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Summary of the Book of Oswaldo de Rivero
The Non-Viable Countries in the XXI Century
Academics who theorize about the wealth of nations and technocrats who specialize in formulating projects aimed to raise the standard of living may be willing to admit that they have made mistakes in the design of their economic development models, but they do not appear to harbor the slightest doubt about the possibility of development. To their minds, the very idea that development may be impossible is absolutely unthinkable.
Economic development is one of the great myths of the XX Century. Rooted in our Western civilization's idea of progress, it is constantly fed by an epistemological optimism founded on the belief that all the obstacles to the material progress of nations can be solved by economic science.
Economists, technocrats and politicians have held to the belief that one needs only to apply the right theory and the correct economic model for the poor countries to begin to create wealth and to become societies with high living standards, like those enjoyed today by only 24 industrialized capitalist democracies. According to this prescription, more than 100 countries have attempted to apply theories and models over more than half a century, but their development has remained as elusive as El Dorado.
During the last 40 years, national development
has been predicted many times and in many places. In the seventies,
it was considered a foregone conclusion that Brazil would conquer
poverty and become one of the world powers of the future. Then,
the same was said of India. Finally, Mexico and the "emerging
countries" of Asia were in fashion. Following their severe
financial crises, the only remaining hope is China, a country
with 1.2 billion inhabitants, saddled with severe ecological problems,
and where only 300 million inhabitants have sufficient income
to be consumers in the
global economy.
The fact is that on the verge of the XXI Century,
there are over 100 countries that have not developed and only
3 Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs): South Korea, Taiwan and
Singapore. That is to say, two small countries and one city-state,
that represent less than 2% of the population of the so-called
"developing world".
These NICs - South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore - are the only cases to have achieved a semblance of the capitalist industrialized powers' development, despite the financial crisis of 1997. This means that they have managed to convert their societies from agriculture to industry, with an advanced service sector, overcoming generalized poverty, to raise their living standards and create a middle class majority. In spite of this achievement, these NICs still do not enjoy the high incomes nor the scientific and cultural development, much less the democratic institutions, of the United States and Europe.
Apart from these exceptions, the large majority of the mistakenly-called "developing" countries are definitely not undergoing a process of development. Their production has not been substantially modernized, they continue to produce raw materials and manufactures with very low technology. The 4.8 billion inhabitants of these countries are light years away from becoming a huge global middle class. Nearly 1.3 billion people live on less than one dollar a day and are unable to buy enough food; and another 3 billion live on two dollars per day, with no hope of satisfying their basic health, education and housing needs. In more than 100 countries, the per capita income has remained unchanged or is less than it was twenty years ago.
Global Darwinism and National Economic Non-viability
Today's technological revolution, driven by a global competition, triggers off a process of natural selection, casting aside thousands of unskilled persons and tons of raw materials at the very moment when an urban demographic explosion is occurring in the poor countries. In addition, this selection by the market and by technology, is starting to discard, through low prices, the manufactures with low technological input produced by abundant labor, which represent the first step toward industrialization in these countries.
At the end of this century, the amount of raw
material per unit of industrial production is two-fifths of that
used in 1930. Forty years ago one of every four employed persons
was a laborer, today the ratio is one in seven. During this process,
the developing countries' urban population is growing explosively,
and will have almost doubled by the year 2020. By the start of
the next century one billion new jobs will be needed, but it will
be difficult to create them in view of the new technologies, that
do not cater to the proletariat. Today the technological revolution
is on a
collision course with the population explosion.
Rapid and indiscriminate liberalization of the poor economies, in accordance with the World Bank and the IMF's policies, has only worsened the situation, by connecting these economies to the global economy, and forcing countries to produce, on the basis of the comparative advantages they already had in the world market. Thus, the underdeveloped economies produced what they always had, that is primary and marginally transformed exports subject to low demand in exchange for volatile speculative investments from the global financial casino, which were not designed to modernize production. It was this kind of non-viable economies that the development gurus dare to call "emerging".
In truth, the policies of the World Bank and
the IMF, despite their high social cost, did not make anything
emerge, only serving to consolidate a pattern of exports that
is the least competitive in the world economy today. These countries
were condemned to export raw materials and products with a low
technological input, at ever less remunerative prices, while importing
increasing amounts of manufactured goods and services with a high
technological content and at growing prices, pushing them further
and further into debt. As a consequence, the great majority of
the underdeveloped countries, rather than becoming NICs (Newly
Industrialized Countries), are turning into NNEs (Non-Viable National
Economies).
Ungovernable Chaotic Entities (UCEs)
The non-viable nature of many economies, together with the high growth rate of the increasingly urban population, leads to greater social exclusion, social and political instability and violence. At the present time, there are more than 23 domestic conflicts and about 50 armed groups in the poor regions of the planet.
In all the countries that are subject to violence today, the average per capita income over a 35 year period (1960-1995) grew by less than the 3% which is considered the minimum required to escape from poverty. For example, in Algeria the average per capita income growth over three decades was 0.5%; in Angola, 0.2%; in Somalia, 0.1%; in Mexico 1.8%; in Colombia, 2%; in Peru, 0.2%. The same was true of Liberia, the Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, India, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Yemen, Tajikistan and other countries.
The ongoing armed conflicts in the underdeveloped
world have in common the fact that they are real battles of national
depredation, where respect for the most elementary principles
of human behavior has been lost and civil war colludes with criminality.
In many countries these conflicts become stabilized in situations
of intermittent violence, repeated truces and new outbursts of
fighting, where rebel groups share the monopoly on violence
that previously belonged exclusively to the corrupt governments.
When this occurs, the underdeveloped Nation State implodes and
becomes an Ungovernable Chaotic Entity (UCE).
The UCEs are typified by the collapse of government control over large segments of the territory and of the population. Economic sectors, provinces, regions fall under the control of warlords, drug traffickers, mafias, or a mixture of all of these. Legality, public order and the incipient civilian society disappear. The population becomes a citizen of the Red Cross, Caritas, Doctors without Borders and of the humanitarian system of the United Nations. This situation can be observed today in Afghanistan, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Tajikistan, Cambodia, Rwanda, Burundi, Kosovo, Bosnia, Chechnya, Haiti, Albania, the Congo.
The Physico-Social Imbalance
The future disintegration of many underdeveloped countries may also be due to the physico-social disequilibrium that is being created within them as the result of increasingly limited access to water, food and energy, in the face of the explosive increase in their urban populations.
Twenty years from now, the population of the underdeveloped world will have reached 6.6 billion and will be principally urban. Except for a drastic reduction in the birth rate,a radical reversal of the migration flows to the cities, an unprecedented increase in water, food and energy supplies, a major part of the planet's population will be living in a dangerous physico-social imbalance. That is to say, in chaotic cities and megalopolis, lacking water, with food and energy priced far beyond the means of the majority of the population. These poor cities and megalopolis could become veritable human infernos and ecological time bombs, affecting the stability of the whole world.
The physico-social imbalance between the vital resources and a large and poor urban population is analogous to the instability in the earth's tectonic plates. Everyone knows that some day an earthquake will occur, but no one can predict exactly when it will happen, and even less whether the violence will be shrouded in an ideology, religion, ethnic group, or will be simply a combination of anarchy and common delinquency.
At the dawn of the third millennium, a growing number of low-income countries are founded on enormous seismic faults, formed by the physico-social disequilibrium. Nearly the whole of Africa, the majority of Central American countries, the largest Andean countries, Peru and Bolivia - and, above all, China, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, where the largest urban populations on the planet will be located, are now beginning to combine the lowest per capita consumption of water, energy and food with a high rate of demographic growth among the urban poor. If this situation is not changed, social and political tensions will increase and wars of national depredation could break out, or grow more violent, from which situation new Ungovernable Chaotic Entities UCEs could also emerge.
The Quest for El Dorado
To escape from the trap of exporting only primary and marginally transformed products, finding investments to increase the technological component of production and exports is a matter that no longer depends on the national policies of the poor countries, since their national capital is insufficient and domestic scientific and technological resources are virtually nonexistent. The global speculation capital would have to be transformed into a critical mass of productive investments, amounting to at least 300 billion dollars a year. This critical mass of productive capital has never been available, and now, in the wake of the financial catastrophes of the so-called emerging nations, the possibilities of finding such investments are totally unrealistic.
Even in the hypothetical case that such a critical mass of transnational productive investment were to reach the underdeveloped world, this industrial process would apply modern technologies, of very low labor intensity, that could hardly provide employment for the nearly 30 million unskilled men and women who are looking for jobs in the cities of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Besides, if the underdeveloped countries become industrialized according to the consumption patterns of the North American model (the global paradigm), the ecological cost would be catastrophic. The planet's biosphere could be consumed by 4.8 billion credit cards. The Asian-Pacific countries can be mentioned as examples; they were the recipients of the greater part of the productive investment in the underdeveloped world between 1970 and 1990. In the year 2020, these countries by themselves will produce one third of the world's emissions of gases into the atmosphere.
A few years ago, the state-driven and communist development models collapsed. Today the neo-liberal global model is being undermined by reality. The financial casino has driven to bankruptcy even the so-called emerging economies and the use of modern technologies is making the creation of jobs increasingly dificult, in the face of the urban explosion in the underdeveloped world.
Since the industrial revolution, more than 140 Nation-States have proliferated in Latin America, Asia and Africa. After a century or, at the least, many decades of independence, the majority of them are still incomplete national projects, which are not developing, in other words, quasi-Nation States. History is showing that nations are born with strong chances of not developing. A sort of perverse historic law has fostered the birth of a myriad of feeble infant States, the children of self-determination, but not of economic and scientific progress. It would not be surprising, therefore, to observe in the XXI century that many of these aborted Leviathans collapse in profound economic crises, then recuperate to continue to stagnate in their non-development, or end by violent implosion.
The agenda on the wealth of nations will have to be replaced by one devoted to the survival of nations. In order to prevent increasing social and political disorders, many countries with primary production and explosive urban growth will have no choice but to abandon dreams of development and adopt a policy of national survival based on the search for water, food and energy security and on the stabilization of their populations.
Until now the belief that the process of development was part and parcel of the Nation State prevailed, but experience has shown otherwise, compelling one to think the unthinkable. A large majority of the countries mistakenly called "developing" are not in process of becoming Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs). Far from that, they are on the way to being Non-viable National Economies (NNEs) and are even in danger of imploding into Ungovernable Chaotic Entities (UCEs). The story has not ended, it has just begun.
LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE
L'approche de la double fin de siècle
et de millénaire encourage les réflexions géopolitiques
sur le devenir du monde. Parmi les nombreux essais qui paraissent
sur ce thème (on se souvient de ceux de Francis Fukuyama
ou de Samuel Huntington), ce livre d' Oswaldo de Rivero, ancien
diplomate aux
Nations unies, est à lire absolument. En raison de l'originalité
de la réflexion, de la pertinence de l'analyse et la singularité
des propositions.
Oswaldo de Rivero y évoque, tour à tour , le crépuscule de l'Etat-nation, l'essor du pouvoir global favorisé par la mondialisation, le darwinisme international et la déprédation de la planète. Sa critique des marchés financiers s'accompagne de constatations sur ce qu'il appelle les "entités chaotiques ingouvernables", les "économies nationales non viables", le "haut clergé supranational" et le "non-développement"
Foisonnant d'idées neuves, de concepts originaux, l'auteur propose une grille de lecture intelligente pour mieux comprendre les désordres contemporains.
