Abstract
At the beginning of the 1980s, the edifice appeared complete. In a world where the most widely shared political value was the virtue of economic growth, the World Bank had emerged as the Vatican of development, an intellectual mansion forty years in the building—but with much deeper historical origins—a crystal palace that beckoned to most of the earth’s still developing nations.
Then—this is all what you say—new economic relations will be established, all ready-made and worked out with mathematical exactitude, so that every possible question will vanish in the twinkling of an eye, simply because every possible answer to it will be provided. Then the “Palace of Crystal” will be built.1
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), where the neo-Hegelian thesis is advanced that with the collapse of communism, global economic and political development is achieving its logical culmination-the reign of a global market economy and liberal, Western democracy. But Fukuyama’s vision of democracy accepts as a premise and inevitability a single path of global modernization in which “all countries … must increasingly resemble one another,” sharing a “universal consumer culture” (pp. xiv–xv). “Rather than a thousand shoots blossoming into as many different flowering plants, mankind will come to seem like a long wagon train strung out along a [single] road. … To get through the final mountain range they all must use the same pass” (pp. 337–38).
- 2.
See, for example, the extraordinary collection of environmental disasters, some tlnanced by the Bank, documented in Mitaghi Farvar and John P. Milton, The Careless Technology: Ecology and International Development (Garden City, New York: Natnral History Press, 1972).
- 3.
I.e., the injunction of Article III, Section 4 (vii) that the Bank was to lend only for specific projects “except in special circumstances.”
- 4.
For an indictment of the disastrous effect of World Bank and imf adjustment policies and on the welfare of children in developing nations, see the unicef study Adjustment with a Human Face, Giovanni Andrea Cornia, Richard Jolly, and Francis Steward, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), vol. 1, Protecting the Vulnerable and Promoting Growth.
- 5.
Including the author, Brent Blackwelder (now vice-president of Fricnds of the Earth, U.S.), and Barbara Bramble, director of international programs at the National Wildlife Federation.
- 6.
In the early 1980s, the only comprehensive outside study on the World Bank and the environment was that prepared by the London- and Washington-based International Institute for Environmental Development (iied), an institution involved in a conflict of interest, since much of its work was dependent on paid contracts with the same aid agencies it purported to evaluate. The iied report, called Banking on the Biosphere?, examined the environmental policies and procedures of nine multilateral aid institutions and focused on the World Bank, praising it for showing “since the early 1970s, a unique practical concern over the environmental impact of its lending” as well as “undoubtedly exert[ing] intellectual leadership in environmental matters in the entire international development community.” The study did note that a “wide gap remains between the … concern of some individuals and the official response of most institutions,” but that the World Bank and the idb (Inter-American Development Bank) “have developed a greater environmental awareness and sophistication than other development organizations.” In other words, though more needed to be done, there was no cause for alarm, the World Bank was leading the way. (Brian Johnson and Robert Stein, Banking on the Biosphere?: Environmental Procedures and Practices of Nine Multilateral Development Agencies [London and Washington: International Institute for Environment and Development, 1979], xiv, 11, 133.)
- 7.
“The public record on what had been going on within funai … which was available to anyone who wanted to read Brazilian newspapers, made it very, very clear … that it had been taken over … by military men with previous experience in intelligence and manipulation of public opinion, security, and that more than 50 sincere committed indigenists with a genuine concern for the welfare of the Indians had been systematically identified and weeded out” (Price [see endnote 17],477).
- 8.
Moreover, critics like Aart Van de Laar and Cynthia Hewitt de Alcantara argued, we recall, that in practice Rank agriculture projects—the heart of the McNamara poverty strategy—were actually creating new hordes of displaced poor, rather than helping them. Van de Laar concluded in 1980 that “if, indeed, there is a growing body of evidence which indicates that the pattern of economic growth has been accompanied by growing unemployment, more pronounced income inequality, and continuation of mass poverty and disease, there is then a clear need for a different pattern of future growth and development” (Van de Laar, The World Bank and the Poor [see endnote 12], 1).
- 9.
The other vice-presidents present were Shahid Husain, the vice-president for operations policy; the vice-presidents for the South Asia region, and for energy and industry, David Hopper and Jean-Loup Dherse, respectively; and Warren Baum.
- 10.
One could argue, though, that it was easier for him or any other senator to take a strong stand on environmental issues that did not affect interests in his own constituency.
- 11.
Including the author, Brent Blackwelder of the Environmental Policy Institute, and Barbara Bramble of the National Wildlife Federation.
- 12.
The best account of the struggle of the rubber tappers and their subsequent alliances with NGOs in Brazil and the United States can be found in Andrew Revkin’s The Burning Season: The Murder of Chico Mendes and the Fight jiir the Amazon Rain Forest (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990). Another excellent account is Adrian Cowell’s The Decade of Destruction: The Crusade to Save the Amazon Rainforest (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1990).
- 13.
There were three proposed loans, totaling $72 million. The U.S. abstention did not prevent the approval of two of the loans, which were “hard,” with interest rates close to commercial terms, since the U.S. voting share in the idb, 34.5 percent, was not sufficient to carry the vote. It did veto the third, “soft,” no-interest loan of $13.5 million, for which the idb’s charter requires two-thirds of Executive Board votes for approval, rather than a simple majority.
- 14.
As Stephan Schwartzman points out, what was critical in the campaign of thc rubber tappers was not the lise of local knowledge, “but its application in the context of a campaign mounted by organizations with the political weight to gain a hearing in the [U.S.] Congress and the U.S. government agencies, and with the will to use their weight. The history of extractive reservcs as a development alternative, proposed by the rubber tappers movement and eventually endorsed by the mdbs and the Brazilian government, is a history of making a specific cultural and historical reality comprehensible as a general principle” (Stephan Schwartzman, “Deforestation and Popular Resistance in Acre: From Local Social Movement to Global Network,” Centennial Review, vol. 35, no. 2 [College of Arts and Letters, Michigan State University: Spring 1991], 420).
- 15.
This meant that the Indonesian government, too, was reducing, if not eliminating, its expansion of Transmigration. With the collapse of oil prices in the mid-1980s, Indonesia—one of the world’s largest oil exporters—was increasingly dependent on the foreign exchange provided by the World Bank; it could not finance large-scale expansion of Transmigration without further international funding.
- 16.
In the mid-1980s, the most active Indonesian ngos institutionalized their relations with groups abroad through the creation of the ingi—the International ngo Forum on Indonesia. Formed with the support of Dutch church groups, the INGI grew to include more than twenty-five major ngos from Indonesia and more than fifty non-Indonesian groups from eleven countries by the early 1990s.
- 17.
See Cowell’s account of his experiences in Brazil during the 1980s, Andrian Cowell, The Decade of Destruction: The Crusade to Save the Amazon Rain Forest (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1990).
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© 2013 Bruce Rich
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Rich, B. (2013). Greens Lay Siege to the Crystal Palace. In: Mortgaging the Earth. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-515-1_5
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