President Thabo Mbeki has launched a campaign for an international economic system more advantageous to developing countries Howard Barrell President Thabo Mbeki is not given to timidity when it comes to “the vision thing”, as George Bush called it. Having declared his intention as vice president to rouse Africa into renaissance, as president he is now trying to recast the world economic system – to the greater benefit of developing countries. Mbeki, evidently, likes to think in epochs. The rest of us may be more limited – more modest perhaps – but he inhabits a world of grand historical currents. He has come in for some stick for this in recent months. For, notwithstanding the scale and sweep of his global schemes, they have failed to obscure South Africa’s many unresolved domestic problems and the less conspicuous forms of attention he has devoted to them.
Staff in the presidency and at the top of the Department of Foreign Affairs, however, fiercely defend Mbeki’s grander concerns. They argue these campaigns are intimately connected to his attempts to resolve the problems at home. They clearly have a point in the case of his campaign for an international economic system more advantageous to developing countries. There is, however, one important proviso. It is this: in championing the cause of the weakest or worst- managed developing countries, Mbeki has to be careful that he does not leave behind in the minds of, say, his (often quite ignorant) foreign-investor audiences the impression that South Africa should be classified together with, for example, dirt-poor Guinea-Bissau. Put another way: Guinea-Bissau’s first need may be for more and better directed aid, but South Africa’s is for more investment and better terms of trade. Sipho Pityana, Director General of Foreign Affairs, says Mbeki and his department are alive to the distinction that needs to be drawn when it comes to marketing South Africa and advancing its national interests.
Mbeki has recently made a number of major speeches on his vision of a fairer economic system. His theme has been, as he told a meeting of businessmen on the eve of the Durban Commonwealth Conference in November last year: “It cannot be beyond our human capabilities to find practical ways … to build a world economy that results in an end to poverty and the reduction of the disparity between rich and poor.” Mbeki’s point of departure appears to be that it is impossible to put the clock back to some pre- globalisation era. What is needed, therefore, is to order the globalised economy in a way that is more beneficial to developing countries. In taking forward his argument, he is presenting himself as a social democrat – explicitly in a joint statement he issued earlier this year with Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson and Chilean President Ricardo Lagos. “As social democrats, we …,” it declares. The three men also say at one point: “We recognise and welcome the potential for development created by globalisation. We want market economies, but not market societies. We are dissatisfied because the growth and development produced so far have not contributed sufficiently to alleviating poverty and promoting equality in large parts of the world. On the contrary, they have made the rich richer and marginalised even more the excluded.”
Mbeki’s strategic audience in this campaign consists – at this stage – of leaders of the major economic powers. He has picked up on some of their statements and sought to set the agenda and criteria for reordering the world economy. This has meant Mbeki paying close attention to the utterances of United States President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, German Chancellor Gerhard Schr”der and French President Jacques Chirac – and engaging them on his frequent trips abroad. There, Mbeki’s tone has not been hectoring. Rather, it has been suggestive. One particularly fruitful opening for Mbeki came in an address Clinton gave to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in September 1998. Clinton said: “If citizens tire of waiting for democracy and free markets to deliver a better life to them, there is a real risk that democracy and free markets, instead of continuing to thrive together, will begin to shrivel.” It has enabled Mbeki to suggest how the relationship between democracy and the market might be preserved in the developing world. Moreover, Mbeki has served notice that he plans to help develop popular movements in the richer countries – perhaps along the lines of the former anti-apartheid movements – to put pressure on their governments to make the necessary concessions to the developing world. Addressing the South Summit in Havana, Cuba, in April, Mbeki said: “We must work for the mobilisation of the masses of the countries of the North to sensitise them to the imperative to eliminate global poverty and inequality, in the interests of all humanity”. The kernel of such a movement may already exist – as protests at the recent conference of the World Trade Organisation in Seattle showed. As a result of his recent interventions, Mbeki has emerged over the past six months as the developing countries’ single most important voice on the world economy.
His message is not particularly original, according to economists, but it is comprehensive. At its centre is the old imponderable: how do you get the rich to accept that they may enrich not merely others but also themselves if they spread their riches around a little? The basic elements of Mbeki’s message are: increase aid budgets to poor countries and improve the design and targeting of it; ease the criteria to forgive the debt incurred by poor countries, which has reached ridiculous (even meaningless) proportions; encourage investment flows and technology transfers to developing countries; and relax access to rich countries’ markets for developing countries’ exports. It would be a mistake, however, to believe that Mbeki is merely calling for improvements of degree across these various forms of economic activity. He believes the world, the rich in particular, must and can fundamentally alter their way of interacting with the developing world – in the interests of all.