How was the richest country in the Western Hemisphere turned into the poorest?
To understand and to confront the terrible disaster that has just occurred in Haiti, it is vital to understand how wealth was destroyed and poverty constructed in that country. Otherwise we are likely to assume that the massive overcrowding of Port-au-Prince, the flimsiness of the shacks of the poor, and the deforestation and consequent impoverishment of the soil are all the fault of the people who live there.
And as long as we believe that, we will assume that the only salvation must come from us, smarter or better people from outside. And if we act on that premise, we will continue to squash the promise of that proud little country that has had so much determination and ingenuity that they defeated Napoleon, 8 years before Wellington finally stopped his career at Waterloo.
Haitians, in the western part of Hispaniola, won victory in their revolution in 1804, just 8 years after the 13 North American colonies started theirs. They financed and armed Simón Bolívar, enabling him to carry the national liberation struggle to and through South America. Their power was such that they invaded and conquered the eastern part of the island, driving the Spaniards from Santo Domingo. But then, beginning in the mid 19th century, too many forces began to conspire against them, a combination far more powerful even than Napoleon's expeditionary army. I don't yet know the full story as well as I should, but it is clear that French bankers, Arkansas rice growers, U.S. timber interests and much else was involved in destroying the national wealth. And for Haitians to regain some of it, they are going to have to free themselves of those and similar outside interventions. Aristide tried it, and made some progress before he was whisked out of the country by a frightened U.S. military. Others will try and will get further if given a chance. The poverty is reversible, I am convinced, and only the Haitians can do it.
But the starting point for understanding the country's tragic history, including hurricanes, civil wars and invasions by U.S. Marines as well as brutal exploitation of the natural and human resources, has to be the amazing revolution 200 years ago. The most stirring account I ever read is James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1963. But if you don't have that handy, this is also good to read:
FRANKLIN W. KNIGHT | The Haitian Revolution | The American Historical Review, 105.1 | The History Cooperative
Showing posts with label Haiti. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Haiti. Show all posts
2010/01/27
2010/01/17
Haiti’s Environment and Social Justice
I didn't know this. It's important, to help us know how to direct aid resources. Thanks to Dennis Hidalgo for posting. Professor of History: Haiti’s Environment and Social Justice
2010/01/16
If I were a Haitian…
… I no doubt would be desperately worried about family, friends, and neighbors. But there are times when one can do nothing -- if I'm on the scene, the rubble is too heavy to lift, or I'm desperately trying to get there but I'm stuck in an airport, or in a distant country, Spain let's say, and can't get any news by telephone or email of my sister, or my spouse, or my parents. And I know I have to do something to keep from going crazy.
And if I were a certain kind of Haitian, one with some experience of other countries and their history and politics -- like some of the people around President Préval, or active in other groups, or academics in or out of Haiti -- in those moments when I could think beyond survival for the next few hours or days, I would have go back to thinking about the same issue that Haitian intellectuals had been debating for long before this earthquake: What can be done to make that country safer, more stable, prosperous?
For some, the answer may seem to be, "Nothing!" Like Bolívar in his dispirited last days, they'll say, "The only thing to do in América [he meant what we call "Latin" America] is emigrate." But there are and will be some Haitians who have a dream. Aristide was one of them, and whatever we think of the specifics of how he tried to realize that dream, he demonstrated that it is possible to inspire people to great effort to overcome enormous odds.
I am not a Haitian, and cannot presume to answer the question. But I'm pretty sure that Haitian dreamers will be working on it. And that they will be very wary of becoming a protectorate again, whether of the U.S., or of some combination of powers as Sarkozy seems to be urging -- even though the country cannot afford to refuse aid now.
Everything now will have to be rebuilt: buildings and roads and ports, police and fire forces, all forms of economic activity, and maybe even the system of governance. And some Haitians, surely, will see this disaster as an unavoidable opportunity to start things on a better path. Despite the poverty, the country does have resources, especially the energy of its people. Let's watch and listen for those new voices, and be ready to respond when asked -- even if what they ask is that we just stay out of their way.
BBC News - The long history of troubled ties between Haiti and the US
Tomorrow: My scheduled weekly essay on Spain. But today, Haiti was more urgent.
And if I were a certain kind of Haitian, one with some experience of other countries and their history and politics -- like some of the people around President Préval, or active in other groups, or academics in or out of Haiti -- in those moments when I could think beyond survival for the next few hours or days, I would have go back to thinking about the same issue that Haitian intellectuals had been debating for long before this earthquake: What can be done to make that country safer, more stable, prosperous?
For some, the answer may seem to be, "Nothing!" Like Bolívar in his dispirited last days, they'll say, "The only thing to do in América [he meant what we call "Latin" America] is emigrate." But there are and will be some Haitians who have a dream. Aristide was one of them, and whatever we think of the specifics of how he tried to realize that dream, he demonstrated that it is possible to inspire people to great effort to overcome enormous odds.
I am not a Haitian, and cannot presume to answer the question. But I'm pretty sure that Haitian dreamers will be working on it. And that they will be very wary of becoming a protectorate again, whether of the U.S., or of some combination of powers as Sarkozy seems to be urging -- even though the country cannot afford to refuse aid now.
Everything now will have to be rebuilt: buildings and roads and ports, police and fire forces, all forms of economic activity, and maybe even the system of governance. And some Haitians, surely, will see this disaster as an unavoidable opportunity to start things on a better path. Despite the poverty, the country does have resources, especially the energy of its people. Let's watch and listen for those new voices, and be ready to respond when asked -- even if what they ask is that we just stay out of their way.
BBC News - The long history of troubled ties between Haiti and the US
Tomorrow: My scheduled weekly essay on Spain. But today, Haiti was more urgent.
2008/11/29
Crunching numbers, saving people
Collier, Paul. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Paul Collier deserves -- and has received -- great credit for developing a method of statistical comparison for identifying the very poorest countries and estimating the costs of such poverty to them and potentially to all of us (short life spans, HIV and other devastating diseases, political violence that spreads beyond their borders, etc.). He and his co-researchers are especially keen on finding correlations between such wretched conditions and various geographical, demographic and historical factors, and comparing them to countries which share many such characteristics but that have broken out of poverty -- most notably, India and China, still beset by many problems but developing.
Very briefly: Collier has identified 58 countries, together comprising about 1/6 of the world's population or nearly 1,000,000,000 people, which are not only extremely poor, but which are not developing at all -- that is, they are experiencing no economic growth whatever. He declines to provide the full list, but in the course of the book he names several: most are in Africa, others include "Haiti, Laos, Burma [Myanmar], and the Central Asian countries, of which Afghanistan has been the most spectacular" development failure.
These are all places caught in "traps" of: recurring civil conflict, an abundance of a single natural resource whose exploitation (mostly for the benefit of outside corporations and the local corrupt elite) causes neglect of all other productive areas, being "landlocked with bad neighbors," and/or suffering "bad governance in a small country."
His question: How to get these countries out of the "traps" of undevelopment and get their economies growing?
Aid doesn't work, because too much of it is eaten up in corruption and inefficiency -- though without it, people's lives would be even worse. Collier gives several woeful examples, but also singles out a few heroes who have struggled to limit or end corruption, for example in Nigeria and Uganda.
Military intervention could work very well in those places wracked by civil war and terrorism, if only the richer countries dared to use it and if they avoided the disastrous misuse in the U.S.'s spectacular and self-defeating deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. The other African countries are themselves too poor to intervene effectively in Sudan, for example, or the Congo, and would need the troops, arms and logistical support of richer countries. To be seen as legitimate, such intervention would have to come at the invitation of groups in the country or region that had wide popular support. And without raising any suspicion that the intervenors' true goal was to seize natural resources, e.g., oil. Unfortunately, in Collier's view, the U.S.'s bungling in Iraq has given intervention such a bad name that when the French, for example, send troops to a civil war zone, they are ordered to stay in barracks when the fighting breaks out. And we all remember the passivity of the Dutch UN troops in Srebrenica. UN troops in the Congo also seem to be more concerned for their own safety than that of the populace.
"By contrast, the British intervention in Sierra Leone [in 2000], Operation Palliser, has been a huge success. It has imposed security and maintained it once the RUF [rebel movement] was disposed of. The whole operation has been amazingly cheap," Collier writes (p. 127). Another example that seems to me to have been very positive (though I think Collier would disagree) was Cuban intervention in Namibia and Angola, saving both countries from far worse fates -- but of course that occurred during the Cold War, which distorted everything and made all sides' motives suspect.
"So we should intervene," says Collier, "but not necessarily everywhere. Sierra Leone rather than Iraq is the likely future of intervention opportunities in the bottom-billion countries. Look at the contrasts between the two situations. In Sierra Leone our [i.e., British] forces were invited in by the government and hugely welcomed by the local population. In Sierra Leone we could not be accused of going in for the oil, as there wasn't any." (pp. 128-9)
We also need to change laws and charters in the developed world, for example, banking secrecy regulations that permit corrupt dictators to steal their countries' wealth and hide it. (He has much more to say about laws and charters, including a proposed charter for world democracy.)
Finally, he proposes "trade policy for reversing marginalization" -- ending, for example, protective tariffs for European and U.S. agricultural interests that make it impossible for African cotton producers, etc., to compete in the only lucrative markets.
There's a lot of good stuff here, and Collier and his team keep on producing more such pointed analyses. Check out the Paul Collier home page. His statistical work is a good starting point for finding solutions, but it is only a starting point. To understand phenomena such as massive corruption, suicidal terrorism (such as in Mumbai this week), and the consequences and contradictions of rapacious global capitalism requires much more than number-crunching. The "traps" he lists are not all really comparable phenomena, though the statistical method showing only their numerical consequences make them appear so. Being landlocked with few natural resources is a geographical and historical phenomenon. As Collier sagely remarks, the reason so many such countries are in Africa is that, in other parts of the world, territories that are landlocked and have few resources don't become countries -- so that is a historical political problem, dating from the way colonial powers carved up the continent.
"The Natural Resource Trap," i.e., being "too rich" in petroleum, or diamonds, or some other valuable commodity, is not a geographical fatality at all. What makes such natural wealth a "trap" rather than an asset is obviously a problem of the way markets are organized and who has the means to exploit someone else's wealth. Bolivia under Morales, for example, is working to turn its natural gas into an asset.
But if we can think along two or more tracks at the same time, keeping in mind the statistical correlations that Collier and other investigators generate while also thinking broadly and deeply about markets and other social process in the manner of, say, Ulrich Beck, Alain Touraine and others, we may seriously address these problems.
One minor quibble: The cover declares the book a winner of the "Lionel Gelber Prize for excellence in writing on international relations." It seems to me that the writing would have been more excellent had Collier found a better metaphor than "traps" to describe those difficulties and had he not repeatedly referred, with no apparent irony, to landlocked countries as "missing the boat" (of development).
Paul Collier deserves -- and has received -- great credit for developing a method of statistical comparison for identifying the very poorest countries and estimating the costs of such poverty to them and potentially to all of us (short life spans, HIV and other devastating diseases, political violence that spreads beyond their borders, etc.). He and his co-researchers are especially keen on finding correlations between such wretched conditions and various geographical, demographic and historical factors, and comparing them to countries which share many such characteristics but that have broken out of poverty -- most notably, India and China, still beset by many problems but developing.
Very briefly: Collier has identified 58 countries, together comprising about 1/6 of the world's population or nearly 1,000,000,000 people, which are not only extremely poor, but which are not developing at all -- that is, they are experiencing no economic growth whatever. He declines to provide the full list, but in the course of the book he names several: most are in Africa, others include "Haiti, Laos, Burma [Myanmar], and the Central Asian countries, of which Afghanistan has been the most spectacular" development failure.
These are all places caught in "traps" of: recurring civil conflict, an abundance of a single natural resource whose exploitation (mostly for the benefit of outside corporations and the local corrupt elite) causes neglect of all other productive areas, being "landlocked with bad neighbors," and/or suffering "bad governance in a small country."
His question: How to get these countries out of the "traps" of undevelopment and get their economies growing?
Aid doesn't work, because too much of it is eaten up in corruption and inefficiency -- though without it, people's lives would be even worse. Collier gives several woeful examples, but also singles out a few heroes who have struggled to limit or end corruption, for example in Nigeria and Uganda.
Military intervention could work very well in those places wracked by civil war and terrorism, if only the richer countries dared to use it and if they avoided the disastrous misuse in the U.S.'s spectacular and self-defeating deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. The other African countries are themselves too poor to intervene effectively in Sudan, for example, or the Congo, and would need the troops, arms and logistical support of richer countries. To be seen as legitimate, such intervention would have to come at the invitation of groups in the country or region that had wide popular support. And without raising any suspicion that the intervenors' true goal was to seize natural resources, e.g., oil. Unfortunately, in Collier's view, the U.S.'s bungling in Iraq has given intervention such a bad name that when the French, for example, send troops to a civil war zone, they are ordered to stay in barracks when the fighting breaks out. And we all remember the passivity of the Dutch UN troops in Srebrenica. UN troops in the Congo also seem to be more concerned for their own safety than that of the populace.
"By contrast, the British intervention in Sierra Leone [in 2000], Operation Palliser, has been a huge success. It has imposed security and maintained it once the RUF [rebel movement] was disposed of. The whole operation has been amazingly cheap," Collier writes (p. 127). Another example that seems to me to have been very positive (though I think Collier would disagree) was Cuban intervention in Namibia and Angola, saving both countries from far worse fates -- but of course that occurred during the Cold War, which distorted everything and made all sides' motives suspect.
"So we should intervene," says Collier, "but not necessarily everywhere. Sierra Leone rather than Iraq is the likely future of intervention opportunities in the bottom-billion countries. Look at the contrasts between the two situations. In Sierra Leone our [i.e., British] forces were invited in by the government and hugely welcomed by the local population. In Sierra Leone we could not be accused of going in for the oil, as there wasn't any." (pp. 128-9)
We also need to change laws and charters in the developed world, for example, banking secrecy regulations that permit corrupt dictators to steal their countries' wealth and hide it. (He has much more to say about laws and charters, including a proposed charter for world democracy.)
Finally, he proposes "trade policy for reversing marginalization" -- ending, for example, protective tariffs for European and U.S. agricultural interests that make it impossible for African cotton producers, etc., to compete in the only lucrative markets.
There's a lot of good stuff here, and Collier and his team keep on producing more such pointed analyses. Check out the Paul Collier home page. His statistical work is a good starting point for finding solutions, but it is only a starting point. To understand phenomena such as massive corruption, suicidal terrorism (such as in Mumbai this week), and the consequences and contradictions of rapacious global capitalism requires much more than number-crunching. The "traps" he lists are not all really comparable phenomena, though the statistical method showing only their numerical consequences make them appear so. Being landlocked with few natural resources is a geographical and historical phenomenon. As Collier sagely remarks, the reason so many such countries are in Africa is that, in other parts of the world, territories that are landlocked and have few resources don't become countries -- so that is a historical political problem, dating from the way colonial powers carved up the continent.
"The Natural Resource Trap," i.e., being "too rich" in petroleum, or diamonds, or some other valuable commodity, is not a geographical fatality at all. What makes such natural wealth a "trap" rather than an asset is obviously a problem of the way markets are organized and who has the means to exploit someone else's wealth. Bolivia under Morales, for example, is working to turn its natural gas into an asset.
But if we can think along two or more tracks at the same time, keeping in mind the statistical correlations that Collier and other investigators generate while also thinking broadly and deeply about markets and other social process in the manner of, say, Ulrich Beck, Alain Touraine and others, we may seriously address these problems.
One minor quibble: The cover declares the book a winner of the "Lionel Gelber Prize for excellence in writing on international relations." It seems to me that the writing would have been more excellent had Collier found a better metaphor than "traps" to describe those difficulties and had he not repeatedly referred, with no apparent irony, to landlocked countries as "missing the boat" (of development).
2008/11/11
Cautionary tales & historical theory: 2 by Diamond
Having been greatly stimulated by Jared Diamond's earlier book, Guns, Germs and Steel (see below), I was eager to read this newer one -- Diamond, Jared. Collapse. How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. London: Penguin Books, 2005. But, as you'll see from my notes, I found it disappointing .
In Collapse, Diamond relates cautionary tales of societies that thrived and then collapsed, contrasted to some that still survive, to identify recurrent causes of collapse. In all the cases selected, the main cause (according to him) was the society's misuse and exhaustion of material resources, esp. forests, aggravated in some cases by aggression from other societies -- which is hardly surprising. And he warns us of comparable dangers (but are they really comparable?) to our new, global ecosystem. Stories include Easter Island, the contrasting experiences of 3 dissimilar S. Pacific islands, the Anasazi, Maya, Viking settlements (Greenland, a failure; Iceland still going strong), Japan (Tokugawa success in forest management), Rwanda (Diamond blames environmental stress more than ancient enmities for the genocide of 1994), Haiti's poverty v. the Dominican Republic's much better management of resources (he credits Joaquín Balaguer especially), China, and Australia (still functioning, but precarious because overexploiting poor soil and little water). These tales are all more or less interesting (China less, Greenland more, because the information is less well known), but they don't add up to anything much beyond a reminder that the prosperity of global society requires much better husbanding of resources.
After his "Guns, Germs and Steel," which presented a coherent and audacious theory explaining Europe's rise to preeminence, this is a pious hodgepodge. Here are my notes on the earlier, stronger book:
Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: Random House, 1997. 1999 Norton paperback.
The reasons why European whites acquired the "guns, germs and steel" with which they decimated and subdued all other peoples are (according to Diamond) due entirely to accidental geographical advantages: a wider variety of minerals in Eurasia, including the rocks necessary for an efficient stone-age technology necessary as a first stage of development; the availability of easy-to domesticate, highly productive plants and animals enabling people in Mesopotamia to become farmers and produce enough of a surplus to build cities, long before anybody else; and the east-west orientation of the Eurasian continent, with a wide swath in the same latitude with a long growing season and plenty of rain, so that crops developed in Mesopotamia could also be grown as far as western India, all across northern Africa and across southern Europe to its western edge; the absence of major physical barriers also facilitated transfers of inventions (whether in agriculture or devices such as the wheel, practices such as weaving, etc.).
The book's great success ("over 1 million copies sold," the cover proclaims) is mainly because Diamond weaves a coherent story through a huge subject, all human history, that is a plausible alternative to the naïve race theories still current. The problem for many scholars is that the coherence seems too facile, neglecting the complexities of many developments over the millennia and (according to some of those scholars) getting many particulars wrong.
The other reason for both the book's popularity and many scholars' impatience is that Diamond repeats his essential points over and over. This makes it hard to miss them, which must be convenient for the distracted undergraduate, but is wearisome for the attentive reader, especially one who is already familiar with many of the arguments.
In Collapse, Diamond relates cautionary tales of societies that thrived and then collapsed, contrasted to some that still survive, to identify recurrent causes of collapse. In all the cases selected, the main cause (according to him) was the society's misuse and exhaustion of material resources, esp. forests, aggravated in some cases by aggression from other societies -- which is hardly surprising. And he warns us of comparable dangers (but are they really comparable?) to our new, global ecosystem. Stories include Easter Island, the contrasting experiences of 3 dissimilar S. Pacific islands, the Anasazi, Maya, Viking settlements (Greenland, a failure; Iceland still going strong), Japan (Tokugawa success in forest management), Rwanda (Diamond blames environmental stress more than ancient enmities for the genocide of 1994), Haiti's poverty v. the Dominican Republic's much better management of resources (he credits Joaquín Balaguer especially), China, and Australia (still functioning, but precarious because overexploiting poor soil and little water). These tales are all more or less interesting (China less, Greenland more, because the information is less well known), but they don't add up to anything much beyond a reminder that the prosperity of global society requires much better husbanding of resources.
After his "Guns, Germs and Steel," which presented a coherent and audacious theory explaining Europe's rise to preeminence, this is a pious hodgepodge. Here are my notes on the earlier, stronger book:
Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: Random House, 1997. 1999 Norton paperback.
The reasons why European whites acquired the "guns, germs and steel" with which they decimated and subdued all other peoples are (according to Diamond) due entirely to accidental geographical advantages: a wider variety of minerals in Eurasia, including the rocks necessary for an efficient stone-age technology necessary as a first stage of development; the availability of easy-to domesticate, highly productive plants and animals enabling people in Mesopotamia to become farmers and produce enough of a surplus to build cities, long before anybody else; and the east-west orientation of the Eurasian continent, with a wide swath in the same latitude with a long growing season and plenty of rain, so that crops developed in Mesopotamia could also be grown as far as western India, all across northern Africa and across southern Europe to its western edge; the absence of major physical barriers also facilitated transfers of inventions (whether in agriculture or devices such as the wheel, practices such as weaving, etc.).
The book's great success ("over 1 million copies sold," the cover proclaims) is mainly because Diamond weaves a coherent story through a huge subject, all human history, that is a plausible alternative to the naïve race theories still current. The problem for many scholars is that the coherence seems too facile, neglecting the complexities of many developments over the millennia and (according to some of those scholars) getting many particulars wrong.
The other reason for both the book's popularity and many scholars' impatience is that Diamond repeats his essential points over and over. This makes it hard to miss them, which must be convenient for the distracted undergraduate, but is wearisome for the attentive reader, especially one who is already familiar with many of the arguments.
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