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Myth or realistic policy goal?
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8-9/2003
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Myth or realistic policy goal?
Development under pressure of globalisation
Is development a myth or a realistic policy goal – this was the question posed by a conference organised by the Development and Peace Foundation and the Federal Centre for Political Education in Brühl, near Bonn, July 2-4. The conference began with an stimulating controversy: Michael Hofmann (Head of Directorate-General 3 in the BMZ), and Birgit Mahnkopf (Berlin School of Economics), examined in two introductory addresses the role of development policy under the influence of globalisation. Hofmann noted that development was to a great extent steered from within, but also needed conducive conditions from outside. The EU common agricultural policy, for example, was an impediment to development, and our trade structures in general were jointly responsible for non-development. Therefore reforms must make a start here. But at the same time, he added, those who wanted development must improve the inner structures of the developing countries and, in particular, by capacity-building enable these countries to make their demands on the North at all and be in a position to negotiate. Birgit Mahnkopf saw in such reforms no chance for developing countries because for latecomers it was fundamentally impossible to achieve industrialisation in the context of fully-developed industrialised nations. Free trade made sense only between industrialised economies of the same level, and development could only be achieved by protection against the economically powerful. Hofmann countered that an analysis which was right in principle was little helpful if it could not determine the actors for the proposed policy. But Mahnkopf insisted that much more could be achieved if only the political will for it was there, and if the states as actors were not willing they must be made so by civil society. "The actors for that meet in Porto Alegre."
The contrast between the actor-related approach of Hofmann and the analytical approach of Mahnkopf ran through the next days of the conference as its tonal centre. That was appropriate for this symposium, whose motif was improving cooperation between academia and politics. Keith Bezanson (Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex), declared development to be the one revolutionary idea of the 20th century whose time was in no way over, as Wolfgang Sachs had claimed, but was dealing with new challenges due to globalisation. But that changed nothing about the fact that the only successful development model to date was that of the East Asian countries: "managed transition". Adebayo Olukoshi (CODESRIA, Dakar) complained about the maladjustment caused by the World Bank's Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP) which had resulted in Africa remaining a non-industrialised supplier of raw materials ("an economic wasteland"), while Xie Kang (Institute of World Economics, Shanghai) emphasised the merits of a planned integration of threshold country China in the world economy based on a division of labour. Franz Nuscheler, the final speaker, left no doubt that what was more important for development assistance than more money was establishment of fairer rules, and first and foremost the embedding of the finance business in firm rules in order to prevent socially Darwinian developments. To assert that, he said, empowerment was necessary, to be provided by an alliance between the poor countries and civil society of the North: "Power reacts only to counter-power."
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