SCN: A Message from the Global South by Saskia Sassen

[Doug Schuler]

This article to me is both inspiring and a wake-up call.  America, and
the rest of the developed world, is not autonomous and independent from
everybody else.  People have talked about bombing Afghanistan back to
the stone age...  It's there already...

-- Doug

---------------------


A  Message From the Global South
by Saskia Sassen
Published on Wednesday, September 12, 2001 in the Guardian of London
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0912-04.htm


Yesterday's attack brings home the fact that we cannot hide behind
our peace and prosperity. The evidence has been growing but our
leaders did not want to see it. The horrors of wars and deaths far
away in the global south do not register. But missile shields cannot
protect us. Powerful states cannot fully escape bricolage terrorism,
nail bombs, elementary nuclear devices, and homemade biological
weapons.

The growth of debt and unemployment, and the decline of traditional
economic sectors, has fed an illegal trade in people directed at the
rich countries. The diseases and pests of the global south are now in
the global north as well: TB is back in the US and the UK, the
encephalitis-producing Nile mosquito has arrived for the first time
in the north. As governments become poorer they depend more on the
remittances of immigrants in the north and have little interest in
managing emigration and illegal trafficking. The pressures to be
competitive make governments in poor countries cut their health,
education and social budgets, further delaying development and
stimulating emigration.

The rising debt, poverty, and disease in the south are beginning to
reach deep into rich countries in the north. We can no longer turn
our backs on this misery. If we dislike humanitarian reasons for
addressing these issues, we should at least be motivated by
self-interest.

We must now accept that markets cannot take care of everything.
Governments will have to govern more. But we cannot return to the old
system of countries surrounding themselves with protective walls. It
will take genuine multilateralism and internationalism; radical
innovations and new forms of collaboration with civil society and
supranational institutions. The violence of hunger and poverty; the
destruction of once fertile lands; the oppression of weaker states by
highly militarized ones; persecution - all these feed a complex, slow
but relentless movement towards the north. The north creates much of
the damage and the north has the resources to redress some of it.

Part of the challenge is actually to recognize the interconnectedness
of forms of violence that we do not view as being connected or even
as forms of violence. We are suffering from a translation problem.
The language of poverty and misery is unclear and uncomfortable. The
language of yesterday's attacks is clear.

There are two problems in particular that must be addressed: the debt
trap and immigration. The debt trap is far more significant than many
in the north understand. The focus is always on the amounts of the
debts, which are a small fraction of the overall global capital
market, now estimated at about 83 trillion dollars. But the debt trap
will eventually ensnare the rich countries through the increase in
illegal trafficking in people, in drugs, in arms, through the
re-emergence of diseases we had thought were under control and
through the further devastation of our fragile eco-system. The debt
trap is now entangling more countries and it has reached middle
income countries.

There are now about 50 countries that are hyper-indebted and unable
to redress the situation. It is no longer a matter of loan repayment
but a fundamental new structural condition. What is often overlooked
or even unknown is that many of those debts are far more extreme than
those that were considered as unmanageable levels of debt in the
Latin American crisis of the 80s. Debt to GNP ratios are especially
high in Africa, where they stood at 123%, compared with 42% in Latin
America and 28% in Asia.

The IMF asks HIPCs to pay 20-25% of their export earnings toward debt
service. In contrast, in 1953 the Allies canceled 80% of Germany's
war debt and only insisted on 3-5% of export earnings debt service.
These are the terms asked from Central Europe after Communism.

What can be done to pull these countries out of the trap? Poor
countries need to import goods and the West will only accept payment
in dollars or other high value currencies. This produces a trap that
reproduces itself endlessly. One of the few solutions to neutralize
the trap is to allow countries to pay in their own currencies, which
would enable them to import needed goods for development and,
importantly, eventually strengthen their currencies.

=46ew poor countries can avoid trade deficits - of 93 low and moderate 
income countries, only 11 had trade surpluses in the year 2000. These 
countries would like to export more, as is shown by the recent 
setting up of a new African Trade Insurance Agency supporting exports 
to, from and within Africa. Such specialized and focused efforts are
promising. Most countries in the south are heavily dependent on
imports of oil, food, and manufactured goods. They need loans, and
once they have debts, interest payments and other debt servicing
costs escalate rapidly and their currencies are likely to devalue
further. Borrowing in the leading foreign currencies is a trap.

The government debts of poor countries, and increasingly of
middle-income countries as well, need to be taken out of the global
capital markets and placed in the domain of the interstate system. J
M Keynes proposed this in the 40s when the IMF was created. And the
IMF went in this direction with its plan to provide early financing
before a crisis, rather than bailing out rich countries' investors.

The second great problem in immigration and illegal trafficking in
people. The growth of debt and its attendant economic griefs have
created whole new migrations. As the rich economies become richer,
they become more desirable places to be and have to raise their walls
to keep immigrants and refugees out. So they actually encourage the
illegal trade in people.

We may think that the debt and growing poverty in the south have
nothing to do with the violence in New York and Washington. But they
do.

The attacks are a language of last resort: the oppressed and
persecuted have used many languages to reach us so far, but we seem
unable to translate the meaning. So a few have taken the personal
responsibility to speak in a language that needs no translation.

An updated version of Saskia Sassen's book, The Global City, is
published by Princeton University Press.

Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001


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