye view of the world, 'trickle-down' (rebaptized for the occasion 'massive transfers') will somehow work this time around, although it is easy to show that it has not worked over the past thirty years. For ICIDI, there is no contradiction between, on the one hand, full participation in and concentration on world markets and, on the other, self-reliance, in spite of the demonstrated impoverishment such participation has brought to the LDCs, with the exception of the NICs.
In the area of food and agriculture, which interests us in the context of ICIHI, 'modern' agricultural technology and large- scale development schemes are never called into question by the Brandt Report. Some samples: 'At the moment there should be no clear danger of a worldwide shortage of fertilizers, nor is there yet an urgent need to introduce plant varieties less dependent on chemicals. Modern high-yielding plants are efficient converters of nitrogen into food with the minimum non-food content and making efficient use of sunlight' (p. 100).
This short passage is a splendid concentrate of unstated assumptions. Because the category of 'modern agriculture' clearly has a totally favourable connotation, the Report does not (indeed could not) ask (i) which people in the Third World can afford to use 'modern high-yielding plants' cultivated with chemicals, (2) whether the vast majority of the world's peasants do not need 'low-risk, stable yield' systems more than 'high-yielding' ones, and (3) whether the 'non-food content' (straw, etc.) of plants does not have its place in the peasant's survival economy (you will perhaps recall my story about people freezing to death in Bihar from lack of straw to cover themselves).(In 1980 in India, I learned from a high official of the Indian civil administration that for the first time people in his country were dying from exposure. Why? Because straw had been a free good and the poorest people used it to keep warm. When short-straw varieties came to dominate agriculture, reducing overall quantities of straw, and as industrial paper production also began to use straw as a raw material - decimation of forests having made wood-pulp-based paper expensive - straw became a commodity people could not always afford. My lack of ecological sensitivity in 1984, not to mention that of the Brandt Commission, shows in this passage. Another unstated assumption of ICIDI that I should have caught is its belief that chemical fertilizers do not undermine natural soil fertility, do not pollute drinking water from streams or ground water through run-ofls, do not kill fish, a major source of protein, etc.)
Brandt is for nothing if not for growth, and here it seems that agriculture is a real drag: 'Virtually all these [low-income] countries have two-thirds or more of their workers in agriculture and all of them rely heavily on exporting raw material. These are among the chief economic causes of their slow growth' (p. 51). Some countries, like India and the Philippines, have, however, seen the light and have adopted the 'new crop varieties of the Green Revolution [which] produced substantial agricultural growth ...' (p. 52). Again, we do not learn that there was also substantial (and substantiated) criticism of the Green Revolution which could certainly have been made available to the Commissioners, many of whom were probably not aware of this literature. They might then have been less eager to praise growth for growth's sake and might have pondered the fate of the millions who are excluded from this kind of agricultural productivity.
But in Brandt's ordering of the world this is not possible because there is no history. We look only at the fraction of the peasantry using the Green Revolution now and at its total output. There is no particular connection between the countryside and the city either, so we do not witness out-migration from rural areas. The Report does not even contain a section on urban problems per se. In other words, the particular set of categories chosen (or, rather, assumed) renders invisible the poor people who suffered from intensified competition for land and employment, induced by the Green Revolution, and were forced to settle in shanty-towns, or who simply lost their livelihood and died. Similarly, we do not learn about the appalling living conditions of the Filipino peasantry, nor the 48 per cent of the Indian rural population still living below a very stringently determined 'poverty line'.
The power to define categories is ipso facto the power to include and to exclude. Bank-type, Brandt-type logical ordering leaves Bank-type initiatives out of all the more painful equations. Thus intervention by outside agencies, particularly international ones, cannot, by definition, make the plight of poor people worse and development spending always automatically results in development. Profligate use is also made in Brandt of what I like to call the 'ubiquitous we': 'We are arming ourselves to death' ... 'Mankind still behaves as if all these resources - up to now so abundantly wasted - were renewable' etc. All of which is true but gives the impression that grandmothers and Upper Voltaics bear as much responsibility for this state of affairs as missile corporations and owners of Rolls-Royces.
Some progress is made in the second Brandt Report. Published in 1983 after Cancun had well and truly disposed of the myth of the New International Economic Order, Common Crisis contains some hopeful signs. Timid murmurs of criticism arc heard concerning some international institutions.
'[Cancun called] for a review of agricultural and food agencies working within the framework of the United Nations,' says Report No. 2. 'While we are aware of excellent work being done by sections of several institutions, there has been criticism of other activities, of overlapping functions and inadequate coordination. We support an urgent review of this kind' (p. 32, emphasis in the original).
The IMF (which we targeted at our meeting as one of the chief contemporary factors reducing poor people's food security) also attracts mild criticism: 'There is typically more than one way of achieving external equilibrium, but the Fund generally assumes a very limited range of possibilities ... in particular it should avoid advocating policies for a number of countries which, when carried out by all of them together, will reduce world income and employment at a time when expansion is needed' (p. 62).
The Common Crisis report also comes close to saying (p. 36) that if Western countries like the US had taken the slightest interest in Afghanistan during the decade before the Soviet invasion - when this miserable country was a rock-bottom aid recipient relative to its size and poverty - they would have helped to reduce East-West tensions before the fact: 'Certainly the situations of that country and many others now call forth military expenditures well in excess of anything that was ever provided to promote their development - development which might have forestalled political crisis.'
So there's a good deal one can build on in Brandt 2, and even in Brandt 1. Since I'm trying here to discuss for a very small audience the epistemological problem of world-ordering, I've stressed the (negative) aspects which clearly support my case. One could doubtless make the same points more gently, to ICIHI's Commissioners fo
r example, some of whom overlap with Brandt's. The signal weakness of the Independent Commission on International Development Issues, ICIDI, remains, however, its basic view of development as something that is done to people by governments or by UN agencies or by something called the 'international community', which takes responsibility for trade policy, high finance and the like. The people themselves are invariably regarded (if they are present at all) as objects, as obstacles or as victims, never as actors.
The enormous opportunity of the International Commission on International Humanitarian Issues, ICIHI, lies in its very mandate, which demands that people be placed at front and centre stage. If it carries out this mandate with imagination and if it is willing to cast a critical eye on its own world-ordering categories, it can actually turn ICIDI inside out.
Many of the recommendations I would personally like to see emerging from the ICIHI process can be read en flligrane or as the mirror image of the criticisms set forth above, so I'll not repeat them systematically here. What does seem urgent is that a credible body state clearly that the emperor has no clothes on. The official development strategies practised up to now simply haven't worked.
Non-Governmental Organizations are already saying this as loudly as they can, but they get no help from any body even remotely attached to the United Nations. It is often felt that the UN system wants NGOs to parrot its own views to their constituencies, not to make serious inputs to the system itself.
One could conceivably argue that things might have been even worse without the 'development' interventions of past decades, but surely this is cold comfort. We need a frank admission of failure and a recognition that nearly all the strategies that have worked have been smaller-scale, pragmatic, non-technocratic and community-based. In the UN system itself, the work of Unicef, IF AD and the High Commission for Refugees stands out in this regard.