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Contributions from
the Column
Books and Media
Development after globalisation
Rethinking UN business partnerships
Preventive Policy instead of preventive wars
Education tool kit of rural people
06/2005 |
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Development policy:
Important contribution
Peter Niggli:
Nach der Globalisierung. Entwicklungspolitik im 21. Jahrhundert
(After Globalisation. Development Policy in the 21st Century).
Zürich, Rotpunktverlag 2004, 136 pp.,
Euro 11.50, ISBN: 3-85869-285-9
A different course of globalisation is possible and a new economic order is inevitable. This is the core thesis put forward by Peter Niggli and the Swiss Coalition of Development Organisations. Swissaid, Catholic Lenten Fund, Bread for all, Helvetas, Caritas and the Protestant Interchurch Aid of Switzerland spent three years analysing the global political situation and drafting a concept for development policy in the 21st century. Niggli has summarised their findings. His hundred-page analysis is followed up by 16 concrete guidelines for development policy. The book is meant to be a policy paper, rather than only a contribution to the ongoing discussion.
Niggli responds with a clear “yes” to the question of whether world market integration can speed up development. However, the specific conditions of each individual country must be taken into account. The concept of “catch-up industrialisation” has to date only been successful in states which followed a strategy combining protectionism and global market integration – a recipe that goes beyond the doctrines of the World Bank and IMF. According to Niggli, greater emphasis should be placed on these experiences in future.
The Swiss Coalition considers that all development policy is subject to a central dilemma of capitalist production: Catch-up development is essential if all people are to live without poverty. At the same time, however, such development destroys the natural foundation on which life depends. Foresighted concepts must take this fact into account, for example, by favouring energy from sustainable resources and basing industrial production on closed loop material flows.
The book bemoans that current international economic policy undermines the democratic division of power in nation-states. Cross-border movements of capital have led to capital flight and currency speculation, and permanent trade liberalisation within the scope of the WTO has eroded welfare states. Global elites have degraded welfare states to “national competition states“, and the developing state to the ”bridgehead for the world market”. The latter is exclusively meant to safeguard the interests of the global elites, and to control the aspirations of the people who are excluded from global capitalism.
Niggli sees a “political trilemma of the global economy” in the efforts of political and economic elites to implement a system combining full economic integration, national self-determination and democratic politics. All three together cannot be had. Full economic integration together with democratic politics leads to “global federalism”, from which the international community is still “light years away”. Full economic integration within a system of nation-states as currently practised “considerably reduces the scope for democracy“. The third option would be to practise democratic politics within the framework of nation-states, and to respect national decision-making – particularly of an economic nature – at an international level too. This would only work with a new consensus which would have to include ecological components as well as the “re-regulation” of financial markets. At the same time, the powers of the WTO would have to be reduced to the regulation of cross-border trade.
Niggli and the Swiss Coalition of Development Organisations have provided an important contribution to the development debate. Their analysis of the most important contentious issues between critics and proponents of globalisation is helpful – as are the outlines of problem solutions they have come up with. The appendix includes concrete strategies for implementing the proposed policies.
Claudia Isabel Rittel
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