The global South comes full circle in its search for development

 

2022/06/23

 

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

T.S. ELIOT Four Quartets

Sri Lanka is number one news internationally and for all the right reasons. Today it is an abject failure from the viewpoint of national development and by virtue of this fact it has become an object lesson in how a country ought not to go about developing itself. Thus, it provides lessons to the South on how the grave pitfalls in development could be avoided and from this point of view is one of the most newsworthy countries currently, though in a negative sense.

As this is being written Sri Lanka is financially bankrupt and is in a vital sense all at sea on ‘where its next meal will be coming from.’ Just a few months back Sri Lanka was touted as one of the most spectacular developing countries of the world. Today, it is being described by sections of the international community as being among ‘the poorest of the poor’; ‘a Highly Indebted Poor Country’.

How this happened to Sri Lanka has and is being widely discussed and analyzed. Accordingly, it would be superfluous on the part of this columnist to dwell at length here on the subject. However, if Sri Lanka, the once dynamically developing country, has suddenly collapsed into economic ruin, the point that ought to be considered as being beyond dispute is that its development, if at all it could be described as development in the true sense, has been generated on very shaky and flimsy foundations. Metaphorically speaking, the ‘House was built on sand’. Hence its precipitous collapse.

There are numerous external factors that have contributed towards Sri Lanka’s economic downfall over the years and there is no disputing this important aspect of the crisis. For example, there has and is ‘unequal exchange’ in international trade along with a consistent ‘flight of capital’ from Sri Lanka to the more dominant economies of the world, particularly since the ‘open economy’ experiment was tried out in the mid-seventies, to name merely two such external factors. These processes have been continuing largely to the detriment of the country and if Sri Lanka is today bogged down in an overwhelming national debt crisis these and many other external factors have been contributing considerably towards it.

There is therefore a case, to a degree, for those who argue that Sri Lanka has been, and is, a serious victim of an unequal international economic order. That is, this country is being ‘sinned against’ rather than ‘sinning’ in the context of the current economic challenges confronted by it. That this is so and has been so in Sri Lanka’s case as well as in that of the majority of developing countries could be ascertained by perusing the history of North-South relations since the end of World War Two and the coming into being of the Western dominant current international political, economic and military order.

There is certainly no disputing, considering the historical record, that Western economic dominance over the South, facilitated to a considerable degree by the World Bank and the IMF, has been a huge factor in the pauperization of many a developing economy; that is, in the ‘Development of Underdevelopment’. However, the issue to confront at present is: To what extent is such a viewpoint objective and cognizant of the totality of factors that has led to the economic ruin of countries such as Sri Lanka?

At the time of this writing, the Gotabhaya Rajapaksa-Ranil Wickremesinghe regime has enlisted the assistance of Western financial and legal firms to reportedly evolve a ‘framework for Sri Lanka’s debt restructuring’ in the lead-up to its obtaining IMF financial help to overcome its debt crisis. Why go to Western entities for this purpose? Does not Sri Lanka have the required expertise?

It is unlikely that Sri Lanka does not possess expertise of this kind. It is simply that the Sri Lankan political leadership is overly and slavishly dependent on foreign, especially Western expertise and acumen. Here we have an important facet of Dependent Development; a phenomenon that has been recurring in this country’s post-independence history. Needless to say, such extreme reliance only perpetuates Sri Lanka’s dependence on external quarters and at unbearable financial and other costs.

Such abject dependence, in a number of areas touching on their national interest, has been characteristic of both Sri Lanka and quite a number of impoverished countries of the South over the decades. However, the uncomfortable irony is that issues such as this, that are at the heart of underdevelopment, were discussed almost exhaustively decades ago, close on the heels of the majority of underdeveloped countries gaining ‘political independence’. The relevant discourse came to be described as part of the North-South Dialogue on the economic and political independence of developing countries.

A considerable measure of what was discussed among the more progressive Southern countries in particular in those times on the subject of self-sufficient development could be gleaned by revisiting, for instance, the ground-breaking study titled: ‘North-South: A Programme for Survival’ – The Report of the Independent Commission on International Development Issues under the Chairmanship of Willy Brandt – (First published in 1980 by Pan Books Ltd).

Accordingly, the underdeveloped world needs to retrace its steps to those times when its impoverishment and disempowerment were the talk of the then Third World in particular and figure out how best it could make use of the largely untapped intellectual acumen of those decades to set right the developmental tragedies that have currently befallen it. Considering that many of the ruling elites of the South are slavishly dependent on the West for even their bare survival, tracing current developmental ills of the South to entirely external quarters could be misleading and lacking in impartiality and objectivity.

As pointed out above, the utter dependence of the ruling elites of the South on the intelligentsias and other influential sections of the West needs to be focused on in discussions on the South’s development debacles. The role of political elites in the perpetuation of Southern underdevelopment ought to remind us, among other things, of the Marxian nugget, ‘Social condition determines consciousness’. In other words, most of the South’s ruling elites do not identify themselves with the people and their best interests. From this fact too stems the South’s perpetual disempowerment.