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Ed Webb

What Black America Means to Europe | by Gary Younge | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

  • Europe’s identification with Black America, particularly during times of crisis, resistance, and trauma, has a long and complex history. It is fuelled in no small part by traditions of internationalism and anti-racism on the European Left, where the likes of Paul Robeson, Richard Wright, and Audre Lorde would find an ideological—and, at times, literal—home.
  • But this tradition of political identification with Black America also leaves significant space for the European continent’s inferiority complex, as it seeks to shroud its relative military and economic weakness in relation to America with a moral confidence that conveniently ignores both its colonial past and its own racist present.
  • the number of Europeans of color—particularly in the cities of Britain, Holland, France, Belgium, Portugal, and Italy—has grown considerably. They are either the descendants of former colonies (“We are here because you were there”) or the more recent immigrants who may be asylum-seekers, refugees, or economic migrants. These communities, too, seek to pollinate their own, local struggles for racial justice with the more visible interventions taking place in America. “The American Negro has no conception of the hundreds of millions of other non-whites’ concern for him,” Malcolm X observed in his autobiography. “He has no conception of their feeling of brotherhood for and with him.”
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  • transnational protests have become more frequent now because of social media. Images and videos of police brutality and the mass demonstrations in response, distributed through diasporas and beyond, can energize and galvanize large numbers quickly. The pace at which these connections can be both made and amplified has been boosted, just as the extent of their appeal has broadened. Trayvon Martin was a household name in Europe in a way that Emmett Till never has been.
  • Well into my thirties, I was far more knowledgeable about the literature and history of Black America than I was about that of Black Britain, where I was born and raised, or indeed of the Caribbean, where my parents are from. Black America has a hegemonic authority in the black diaspora because, marginalized though it has been within America, it has a reach that no other black minority can match.
  • the power of empire. The closer you are to the center, the less you need know about the periphery, and vice-versa
  • Europe has every bit as vile a history of racism as the Americas—indeed, the histories are entwined. The most pertinent difference between Europe and the US in this regard is simply that Europe practiced its most egregious forms of anti-black racism—slavery, colonialism, segregation—outside its borders. America internalized those things.
  • George Floyd’s killing comes at a moment when America’s standing has never been lower in Europe. With his bigotry, misogyny, xenophobia, ignorance, vanity, venality, bullishness, and bluster, Donald Trump epitomizes everything most Europeans loathe about the worst aspects of American power. The day after Trump’s inauguration, there were women’s marches in eighty-four countries; and today, his arrival in most European capitals provokes huge protests. By his behavior at international meetings, and his resolve to pull out of the World Health Organization in the middle of a pandemic, he has made his contempt for the rest of the world clear. And, for the most part, it is warmly reciprocated.
  • Although police killings are a constant, gruesome feature of American life, to many Europeans this particular murder stands as confirmation of the injustices of this broader political period. It illustrates a resurgence of white, nativist violence blessed with the power of the state and emboldened from the highest office. It exemplifies a democracy in crisis, with security forces running amok and terrorizing their own citizens. The killing of George Floyd stands not just as a murder but as a metaphor.
  • There has always been a strong internationalist current of anti-racism, alongside anti-fascism, in the European Left tradition, which provided fertile ground for the struggles of African Americans. Back in the 1860s, Lancashire mill workers, despite being impoverished themselves by the blockade on Confederacy that caused the supply of cotton to dry up, resisted calls to end the boycott of Southern goods, though it cost them their livelihoods. In the early 1970s, the Free Angela Davis campaign told The New York Times that it had received 100,000 letters of support from East Germany alone—too many to even open.
  • If Europe has a proven talent for anti-racist solidarity with Black America, one that has once again come to fore with the uprisings in the US, it also has a history of exporting racism around the world
  • the rejection of US foreign policy and power—at times, reflexive and crude but rarely completely unjustified—never entailed a wholescale repudiation of American culture or potential.
  • Our civil rights movement was in Jamaica, Ghana, India, and so on. In the post-colonial era, this offshoring of responsibility has left significant room for denial, distortion, ignorance, and sophistry when it comes to understanding that history.
  • “It is quite true that the English are hypocritical about their Empire,” wrote George Orwell in “England Your England.” “In the working class this hypocrisy takes the form of not knowing that the Empire exists.” In 1951, a decade after that essay was published, the UK government’s social survey revealed that nearly three-fifths of respondents could not name a single British colony.
  • One in two Dutch people, one in three of Britons, one in four of the French and Belgians, and one in five Italians believe that their country’s former empire is something to be proud of, according to a YouGov poll from March of this year.
  • only one in twenty Dutch, one in seven French, one in five Britons, and one in four Belgians and Italians regard their former empires as something to be ashamed of
  • The level of understanding about race and racism among white Europeans, even those who would consider themselves sympathetic, cultured, and informed, is woefully low
  • Fascism is once again a mainstream ideology on the continent, with openly racist parties a central feature of the landscape, framing policy and debate even when they are not in power. There are no viral videos of refugees in their last desperate moments, struggling for breath before plunging into the Mediterranean (possibly headed to a country, Italy, that levies fines on anyone who does rescue them).
  • Levels of incarceration, unemployment, deprivation, and poverty are all higher for black Europeans. Perhaps only because the continent is not blighted by the gun culture of the US, racism here is less lethal. But it is just as prevalent in other ways. Racial disparities in Covid-19 mortality in Britain, for example, are comparable to those in America. Between 2005 and 2015, there were race-related riots or rebellions in Britain, Italy, Belgium, France, and Bulgaria. The precariousness of black life in late capitalism is not unique to America, even if it is most often and glaringly laid bare there. To that extent, Black Lives Matter exists as a floating signifier that can find a home in most European cities and beyond.
  • There is no reason, of course, why the existence of racism in one place should deny one the right to talk about racism in another place. (If that were the case, the anti-apartheid movement would never have got off the ground in the West.) But it does mean having to be mindful about how one does it.
  • In my experience, drawing connections, continuities, and contrasts between the racisms on either side of the Atlantic invites something between rebuke and confusion from many white European liberals. Few will deny the existence of racism in their own countries but they insist on trying to force an admission that it “is better ‘here than there’”—as though we should be happy with the racism we have.
  • “Racism’s bad everywhere,” has always been my retort. “There really is no ‘better’ kind.”
Ed Webb

Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through une... - 0 views

  • Unequal exchange theory posits that economic growth in the “advanced economies” of the global North relies on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through price differentials in international trade.
  • Our results show that in 2015 the North net appropriated from the South 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour, worth $10.8 trillion in Northern prices – enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over.
  • Our analysis confirms that unequal exchange is a significant driver of global inequality, uneven development, and ecological breakdown.
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  • Historians have demonstrated that the rise of Western Europe depended in large part on natural resources and labour forcibly appropriated from the global South during the colonial period, on a vast scale. Spain extracted gold and silver from the Andes, Portugal extracted sugar from Brazil, France extracted fossil fuels, minerals and agricultural products from West Africa, Belgium extracted rubber from the Congo; and Britain extracted cotton, opium, grain, timber, tea and countless other commodities from its colonies around the world – all of which entailed the exploitation of Southern labour on coercive terms, including through mass enslavement and indenture. This pattern of appropriation was central to Europe’s industrial growth, and to financing the expansion and industrialization of European settler colonies, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, which went on to develop similarly imperialist orientations toward the South
  • Today, we are told, the world economy functions as a meritocracy: countries that have strong institutions, good markets, and a steadfast work ethic become rich and successful, while countries that lack these things, or which are hobbled by corruption and bad governance, remain poor. This assumption underpins dominant perspectives in the field of international development (Sachs, 2005, Collier, 2007, Rostow, 1990, Moyo, 2010, Calderisi, 2007, Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012), and is reinforced by the rhetoric, common among neoclassical economists, that free-trade globalization has created an “even playing field”.
  • Emmanuel and Amin argued that unequal exchange enables a “hidden transfer of value” from the global South to the global North, or from periphery to core, which takes place subtly and almost invisibly, without the overt coercion of the colonial apparatus and therefore without provoking moral outrage. Prices are naturalized on the grounds that they represent “utility”, or “value”, or the outcome of “market mechanisms” such as supply and demand, obscuring the extent to which they are determined by power imbalances in the global political economy. Price differentials in international trade therefore function as an effective method of maintaining the patterns of appropriation that once overtly defined the colonial economy, allowing blame for “underdevelopment” to be shifted onto the victims.
  • Historians have demonstrated that the rise of Western Europe depended in large part on natural resources and labour forcibly appropriated from the global South during the colonial period, on a vast scale. Spain extracted gold and silver from the Andes, Portugal extracted sugar from Brazil, France extracted fossil fuels, minerals and agricultural products from West Africa, Belgium extracted rubber from the Congo; and Britain extracted cotton, opium, grain, timber, tea and countless other commodities from its colonies around the world – all of which entailed the exploitation of Southern labour on coercive terms, including through mass enslavement and indenture. This pattern of appropriation was central to Europe’s industrial growth, and to financing the expansion and industrialization of European settler colonies, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, which went on to develop similarly imperialist orientations toward the South (e.g., Naoroji, 1902, Pomeranz, 2000, Beckert, 2015, Moore, 2015, Bhambra, 2017, Patnaik, 2018, Davis, 2002).
  • for every unit of embodied resources and labour that the South imports from the North they have to export many more units to pay for it, enabling the North to achieve a net appropriation through trade. This dynamic was theorized by Emmanuel (1972) and Amin (1978) as a process of “unequal exchange”.Emmanuel and Amin argued that unequal exchange enables a “hidden transfer of value” from the global South to the global North, or from periphery to core, which takes place subtly and almost invisibly, without the overt coercion of the colonial apparatus and therefore without provoking moral outrage. Prices are naturalized on the grounds that they represent “utility”, or “value”, or the outcome of “market mechanisms” such as supply and demand, obscuring the extent to which they are determined by power imbalances in the global political economy. Price differentials in international trade therefore function as an effective method of maintaining the patterns of appropriation that once overtly defined the colonial economy, allowing blame for “underdevelopment” to be shifted onto the victims.
  • Following Dorninger et al. (2021), we use a “footprint” analysis of input–output data to quantify the physical scale of raw materials, land, energy and labour embodied in trade between the North and South, looking not only at traded goods themselves but also the upstream resources and labour that go into producing and transporting those goods, including the machines, factories, infrastructure, etc.
  • Grounding our analysis in the physical dimensions of unequal exchange is important for several reasons. First, these resources – raw materials, land, labour and energy – embody the productive potential that is required for meeting human needs (use-value) and for generating economic growth (exchange-value). Physical drain is therefore ultimately what drives global inequalities in terms of access to provisions, as well as in terms of GDP or income (see Hornborg, 2020). Second, this approach allows us to maintain sight of the ecological impacts of unequal exchange. We know that excess energy and material consumption in high-income nations, facilitated by appropriation from the rest of the world, is causing ecological breakdown on a global scale. Tracing flows of resources embodied in trade allows us to determine the extent to which Northern appropriation is responsible for ecological impacts in the South; i.e., ecological debt (Roberts and Parks, 2009, Warlenius et al., 2015, Hornborg and Martinez-Alier, 2016).
  • Due to the growing fragmentation of international commodity chains, monetary databases on bilateral gross trade flows have been criticised for not accurately depicting the monetary interdependencies between national economies (Johnson and Noguera, 2012), i.e., the amount of a countries’ value added that is induced by foreign final demand and international trade relations. Trade in Value Added (TiVA) indicators Johnson and Noguera, 2012, Timmer et al., 2014 are designed to take into account the complexity of the global economy. The TiVA concept is motivated by the fact that, in monetary terms, trade in intermediates accounts for approximately two-thirds of international trade. Imports (of intermediates) are used to produce exports and hence bilateral gross exports may include inputs (i.e., value added) from third party countries (Stehrer, 2012). TiVA reveals where (e.g., in which country or industry) and how (e.g. by capital or labour) value is added or captured in global commodity chains (Timmer et al., 2014).
  • TiVA, which is sometimes referred to as the “value footprint”, is the monetary counterpart of the MRIO-based environmental footprint because both indicators follow the same system boundaries, i.e., all supply chains between production and final consumption of two countries including all direct and indirect interlinkages. Moreover, in contrast to global bilateral monetary trade flows, TiVA is globally balanced, meaning that national exports and imports globally sum up to zero. This is an important feature of the TiVA indicator that facilitates more consistent and unambiguous assessments.
  • for every unit of embodied raw material equivalent that the South imports from the North, they have to export on average five units to “pay” for it
  • For land the average ratio is also 5:1, for energy it is 3:1, and for labour it is 13:1
  • Table 1. Resource drain from the South.ResourceNorth → South flows 2015South → North flows 2015Drain from South in 2015Cumulative drain from South 1990–2015Raw material equivalents [Gt]3.3715.3912.02254.40Embodied land [mn ha]527.421,349.01821.5932,987.23Embodied energy [EJ]21.5543.5121.06650.34Embodied labour [mn py-eq]31.11219.22188.125,956.62
  • in the year 2015 the North’s net appropriation from the South totalled 12 billion tons of raw materials, 822 million hectares of land, 21 exajoules of energy (equivalent to 3.4 billion barrels of oil), and 188 million person-years equivalents of labour (equivalent to 392 billion hours of work). By net appropriation we mean that these resources are not compensated in equivalent terms through trade; they are effectively transferred gratis. And this appropriation is not insignificant in scale; on the contrary, it comprises a large share (on average about a quarter) of the North’s total consumption.
  • significant consequences for the global South, in terms of lost use-value. This quantity of Southern raw materials, land, energy and labour could be used to provision for human needs and develop sovereign industrial capacity in the South, but instead it is mobilized around servicing consumption in the global North.
  • Eight hundred and twenty-two million hectares of land, which is twice the size of India, would in theory be enough to provide nutritious food for up to 6 billion people, depending on land productivity and diet composition
  • material use is tightly linked to environmental pressures. It accounts for more than 90% of variation in environmental damage indicators (Steinmann et al., 2017), and more than 90% of biodiversity loss and water stress (International Resource Panel, 2019). Moreover, as Van der Voet et al. (2004) demonstrate, while impacts vary by material, and vary as technologies change, there is a coupling between aggregate mass flows and ecological impact. Net flows of material resources from South to North mean that much of the impact of material consumption in the North (43% of it, net of trade) is suffered in the South. The damage is offshored.
  • Industrial ecologists hold that global extraction and use of materials should not exceed 50 billion tons per year (Bringezu, 2015). In 2015, the global economy was using 87 billion tons per year, overshooting the boundary by 74% and driving ecological breakdown. This overshoot is due almost entirely to excess resource consumption in global North countries. The North consumed 26.71 tons of materials per capita in 2015, which is roughly four times over the sustainable threshold (6.80 tons per capita in 2015). Our results indicate that most of the North’s excess consumption (58% of it) is sustained by net appropriation from the global South; without this appropriation, material use in high-income nations would be much closer to the sustainable level.
  • In consumption-based terms, the North is responsible for 92% of carbon dioxide emissions in excess of the planetary boundary (350 ppm atmospheric concentration of CO2) (Hickel, 2020), while the consequences harm the South disproportionately, inflicting dramatic social and economic costs (Kikstra et al., 2021b, Srinivasan et al., 2008). The South suffers 82–92% of the costs of climate change, and 98–99% of the deaths associated with climate change (DARA, 2012)
  • Net appropriation of land means soil depletion, water depletion, and chemical runoff are offshored; net appropriation of energy means that the health impacts of particulate pollution are offshored; net appropriation of labour means that the negative social impacts of exploitation are offshored, etc (Wiedmann and Lenzen, 2018). In the case of non-renewable resources there is also a problem of depletion: resources appropriated from the South are no longer available for future generations to use (Costanza and Daly, 1992, World Bank, 2018), which is particularly problematic given that under conditions of net appropriation economic losses are not offset by investments in capital stock (cf. Hartwick, 1977). Finally, the extractivism that underpins resource appropriation generates social dislocations and conflicts at resource frontiers (Martinez-Alier, 2021).
  • the value of resources and labour cannot be quantified in dollars, and there is no such thing as a “correct” price.
  • Prices under capitalism do not reflect value or utility in any objective way. Rather, they reflect, among other things, the (im)balance of power between market agents (capital and labour, core and periphery, lead firms and their suppliers, etc); in other words, they are a political artefact
  • While prices by definition do not reflect value, they do allow us to compare the scale of drain to prevailing monetary representations of production and income in the world economy.
  • Fig. 2 shows that drain from the South in 2015 amounted to $14.1 trillion when measured in terms of raw material equivalents, $5.1 trillion when measured in terms of land, $3.6 trillion when measured in terms of energy and $20.3 trillion when measured in terms of labour.
  • Over the period 1990–2015, the drain sums to $242 trillion (constant 2010 USD). This represents a significant “windfall” for the North, similar to the windfall that was derived from colonial forms of appropriation; i.e., goods that did not have to be produced on the domestic landmass or with domestic labour, and did not have to be bought on the domestic market, or paid for with exports (see Pomeranz, 2000, Patnaik, 2018). While previous studies have shown that the price distortion factor increased dramatically during the structural adjustment period in the 1980’s (Hickel et al., 2021), our data confirms that since the early- to mid-1990’s it has tended to decline slightly. This means that the increase in drain during the period 1990–2007, prior to the global financial crisis, was driven primarily by an increase in the volume of international trade rather than by an increase in price distortion.
  • Table 3 shows that, over the 1990–2015 period, resources appropriated from the South have been worth on average roughly a quarter of Northern GDP.
  • the North’s reliance on appropriation from the South has generally increased over the period (despite a significant drop after the global financial crisis), whereas the South’s losses as a share of total economic activity have generally decreased, particularly since 2003, due to an increase in South-South trading and higher domestic GDP creation or capture within the South, both driven largely by China
  • Aid flows create the powerful impression that rich countries give benevolently to poorer countries. But the data on drain through unequal exchange raises significant questions about this narrative.
  • net appropriation by DAC countries through unequal exchange from 1990 to 2015 outstripped their aid disbursements over the same period by a factor of almost 80
  • for every dollar of aid that donors give, they appropriate resources worth 80 dollars through unequal exchange. From the perspective of aid recipients, for every dollar they receive in aid they lose resources worth 30 dollars through drain
  • The dominant narrative of international development holds that poor countries are poor because of their own internal failings and are therefore in need of assistance. But the empirical evidence on unequal exchange demonstrates that poor countries are poor in large part because they are exploited within the global economy and are therefore in need of justice. These results indicate that combating the deleterious effects of unequal exchange by making the global economy fairer and more equitable would be much more effective, in terms of development, than charity.
  • In an equitable world, the resource trade deficit that the North sustains in relation to the South would be financed with a parallel monetary trade deficit. But in reality, the monetary trade deficit is very small, equivalent to only about 1% of global trade revenues, and fluctuates between North and South. In effect, this means that the North achieves its large net appropriation of resources and labour from the South gratis.
  • The question of sectoral disparities has been moot since the 1980s, however, as industrial production has shifted overwhelmingly to the South. The majority of Southern exports (70%) consist of manufactured goods (data from UNCTAD; see Smith, 2016). Of all the manufactured goods that the USA imports, 60% are produced in developing countries. For Japan it is 70%. We can see this pattern reflected also in the industrial workforce. As of 2010, at least 79% of the world’s industrial workers live in the South (data from the ILO; see Smith, 2016). This shift is due in large part to the rise of global commodity chains, which now constitute 70% of international trade. Between 1995 and 2013, there has been an increase of 157 million jobs related to global commodity chains, and an estimated 116 million of them are concentrated in the South, predominantly in the export manufacturing sector (ILO, 2015). In other words, during the period we analyse in this paper (1990–2015), the South has contributed the majority of the world’s industrial production, including high-technology production such as computers and cars. And yet price inequalities remain entrenched.
  • if Northern states or firms leverage monopoly power within global commodity chains to depress the prices of imports and increase the prices of final products, their labour “productivity” appears to improve, and that of their counterparts declines, even if the underlying production process remains unchanged. Indeed, empirical evidence indicates that real productivity differences between workers are minimal, and cannot explain wage inequalities (Hunter et al., 1990).
  • wage inequalities exist not because Southern workers are less productive but because they are more intensively exploited, and often subject to rigid systems of labour control and discipline designed to maximize extraction (Suwandi et al., 2019). Indeed, this is a major reason why Northern firms offshore production to the South in the first place: because labour is cheaper per unit of physical output (Goldman, 2012).
  • the terminology of “value-added” is a misnomer. In international trade, TiVA does not tell us who adds more value but rather who has more power to command prices. And in the case of global commodity chains, TiVA does not indicate where value is produced but rather where it is captured (Smith, 2016).
  • our analysis reveals that value in global commodity chains is disproportionately produced by the South, but disproportionately captured by the North (as GDP). Value captured in this manner is misleadingly attributed to Northern economic activities
  • rich countries are able to maintain price inequalities simply by virtue of being rich. This finding supports longstanding claims by political economists that, all else being equal, price inequalities are an artefact of power. Just as in a national economy wage rates are an artefact of the relative bargaining power of labour vis-à-vis capital, so too in international trade prices are an artefact of the relative bargaining power of national economies and corporate actors vis-à-vis their trading partners and suppliers. Countries that grew rich during the colonial period are now able to leverage their economic dominance to depress the costs of labour and resources extracted from the South. In other words, the North “finances” net appropriation from the South not with money, but rather by maintaining the prices of Southern resources and labour below the global average level.
  • Patents play a key role here: 97% of all patents are held by corporations in high-income countries (Chang, 2008:141)
  • In some cases, patents involve forcing people in the South to pay for access to resources they might otherwise have obtained much more affordably, or even for free (Shiva, 2001, Shiva, 2016).
  • In the World Bank and the IMF, Northern states hold a majority of votes (and the US holds a veto), thus giving them control over key economic policy decisions. In the World Trade Organization (which controls tariffs, subsidies, and patents), bargaining power is determined by market size, enabling high-income nations to set trade rules in their own interests.
  • ubsidized agricultural exports from the North undermine subsistence economies in the South and contribute to dispossession and unemployment, placing downward pressure on wages. Militarized borders preclude easy migration from South to North, thus preventing wage convergence. Moreover, structural adjustment programs (SAPs) imposed by the World Bank and IMF since the 1980s have cut public sector salaries and employment, rolled back labour rights, curtailed unions, and gutted environmental regulations (Khor, 1995, Petras and Veltmeyer, 2002).
  • SAPs, bilateral free trade agreements, and the World Trade Organization have forced global South governments to remove tariffs, subsidies and other protections for infant industries. This prevents governments from attempting import substitution, which would improve their export prices and drive Northern prices down. Tax evasion and illicit financial flows out of the South (which total more than $1 trillion per year) drain resources that might otherwise be reinvested domestically, or which governments might otherwise use to build national industries. This problem is compounded by external debt service obligations, which drain government revenue and require obeisance to economic policies dictated by creditors (Hickel, 2017). In addition, structural dependence on foreign investors and access to Northern markets forces Southern governments and firms to compete with one another by cutting wages and resource prices in a race to the bottom.
  • structural power imbalances in the world economy ensure that labour and resources in the South remain cheap and accessible to international capital, while Northern exports enjoy comparatively higher prices
  • Cheap labour and raw materials in the global South are not “naturally” cheap, as if their cheapness was written in the stars. They are actively cheapened
  • the analysis obscures class and geographic inequalities within countries and regions, which are significant when it comes to labour prices as well as resource consumption. The high levels of resource consumption that characterize Northern economies are driven disproportionately by rich individuals and affluent areas, as well as by corporations that control supply chains, and enabled by internal patterns of exploitation and unequal exchange in addition to drain through trade (Harvey, 2005). For example, there are marginalized regions of the United States that serve as an “internal periphery” (Wishart, 2014). It would also be useful to explore the gender dynamics of unequal exchange within countries. These questions cannot be answered with our data, however.
  • This research confirms that the “advanced economies” of the global North rely on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through induced price differentials in international trade. By combining insights from the classical literature on unequal exchange with contemporary insights about global commodity chains and new methods for quantifying the physical scale of embodied resource transfers, we are able to develop a novel approach to estimating the scale and value of resource drain from the global South. Our results show that, when measured in Northern prices, the drain amounted to $10.8 trillion in 2015, and $242 trillion over the period from 1990 to 2015 – a significant windfall for the North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. Meanwhile, the South’s losses through unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30.
  • support contemporary demands for reparations for ecological debt, as articulated by environmental justice movements and by the G77
  • True repair requires permanently ending the unequal distribution of environmental goods and burdens between the global North and global South, restoring damaged ecosystems, and shifting to a regenerative economic system.
  • It is clear that official development assistance is not a meaningful solution to global poverty and inequality; nor is the claim that global South countries need more economic liberalisation and export-oriented market integration. The core problem is that low- and middle-income countries are integrated into the global economy on fundamentally unequal terms. Rectifying this problem is critical to ensuring that global South countries have the financial, physical and human resources they need to improve social outcomes.
  • democratize the institutions of global economic governance, such as the World Bank, IMF and WTO, so that global South countries have more control over trade and finance policy.
  • end the North’s use of unfair subsidies for agricultural exports, and remove structural adjustment conditions on international finance, which would help mitigate downward pressure on wages and resource prices in the South while at the same time enabling Southern countries to build sovereign industrial capacity
  • a global living wage system, and a global system of environmental regulations, would effectively put a floor on labour and resource prices
  • Reducing North-South price differentials would in turn reduce the scale of the North’s net resource appropriation from the South (in other words, it would reduce ecologically unequal exchange), thus reducing excess consumption in the North and the ecological impacts that it inflicts on the South.
  • Structural transformation will only be achieved through political struggle from below, including by the anti-colonial and environmental justice movements that continue to fight against imperialism today
Ed Webb

What Gingrich Didn't Learn in Congo - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    In shocking news, Newt probably speaks and reads French.
Ed Webb

Josep Borrell's European 'garden' is built on the plunder of the 'jungle' | Middle East... - 0 views

  • Continuing the racist metaphor which Israel's former prime minister, the Lithuanian-born Ehud Barak, née Brog, posited in 2002 when he described Israel as a "villa in the jungle", European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell declared last week that "Europe is a garden. We have built a garden…The rest of the world – and you know this very well, Federica [Mogherini] – is not exactly a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden." 
  • In the 19th and much of the 20th century, the favourite metaphor that European colonial racists used against the rest of the world was that Europe represented "civilisation", while the rest of the world represented "savagery" and "barbarism". The indigenous peoples of the Americas were described early on as savages. Any resistance to Europe’s colonial genocides then or later was considered nothing short of barbarism, as the French described the resistance of the enslaved Africans of Saint Domingue, the Algerian people, the Kanak of New Caledonia, among many others.
  • Europe’s liberal luminaries like John Stuart Mill argued that “nations which are still barbarous have not got beyond the period during which it is likely to be for their benefit that they should be conquered and held in subjection by foreigners.”
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  • Like de Tocqueville before him, and even like Israel’s former prime minister, the Ukrainian-born Golda Meir (née Mabovitch), who was unable to sleep worrying about how many Palestinian children were being conceived or born every night, Borrell’s main worry is about the inhabitants of the jungle invading the garden.
  • Borrell used the Malthusian language of population control when he expressed his concern to Mogherini that "the jungle has a strong growth capacity, and the wall will never be high enough in order to protect the garden".
  • Borrell’s imperialist and racist metaphor was spewed as part of his opening remarks at the European Diplomatic Academy in Bruges last week and were addressed to the Italian Islam expert and former communist Federica Mogherini, rector of the College of Europe.
  • What is most bewildering about Borrell’s speech is not its ignorance of colonialism and neocolonialism, of which he is evidently aware, but that he thinks they only affect the “jungle” but not the “garden”.
  • "There is a big difference between Europe and the rest of the world – well, the rest of the world, understand me what I mean, no? - is that we have strong institutions. The big difference between developed and not developed is not the economy, it is institutions.”
  • It seems that Europe’s own colonial and neocolonial institutions are not what made it possible to build the European "garden" - with the labour of immigrants from the “rest of the world” and with the stolen wealth of the "rest of the world". Rather, according to Borrell and the rest of Europe’s white supremacists, with the fantasised ingenuity of Europeans themselves.
  • It is colonialism and slavery that built the European "garden" - from Portugal to France, to Belgium and the Netherlands - and not Europeans’ ingenuity or goodwill. Borrell’s worry about a potential new European neocolonialism is nothing short of a smokescreen to cover up Europe’s ongoing and actual neocolonialism in Asia and Africa.
  • De Tocqueville, who was so enamoured of the US republic of slavery, which he dubbed a "democracy", wrote that white Americans have much "national vanity": "The Americans, in their intercourse with strangers, appear impatient of the smallest censure and insatiable of praise... They unceasingly harass you to extort praise, and if you resist their entreaties they fall to praising themselves. It would seem as if, doubting their own merit, they wished to have it constantly exhibited before their eyes. Their vanity is not only greedy, but restless and jealous." Europeans clearly suffer from a similar ailment. Borrell volunteers that: “The world needs Europe. My experience of travelling around the world is that people look at us as a beacon. Why [do] so many people come to Europe? Are there flows of illegal or irregular migrants going to Russia? Not many. No, they are coming to Europe but for good reasons." 
  • Those Asians and Africans who flock to Europe, and are able to jump over its high walls, are following their stolen wealth to be able to live.
  • “We are not a young people with an innocent record and a scanty inheritance... We have engrossed to ourselves an altogether disproportionate share of the wealth and traffic of the world. We have got all we want in territory, and our claim to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less reasonable to others than to us."
  • Borrell’s final clarion call to young Europeans that they must “keep the garden, be good gardeners. But your duty will not be to take care of the garden itself but [of] the jungle outside", is indeed nothing short of another directive for them to be better racists and colonialists. This is hardly a new call. Plus ça change!
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