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Literary Review
Challenging the World Bank and globalisation
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Two books that look at the economic process euphemistically called globalisation. In Depoliticizing Development, Harriss demonstrates how the idea of social capital has become a rhetoric ploy. Naomi Klein's Fences and Windows underscores how international trade laws put up new barriers around knowledge, technology and newly-privatised resources. A review by KARIN KAPADIA.
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THESE two books can be seen as complementary: while the one carefully and scrupulously uses a scalpel to dissect the World Bank from within its glassy rhetorical walls, the other gathers the armies of protesters and launches a spirited attack from without, across the razor-wire barricades and the tear gas canisters. John Harriss' scholarly book, Depoliticizing Development: The World Bank and Social Capital is a painstaking examination of the rhetoric the World Bank employs in its research. With the care of an expert surgeon Harriss elegantly and wittily dissects the concept of "social capital" as it is used in Bank-speak, revealing the history of this idea and the political reasons why the concept has so endeared itself to the World Bank. He convincingly demonstrates how "social capital" has become a rhetorical ploy, by which the WB seeks to present the processes of "development" as purely technocratic processes that have no political content.
Naomi Klein's book, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate, is a brilliant collection of many of the short weekly columns that Klein wrote over a two-year period, from December 1999 to March 2002, as she covered the "anti-globalisation" movement from the streets of Seattle, Washington, D.C., Prague, Toronto and Genoa, as well as the Zapatista movement in Mexico. This collection brings the reader up-to-date on the dynamics of the movement that led to the first World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in January 2001 — and to the first Asian Social Forum, held in Hyderabad in January 2003. Klein dissects the neo-liberal rhetoric of the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO with her rapier wit, revealing, as does Harriss, the vast gulf between the rhetoric and the actual practices of these powerful institutions.
We will turn to Harriss' book first. John Harriss points out that the World Bank has constantly sought to "depoliticise development" in its research, by representing the socio-political processes of change as apolitical and merely technocratic. The book aims to show "how the work of very clever and well-intentioned social scientists derives from and contributes to a hegemonic social science that systematically obscures power, class and politics" (p.2). The generous spirit which these words reveal, inspires the entire book, for Harriss takes great care to ensure that he gives ample space to the arguments of the World Bank. However, his politeness covers an ironic wit and a nice sense of humour, with which he carefully rebuts the World Bank's arguments word for word. He observes that, in the World Bank's use of the concept of "social capital", the notion has become a new weapon "in the armoury of `the anti-politics machine' that is constituted by the practices of `international development'. They are clever ideas which suit the interests of global capitalism (or in other words, present-day, US-centred imperialism) because they represent problems that are rooted in differences of power and in class relations, as purely technical matters that can be resolved outside the political arena. They are directed in particular, therefore, against movements of the political left for progressive socio-political and economic change, that do identify the roots of poverty and social deprivation in class differences" (pp.2-3, emphasis added).
Harriss points out that Robert Putnam's book, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, (1993), which popularised the concept of "social capital", has been severely criticised by leading historians of Italy, who have argued that the Italian south was deliberately "made into the Ireland of Italy" in the political context of the early 19th Century and that there is "an alternative historiography which explains the performance of regional governments in both north and south in terms of political factors. But these and other powerful criticisms of Putnam's work in terms of method and logic, as well as of historical substance, have been systematically ignored, by the author himself and by his followers, and his book ... has become a charter for the view that social capital, understood as meaning essentially `membership in groups' or `voluntary associations', is a critical condition for `good government' and probably for economic development as well" (pp.7-8).
In the following chapters Harriss examines the following: 1. How the World Bank elevates "social capital" into the position of "the missing link" in development. 2. How Putnam's ideologically-driven historiography has been "comprehensively trashed" (p.31) by his fellow specialists, yet — due to its evident usefulness to the World Bank — has come to enjoy widespread influence. 3. How Putnam followed up his success with a second book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000) where he elevated "social capital" even more, arguing that "investment in social capital was not an alternative to, but a prerequisite for, political mobilization and reform" (Putnam 2000: 399, emphasis in original, quoted on p.58). Harriss wryly comments, "It is hard to avoid the feeling that the runaway success of the social capital idea has led him to throw caution, nuance and history out of the window" (p.58). 4. Harriss then considers a major collection of research studies on social capital, edited by Peter Evans, professor of sociology at Berkeley. Evans himself notes that the studies vividly illustrate the overriding importance of political processes (p.73). 5. Harriss dismisses the claim of the World Bank sociologist who claims that "social capital" is being used as a kind of "Trojan horse" in the citadel of the economists and that "mainstream sociological ideas are finally being given their due at the highest levels" (Michael Woolcock, quoted on p.83).
He concludes that "the systematic depoliticisation of development" (p.114) has been ably assisted by the World Bank's "social capital" rhetoric, which has "proven itself so attractive because it has quite systematically obscured class politics and power" (p.115). He observes, "The emphasis in the social capital literature on the causal primacy of (specifically non-political) social networks and local associations suggests that it is possible to have effective democracy without the inconveniences of contestational politics" (p.117, emphasis in original). This, he demonstrates, is precisely why the idea of social capital has recommended itself to the World Bank. His book is of great value in understanding why "social capital" and the World Bank's rhetoric are so suspect.
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IN the interim, while Harriss has been very ably demolishing the World Bank's rhetorical capital, Naomi Klein and the Rainbow Brigade — anarchists, students, farmers, labour unions — have been mounting a powerful assault on the World Bank and its cohorts, from across the chain-link barricades, despite the massed police in their special riot gear. This wonderful collection of her newspaper articles over two years, takes the "anti-globalisation" movement from its beginnings at the Battle of Seattle in November 1999 to the Argentinian crisis in March 2002. Klein is, of course, the best-selling author of No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (published in 2000). She tells us that No Logo was at the printer's "when the largely subterranean movement it chronicled entered into mainstream consciousness in the industrialised world, mostly as a result of the November 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle. Overnight, I found myself tossed into the middle of an international debate over the most pressing question of our time: what values will govern the global age?" (p.xiii). This is indeed a fundamental question and every article in this book addresses itself to some aspect of the answer.
After Seattle, Klein writes, "Tens and then hundreds of thousands of people were joining new demonstrations each month, many of them people like me who had never really believed in the possibility of political change until now... In the name of meeting the demands of multinational investors, governments the world over were failing to meet the needs of the people who elected them... A booming global economy focused on the quest for short-term profits, was proving itself incapable of responding to increasingly urgent ecological and human crises... incapable, despite all the pledges and hand-wringing, of devoting the resources necessary to reverse the speed of HIV in Africa; unwilling to meet international commitments to reduce hunger... It's difficult to say why the protest movement exploded when it did... but part of the credit, surely, has to go to globalisation itself. Now, thanks to a surge in crossborder information swapping, such problems were being recognised as the local effects of a particular global ideology. One enforced by national politicians, but conceived of centrally by a handful of corporate interests and international institutions, including the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank" (pp.xiv-xv).
Klein's observations on our contemporary "fences" are deeply insightful: "When I first noticed that the image of the fence kept coming up in discussion, debates and in my own writing, it seemed significant to me. After all, the past decade of economic integration has been fuelled by promises of barriers coming down, of increased mobility and greater freedom. And yet, twelve years after the celebrated collapse of the Berlin Wall, we are surrounded by fences yet again, cut off — from one another, from the earth and from our own ability to imagine that change is possible. The economic process that goes by the benign euphemism `globalisation', now reaches into every aspect of life, transforming every activity and natural resource into a measured and owned commodity. As the Hong Kong-based labour researcher Gerard Greenfield points out, the current stage of capitalism is not simply about trade in the traditional sense of selling more products across borders. It is also about feeding the market's insatiable need for growth, by redefining as products entire sectors that were previously considered part of `the commons' and not for sale. The invading of the public by the private has reached into categories such as health and education, of course, but also ideas, genes, seeds... traditional aboriginal remedies, plants, water and even human stem cells. With copyright now the US's single largest export (more than manufactured goods or arms), international trade law must be understood not only as taking down selective barriers to trade, but more accurately, as a process that systematically puts up new barriers — around knowledge, technology and newly privatised resources. The Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights are what prevent farmers from replanting their Monsanto patented seeds and make it illegal for poor countries to manufacture cheaper generic drugs to get to their needy populations" (pp. xx-xxi, emphasis added). For example, India and Brazil have been trying recently at the WTO to get the ban lifted so that they can produce cheaper generic HIV drugs — only to have their efforts stalled by the U.S., according to reports in the Indian press in February 2003.
I have quoted Klein's Preface at some length to give a taste of her vivid writing style, which is extraordinarily inventive, energetic and engaged. This is journalism at its remarkable best. Not only has her book an eye for the telling detail and a wonderful turn of phrase, but it is also a reflective book, looking deeply at the dreadful ironies of our contemporary world, unconfused by the maelstrom of issues. She therefore sees, clearly and unerringly, how "free trade", asphyxiated asylum seekers and George Bush's military ambitions, are, in fact, all connected by the fact that these phenomena derive from the single-minded protection of global corporate/elite self-interest.
This is an eloquent, passionate, inspiring book. Read it, breathe it, devour it. It blazes with a wonderful contempt for corporate greed and for the imperial international institutions — the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO — that are the handmaidens to the elite global corporates. "Greed is good" has been the global corporate's mantra since the reign of Reagan and Thatcher, but the times, they are a-changing. There are stirrings abroad, so that the imperial juggernaut no longer has unobstructed way. The last word should go to Klein: "This book... (presents) postcards from dramatic moments in time, a record of the first chapter in a very old and recurring story, the one about people pushing up against the barriers that try to contain them, opening up windows, breathing deeply, tasting freedom" (p.xxvii). It is also an invitation to us to do likewise: to cross over the barriers that we have ourselves created, to open those windows, to breathe again, and to taste the air, so new and so different.
Depoliticizing Development: The World Bank and Social Capital, John Harriss, LeftWord Books, 2001, p.145, Rs. 250.
Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate, Naomi Klein, LeftWord Books, 2002, p.xxvii+267,
Rs. 150.
Karin Kapadia is a Visiting Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. From 1999 to 2001 she worked for the World Bank in Washington, D.C.
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