John Rapley - Foreign FocusIN THE 1990s, the American journalist Robert Kaplan predicted that rising population in poor countries would provoke conflicts over natural resources. In the twenty-first century, he said, the world would slide into a new barbarism as humanity fought over a diminishing pie.
There were obvious flaws in Kaplan's thesis. Plenty of regions packed with people the Netherlands, Hong Kong or Singapore are stable, and new technologies stretch the boundaries of resource bases. Besides, many of the conflicts Kaplan cited as instances of the coming anarchy, as he called it, had other causes.
Nevertheless, an old topic had been revived. Thomas Homer-Dixon, an international relations specialist at the University of Toronto, developed a similar thesis which, however, carried more academic force. Homer-Dixon suggested that the key was not rising population, but crowdedness in areas which were poor and environmentally vulnerable.
There were, he argued, several volatile areas in the Third World where poverty led people to adopt environmentally unsustainable practices, like slash-and-burn farming or using wood for fuel. This, along with the low quality of water supplies in poor regions, would prompt the resource struggles of which Kaplan spoke.
Following Homer-Dixon's reasoning, the problem was not too many people the so-called neo-Malthusian approach espoused by Kaplan but too many poor people. The solution, therefore, was development.
Alas, Professor Homer-Dixon's advice went unheeded. He was invited to the White House by then-President Bill Clinton, always one with an eye on intellectual fashion. But that did not stop the Clinton administration from cutting its aid to poor countries.
Indeed, the 1990s economic boom saw the gap between rich and poor widen on a planetary scale, and the policies promoted by the American government arguably did not help matters. As America charged forward into the Information Age, the average African family was worse off than it had been a generation before. At the same time, government cutbacks in the Third World withdrew many of the services the poor had
come to rely upon in the
post-war period.
This growing army of marginalised, angry people has provided a growing recruitment base for those be they drug gangs or Islamist radicals who are now trying to weaken or destroy the nation-state, the supposed beach-head of modernity.
"They threaten our civilisation," we now hear: desperate times call for desperate measures. An unfortunate by-product of the war on terror is that one of the supposed fruits of modernity, the rejection of torture as a state weapon, is now being re-examined. The debate has been opened: is one justified in using torture to extract information from terrorist suspects if that information can save innocent lives?
Events have thrust this issue back to the forefront. Torture, of course, never disappeared. It was still widespread in Third World countries, while it occurred periodically in First World ones as well. But it was universally seen as illegitimate, and best kept from public view. But now, when we hear that hardened terrorists arrested by American special forces have suddenly begun co-operating with their interrogators, we all know what persuasive tools have been employed. The task is no longer to conceal but to justify what is happening.
Critics of torture maintain that even if the cause seems just, civilised societies have no right to use unjust means. If torture once again becomes a state weapon, those states which call themselves civilised will get dragged back into the new barbarism. Or worse. When asked what he thought of Western civilisation, M.K. Gandhi once replied, it would be a good idea.
The other day, I saw a report on the American evening news about a breakthrough in medical science. Researchers had apparently found a treatment that might one day make it possible for Americans to consume as much food as they wanted without growing fatter.
In a planet in which millions die of hunger, and the number of poor children rises daily, expensive research to enable rich people to gorge themselves without liposuction strikes me as perverse. If this is the society under threat, one has to ask if not only the means used to defend it, but also the ends themselves, have any moral claim to the title of civilisation.
If we are sliding into a new barbarism, perhaps the question to ask is whether all this would have happened if the fruits of modernity prosperity and democracy had been extended to the poor countries in the first place.
John Rapley is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona.
