Going Deeper
Avoiding the path to chaos
If Walzaerian concept of war between nations (Michael Walzer -- Just and Unjust War) is modeled on conflict between section of the people and the government in power at any given time one would expect that the coercive powers that only a government can legitimately possess would be used according to the principles of proportionality and reciprocity keeping in mind that we no longer live in a Hobbesian world which is "short, nasty and brutish" but in a world of regulated sovereignty where the sovereign (the government) is accountable for its actions to the entire populace and the international community.
Admittedly the responsibility to act rationally devolves upon the people as it does on the government. But the German born philosopher Hannah Arendt contrasts power and violence in the following words: "Power and violence are opposites; where one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance." In many Third World countries, however, the governments in power, certainly in the past and even now though in lesser number, tend to use violence as an instrument of power to subordinate popular expression of resentment against the government to its interpretation of law.
One can trace this authoritarian attitude of the governmental response to popular wish for "social coordination" in the form of gathering popular support and organize itself to exert political influence in the determination of social goods in addition to economic goods that an authoritarian regime can provide its people with ease from the colonial past of the Third World countries.
Many of these governments have also tried to use dependency theory of Latin American economist and former UNCTAD Chief Raul Prebisch that puts the blame for Third World underdevelopment on exploitation by the center or the colonial powers of the periphery reducing them to the status of "hewers of wood and drawers of wate." Francis Fukuyama, (The end of history and the last man), however, argues that the late comers to the development process have the advantage of borrowing the technologies of the developed nations that had taken the West centuries to develop. In support of his thesis Fukuyama advances the fast growing economic development of countries like Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand and Malaysia caused by their identification of obstacles put by dependency theory and import substitution and their pursuit of open market economic policies.
But since Fukuyama's theory of liberal politico-economic system as the "end point of mankind's ideological evolution" has become controversial his examples of some command economies as bearing testimony of the victory of capitalism over the now discarded Marxism does not answer the continued ills of the ailing economies of the developing countries, many of whom have now become victims of climate change in addition to unfavourable terms of trade for their goods in the international market almost totally controlled by the developed world.
The world has already crossed over the period of mercantilism as an economic language, notwithstanding its emphasis on full employment, without which an economy could not achieve its full potentials and its advocacy of public works and regional policies to fuel employment, not dissimilar to the later theories promoted by twentieth century economists and also its emphasis on surplus in balance of payment.
In today's period of globalization, albeit defined by Ziauddin Sardar as a rubric for "colonialism," where the West has the power to define political and economic terms that the developing world has to accept or be defined out of existence(Developments and locations of Euro-centrism), echoed by others as "the rise of supranational global institutions and market oriented global networks (that) has increased the power of core capitals to subjugate the peripheral regions."
The dichotomous contrast between the rich and the poor easily demarcated in terms of regions of the world shall continue to fuel frustration among the have-nots as the transmission of pictures of a prosperous world takes only seconds to be seen by the have-nots.
If the recent riots (when Nicholas Sarkozy was French interior minister) in France and the religious profiling in the West in post-9/11 world are any indications of a global rich-poor divide then the root of the recent unrest at Dhaka University and elsewhere in Bangladesh should be seen as the result of inequality in the living standards of the middle and lower middle classes (the ultra-poor having already been washed out in the current floods), and the fear of the students of any future for themselves in the years ahead.
The solution lies in price control that would reduce the avarice of a section of business people, increase supply of goods matching their demand at affordable prices through governmental agencies, encourage private sector importers, and increase employment if necessary by following the Keynesian advice of digging holes and filling them up, albeit unproductive work at the first flush but increasing wealth of the people for the time being, and more importantly by increasing the quality of the working force through infusion of technological knowledge with smattering of liberal arts as an icing on education and really learning a foreign language instead of being totally immersed in the mother tongue that, in our case, has little monetary value beyond our border.
The newly emerging economies, particularly India, have learnt that politico-economic development is intractably connected with learning a foreign language, in particular, the English language. That a multi-linguistic, multi-racial, multi-religious, and multi-cultural entity like India has to depend on English for social cohesion and unity of the country is not a negative argument against the English language.
What is important is the benefit the country has drawn from its knowledge of the language, both monetarily, in international interaction, and in transforming the country into a knowledge-based society. In our case, consultative process among people, in the words of German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, of "opinion and will formation in which free and equal citizens reach an understanding on which goals and norms lie in equal interest of all" would be a good option.
Kazi Anwarul Masud is a former Secretary and Ambassador.
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