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Jose Luis Coraggio: Another Economy is Happening |
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Page 20 of 27
Coraggio has no objection to “development” as Amartya Sen and other authors humanistically define it, and as it has come to be endorsed as “sustainable human development” by agencies of the United Nations. (42) But he finds that in practice the UN and other agencies committed in principle to human development tend to regress backward from their own ideals, and to promote the older idea of “development” invented after World War II as part of the West’s search for an antidote to Communism, under the guidance of books like W.W. Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth. (43) At that point in history, a discourse arose dividing the world into two main parts, the “underdeveloped” (later called “developing”) countries, and the “developed” countries (with a second world of planned economies off to the side in a separate category). The promise to the world’s poor that was made by speaking of development in this way was that those countries which succeeded in getting onto a path of economic growth, and in staying on it, would eventually change their status from “developing” to “developed.” Time had an arrow, the arrow had a direction, and the direction of the arrow was to end poverty through growth. (44) Gunnar Myrdal of Sweden was made head of a team of UN experts whose task was to show the poor countries of the world how they could cease to be poor. (45) Sweden was the leading model, and the concrete paradigmatic meaning of “developed” was to be as Sweden was in the 1950s and 1960s: prosperous, free, and with advanced social programs assuring economic security to all its citizens. Other social democracies were also taken to be models of what it meant to be “developed.” The United States was not an exemplar showing the meaning of the word “developed,” because of its racism and because it had a large minority living in poverty, but, generically speaking, it was part of the developed world and not part of the developing world. Argentina and other major Latin American nations during the period after World War II had a series of developmentalist governments, generally backed by international aid institutions, which tended to focus on industrialization, adopting the premise that joining the developed world required industrialization. (46)
From the vantage point of 2005, it is clear that the older discourse of “development” was illusory. The exemplars of development, the social democracies of Western Europe, have been forced to backtrack under the pressures of globalization. They suffer from chronic unemployment, new pockets of poverty, racial and ethnic tensions, and new holes in their social safety nets. (47) Fifty years later, the attempt to end poverty by using economic growth to move from developing country to developed status, has lost its rationale, since there is not a single example left of the “created harmony” (Myrdal’s phrase) epitomized by the Sweden of the 1950s and 1960s, that defined the development that the poor countries set out to achieve.
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