by Paul Collier
A PERSONAL POSTSCRIPT
Ten years ago, my wife and I faced a moral choice. In a further twist in the spiral of divergent fortunes, the infant grandchildren of my cousin were taken into ‘care’ by the paternalist state (a euphemism of Orwellian proportions). Given the current norms of the new British educational elite, we faced no social pressure from the community to take them in ourselves, and our families had a correspondingly undemanding understanding of our responsibilities. I wish I could say that we did not equivocate. It is hard in retrospect to reconstruct the filaments of thought, but one important influence was what that senior generation would have expected of us. Even in death, they exerted a fierce moral pressure on self-respect. Another potent influence, given our long exposure to African culture, was our respect for the African norm of the extended ethical family. Fortuitously, the state made it easy, since new legislation provided a route for the extended family to bypass the excruciating process of adoption. Assisted by unanimity of official and family opinion, we flew through the process in a mere eight of the crucial early months in a flurry of forms, checks and cheques. During that entire year, in a country of 65 million people, only 60 children were adopted through the standard route: hence that statistic of 70,000 children stuck in the limbo of transient foster care, a number which has been rising every year.
When our two toddlers came home, our African friends reacted with a ‘welcome to the club’ shrug. Our British friends told us we were ‘bold’, in the Yes Minister usage, implying ‘you’ll regret this’. Ten years on we are far from regret, but clearer on family obligations. What we stumbled into should be as normal in our societies as it is in Africa. But in an affluent and ethical society what we did should not even be necessary.
6
The Ethical World
What might an ethical world look like? The ideologues each have their own prescriptions. Utilitarian ideology would demand a paternalist global government tasked with arranging fiscal transfers to achieve ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’. Rawlsian lawyers have become increasingly influential in United Nations assertions of ‘human rights’. Joining the cacophony are the emoting celebrity populists: Angelina Jolie, a spokesperson for the headless heart, wants ‘global peace’.
If, instead, we apply the core precepts of Chapter 2, we can conceive of an ethical world analogous to that of an ethical state, an ethical firm and an ethical family.
Precept 1 Recognition of obligations to other societies that are not dependent upon reciprocity: the duties of rescue. These cover obligations to groups such as refugees, those societies facing mass despair, and those lacking the rudiments of justice.
Precept 2 The construction of more far-reaching reciprocal obligations among those countries willing to go further.
Precept 3 This reciprocity is supported by a recognition of common membership of a group, based on common purposive actions that further the enlightened self-interest of each participant.
The international situation of 1945 was about as far from such an ethical world as could be imagined. There were four longstanding nightmares. My parents’ generation had spent a third of their conscious lives in global warfare. They had lived through the collapse of the prosperous global economy into which they had been born, into an opportunistic race of beggar-thy-neighbour protectionism that had led to mutual impoverishment. They had lived through an era of empires – British, French, Russian, Japanese, Austrian, Portuguese, Belgian, German, Italian – that were unravelling under the pressures of their manifest ethical absurdities. And they had lived through the horrors inflicted by fascist and Marxist ideologies that had taken control of Germany, Russia, Spain and Italy. In addition to these inherited disasters, the end of the Second World War bequeathed two new ones: the prospect that the aggressive new communist regimes that controlled around a third of the world would attempt to take over the rest of it; and the immediate reality of a huge pool of refugees resulting from the dislocation of Central Europe.
The political leaders of the time might reasonably have felt overwhelmed by a sense of ‘don’t start from here’. But instead, they began to put together an ethical world, using these three core concepts. They recognized those obligations towards other societies that arise irrespective of whether they are reciprocated – duties of rescue – and began to meet them. They began to tap the vast, unexploited potential of reciprocal obligations between nations by building new purpose-specific clubs. They reinforced the clubs by causal chains that replaced the opportunistic pursuit of immediate self-interest by enlightened self-interest. This was an astounding achievement, and it paid off: the world gradually transformed for the better.
But the lucky generation of leaders who inherited that success did not understand the process that had produced it. The smart Pragmatism that had built success out of the ashes of catastrophe gave way to the appealing narratives of Utilitarian and Rawlsian ideologues who have gradually undermined their inheritance. The current world is nowhere near as unethical as that of 1945, but there is again much work to be done. That story of remarkable achievement, deterioration and the task ahead forms the structure of this chapter.
BUILDING AN ETHICAL WORLD
The fundamental insight of leaders in 1945 was that the opportunistic behaviour of individual nations had to be replaced by common obligations enforced by peer pressure. But peer pressure depends upon recognition of shared identity, something that had been lacking in the 1930s. New clubs of members willing to accept reciprocal obligations were gradually built; shared belonging around purposive actions.
The most pressing priority was international security. In response to the climate of fear created by the Soviet Union, a new club was formed in 1949 – the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The central principle was reciprocal security guarantees among its members. The shared identity was of democracies facing a common threat. There were a few free-riders, but the new obligation was reinforced by an all-too-credible narrative of enlightened self-interest: hang together, or be hanged. Actions matched words, the key moments being the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and the deployment of cruise missiles in the early 1980s. The new reciprocal obligations were successful in keeping the peace while the many internal tensions of communism accumulated.
While the Soviet Union was the new threat, within Europe Germany remained the old fear. France had fought three deadly wars against Germany in a mere seventy years. Enlightened self-interest was yet more obvious, but impeding it were the hatreds that the wars had produced. The solution was a realistically slow process of modest but repeated common endeavours, beginning in 1951 and expanding into the EEC. As with NATO, the central principle of the club was acceptance of reciprocal obligations.
To unwind the beggar-thy-neighbour protectionism of the 1930s, another new club was formed: the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Between 1947 and 1964 it concluded six rounds of reciprocal trade liberalization. Again, the key driver was enlightened self-interest; everyone recognized where protectionism had led.
In response to the Great Depression of the 1930s, a further new club of nations was established. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was a public bank into which a defined membership paid, undertook to abide by a set of rules and supervision, and in return were entitled to loans in the event of crisis. It was, in effect, a giant mutual insurance system.
The common principle of reciprocity underpinning these clubs was reinforced by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which was designed to create peer pressure. It encouraged comparisons through league tables (such as the PISA ranking of educational performance), and by peer reviews of national policies.
These purpose-specific clubs, each with its defined and limited membership, reciprocal obligations within the group, and credible enlightened self-interest, gradually transformed the world. Each came to fruition at its own speed, but their cumulative achievement was astounding.
NATO delivered spectacularly i
n 1989, with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Within Europe, the EEC gradually anchored countries such as Spain, Greece and Portugal to democracy while deepening trade integration, enabling the poorer members to catch up with the richer ones. By its final round in 1986, the GATT had laid the foundations for the huge economic gains of the subsequent expansion of global trade. The IMF backstopped crises, its largest bailout during this entire era being for a British political crisis in 1976, averting the prediction of a New York Times headline that said, ‘Goodbye Britain, nice knowing you’. The country was saved because Keynes and other British officials of a previous generation had established the IMF for just such an eventuality. They should be national heroes.
Alongside these clubs of reciprocal obligations, global leaders built new organizations designed to meet duties of rescue. Again, they were smart. Rather than leave these duties of rescue to each individual affluent country, they built global institutions that used the principle of reciprocity among those affluent nations to enforce new norms of meeting their duties to others. The UNHCR was launched to provide care for refugees; the World Food Programme was launched to provide food during famines; the World Health Organization was launched to provide improved health in the poorest societies. But the apex organization was the World Bank. Its membership was divided into two groups: affluent countries, which disciplined each other into contributing, and poorer countries, which were recipients of the pooled finance.
At the time, these were unprecedented collective responses to the duty of rescue, noble actions that complemented the rise of the reciprocal obligations. No one questioned that any of these duties of rescue should be met, and met collectively. In retrospect, this lack of controversy was remarkable.
In parallel to the new clubs and duty of rescue organizations, the global leaders of 1945 resurrected a proto-world government: an assembly of nations. In place of the failed and defunct League of Nations, founded after the First World War, came the United Nations, whose Security Council was intended to police world order. As with the League of Nations, and despite huge goodwill, it has seldom been effective. The five Permanent Members of the Security Council were a sufficiently small group for reciprocity to be feasible, but the ideological polarization between the USA and the USSR made it impossible to build the trust necessary for enlightened self-interest. Paradoxically, the United Nations achieved its greatest successes by turning itself into a club of the excluded: the ‘Club of 77’ formed by those countries lacking an effective voice in the club-based organizations.
THE EROSION OF THE ETHICAL WORLD
The clubs had worked by reciprocity, underpinned by the norms of loyalty and fairness. As pragmatism gave way to ideology, these were displaced by the norms of care and equality favoured by the WEIRD, and the consequent demands for the inclusion of all based on need. In response to this noble ambition, the clubs expanded both their membership and their aspirations.
NATO grew from its original twelve members to its current size of twenty-nine, taking NATO eastwards. Whereas the original group had some genuine element of reciprocity, the expansion amounted essentially to an extension of an American security guarantee to countries lacking military capacity. The EEC expanded from its initial six-member club into an EU of twenty-eight. The domain of the rules was greatly expanded from trade and democracy to cover most aspects of public policy. The GATT dissolved itself into the World Trade Organization (WTO), with an expansion to near-global membership and a correspondingly vast expansion in its domain of regulation to agriculture, services and intellectual property. Similarly, the IMF expanded to near-global membership and increased its remit.
As the defined groups expanded, the glue that had enforced reciprocal obligations began to weaken.* In response, the organizations could either become less effective or turn themselves into quasi-empires run by an inner core of members who enforced the rules through penalties imposed on subject members. Some organizations took one route, some the other.
First the route to ineffectiveness. In NATO mutuality declined even among the original membership. Only five of the twenty-nine members now meet the club commitment to spend 2 per cent of GDP on defence. In response, American commitment has begun to weaken. But the classic instance of an effective club that morphed into an ineffective globally inclusive organization is the WTO. Whereas the GATT achieved six mutual trade rounds in its first seventeen years, the WTO has failed to conclude even a single round in twenty-three years.
Now, more controversially, the route to empire. The expansion of the EEC into the EU, and of the IMF from a mutual bank for a club to a global fund for poor countries, have changed both into quasi-imperial bodies, through which some governments tell other governments what to do. In the EU, enlightened self-interest, which had infused compliance with purpose, gave way to a wide range of prescriptive norms, set and enforced by an inner group that is currently at loggerheads with three groups of supplicants: eastern members, southern members and Britain. I do not wish either to pass judgement on the norms or to exaggerate the process; in other respects, the EU remains a club of immense value and has the potential to do yet more. But the EU is no longer unambiguously a mutually supportive club: it has increasingly become powerful countries telling other countries what to do.
The IMF morphed into a global fund like the World Bank, whose rationale was to meet duties of rescue. By their nature, duties of rescue are neither reciprocal nor conditional. But both organizations became dominated by an inner core of donor countries that turned duties into power. Donors first made support conditional upon the adoption of particular economic policies. But this idea, bad enough in itself, rapidly got hijacked by politically powerful NGOs. Currently, Western aid is conditioned on environmental and human rights requirements, often so strict that they are not even met in rich societies. For example, all World Bank projects must have ‘environmental impact assessments’. Hydro-electric projects became impossible to finance because NGOs considered that they infringed human rights. Even urban road-widening became blocked by Western human rights campaigners.* Carbon emission standards were imposed on World Bank projects in poor countries that were considerably higher than those practised in high-income countries – a matter of passionate resentment given the severity of Africa’s power shortages.* Again, I do not wish to overstate the case: both organizations still do an immense amount of good and are our primary vehicles for doing much more. But they have been captured for a different agenda.
REBUILDING AN ETHICAL WORLD
We need both the reciprocal clubs and the duties of rescue to work. We need clubs because a paternalist world government is neither feasible nor desirable: its attempts to rule over us all would be overwhelmed by non-compliance. Rather than reviving the old clubs it might be easier to form a new, multipurpose club that reflected the realities of current economic and military power. Such a club should be able to find many opportunities for reciprocal obligations that are globally beneficial. The G20 has sufficient span, but in practice it is too large, disparate and spasmodic to be very effective, and it is beset by free-riding. The G7 is smaller and tighter, but now has the wrong membership, excluding both China and India. A smaller group composed of China, India, the USA, the EU, Russia and Japan would encompass enough of the global economy and military capacity that its collective interest would be to fix global problems even if non-members chose to free-ride. And each member would know that, if it chose to free-ride, the other members would do the same: each is too large to be a free-rider.
Forming such a club faces two challenges. One is that the six have nothing in common, while their individual geopolitical interests conflict. However, for looming global problems such as climate change, pandemics and fragile states, they will increasingly have a common interest. They will also come to recognize a common distinctive characteristic: they, and only they, are large enough collectively to fix these problems, while individually being too large to free-ride on the other five. The
other challenge is the predictable opposition from the headless-heart idealists: what about the excluded? Yet it is very much in the interests of the excluded to have a group that is small enough to surmount the world’s collective-action problem. Others can join in the commitments, as long as the six have informally agreed that each of them must act. The disparate characteristics of the six ensure that there is unlikely to be any issue on which the six agree but which disadvantages everyone else. That is the new club that we need. It will take years to form, but the underlying logic of effective action on critical global issues may gradually drive us there.
Alongside the clubs, we need organizations that meet our duties of rescue more effectively. This is my home turf: I have spent my entire adult life trying to encourage people in affluent societies to recognize that we have such duties to others. We have been doing a terrible job at meeting them; the temptation to grandstand has impeded practical effectiveness, as we can see from the examples below.
Refugees*
I begin with our duty of rescue to refugees. There are 65 million people worldwide who have fled their homes, driven by fear or hunger. A third of them become refugees. They strive to restore normality to their lives: to find somewhere to live that is familiar; to find a job to support their families; and to cluster together with other people from their community. These are reasonable needs, but the government of the neighbouring country may struggle to meet them. Most likely, its own citizens are poor and are finding it hard to meet their needs.
Societies do have obligations to their neighbours that, being naturally reciprocal, can be greater than the non-reciprocal duties of rescue. But with a mass calamity as drastic as an exodus of refugees, there is also a global duty of rescue. A neighbouring haven has reason to complain if you leave it to struggle on its own. Although it should permit refugees to cross the border onto its soil, you are richer: the two of you should be able to co-operate in meeting their duty to neighbourliness and your duty of rescue. Here we can be guided both by the principle of the heart, which demands solidarity with the society that borders on the crisis situation, and the principle of the head, which tells us to divide up our responsibilities according to our comparative advantage.