There are long-standing debates about the utility of foreign aid (sometimes called foreign assistance) as a development tool. Here it is necessary to distinguish among aid for development purposes, aid designed to meet humanitarian needs—be it to help a country recover from a natural disaster, care for refugees, provide basic health care, or donate food to ward off hunger—and aid provided to allies deemed to be strategically critical for general foreign policy purposes, which can consist of military training, arms transfers, or general budgetary support.
Development aid or assistance tends to be focused on providing funds either for specific projects or for helping people directly. What we do know is that aid targeting education pays off, especially when it is focused on the education of girls and women, where reductions in illiteracy and the development of skills can reduce pregnancies, improve the health of children, and lead to productive small-scale economic activity. Studies also show that aid aimed at improving health and increasing access to energy is useful. Specific channeling of aid to such basic needs coupled with careful monitoring appears to be the best approach. Insufficiently targeted aid can perpetuate inefficiencies and lead to corruption and tends to be wasted on expensive vanity projects.
Some things are true of all successful countries. Predictability matters. Companies need to feel confident that their assets will not arbitrarily be seized, that they will be able to market and sell what they produce, and that they can bring a reasonable share of the profits back home. It is no less true that development can only take place (or advance at a meaningful rate) in a context of stability. This translates into both political stability (along with good governance) and physical security, because economic development struggles in their absence. People need to be able to go to school, to work, and to shops. Conflicts will interrupt economic activity and scare off investment and tourists. It is noteworthy that two countries whose HDI ratings have dropped the most in recent years, Syria and Libya, are experiencing serious, prolonged armed conflict.
While there are multiple paths to developing a nation, there are some strategies that have clearly been useful. The introduction of new technologies and training of skilled laborers can translate to increases in productivity. Foreign trade and inbound investments can be a real engine for these improvements. Countries that shift their economic focus away from small-scale agriculture into manufacturing, a change that goes hand in hand with increased urbanization, have also seen boosts to their development. Enforcing the rule of law, property rights protections, and access to capital are vital. Citizens need opportunities, and eliminating barriers to them, especially ones rooted in discrimination based on gender, religion, or ethnicity, is a boon to a country’s quality of life. Investments in education and infrastructure pay dividends. And nations are rewarded for a gradual integration with the rest of the world—as opposed to a rapid integration early in the development process. Countries should look to diversify their economic activities so they can employ more people and provide alternatives to dependence on individual commodities. Relying on commodities such as oil can look good statistically (in terms of the GDP per capita) but in reality can be counterproductive because it lends itself to corruption and can discourage employment-generating economic activity.
In recent decades, countries of the world have joined together in the United Nations to set goals for development. The first set of goals, the Millennium Development Goals, were adopted by the United Nations in 2000. The specific objectives were to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases; and adopt better and more sustainable environmental practices. The intention was to achieve these goals or at least meaningful progress toward them by 2015. As might be expected, the record was mixed. Percentages of extreme poverty, malnourishment, and maternal and child mortality all came down, but the overall number of those in extreme poverty stayed high given population increases. Gender bias and inequality persisted, the number of displaced persons and refugees ballooned, and the effects of climate change grew more severe. And even where there was progress (such as in the dramatic reduction of extreme poverty in China), foreign aid played a negligible role.
The subsequent set of goals, adopted in 2015, are the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals. These cover all of the concerns of the previous goals but with added emphasis on reducing hunger and inequality, protecting people from violent crime and sex trafficking, and ensuring growth does not come at the expense of climate-related concerns. Progress will require concerted effort on the part of governments, international agencies, foundations, businesses, and NGOs. The aim is to see real progress by or before 2030. The expectation is that the record will be uneven, underscoring the reality that development is not just a historical phenomenon but a continuing one.
Part IV
ORDER AND DISORDER
History can be understood as an ongoing narrative of world orders materializing, breaking down, and reemerging in another form. At its core, world order is a description and a measure of the world’s condition at a particular moment or over a specified period of time. World order is a matter of degree and trend, akin to an assessment of an individual’s health in that it reflects a mix of positive and negative elements and can be understood either as a snapshot or as a moving picture.
Order tends to reflect the degree to which there are widely accepted rules as to how international relations ought to be carried out and the degree to which there is a balance of power to buttress those rules so that those who disagree with them are not tempted to violate them or are likely to fail if in fact they do. Any measure of order necessarily includes elements of both order and disorder and the balance between them. There is never total peace, much less complete justice and equality in the world.
All this raises a fundamental question: Why does world order matter as much as it does? When it is in short supply between countries, and in particular the major powers of the day, the loss of life and the absorption of resources can be enormous and the threat to prosperity and freedom substantial. This is the lesson of the two world wars that defined the first half of the twentieth century. This is why world order is so basic, because its existence or absence translates into benefits or costs for everyone given how interconnected the world now is. It is the international relations equivalent of oxygen: with it cooperation on virtually every front becomes possible, while without it prospects for progress fade.
The Australian academic Hedley Bull, in his seminal book The Anarchical Society, writes about international systems and international society. It is a distinction with a difference. An international system is what exists absent any policy decisions; countries and other entities along with various forces simply interact with and affect one another. There is little or nothing in the way of choice or regulation or principles or rules. What distinguishes an international society from a system is that a society reflects a degree of buy-in on the part of its participants, including an acceptance of limits on what is either sought or discouraged, how it is to be sought or discouraged, or both. Elements of a society exist when governments do not use force to resolve disputes, instead turning to diplomacy, or, more positively, when they observe established rules on trade and band together to address climate change, refugees, proliferation, and terrorism.
In the international sphere, the notion of “society” as described by Bull has specific meaning. First, the principal “citizens” of this society are countries. Second, a founding principle of this society is that the governments and leaders who oversee the countries are essentially free to act as they wish within their own borders. How those individuals come to occupy positions of authority, be it by birth, revolution, elections, or some other means, matters not. Third, the members of this international society respect and accept this freedom of action on the part of others (in exchange for others in turn ac
cepting that they can act as they wish within their own borders) and also the existence of other members of this society. It is not far off to describe this approach to international relations as a “live and let live” cross-border understanding.
The title of The Anarchical Society captures the essence of the book, namely, that at any moment in history there are forces promoting anarchy in the world and forces promoting society. The words “chaos” and “disorder” could be substituted for “anarchy,” and “order” for “society,” but whatever the choice of words, the idea could not be clearer. What gives any moment or era of history its character is the balance between these forces. Indeed, it is akin to the balance sheet of a business, but instead of revenues and expenses, or assets and liabilities, what is at issue is the combined strength of those forces tearing the world apart as opposed to those bringing it together.
The framing works for all three previous sections of this book. Each of the four historical eras covered can be understood through the lens of order. The emergence of the modern notion of sovereignty, along with trade, increased order, but the rise of nationalism and the erosion of the balance of power ultimately overwhelmed it and resulted in World War I. Similarly, World War II came about through failures of diplomacy, the reemergence of strident nationalism, the rise of protectionism, and a failure to maintain a balance of power. By contrast, the Cold War stayed cold because forces of order, including diplomacy, arms control, nuclear deterrence, and the NATO alliance, more than offset competing ideologies, proxy wars, a nuclear arms race, the division of Germany and Europe, and more. And as discussed, the character of the post–Cold War era is still being determined, although it is not difficult to identify numerous elements of what Bull terms anarchy and I describe as disarray in my previous book.
This framing can also work at the regional level. The Middle East is the way it is because of the preponderance of forces of anarchy and the relative paucity of those promoting order. In Asia the balance is or at least was markedly different, which goes a long way to explaining why the region has been so successful over the past few decades. What makes Europe worrisome is the erosion on that continent of the main elements of what Bull described as society and the rise of new sources of anarchy. Both Latin America and Africa are characterized by order between countries but in many instances disorder and at times something much worse within them.
And at the global level, what we have seen is that in each domain there are again elements of order and disorder, but that in most of these areas the gap between the two is growing, as the result of governments and others falling short in their willingness or ability to contend with challenges. This reality holds for many of globalization’s realms, in particular those of climate change and cyberspace.
The specifics of what goes into any balance sheet obviously change. The approach of this final section, then, is to discuss order and disorder in a manner that is likely to prove useful no matter what happens with the particulars. It will thus focus on enduring features of both order and disorder to give you the tools you need to understand both the state of play and the trends at the regional and global levels.
Sovereignty, Self-Determination, and Balance of Power
The bedrock of world order, since the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years’ War in Europe in the mid-seventeenth century, has been respect for sovereignty and the idea that borders ought not to be changed forcibly. This has become the closest there is to a universal principle promoting order in the world. Only countries, sometimes referred to as states, nations, or nation-states, can claim sovereignty.
Sovereignty is closely tied to the supremacy of governmental authority within a country’s given borders. This applies to all who live or happen to be present there regardless of the form of government. Individuals and other entities such as corporations have rights, but on most issues they must respect the ultimate authority of the national government and those who act in its name unless the constitution or law of the country provides otherwise. The specifics are for the government and in some cases people of particular countries to decide.
Sovereignty also has an international dimension. Unlike the domestic definition, sovereignty in the international context connotes equality. All countries, no matter what their size or population or power or wealth, are equal in their rights, above all in the notion that their borders are to be respected by other states. Noninterference in the internal affairs of another country is a hallmark of sovereignty and the current world order.
A political entity qualifies as a sovereign country if it possesses supreme political authority and, to paraphrase the nineteenth-century German sociologist Max Weber’s famous conception, a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within its borders. In other words, it can enforce its laws and punish those who break them, and its citizens recognize the government’s authority to do so. The government is supposed to be able to control its borders and regulate all that enters and leaves its territory, from goods to people. In return, a country has the ability to adopt the domestic policies of its choosing. Finally, a country is one recognized by its peers, that is, other sovereign countries. Normally, this recognition manifests itself in the establishment of embassies, the exchange of ambassadors, and diplomatic interactions such as concluding treaties. The UN General Assembly is composed only of entities, that is to say countries, that meet or at their time of entry were thought to meet these criteria. The United Nations currently recognizes 193 countries in the world.
Sovereignty is widely considered near but not quite absolute. An ongoing debate is tied to the question of whether there ought to be legitimate grounds for intervening (including with military force) in the internal affairs of other countries, for example, to prevent genocide, defined as the purposeful destruction of a group of people based on their race, religion, ethnicity, or national identity. Central to this debate is whether order ought to reflect more than relations between countries and take into account what goes on within them.
In recent years, there has been an effort to rebalance the rights of the state and the rights of the individual away from the former and toward the latter. Under this line of thinking, sovereignty is something of a contract between a government and both its citizens and other governments, and when a government is unable or unwilling to live up to its responsibilities, it forfeits some of the rights that normally come with being sovereign. One of these rights is the presumption of noninterference and a free hand for it to do what it wants at home. Eleven years after the civil war and genocide that took place in Rwanda in 1994, the world embraced the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (commonly referred to as R2P), which in principle provides a basis for interventions by other countries or regional or global organizations (be it with words, sanctions, or even military force) in situations in which a government carries out or fails to prevent mass atrocities against people living in its territory.
In practice, the R2P doctrine has not fared well. The United States and its NATO allies invoked R2P to justify their intervention in Libya in 2011, but several governments (above all China and Russia) came to view the doctrine with suspicion when what began as a humanitarian effort to deter attacks against civilians morphed into an effort to oust the ruling regime. It also turns out that R2P can be extraordinarily difficult and costly to carry out, something that helps to explain why the world did little when some 500,000 Syrians lost their lives and a majority of the population was made homeless because of a conflict in Syria that its government has played a central role in. There is also the reality that many governments, including China, Russia, and India, tend to resist any exception to the notion of absolute sovereignty out of concern that a precedent could be established that might be used to constrain what it is they do or would like to do within their own borders.
In addition, when a government allows a terrorist group to operate freely in its territory, it cannot expect its borders to be respected by actual or would-be vi
ctims of that terrorism. This was the case with the Taliban-led Afghan government, which saw its sovereign rights violated after it allowed al-Qaeda to use Afghanistan as a base from which to carry out the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States. Similarly, when one country violates the sovereignty of another country directly, be it with military force or cyberattacks, it legitimizes retaliation against it either in kind or with other means chosen by the victim.
Russia merits special mention given much of the above. On the one hand, its belief in sovereignty is near absolute lest others “interfere” with what goes on politically in Russia. At the same time, Russia has intervened militarily in Ukraine, seizing Crimea and undermining the government’s authority in other parts of the country. In addition, Russia employed various tools in the domain of cyberspace and social media in order to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election in the United States. What all this reveals is that respect for even the most basic of international rules is far from universal.
It should be added that sovereignty can also be voluntarily constrained or even ceded or delegated. This, for example, is what countries do inside the European Union, where they pool their sovereignty, allowing the EU’s various organs to make decisions that affect them. Other countries do something similar in the World Trade Organization. In all such cases, governments do so out of the belief that on balance their interests are better served by engaging in collective decision making even if occasionally decisions are made that they disagree with. What is critical in all these cases is that the transfer of sovereignty is partial and voluntary and can be rescinded at any time.
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