Speech for the Post-was Reconstruction Development Unit (PRDU), University of York, 23 October 2003
Published in Revival, the Newsletter of the PRDU, University of York, February 2004
Short praises PRDU work as “enormously important”
Former Labour Cabinet Minister, Clare Short, attracted the largest audience to a PRDU Open Day for some years on 23 October 2003. Having resigned from government as a result of Prime Minister Blair’s strategy on Iraq, Ms Short had much to say on the reconstruction of post-Saddam Iraq. But, as the foundation Minister at Britain’s Department for International Development (DfID), she was keen to make connections with wider issues of development and international trade.
General development issues
Ms Short began her address with a near encyclopaedic summary of contemporary development issues beginning with a rapidly increasing world population and the consequent pressures on resources. (Extracts from her speech are printed in italics).
We’ve got far more human beings than ever before. There’s 6 billion of us, and there’s going to be 8–9 billion of us in the next 20–30 years. But when you think that in 1900 there were just over a billion people ... over 100 years, that’s a phenomenal shift. It’s the consequence of development. Nonetheless, the need to share the resources of the earth equitably and sustainably becomes a much bigger imperative.
Today, 1.2 billion people (1 in 5) are still living in abject poverty, malnourished, living
on less than the equivalent of what a dollar a day would buy in the US, with lack of access to clean water. Half of humanity have no sanitation, which is both a cause of illness and humiliation.
I think this is a new era in history, where we have a problem in the political elites (and the structures of States) across the world that are serving the imperatives of a previous era.
Towards a new development model
Ms Short stressed the importance of learning from past successes and failures in post-war reconstruction and development, and of pooling this knowledge into new, more sustainable strategies for recovery. A key theme which she developed was the need to move away from the ‘charity box’ approach to development and humanitarianism and the need to move these issues into the mainstream of Western politics. Interestingly she stated that “It is in the selfish self-interest of the richest countries to get more equity into the way in which we manage the world, in order that we all have a stable and secure future.” Continued, uneven development on such a scale would be perilous for the privileged one-fifth of the world’s population.
(It’s vital) to think intellectually and clearly about failed states, conflicts, post-conflict, to pool the knowledge the world has, the lessons of where we’ve failed or where we’ve made advances, and to have more and more people in the international system, not just on emergency response mode, but beginning to think ‘how do you rebuild societies and make sure they don’t fall back?’. The learning about how you prevent that – and how you help people build the institutions that will enable them to develop their economy and provide a better life for their people, and not slip back into conflict – is crucial. And I think there is experience in the international system but it’s weak, and the reflecting on it and the learning from it, and clarifying and enhancing the capacity of international institutions is a very urgent task. And clearly that’s the task to which this Unit (the PRDU) is devoted, and that I think is enormously important.
I think the way in which development, global equity and sustainability are seen as charity box type issues is a major problem for the era. Because, even if we don’t care about justice and equity, but just want to make the world safe and sustainable, we have to look at the world through an equity development perspective or we’re going to be in more and more difficulty.
And it was one of my endless frustrations and battles that people want to say, “mainstream politics is Ministry of Defence, Foreign Office, Tax, Transport” and then “here’s a bit of residual money to go round being nice to the poor”.. And I do think that a lot of the rhetoric of the development NGO’s plays that game.
Europe’s got difficulties finding the places to invest the pension funds to get the rates of return that people of my generation, who could live to be 100, expect. And there’s Africa, 20 miles from Europe, crying out for capital to invest in sanitation or water supplies. So there’s all this need, but also there’s a massive capacity to invest in the conditions that would enable people to improve their own lives very rapidly. And this isn’t just an issue of morality, it’s also an issue of the future safety and sustainability of the world for everybody.
We’ve had the experience in East Asia of the fastest reduction of poverty, for the largest number of people, in history. Evidence from all over the world shows that investment in education – and it must start with universal primary education, not just partial education of an elite – is the single most powerful intervention any country can make in its development.
The world before 9/11
Before the 9/11 atrocities there were, according to Ms Short, positive signs that all countries of the world were beginning to act to bridge the gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’.
The Millennium Assembly of the United Nations General Assembly, attended by more Prime Ministers and Heads of State than have ever previously attended a UN meeting, committed to development goals. All countries in the world (agreed to) work together to halve poverty by 2015, to have every child in primary education, to massively reduce infant and maternal mortality, and so on. Those commitments coming through the UN were then endorsed and made the guiding principles of the work of the World Bank and the IMF, which was a big shift from the old neo liberal ideas.
In World Trade discussions we even had more and more of an understanding that the world trade rules are very ferociously biased against the developing countries. I don’t know if you know this, but it encapsulates it: every European cow gets a subsidy of
2.2 euros a day; and half of humanity, or at least 2.8 billion people, are living on less than 2 dollars a day (which is comparable).
But then we have surpluses, so what do we do? We subsidise the export of meat and powdered milk into countries that have dairy industries, and sell them at below cost price and undercut local production. And what we also do, because we’ve got these surpluses, is put up tariff barriers to products coming from developing countries into our markets. 80% of Africa’s exports are unprocessed commodities. So the tea and minerals come out unprocessed, the coffee comes out green, and then the roasting and the packaging takes place in Europe.
We agreed at Doha the agenda for a trade round which, if delivered, would really make global trade rules fairer. There was a new determination in the international system to work globally for the reduction of poverty, to make a more safe and sustainable world. And then along comes September 11th 2001, when the twin towers were blown up in the USA and 3,000 people, originating from countries all over the world of course, lost their lives in that disaster.
The world after 9/11
The second half of Ms Short’s address focused on the international situation post-9/11. She stated that “the response to 9/11 is even more disastrous” than 9/11 itself, and that the war on terror “is acting as a recruiting sergeant for Al-Qaeda and organisations linked to it”.
We are in danger of throwing away that progressive (pre-9/11) agenda, which is both a good agenda and is essential to the future safety of the world. I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be international co-operation to deal with Bin Laden’s organisation. Indeed, a special committee was set up in the Security Council to ask every country in the world to look at its arrangements for control on money laundering, for sharing information, to act together to prevent Al-Qaeda spreading and creating bitterness and division and killing innocent civilians.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Afghan campaign, there was broad international agreement that action should be taken, and quite a strong determination to support the people of Afghanistan in rebuilding their country. That I think has now been let down, and the development of Afghanistan beyond Kabul held back. So here’s a failure in terms of the post-conflict rebuilding, and we need to get back to Afghanistan and make sure that things do go forward better.
And then Iraq. We know that extreme elements in the Bush administration had been calling for military action against Iraq, right through Clinton’s administration. We know there was absolutely no connection between September 11th and Iraq, although many of the people of the USA believed that Al-Qaeda was organised from Iraq. We’ve had a war that divided the international community, and truncated the UN Inspectors’ process of inspection. Many Iraqis have lost their lives. There has been a lot of destruction in that society, and then an almost criminal failure to prepare for the inevitable military victory and the reconstruction of Iraq, and to ensure that Iraqis were supported to lead the redevelopment of their own country.
The money that the UK is committing (to Iraq) is taken from other parts of its development budget whereas, of course, all the military spending in Iraq comes as extra money from the Treasury. Similarly, Japan is making a big commitment, taken from the Japanese aid budget which would otherwise be spent in Asia, where two thirds of the poor of the world live.
Future prospects
I think progress is possible, but I think we’re going backwards, said Ms Short, citing crucial lessons from Northern Ireland over the last 40 years as lessons which Prime Minister Blair and President Bush have, tragically, not learned from. Despite her pessimism, she urges all like-minded people to keep the positive agenda alive, and sees the PRDU as an important part of this mission.
So we are in a very difficult, troubling and dangerous time for the world in my view. We are living at a time when we could have a massive advance for humanity. We have the knowledge, we have the needs, we have the communications, we have the capital. And now we’ve got this distraction from the sustainable and justice agenda, a notion of a war on terror that is led only by the concept of military aggression.
And this country (the UK) above all countries knows that that won’t work. Remember Northern Ireland, when in the 1960’s the Catholic nationalists started to march for civil rights, asking for equality in employment and in the allocation of housing and so on. They were put down very viciously by their own local police, and Britain eventually sent in British troops to stop that. And in a year or so, you had a terrorist movement and a resistance that went on for 30 years and caused enormous loss of life. In response to that, Britain went for internment, locking up anyone they thought might remotely be sympathetic to this uprising, and it spread the membership. Of course, anyone whose brother or sister or cousin was locked up, tended to feel more sympathetic about joining up with the resistance. Britain learned the hard way that the way to deal with a terrorist uprising is not only to have a security system trying to catch and prevent, but also a commitment to justice. So you deal with the causes of the bitterness and the discrimination and the unfairness and you have just systems of law enforcement, not what’s going on in Guantanamo Bay. And then, over time, as people see that there can be justice and there can be opportunities for development, they turn away from feeling that violence is the best way of protesting.
Justice requires a settlement of the Palestinian and Israeli conflict, the biggest cause of outrage and disgust in the Middle East, across the Muslim world and indeed across the whole of Europe. We thought we had agreement negotiated by the UN, The European Union, Russia and the US to this ‘road map’ that would guarantee the establishment of a Palestinian State with full statehood, alongside Israel by 2005, and that is draining away now and collapsing.
I say all of this not to end on a pessimistic, negative note so that everyone feels demoralised and gives up, but for us to face objectively the seriousness of the situation that we’re in. I think units like the PRDU, and the learning and values that you nurture, are an important part of keeping the positive agenda alive. We’ve got to make sure that we get back to the agenda of backing development and the ending of conflicts and helping people build new states. Because I think lots of the talk about conflict in developing countries misunderstands that it’s often taking place where there really aren’t the institutions of a proper state functioning – it’s often a semi-criminalised kind of violence. The sort of conflict there was in Sierra Leone or there is in Northern Uganda, or the nature of the civil war in Mozambique – now very happily over, and Mozambique moving forward significantly – isn’t a political civil war, it’s often about diamonds or other rich resources. We need to understand this so that, if we need to strengthen the capacity of the UN to end conflicts rather than just be peace keepers, we can then try to help people create the institutions of a modern, competent state. That includes armed forces; police; a finance ministry with proper systems so there won’t be corruption in the public finances; an education ministry that’s capable of training teachers, producing books, preparing schools and sustaining an education system; and so on and so forth. Supporting people in building effective, modern, post-conflict states is the instrument of real quality development and greater justice across the world.
