The Moral Empire

A few years ago, Tony Blair termed the state of Africa a 'scar on the world's conscience'. It was not the first time that the dubious honour of being a moral touchstone had been conferred upon the continent. By the late 19th century too, Africa was the foil for various European crises of conscience even as major European powers were busy consolidating colonial regimes across large swathes of the globe. In his remarkable book, King Leopold's Ghost (1999), which chronicles the brutalities of the Belgian monarch's venal reign over the Congo, Adam Hochschild has shown how British popular outrage over extreme degradation 'elsewhere' could serve to normalize injustices at home and in Britain's own colonies. Interestingly, Leopold had undertaken his own violent expropriation of the Congo's land and natural resources by establishing humanitarian bodies such as the 'International Africa Association', whipping up righteous European indignation at 'Arab slave traders.' He had his celebrity allies, like the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who extolled the 'wisdom and goodness' of Leopold's ostensibly humanitarian reign which also came to be known as the 'rubber terror' during which thousands of Africans were forced into servitude, maimed and killed to feed Europe's hunger for the newly discovered material. 

Despite a shared penchant for self-regarding moralism and for all the unconscionable bloodletting that he has sponsored in Iraq -which now rebounds on British civilians (most of whom opposed the invasion) -Tony Blair is no Leopold. But the two historical moments have something in common. Then as now, the technology of modern warfare was used to help 'civilisation overcome barbarism'. It was then too that international humanitarian crusades came to have distinct political uses. Firstly, vast tracts of African or Asian land and resources come under indirect or direct command of the benefactor nations. An equally significant, though less visible, fact was that the emphasis on situations of extreme degradation had the effect of minimizing other kinds of misrule and violence even within progressive quarters. For instance, remarkable activists like the intrepid E.D Morel, who founded the hugely important Congo Reform Movement to expose Leopold's murderous reign in that region, refused to criticize Britain's colonial practices which could also include the expropriation of resources and the use of forced labour. With scrutiny focused on material misdeeds elsewhere, Britain could function, Hochschild suggests, as a kind of new and different 'Moral Empire.' 

And so it has been with Blair's Africa initiatives, heralded by the establishment of the African Commission in February 2004, a year after millions protested against the invasion of Iraq. In March 2005, the commission put out a report entitled Our Common Interest: an Argument (Penguin) while Blair's crusading humanitarianism has been endorsed by the likes of Bono and Bob Geldof. At the same time, the Make Poverty History campaign -a coalition of several non-profit organisations and charities such as Oxfam and Christian Aid -stepped on to a high-profile stage with Nelson Mandela addressing a huge rally in Trafalgar Square. He urged leaders of the G8 to recognise that the ‘world is hungry for action, not words'. All then proceeded to congregate at Edinburgh at the beginning of July this year, the leaders and their sanctioned ‘protestors', to enact a choreographed set of protests and equally ritualistic responses.  A host of celebrities in designer clothing and expensive sunglasses, sporting white Make Poverty History wristbands, the accessory du jour, proceeded to exhort the crowd to demand that poverty in Africa and elsewhere be made to magically vanish.

If these initiatives appeared to redirect widespread political outrage about the continuing mayhem in Iraq into pangs of personal conscience about Africa, they were disrupted by the mindless devastation caused by suicide bombers in London on the 7th of July. But it is essential that we not allow either the bombers or the predictably weak responses of the G8 to allow the debate on poverty itself to disappear. (Oxfam has since sent out a toothless letter to its supporters, apologizing for writing while ‘the whole country is still in a state of shock after the London Bombs. It claims that the paltry moves towards increasing aid and debt relief made at the Gleneagles summit of the G8, ‘will help millions of people' though ‘these must only be regarded as a beginning'; the G8 ‘must finish the job').  But, of course, the problem is that it is not only the G8 whose vision has been paltry.  Those spearheading the Make Poverty History campaign are also culpable of minimalism, of seeking to reduce the complex critique of corporate globalization voiced by grassroots activists across the globe, and many at protests in Seattle, Genoa, Davos and the World Social Forums in Porto Alegre and Mumbai, into a set of superficial bullet points and 'easy' solutions.  It is as though by calling for an to 'end' poverty, the complex debate itself will come to a premature and simple end. Criticism of this way of doing things has been subject to accusations of a failure to be ‘pragmatic' or, worse, downright armchair cynicism.

In the face of populist minimalism, it has not been easy to question the rhetoric of what Joseph Stiglitz, former World Bank Chief Economist and author of Globalization and its Discontents, approvingly calls 'globalization with a human face'. This is so even within the broad left, desperate in the wake of Iraq to find a constructive channel for its critical energies. But even as the left must continue to insist on the basic necessities of dropping debt, improving massively inequitable trade conditions and increasing aid, it is crucial to recognize these as minimal points of departure towards far-reaching transformations in the global economy, and not an 'end' in themselves. Failing to do this is to hand over the project of transformation to those who have the least invested in it, the now iconic 'eight men in a room', some of the most cynical and least accountable political leaders the world has seen in recent times. That these men are jittery about the last decade or so of protests and grassroots activism across the globe and now wish to be seen as responsive is clear. Indeed, it is something of a victory for the left that the vocabulary of economic justice and democratic participation now emerges from those quarters least committed to practicing these values. The Africa Commission, for instance, far from being a motley collection of concerned individuals, 'the majority of whom are Africans, but who include individuals from the world's richest countries,' consists mainly of politicians and heads of private sector enterprises. Apart from Blair, Geldof, Gordon Brown, Nancy Baker (a former Republican senator), and the Canadian finance minister, Ralph Goodale, there are a number of powerful African politicians, some of whom have pursued resolute privatization in their countries (like Trevor Manuel of South Africa) and others with dubious records on democratic rights (like Meles Zanawi of Ethiopia, who was recently exhorted by Bob Geldof to 'grow up', an injunction the musician seems to find applicable to the continent at large). But perhaps the starkest indication of the appropriation of progressive agendas by the very powers they seek to challenge is the presence on the Commission of Michel Camdessus, former Managing Director of the IMF and overseer of some of its most draconian structural adjustment programs, who once reputedly scoffed: 'For human rights, go to the UN.'

Even so, critical distance from Blair's Africa initiative and official approval of the Make Poverty History campaign is not merely a case of opposition to powerful vested interests. The Commission's analysis of poverty is itself troubling; within its language of severely limited responsibility, poverty in Africa is figured as an unhappy accident, even a natural calamity, like the Indian Ocean tsunami (to which it is explicitly compared). The condition of Africa, it turns out, has little to do with decades of the slave trade and colonialism or even with a global economic order that is severely and constitutively tilted in favor of what are called, in another naturalizing expression, 'rich countries.'  If the world is apparently 'awash with wealth,' it is apparently so due to globalization, the benefits of which are potentially infinite (despite the fact that global capitalism is a closed, i.e., finite, system). Colonialism's main failing, according to the report, was to not have given Africa the stellar railway system and administrative service that it provided India with. India is repeatedly invoked as a sibling worthy of emulation, apparently 'shining' in the global economic order (as its own right-wing BJP government boasted before it was summarily thrown out by the millions of rural poor who had been further impoverished by its gung-ho globalization program). 

While it is important not to conflate the diverse coalition that is the Make Poverty History campaign with the Africa Commission, it is an unfortunate truth that the campaign has wound up perpetuating many of the same problematic assumptions that drive the Commission's 'Third Way'-ist agenda. Its manifesto, subtitled 'How You Can Help Defeat World Poverty in Seven Easy Steps (Buying this book is Step One), is formulated, strikingly, as a 'self-help' guide for denizens of the ‘rich world'. But a scarred conscience, it seems, does not necessarily entail recognition of the ways in which one might be implicated in this situation. Like much else in the 'rich world', globe-altering activism too must be 'surprisingly easy': buying a book, sending a text, attending a concert, and sending the PM a postcard (the same one who was unaccountably deaf when a couple of million took to the streets in February 2003). That any discussion of Africa's participation in its own future came down to a heated and pointless debate over whether African musicians should play at Live 8 is telling; in fact, the truly troubling absence in this debate are the voices of African thinkers and activists like Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney or Ngugi wa Thiong'O whose analyses were far more incisive and complex than the facile sound bytes we get from the likes of Bono, cited lavishly in the Make Poverty History self-help guide. These thinkers did not simply blame colonialism or slavery. They identified a complex concatenation of factors responsible for the condition of Africa, including the greed and malfeasance of African elites and the global economic order in which decolonizing nations found themselves. Despite the occasionally sharply posed question with regard to 'free' trade and the dubious benefits of privatization, the burden of the Make Poverty History tract is on Western goodwill rather than shared responsibility. Ultimately, it too comes down on the side of globalization in ways that tweak  but then endorse the same vision that drives the G8 agenda. And so it is that we are made to hear one of global capitalism's favourite canards: 'Economists are always reminding us that wealth is not a zero sum game: in other words, you are not part of the rich world because a poor world exists.  Poor countries are caught in a poverty trap.  We have to find a way of integrating them into the world economy.' 

Unfortunately, in an 'interconnected world' and within the circuits of global capitalism, no such easy purity is possible.  The purchasing power to buy petrol or a pair of trainers is implicated not in some abstract, unrelated 'poverty trap', but has precisely to do the ways in which oilfields or export processing zones in Mexico are integrated into the world economy. When we consider the ways in which Western capitalism built itself through colonialism and the slave trade (recall that the Barclay brothers--as also the families that built Lloyds Bank and the Royal Bank of Scotland-- were slave traders and that slaves were capital), what we call 'aid' should, in fact, be termed 'reparations'--to which absolutely no conditions, barring that it reaches the people at large, should be attached. And if we are sincere about making poverty history, rather than just ending the debate on poverty, let's demand a global minimum wage, and abolish all inequities in labour practices, conditions of work and environmental standards.  The only way to make poverty history is to understand the history of poverty, not for the sake of a lighter conscience, but for the inalienable right of every human being to life, liberty and the means to sustain themselves. We could do no better than to recall the words of Frederick Douglass, a former slave, on the philosophy of reform: 'Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will'.