Journal of International Relations and Development

Volume 2, No. 4 (December 1999)

 

Reframing the Global Politics of Development
By Anthony Payne _*

 

MANY OF THE MAIN FEATURES OF THE CONTEMPORARY POLITICS OF DEVELOPMENT ARE APPARENTLY WELL UNDERSTOOD. Much of Asia, it is said, has been developing, but is now in 'crisis'. Latin America has experienced a 'lost decade' of development. Africa has been 'marginalised'. Russia and Eastern Europe are experiencing the travails of 'transition'. The terms used in the discussion may be somewhat loose, but the big picture purports to be clear. All of this, moreover, is generally understood to have been taking place against the backcloth of something called 'globalisation'.

In fact, everything is rather more complex than these broad contours of analysis suggest. First, as is now widely realised, the debate about globalisation is itself a vibrant one, with Held et al. (1999:2) detecting the emergence of three major contending schools of thought which they refer to as the hyperglobalisers, the sceptics and the transformationalists. Second, although it is the case that these different theses do have views about the impact of globalisation on the pattern of stratification of countries in the world, this part of their analyses - which one might call the development dimension - has not been placed centre stage and accordingly the literature here is disappointingly sparse. Third, such discussion as there has been on the international politics of 'who wins' and 'who loses' from globalisation has tended to be conducted in a vocabulary that originated in a different era and which may be thought to be inappropriate, or at least not precisely designed, to comprehend a globalising world order. As Korany (1994:7) noted several years ago, "boundaries are not only territorial; they are also mental and conceptual Š Our global 'conceptual geography' now needs reordering. Are basic categories such as the Third World or Nonalignment still relevant in the new global equation?"

This article seeks to respond to that question and aims to explore ways of discussing the issue of international development in the context of Korany's new global equation. The first section briefly reconsiders the dominant frameworks of analysis deployed in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The second section reviews two popular approaches advanced in the real world of politics, but with attendant academic versions, during the 1990s - "two tales of world poverty", as Thérien (1999:723) has called them. The final section tries to reframe the whole problem in a way that will open up a research programme capable of genuinely getting to grips with that continuing strand of politics within the contemporary global political economy which seems, still, to pitch the interests of rich countries against those of poor countries.

 

II

WHAT IS IMMEDIATELY STRIKING IN LOOKING BACK AT OLD WAYS OF FRAMING THE INTERNATIONAL POLITICS OF DEVELOPMENT IS THE EXTENT TO WHICH ALL APPROACHES WERE GROUNDED ON A VERY BASIC, REALLY RATHER CRUDE, CATEGORISATION OF STATES - IF NOT A SIMPLE BIFURCATION, THEN GENERALLY NOT ANYTHING MUCH MORE SOPHISticated. Several such formulations of this type can be easily identified in the compendious literature of three decades of analysis.

Central was, of course, the notion of the 'Third World'. Ironically, this was not itself, in origin, an indigenous Third World conceptualisation, but a European concept first deployed in 1952 by a French demographer Alfred Sauvy to refer to the 'third estate', the common people, before the French Revolution (Lewellen 1995). Because this usage implied poverty, powerlessness and marginalisation, it was picked up by a number of scholars in the 1960s to refer to that whole category of emerging ex-colonial countries whose economic, social and political conditions, relatively speaking, replicated those of the French 'third estate' in pre-revolutionary times (Wolf-Phillips 1987). In other words, as Ma (1998:344) has observed, the original notion of the Third World was "not based upon the prior existence of the First and Second World". However, given the numerical aspect of the term, it was hardly surprising that two other worlds were swiftly discerned - the 'First World' of the capitalist West and the 'Second World' of the communist East, thereby implanting Cold War considerations at the very centre of the international development debate and keeping them there for the best part of three decades. In such an antagonistic geopolitical context the concept of the Third World inevitably became political, expressing the attractions of keeping a neutral position, or finding a third way, between the capitalist and communist camps and, in so doing, adding the notion of nonalignment to the definition of Third World (Willetts 1978).

As indicated, this whole literature could not but put politics in the foreground. The alternative starting-point was economics, which also again led in virtually all formulations, whether from the right or the left, to extraordinarily simple dichotomies. From a modernisation perspective, the world was divided between 'developing countries' (viewed optimistically) or 'less developed countries' (viewed only a little less optimistically), on the one hand, and 'developed' countries, on the other. From a dependency perspective, although the theorisation as a whole was sharply divergent, the difference of categorisation was only slight - it was 'underdeveloped' countries which were the antithesis of 'developed countries'. The world-systems approach used a different vocabulary - that of the 'core' and the 'periphery' - and even sought to moderate the starkness of the bifurcation by introducing, albeit somewhat uneasily, the category of 'semi-periphery' to catch the possibility of countries playing an intermediate role in the system and even moving over time between core and periphery. But the fundamental thinking here was part and parcel of the dependency debate and the overall approach was still based on a bipolar analysis.

A final way of setting out the issues characteristic of this period was the notion of a North-South divide. This conceptualisation drew a wavy line across the world broadly between the northern and southern hemispheres, thus separating North from South America, Europe from Africa, North Asia from South Asia and so on, deviating only to draw Australia and New Zealand into the economic and political North. As classically formulated by the first report of the Brandt Commission (1980), which did so much to popularise the term during the 1980s, the idea expressed both the conflict which obviously was deemed to lie at the root of North-South relations but at the same time, and perhaps even more importantly, the essential linkage which bound the fates of North and South together in a world economy seen as increasingly interdependent in its functioning. Although this argument was fiercely criticised from a dependency position, which always saw North-South conflict as fundamental rather than negotiable, the formulation gave rise politically to a brief era of so-called North-South dialogue during which governments from the two sides of the divide met in various conferences ostensibly to discuss ways of creating a 'new (and more equal) international economic order' (Jones 1983; Krasner 1985). Those political opportunities, however, came to an end some while ago and it is widely accepted that a North-South dialogue has been marked of late more by its absence than its vitality.

All of these various terms remain in widespread use within contemporary social science analyses of these issues. Some writers still make a positive case for particular formulations; others somewhat lazily inherit and do not question traditional ways of posing these problems. The position taken up in this article, however, is that all of these conceptualisations are at best dated and at worst flawed, at least in part. As a consequence they should be largely abandoned. Take, first, the notion of the Third World. At the beginning of the 1990s, Holm (1990) was still prepared to suggest that the Third World continued to be a powerful international actor in a number of arenas, whilst Williams (1993) specifically identified the emerging global environmental agenda as something which could re-articulate the Third World coalition. Others argue that Third World countries continue to constitute a distinct group identifiable by their "tenuous, impermanent, fragmented" political culture (Kamrava 1995:page). Against these points, it can be countered that the relevance of the Third World as a collective actor needs to be demonstrated by reference to specific states and specific issues and that the possession of an impermanent culture is not the firmest base on which to build a category of analysis. Indeed, in reviewing two books in 1992, both of which claimed to be 'rethinking' aspects of the Third World, Randall noted that both works held back from "any explicit or sustained questioning of the validity of talking about a 'Third World' as such" and ended by asking directly: "can we justify still holding on to the term?" (Randall 1992:727, 730). As suggested earlier, a lack of clarity has always attached to the term. Given the manifest disappearance of a Second World following the ending of the Cold War and the dramatic variations of development trajectory which different key parts of the so-called Third World have lately experienced (cf. the brief truisms proposed about Asia, Latin America and Africa at the outset of the article), the answer offered here to Randall's question is a firm negative (Berger 1994).

Turning to the various formulations deployed in the modernisation and dependency discourses, the problem is not so much the concept of development itself (of which more later) but the dichotomous way in which all countries have been assigned (usually) to one of only two groups. There are also political subtexts from which it cannot but be helpful to escape. The category of 'developing countries' now embraces countries in respect of which it is no longer apparent that they are developing at all. Perhaps some countries, for various reasons, cannot develop. Others (in Asia) which many thought were developing are perhaps no longer doing so. If so, what does this mean? Equally, the phrase 'underdeveloped countries', if used precisely, can, and always could, refer only to countries whose 'underdevelopment' is thought to have been predominantly caused by their exploitation by the 'developed countries' and this is a position now held only by dependency zealots. As for the 'developed countries' themselves, one has to ask if it makes sense, in the light of all the social and economic problems which continue to beset the parts of the world embraced by this term, to categorise them by reference to an apparently completed (for that is what the word developed implies) process of development? For its part, the world-systems approach also has its difficulties which have been well recognised over the years. Grugel and Hout have lately used the spectrum of core, semi-peripheral and peripheral countries in an ingenious way to probe the regionalist strategies now followed by many states, especially in the intermediate semi-peripheral category. But even they rebel against the economic determinism for which all world-systems approaches have frequently and rightly been criticised and concede that they need to make these terms "less theoretically rigid" (Grugel and Hout 1999:8) to get analytical value out of them. Notions of core, semi-periphery and periphery thus remain useful metaphors to highlight the stratification at the heart of the global political economy, but they do not capture the full extent of the unevenness of global development. In other words, many of the categories of classification used in these various literatures are also too deeply loaded or too crude, or both, to be carried forward into continued easy usage.

The same can unfortunately be said for the terminology of North-South. It is unfortunate because a commitment to recognition of a North-South dimension to international affairs has generally been taken to indicate a genuine concern about unequal levels of development in the world. Nevertheless, for all the term's merit as a symbol of faith, it does not travel well into the post-Cold-War, globalising world. In the first place, there is more than one North. It is too glib just to locate Japan automatically in the same camp as the USA and the leading countries of Western Europe. Japan may have been trained to become a part of the 'West' in the Cold-War sense of that term; but it represents a different view of development and therefore stands for a different North than the USA. Given too the differences that still exist between Anglo-American and continental European forms of capitalism, that fissure within the North also differentiates the political economies of the two sides of the Atlantic alliance. In the second place, for reasons already advanced, there are now many different Souths, whereas one of the principles which underpinned traditional North-South politics was that the South did constitute a relatively well identified and homogeneous group of countries (Ravenhill 1990). If there are several Norths and multiple Souths, the case for working with a fundamentalist North-South view of the world is much weakened. No purpose is served by aggregating too aggressively if one has instantly to disaggregate.

So where does that leave us? The core conflicts raised by these debates have certainly not gone away. Everyone knows that intuitively and the reality can be easily demonstrated by reference to a whole range of statistical material about different standards of living in different parts of the world. To put it at its simplest, there remain huge and unacceptable gaps in welfare between the richer and the poorer countries of the world. The article therefore turns now to consider the two most commonly advanced interpretations of this divide over the last few years. As will be seen, they draw eclectically, and not always consistently, on the terminology discussed above, but nevertheless constitute new and important readings of the situation.

 

III

IN AN IMPORTANT ARTICLE, TO WHICH WE ARE MUCH INDEBTED IN WHAT IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWS, THÉRIEN (1999) HAS POINTED TO THE EMERGENCE OVER THE LAST DECADE OF TWO COMPETING INTERPRETATIONS OF INTERNATIONAL POVERTY WHICH HE HAS DUBBED THE 'BRETTON WOODS PARADIGM' AND THE 'UNITED NATIONS PARADIGM'. The former is associated with the discourse and practices of the international organisations initially conceived at Bretton Woods in 1944, namely, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and its successor, the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The latter corresponds to the discourse and practices of the United Nations (UN) and, in particular, those of its specialised agencies, such as the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and the International Labour Organisation (ILO), whose mandates are related to economic and social issues. Both paradigms explicitly seek to incorporate globalisation into their thinking but differ significantly in their analysis of the impact that it has had upon international inequality and development.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given their function as the main international agencies of liberal capitalism, the Bretton Woods institutions take a broadly optimistic view of the historical achievements of post-war development. In a recent statement, the World Bank (1995a:10) observed that:

Over the last five decades, average per capita incomes in developing countries have more than doubled. The GDPs of some economies have more than quintupled Š There has been a 'green revolution' in South Asia, an 'economic miracle' in East Asia, Latin America has largely overcome its debt crisis, and substantial gains in health and literacy have taken place in Africa.

Future prospects are also deemed to be good, provided that the countries either adopt or maintain the 'market-friendly' package of policies recommended by the institutions. As is well known, these constitute principally the pursuit of 'sound' macroeconomic conditions, openness to world trade, the development of private enterprise and the attraction of foreign capital inflows. In that sense, structural adjustment, the great demand of the Bank and the Fund in the 1980s, is now presented as a necessary, permanent discipline.

Yet, as Thérien and indeed others have noted, the institutions did come to concede in the 1990s that 'zones of extreme poverty' still exist in the world economy and they have moved to make 'poverty alleviation' one of their current watchwords. Much of the World Bank's investment lending and the majority of its adjustment programmes are now poverty-focused. In similar vein, the IMF has made the financing of social safety nets a standard part of its macroeconomic programmes. However, it is important to stress that the attention paid to poverty by the Bretton Woods institutions derives from a distinctively different worldview from that which drove the development debate and the North-South dialogue in the 1970s and 1980s. For these institutions, poverty does not derive from asymmetrical inequalities in the structure of the global political economy, but is "more the result of a temporary misadaptation of markets" (Thérien 1999:732). The causation is perceived to be domestic, not external. Thus poverty is treated by the Bank as a consequence of "country-specific imbalances, policy errors, or political difficulties" (World Bank 1995b:5). It must therefore be countered with selective measures addressed to particular states and situations, not with global reforms which might challenge the core principles of a liberal international economic order. In sum, the vision is deliberately restrictive and clearly political in its attempt to limit the range of possible, acceptable action.

By comparison, the UN paradigm remains closer in spirit to the radicalism which drove much old thinking on international development questions. Yet it too has moved on from the framework of these discourses to embrace and promote as its central idea the notion of 'global poverty'. While recognising the extent of the social and economic progress generated by post-war development policies, the UN position emphasises the unequal distribution of the fruits of development. As stated in the declaration adopted by the UN Summit for Social Development held in Copenhagen in 1995, "we are witnessing in countries throughout the world the expansion of prosperity for some, unfortunately accompanied by an expansion of unspeakable poverty for others" (United Nations 1995:6). In other words, globalisation is openly recognised as generating losers as well as winners. The liberalisation of trade and finance is understood to have reduced the capacities of national governments to shape the social order within the countries over which they preside, producing the "states of disarray" which the UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD 1995) has argued are the social effects of globalisation.

As once again usefully pointed out by Thérien (1999), this analysis has elements of both continuity and change in relation to the conventional North-South approach. The UN paradigm still suggests that Asian, Latin American and African countries face particular difficulties reacting to globalisation because their economies tend to be more vulnerable to shocks emanating from global commodity and financial markets. For all that, UN agencies no longer routinely treat these countries as a homogeneous group, instead fully acknowledging the differentiation that has taken place amongst them over the past twenty years. More importantly, however, the UN view also asserts that the broadening of the gap between rich and poor is genuinely global in impact and that poverty, although more severe in the 'South', also plagues the 'North'. The UNDP (1997:3) thus reported recently that there were 100 million people living below the poverty line in the rich countries that belonged to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Indeed, from this perspective, poverty is increasingly seen as a problem which affects individual human beings, rather than national states and societies. This is a shift of significance because it establishes a parallel between the poor of Asia or Africa and the poor of North America or Western Europe. The causes of each might be different, as well as possible remedies, but from a humanist position there is no intrinsic distinction to be made between the similar fate of a human being in one geographic location and that of another in a different location.

As can be seen, then, both the so-called Bretton Woods and UN paradigms offer strong, divergent accounts of the problem of international poverty and development. They are grounded in different institutional complexes and are sustained by different power blocs of markedly uneven weight within the current world order. The former is very much the orthodoxy of our time; the latter perhaps constitutes something of the critical opposition. It is interesting, and revealing, that each too connects to an academic position within the field of international political economy which purports to be able to offer the very approach to the researching of development questions which this article explicitly seeks. It is to this matter that we now return.

The Bretton Woods paradigm can be quickly dealt with in this connection. It is based in a very straightforward fashion upon the classic economic liberal position within international political economy, the main tenets of which are too well known to need repetition here. The UN paradigm also has its associated international political economy in a sociological strand within that field best represented in the recent work of Hoogvelt (1997). She argues that the fact that the new political economy is "global from the very beginning" has "consequences for our understanding of the locational distribution of wealth and poverty, of development and underdevelopment". Specifically, "the familiar pyramid of the core-periphery hierarchy is no longer a geographic but a social division of the world economy" (Hoogvelt 1997:xii). To use old concepts, in this vision the Third World has come home to the First World, the South has got inside the North. All nestle together inside the world's major cities. The exemplar here is Los Angeles where, as Davis (1990) vividly demonstrated, life in urban southern California for many African-Americans and other more recent immigrants from Latin America is little different from that experienced by, say, Mexicans living south of the Rio Grande in the 'Third World' proper. Viewed more broadly, the global social structure, which is the necessary point of departure from this perspective, can best be envisaged as three concentric circles, representing respectively the elites, the contented and the marginalised, each cutting across ALL national boundaries.

The problem with both of these international political economies is that they underplay politics, most of which still goes on in and between states, globalisation notwithstanding. Each makes the mistake of assuming that somehow the global restructuring of the last decade or so has led to traditional inter-state political conflicts about development being superseded. Liberal international political economy has long been criticised for presuming that political differences can be managed away amidst the interdependence generated by economic contact and concomitant growth. But sociological international political economy also takes us too far and too fast towards global class analysis, given that states, and all the vested interests, not to mention loyalties, which they generate, have yet to disappear. The focus of this article on politics does not allow us to be so dismissive.

 

IV

SO HOW, THEN, DO WE SET ABOUT FRAMING THE NEW GLOBAL POLITICS OF DEVELOPMENT? This is not impossible. The preceding discussion suggests that we must adopt an approach which simultaneously fulfils three needs: first, it must take globalisation seriously, but not be overwhelmed by its supposed force; second, it must recognise the continuing realities of states and inter-state politics, but accept that the nature of states and their interactions are being remade all the time; and, third, it must not reject the concept of development, but rather reinterpret it as a universal problem faced by all states and societies in the world. These observations are briefly developed below.

The argument about globalisation takes us back to the distinction drawn by Held et al. (1999) and mentioned at the beginning of the article, namely, that between hyperglobalist, sceptical and transformationalist accounts of this process. We take up our stance on the terrain of the transformationalist thesis. This asserts that "contemporary processes of globalisation are historically unprecedented such that governments and societies across the globe are having to adjust to a world in which there is no longer a clear distinction between international and domestic, external and internal affairs". The effect is powerful, transformative, but open-ended. Globalisation is conceived as "an essentially contingent historical process replete with contradictions" (Held et al. 1999:7) which is reconfiguring global power relations in ways which cannot be predicted and therefore need to be researched. All of this makes sense and is substantially more nuanced than either the hyperglobalist account which announces the arrival of a new epoch in human history characterised by the emergence of a 'denationalised' world society or the sceptical account which prefers to discern at best only heightened interaction between national units.

The argument about the state and inter-state politics is in fact very similar. It has been put well by Amoore et al. (1997:184) who suggest that the debate has again been couched in too crude a manner as either the "retreat or return" of the state in the face of global restructuring. Instead, they suggest that "the usual understanding of a dichotomy between the state and globalisation is an illusion, as the processes of global restructuring are largely embedded within state structures and institutions, politically contingent on state policies and actions, and primarily about the reorganisation of the state" (ibid.:186). The point that is being made here is that states are at the very heart of the process of globalisation. THE state is neither transcended nor unaltered in some overarching, all-encompassing fashion: instead EACH state is finding that its relationship to key social forces both inside and outside of its national space is being restructured as part and parcel of all the other shifts to which globalisation as a concept draws attention. In other words, the roles (not role) that can now be played by states (not the state) will vary with their history, their leadership, their location in the world order and so on. This is precisely what contemporary inter-state politics has to be understood to be about.

The argument about development rejects the 'exceptionalism' of a special category of countries deemed to be in particular need of development and seeks to reconceptualise the whole question of development as "a transnational problematic" (Pieterse 1996:543). It is not necessary to define the moral or ethical content of the notion of development. This will always remain contested according to contending ideological positions. The important point to make, in the words of Hettne (1995:266), is that "the 'three worlds' are disintegrating and development is becoming a global and universal problem Š too important to be left to a special discipline [development studies] with low academic status". As redefined in this way, development is as much a problem for the ex-hegemon as the smallest ex-colonial territory, for the new industrialiser as much as the former communist country in 'transition'. The key research task, according to Hettne (1995:263), is to analyse specific development predicaments, understanding that "most decision makers operate in a national space but react on problems emerging in a global space over which they have partial and often marginal control".

On these three bases a global politics of development can surely first be discerned and then analysed. A final need is to avoid the temptation to prejudge the actions and needs of different states and societies by categorising them in advance. This is the point of stressing the differentiation that has taken place within the former 'North' and former 'South'. Yet, for all this, new taxonomies have been, and still are being, created both by development organisations and development specialists. The former can be important because they shape policies. Thus it is important to be aware of the distinctions drawn by the World Bank between Low, Lower-Middle, Upper-Middle and High Income categories, or of the UNDP's High, Medium and Low Human Development typology, or the fact that the WTO now utilises the notion of the Least-Developed Countries. These are factors of political significance. On a similar basis, one has to take note of notions like that of the 'big emerging markets' (BEMs) precisely because this turn of phrase was devised in the mid-1990s by the US Department of Commerce for a particular economic and political purpose. However, attempts by analysts to set out firm new categories of countries are largely useless. Magyar, for example, has recently tried to provide such a classification of the international political economy and has accordingly devised seven types of country, classified A, B, C, D, E, F and G. Unfortunately, he ends up producing obtuse sentences - such as "A is certainly a wholly inadequate model at this stage for D, E and F, and probably for most G states at this stage" (Magyar 1995:710) - which merely send the reader flicking back in frustration to the original table in an endeavour to make any sense of the claim! In short, the complexity and the fluidity of the emerging world order is such that all would-be reclassifications are best avoided, including the much used phrase, the Fourth World, deployed of late by even as distinguished an analyst as Castells (1998:70).

To conclude, certain ways of framing the problem have first to be devised. But that can de done, as we have tried to demonstrate here. However, in the final analysis, the new global politics of development have to be researched - by reference to real actors (states, social forces and institutions located in particular geographies and histories), at particular times and within different arenas (trade, finance, security, the environment etc.). A messy picture will almost certainly emerge. In an era of restructuring, which is above all what globalisation implies, the new architecture of the world order at the beginning of the next century cannot be imagined, merely by calling upon a favoured body of overarching theory.

October 1999

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Endnotes

*:  Anthony Payne is Professor at the Department of Politics, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom.Back.

 

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