Understanding global security - Peter Hough

ECONOMIC THREATS TO SECURITY
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Greater emphasis on ‘technology transfers’ from North to South in aid and
development programmes.
Establishment of ‘Common Funds’ to stabilize the global price of primary
products on which many LDCs are dependent.
Reform of the World Bank and IMF so that LDCs have a greater say in decisionmaking
and that the conditions for IMF loans are less austere.
As the 1974 General Assembly vote indicates, the NIEO was something broader
than a wish list of the world’s underprivileged. Many similar themes were taken up
by the Reports of the Independent Commission on International Development Issues
(Brandt Reports) of the late 1970s and early 1980s, a fairly conservative think-tank
set up at the suggestion of the American President of the World Bank, Robert
McNamara. The Brandt Reports upheld the virtues of liberalizing trade but advocated
greater international cooperation to cushion LDCs from the insecurities of free trade
and help them to help themselves. Specifically on the question of hunger the Brandt
reports advocated greater food aid, the establishment of a global grain reserve, less
agricultural protectionism (global trade liberalization had concentrated on industrial
protectionism) and, more radically, land reform in LDCs to empower the poor (ICIDI
1980: 90–104).
Failure of certain states to encourage modernization
The orthodox position on poverty, held by most statesmen of the global North, argues
that it can be eradicated by those countries affected pursuing economic development
of the kind experienced by northern states. This view stands in direct opposition
to the Marxist–Structuralist perspective by advocating that LDCs can best mimic
northern development by integrating themselves into the global economy to permit
export-oriented industries to flourish and gain from the inward investment provided
by multi-national corporations. In this way the conditions for modernization can be
created; wealth, democracy, education, state-welfarism and smaller families; all of
which serve to alleviate poverty. The clearest articulation of this view came from the
influential US economic historian Rostow with his ‘Stages of Growth’ thesis in the
1960s. Rostow analysed the process of development in the North and concluded that
all states pass through similar stages of progression towards ‘take-off’ and an end
stage of a wealthy consumer-driven society (Rostow 1960).
The failure of many LDCs to show any sign of such progression over the last
40 years has dented the rigour of Rostow’s thesis, but the orthodox position on development
remains dominant in the discourse on international economic relations. The
successful economic development of the Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs),
such as the ‘Asian Tigers’ of Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore, after
opening themselves up to foreign investment and developing export-oriented manufacturing
industries, served to reinforce the notion that a global route out of poverty
is at hand for those states stuck in pre-modernity. By the end of the twentieth century
this, allied to the fact that the ‘Third World’ were no longer able to exploit First
World–Second World rivalry to their advantage, allowed orthodoxy on development
to reassert itself against the challenge posed by the NIEO in the 1970s and 1980s.
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