Thomas Pogge on global justice

Pogge is a political philosopher at Columbia. Here are some excerpts from an interview with him.

On the incentives for tyranny in developing countries:

The global economic order as we now have it consists of a very large set of rules. By analyzing severe poverty and premature deaths both institutionally and on the global level, we can trace back their overall incidence to the relevant institutional rules, such as the evolving system of amazingly detailed treaties and conventions structuring the world economy, regulating trade (WTO), investments, loans, patents, copyrights, trademarks, double taxation, labor standards, environmental protection, and much else. Responsibility for these rules lies primarily with the governments of the more powerful countries which, in international negotiations, enjoy a huge advantage in bargaining power and expertise. Their negotiators have succeeded, again and again, in shaping the rules in the interest of the governments, corporations and citizens of the rich countries. In many cases, rules so shaped foreseeably inflict great harms upon the global poor — harms that one can estimate at least in general statistical terms. Seeing that our wealthy countries are at least approximately democratic, we citizens certainly share responsibility for the rules our governments negotiate in our name and for the human cost these rules impose around the world. But there are also less obvious rules that have a tremendous negative effect on living conditions in the poor countries. Take the international resource and borrowing privileges, which allow any person or group holding effective power in a developing country to sell the resources of the country or to borrow in its name, irrespective of whether that person or group has any kind of democratic legitimacy. (I skip here two further, complementary privileges related to arms and treaties: Any person or group holding effective power in a developing country is recognized as entitled to purchase weapons – most often used for domestic repression – and as entitled to sign treaties in the name of the whole country.) These privileges are very convenient for the rich countries who can buy resources from anybody who happens to exercise power in a country. However, they are devastating for the populations of the developing countries because they make it possible for oppressive and unrepresentative rulers to entrench themselves with arms and soldiers they buy with money they borrow abroad or get from resource sales. These privileges also provide incentives for potential strongmen in these countries to take power by force. Their existence explains to a large extent why there are so many civil wars and coups d’état in the developing countries, in particular in Africa. This is an example of how the international order, largely upheld by the rich countries, aggravates oppression and poverty in the poor countries. Therefore, we should not only think about how states ought to behave in their interactions with one another. We should also consider the framework of global rules and what effects this framework has on phenomena such as poverty.

On globalization:

The proponents of globalization are right that sweatshop wages are better than no wages at all, and the opponents of globalization, too, are right that a world so rich in aggregate must not be organized to provide sweatshop work (or worse: prostitution, mining, carpet manufacture — so often forced upon children and teenagers) as the best option available to many. In general, it is a mistake, I think, to make globalization the key issue. Massive and severe poverty can persist (and has persisted) without globalization, and the eradication of such poverty is perfectly compatible with globalization. Over the period since the end of the Cold War, our governments have again and again, for the sake of small gains, shaped and reshaped the rules of the world economy to the disadvantage of the global poor. They force poor countries to open their markets while sheltering their own markets from cheap agricultural and textile imports. They sell weapons to the most barbarous tyrants and rebel movements. They have used their increased power after the collapse of the Soviet empire to renegotiate the sharing of seabed resources out of the Law of the Seas Treaty. They have dramatically lowered their official development assistance from 0.33 percent of their aggregate GNP down to 0.22 percent in less than a decade — even while the end of the Cold War is presenting them with a 1.9-percent peace dividend. None of this is an integral part of globalization as such. It is part of one particular and especially brutal path of globalization which our governments, ruthlessly exploiting our superior bargaining power, are choosing to impose. These governments are acting in our name, and perhaps even in our best interest, in a narrow sense of this phrase. But their strategy has the foreseeable result that global economic growth is not improving the condition of the global poor. Headcounts for severe poverty (1,100 million) and malnutrition (831 million) are stagnant — despite a grandiose promise at the 1996 Rome World Food Summit to halve these figures within 19 years, a promise that has since been dramatically diluted in the formulation of the first Millennium Development Goal. And one third of all human deaths, some 18 million annually, are still due to poverty-related causes. This was and is avoidable, and cheaply so: One percent of aggregate income in the rich countries (containing under 1,000 million people) is equivalent to over 50 percent of aggregate income of the poorest half of humankind (about 3,250 million people).