3071-The political economy of new slavery

192 The Global Framework for Development
were once seen to be primarily about external security and internal law
and order but now include managing the economy and providing many
positive forms of social support. This is not a uniform shift. Indeed part
of what is exciting within even mainstream International Relations is a
wide-ranging debate on just what the responsibilities of states are – their
nature and extent – vis à vis one another, in the areas of development,
environmental protection, intervention for the sake of human rights
and so on. The outcome of these debates, which are really about how
the international society now conceives itself, will make a big difference
as to how well or badly development for the poor really goes. Development
ethicists need to be in there, informing those policy debates with
the leaven of cosmopolitan ideas. Since the internationalist approach
is not necessarily averse to cosmopolitan ideas – in many formulations
it is seen as the best way to advance these ideas in the real world
(Bull, 1977; Navari, 2000) – the cosmopolitan needs to emphasise this
consideration in the formation of national polices and international
agreements. This has a bearing on the role of individuals; I return to this
point later.
Someone who adopts a thorough-going cosmopolitan approach to
international issues like world poverty will generally recognize that
adjustments within mainstream thinking about these issues has not gone
far enough and that a more radical critique is also needed – a critique
more in the mode of discomforting prophets (not negotiators or reconcilers)
or working against the grain (rather than working with the grain).
This critique should not replace engagement by other development
ethicists in the negotiation of new consensuses but should exist alongside
it, since different people should do different things. Its goal is
change in the medium or long term, not the short term. The critique
may focus on the failure to get priorities right, that is on the normative
dimension of policy, or it may focus on the assumptions of the international
order itself – that states are and have a right to be the key players
in the international arena. Let us take these in turn. I shall start with two
examples relating to the priorities issue – policies on aid, and responses
to September 11th 2001.
Critique of foreign aid
Have rich countries really got their priorities right in respect to the levels
of aid that they give, bilaterally or multilaterally? Quite apart from any
moral issue connected with failing to reach the 0.7 per cent target rich
countries actually agreed on in the 1970s, the more basic question is:
should countries be willing to make contributions which might actually