Opinion Good Cops,
Bad Cops, & the World Bank The war against terrorism used to
include a battle against poverty. The “war on terror” seems to
have dumped that creditable cause.
by by David
Ludden
When leaders of the institutions that guide
global economic development set 2015 as a target date for
reducing by half the number of people who live in extreme
poverty, they did not anticipate 11 September 2001. The
subsequent war on terrorism has altered the character of the
campaign against poverty more dramatically than might appear
at first sight, however. After 9/11, military men certainly
did become more prominent in the project of protecting
globalisation against its enemies, but reducing poverty had
previously gained support in rich countries as a means to
combat terrorism. Major new funding for a global campaign
against poverty now seems hostage to military campaigns to
pacify a world of insecurities aggravated by globalisation.
In the US, particularly, the stage was set for
current military campaigns well before 9/11. Military security
already topped the global agenda in the 1990s, when real US
military expenditure remained as high as it was in the 1960s
at the height of the global war on communism. In the 1990s, as
the world’s rich became rapidly richer and extreme poverty
increased along with global inequality, American anxieties
about the instability attending globalisation also increased.
Robert D Kaplan detailed this anxiety in his influential 1994
essay in the Atlantic Monthly, entitled “The Coming Anarchy:
How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease
Are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet”. Bill
Clinton’s presidency saw numerous attacks on US military
installations that foreshadowed the attack on the Pentagon,
and car bombers had attacked the Twin Towers once before 9/11.
American popular anxiety about foreign threats
increased in the context of new immigration, some of it
critical for the economic boom in America in the 1990s,
especially of Asians in the hi-tech sector. Public suspicion
of foreigners lurks in multi-cultural America, where the long
war against communism promoted hatred for un-American aliens.
The internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II suggests
a tendency to conflate foreign and domestic enemies, as do
purges of Marxists and “communist fellow travellers” during
the Cold War. The fear of foreigners has historically tended
to peak in times of high immigration. As immigration boomed
again, the Iranian Revolution produced a new alien menace,
Islam. By 1990 and the war on Iraq, fanatic Muslims had
replaced rabid communists in American demonology.
In American popular opinion, the war against
terrorism resembles a war on crime on a global scale. Popular
ideas about criminality support global police action by the US
military. The American political system has habitually
criminalised behaviour deemed un-acceptable to the voting
majority, such as drug use, sex work, and other deviant
activities that other countries often treat as problems for
medical attention and social reform. The crime problem also
appears in the public eye as being most intense in poor ethnic
communities in urban ghettos, now mostly African-American and
Hispanic, but in earlier times filled with Italian, Irish, and
Chinese immigrants. Racial stereotypes of poor people in poor
neighbourhoods often mingle in discussions of crime. Local
police commonly target young, poor, non-white men for special
attention. Racial profiling by police is common practice. US
prisons hold a hugely disproportionate number of poor people
from minority communities.
In this cultural context, the public can
readily imagine that global attacks on civilised society arise
primarily from alien ethnic groups living in poverty, whose
criminal behaviours include opium and coca growing, drug
smuggling, honour killings, abusing women, rioting,
corruption, and bombing American warships in the Gulf of Aden
and US embassies in Africa. Amidst poverty and ignorance,
fanatics seem to learn terrorist trades in schools of
primitive hatred. Bill Clinton articulated this vision of the
world in one of his last presidential speeches, when he said,
“we have seen how abject poverty accelerates conflict, how it
creates recruits for terrorists and those who incite ethnic
and religious hatred, how it fuels a violent rejection of the
economic and social order on which our future depends”.
Two figures represent complementary strategies
in the fight against crime in America: the “good cop” and the
“bad cop”. A good cop brings a smiling face to patrol bad
neighbourhoods teeming with poor youth. Good cops support
local development initiatives by “keeping kids off the
streets” and by leading them instead into schools, churches,
sports, and other learning centres where they can improve
themselves and stay out of trouble. Meanwhile, the bad cop
patrols the streets with a mean face, gun in-hand, poised to
arrest criminals and, if necessary, to shoot-on-sight dreaded
enemies of the law.
In American national politics, Democrats and
Republicans broadly typify good cops and bad cops,
respectively. Democrats typically see crime as a symptom of
poverty; and thus they promote social welfare and economic
development schemes to reduce the lure of crime. Republicans
typically see crime as an infraction of civil norms demanding
punishment; and thus they promote strict law enforcement,
tough sentencing, and harsh penalties to get criminals off the
streets.
George W Bush is a life-long bad cop
Republican. As governor of Texas, he signed more death penalty
authorisations than any governor in American history. Since
9/11, his snarling self-image as the fierce leader of the
global war on terror has been an everyday media spectacle.
Such media displays are strategic, because like Genghis Khan,
a bad cop seeks to compel compliance with fear.
Bill Clinton is now a good cop Democrat, who
seeks to promote civility with economic development. In his
first major post-presidential speech on US foreign policy (14
December 2001), he spoke to an audience in England, where
Bush’s bad cop ally in the war on terrorism, Tony Blair, is
also Clinton’s good cop friend. Clinton’s speech indicates the
link between the military (bad cop) war on terrorism, (good
cop) concerns for the poor, and the new global anti-poverty
campaign led by the World Bank. He described 11 September as
“the dark side of global interdependence”. He went on to warn
his audience that “if you don’t want to live with barbed wire
around your children and grandchildren for the next hundred
years then it’s not enough to defeat the terrorist. We have to
make a world where there are far fewer terrorists.”
Creating such a world is not a military
mission. Rather, in Clinton’s view, it requires “wealthy
nations” to acquire “more partners” and “spread the benefits
and shrink the burdens” of globalisation. This is a job for
development agencies. James Wolfensohn, President of the World
Bank, is one of its leaders. He has said that, “On September
11 [2001], the imaginary wall that divided the rich world from
the poor world came crashing down”, and that the Bank’s
campaign against world poverty supplements the war on
terrorism as a means to secure globalisation. He says that we
can no longer view as normal “a world where less than 20
percent of the population dominates the world’s wealth and
resources and takes 80 percent of its dollar income”.
In his new anti-poverty campaign at the Bank,
Wolfensohn echoes one of his predecessors. Robert McNamara
left his office as US Secretary of Defense thirty years ago to
start an earlier anti-poverty campaign at the Bank to combat
communism at its roots among people in poverty. McNamara’s
agenda fell by the wayside in the 1970s under the influence of
structural adjustment policies that dominated Bank activity
for the next two decades. When communism had quit the world
stage, and when structural adjustment had subjected poor
countries to world market discipline and to rich country
policy dictates, poverty gained favour again at the Bank,
under Wolfensohn’s leadership.
The “millennium development goals” now
en-dorsed by all the major institutions in the world
development regime include a 50 percent reduction in people
living on USD 1 per day, primary school for all children, a 67
percent reduction in child deaths, a 75 percent cut in
maternal deaths, and halving the number of people without
clean water – all by 2015. Many world leaders have joined the
2015 campaign, and, like UK Chancellor Gordon Brown, promote a
“new deal between developed and developing countries”, having
accepted the idea that the critical issue now “is whether we
manage globalisation well, or badly; fairly or unfairly”.
The scale of the 2015 campaign is
unprecedented, and its future, uncertain. The UN convened a
Financing for Development Conference in Monterrey, Mexico, on
18-22 March 2002, where it sought to raise requisite funds,
but financial commitments from rich countries were meagre.
Monterrey witnessed a unique gathering of big players in
global development, including the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation, 171
heads of state, and representatives of civil society and
business.
9/11 gave the 2015 campaign new urgency but
also gave military initiatives firm control of public opinion.
Fights against terrorists attract more public attention than
efforts to alleviate poverty. The military and its support
services – including education for specialists in subjects
critical for global security – now receive more new funding
than development programmes. Re-cession has also undermined
prospects for new development funding. 2015 is 13 years away.
The clock is ticking. Since the 2015 campaign began two years
ago, more people have surely been driven into more desperate
poverty in Afghanistan and Palestine than have escaped extreme
poverty in most poor countries. Funding for a global campaign
against poverty now seems more hostage than ever to military
budgets buttressed by national fears aggravated by
globalisation. |