by KEITH NURSE
Two weeks ago, leaders of all the governments of Latin America and the Caribbean (save the coup-installed president of Honduras) concluded a three-day “summit” on Mexico’s Maya Riviera with a majority commitment to move toward the formation of a new hemispheric organization, tentatively called the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States. The proposed organization, which would exclude the United States and Canada, would promote South-South political economic relations as a springboard to development. Six years ago, NACLA published an essay by economist Keith Nurse calling for a similar strategy. We re-publish it here as essential background for an understanding of the new commitment to a strengthening South-South relations in the Americas. NACLA Eds.
(This article originally appeared in the November/December 2003 edition of NACLA Report on the Americas.)
The articulation of an alternative framework for development cannot stop with a critique of the neoliberal agenda championed in recent years by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization. Quite the contrary: While it is true that the institutions that shape patterns of global finance and trade must be confronted forcefully, it is also true that meaningful and sustainable alternatives to the present state of affairs must be premised upon a profound rethinking of the dominant ideas that for the past several decades have shaped the “developmentalist project.” This must involve not only a rethinking of the values and images of a preferred society, but also a reconceptualization of the goals, processes and indicators of development itself.
These ideas are based on the observation that the historical practice of development has failed to address the essence of underdevelopment: the continued leakage of capital and other assets from the developing world to the developed economies. We must remember that underdevelopment has its flipside, overdevelopment, and that to discuss one without the other is to adopt a fragmented view of the development problematic. The argument here is that modernization and the Third World development process has all too often been premised on the notion of “catching-up” to the North. A corollary of this misguided way of framing the problem is that a country can overcome the income gap by borrowing capital, close the technology gap by attracting foreign direct investment, and narrow the cultural gap by adopting western institutions and value systems.1 From the perspective of the developed, western, colonizing countries, this reinforces an ethnocentric conception of development as a “civilizing mission”—a matter of saving “the natives” from themselves.