Robert Kaplan's World
We are entering a bifurcated world. Part of the globe is inhabited by Hegel's and Fukuyama's Last Man, healthy, well fed, and pampered by technology. The other, larger part is inhabited by Hobbes' First Man, condemned to a life that is poor, nasty, brutish and short.
- Robert Kaplan, "The Coming Anarchy," 1994
Legend has it that, soon after Siddhartha was born, he was examined by the holy men, who announced that he would become either, a great political leader and would unify India, or a great religious leader. As the story goes, the king, his father wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. So he set about to provide a life of luxury without any hardships for the boy.
Siddhartha wore clothes made of silk, and he grew up in palaces and gardens. Musicians and dancers were there to amuse him. Fearful of the prediction, his father ordered that he be shielded from contact with ugliness, sickness, old age and death.
-- The Legend of Siddhartha, http://www.acay.com.au/~silkroad/buddha/h_life.htm
In his 1996 book, The Ends of the Earth, writer-adventurer Robert Kaplan records his observations and reflections during a long journey through west Africa, Egypt, Turkey, central Asia, Pakistan, western China, India, Thailand and Cambodia—that is, through a huge swath of countries covering most of the middle latitudes of the Old World. While the book is more subjective than the wealth of physical details makes it seem, Kaplan's reflections aid the imagination of the reader to penetrate ways of life that most of us encounter, at best, in the form of incomprehensibly low GDP statistics.
By "incomprehensible," I refer to a series of two thoughts that characterize, I believe, most people's reactions to statistics that in such-and-such a country, incomes are $1,000, or $500, or $200 a year: first, that's absurd, how can anyone live on that?; second, I'll never understand, so why think about it?
Kaplan describes hunger, insecurity, disease, and squalor; crime and litter in the shanty-towns of parts of the world that are newly urbanizing; environmental stress and degradation; ethnic conflict and the pull of bigotry and fundamentalism; the weight of different cultures and histories, but also the universal and often radically disruptive impact of the modern world; and the narrow horizons of hope within which so many people's lives are contained.
Kaplan’s manifesto about the “bifurcated world” (quoted above) captures the main theme of The Ends of the Earth. The bleak existences Kaplan describes are in fact the way most people in this world live. We are dimly aware of this. We know that Americans are only 5% of the world's population, but have much more than our share of the world's wealth and power. We know that foreigners are generally much poorer than we are, and that in many faraway places children go to bed hungry while we can eat far more than we need and have lots of gizmos and luxuries-turned-necessities. But there does not seem to be much we can do about it, so we get on with our lives. At most, we make the odd donation to this or that charity. In Kaplan's writing, the shadowy statistical awareness becomes flesh and blood. We see, we almost feel, the faraway places, and we are forced to contemplate the dreadful paradox by which, though we and they alike are human beings, with the same appetites, sometimes speaking the same languages, surrounded by many of the same icons such as Coca-Cola and the US greenback dollar, sharing the same world, our material and political conditions are so utterly different and open an imaginative gulf between us, so that the conditions of their everyday lives seem to us hellishly unliveable, while the conditions of our everyday lives seem to them a beatific dream.
The legend of Siddhartha begins with a prince who was shielded by his father from the knowledge of human suffering. In the pages of Robert Kaplan, I came to feel that young Americans in the 1990s were like the young Siddhartha, living in a charmed city of peace and prosperity, walled off from the suffering that was the lot of most of mankind. It seemed wrong to be set apart this way. The knowledge that others were suffering made the pleasures of Americans' comfortable lives seem hollow.
I was not the only one to feel this way. Many young people perceived that many of the products that we buy are purchased from places where people live on wages that, from our point of view, are much too low; some of these joined the anti-globalization movement. They staged huge protests at every meeting of the organizations that symbolized global trade, especially the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank. I believe that many or most of these young people thought they were helping, and were willing, if necessary, to sacrifice a portion of their own living standard in order to expiate the moral wrong of living off the products of labor that was paid "starvation wages." What they did not understand was that reversing globalization would only make matters worse, for the low wages were not a cause but a symptom of poverty, that is, of the dismal opportunities available to people in so many poor countries, compared to which even the low wages paid by multinationals represented a better life.
Not long after reading The Ends of the Earth, and in part inspired by it, I entered a Masters program at Harvard in international development. My motives were the same that inspired idealistic Russian youths in the mid-19th century to go out to the villages to "serve the people:" an abstract love of mankind, and a sense of guilt at my good fortune in being born to a wealth of opportunities and prosperity while others were deprived. But I soon discovered (like the 19th-century Russians) that giving is complex. One of my first professors, Jeffery Sachs, was an enthusiastic foreign aid advocate, who thought the rich world should pour money into solving myriad social problems. But other professors, who had more practical experience of development, soon gave me to understand how problematic was Sachs' insistence that mere generosity was enough. It was not clear, it turned out, that foreign aid from the rich world did any good at all. Money given to poor countries often ended up in the wrong hands or was wasted. Aid had unintended consequences: it often increased corruption, undermined traditional modes of accountability, funded projects which damaged the environment, or caused "Dutch disease," an economic phenomenon where an influx of foreign exchange causes imports to displace domestic production. Recent studies have demonstrated (albeit not to everyone's satisfaction) that aid does work, provided that "good" policies are in place, where "good" policies refer to policies that promote broad-based growth. But such policies are not always in the interests of the rulers. And the implementation of good policies, in turn, depends on institutions, configurations of authority, customs and habits that may, or may not, enable policymakers facilitate economic growth.
Let me offer (half-seriously) a crude summary of these conclusions: the key factor in development is whether good guys or bad guys have the guns. Of course, this oversimplifies. There are leaders—Julius Nyerere of Tanzania comes to mind—who are fairly honest and generous but misguided. Culture is surely a big factor in developmental success. And yet the contrast between two Germanies and the two Koreas shows that people of the same culture can succeed when good guys have the guns, and fail when the bad guys do. The most important role culture plays may be to nurture good people who will seek power, and to get those with power to feel responsible for the welfare of the rest of the society. Environmental factors such as resources and access to world trade routes play a role, but an ambiguous one, and perhaps not large. And talk of "good guys" and "bad guys" must not be considered a substitute for rigorous thinking about institutional design. Yet, properly explicated, the statement would indeed capture much of the truth about what makes for good development. Poor institutional design is often a failure not of reasoning but of will. The leader may lack the motivation to face down vested interests that hold development back. Worse, some leaders are simply kleptocrats, motivated only to plunder the country for themselves and their cronies. In some parts of the world, fruitful cooperative relationships between donors and development organizations, on the one hand, and national and local governments, on the other hand, are possible. But in many others, including most of the worst-off countries, donors are either helpless to keep aid money out of the wrong hands and put it to productive use, or else they are excluded altogether. All over the world, efforts to help mankind are thwarted by bad guys with guns.
The bifurcation that Robert Kaplan describes, the yawning gap between wealth and poverty in our world, is a result of the phenomenon that the transfer of money and aid, without the accompanying transfer of institutions and culture, is usually ineffective, and sometimes even detrimental. Yet there was a time when the world's leading countries deliberately transferred institutions and culture to less advanced regions of the world even as they traded and disseminated technology—the age of imperialism. To betray the slightest hint of approval for imperialism was politically incorrect in my international development program at Harvard, for good but ultimately somewhat mistaken reasons. European imperialists committed some horrible atrocities, e.g. in the Belgian Congo, but such incidents, which were not the rule, deserve individual condemnation rather than inclusion in a general indictment of colonialism. More universal was the racism and condescension with which Europeans related to the rest of the world in the imperialist age, which has understandably left behind scars to the self-esteem of many post-colonial nations, and lingering resentment. But, on the other hand, European superiority, not only in science and technology but in political economy and intellectual culture, was a basic truth, which the post-colonial 20th century has confirmed, as nations that have gained their independence have continued, or even accelerated, their emulation of the West, and when they try to reject the Western example the result is always catastrophic. A powerful cloud of mythology has come to surround de-colonization, a mythology that both wealthy European nations, who after World War II wanted to indulge in the luxury of squeaky-clean consciences and cultivated elaborate guilt complexes about their more colorful pasts, and post-colonial elites, for whom nationalist myths (these too were derivative from the West, for nationalism is a Western idea) legitimated an often brutal takeover of power, had an interest in fostering. This mythology has such a wide constituency that revisionist histories by writers like Niall Ferguson and Paul Johnson, though passionate and brilliant, have done little to undermine it. Yet at the same time, the same impulses which motivated relations between rich and poor nations in the age of imperialism—of profit-seeking, altruism, the search for adventure, and cultural exploration—are still present, and give rise to a phenomenon, the development field, which resembles colonialism. A historically minded student (like me) could not but recognize that the ethos of development was an echo of the high mission that the English felt in the Victorian age, of spreading enlightenment through empire. The British built railroads and other infrastructure projects; now we were being trained to do so. The British introduced writing systems to many places which had never had them; established education systems; and promoted global trade networks, comparative advantage and international finance. Now we had the same task.
Only it was now out of the question for wealthier countries to assume sovereignty over poorer ones, and whatever good this constraint may do (for example, while atrocities take place, white people no longer have blood on their hands in any obvious way), it meant that donors' ability to help was held hostage to local elites. Nor, in the 1990s, was military intervention for humanitarian ends a plausible option. Kosovo was the exception that proved the rule. After one genocide in Bosnia, and another one in Rwanda, after chanting that we would "never again" let this happen, when the Serbs began driving the Kosovars out of their homes in 1999, at an oddly-chosen moment with nothing in particular to recommend it (for the crisis had escalated for some time) NATO intervened. But the NATO powers did not seem inclined to put their soldiers at any real risk. There were, indeed, no American casualties at all, though the price for these American-life-saving tactics was that many more Serbs and Kosovars died than would have needed to. America relied entirely on an air war, a highly destructive strategy but not very effective in reducing the bloodshed, and they not only not use but ruled out beforehand the option of a ground invasion, the threat of which could have forced Milosevic to capitulate much sooner. If an intervention even on Europe's doorstep, in response to a genocide, was so feeble, most of the world's kleptocrats, no matter how vile, were presumably safe. And those they ruled were stuck in Robert Kaplan's world.
1