A considerable body of research shows that corporal punishment can never make a child learn or behave better. Yet, the practice is widely prevalent.
A YOUNG achiever charting out a meaningful career in human rights initiatives after a prestigious academic stint in the U.K., remembers, "Every other day in school I was caned by teachers who constantly compared me with my older sister. I was groomed into a nervous wreck, petrified of people. I dropped out of school just before my Board exams after the Lab Assistant struck me and pushed me down in front of other students and teachers. When I swooned in fear, she said I was `acting'."
Isn't it ironic that we get news reports of the repercussions of corporal punishment among children across the country in spite of the periodical official "banning" announcements in various States? How impervious can we get, as a society, to such a grave issue?
Creating awareness
The Global Initiative to End All Corporal Punishment of Children — endorsed by UNICEF, UNESCO and many other organisations and individuals — was launched in Geneva in April 2001. It aims to ensure that the recommendations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child and other human rights bodies are accepted. Lobbying State governments to ban all forms of corporal punishment and to develop public education programmes and provide detailed technical assistance to support States with these reforms is high on its agenda. Yet, lawyers, educationists, doctors and activists in India still continue to point to the lack of awareness among authorities about the legal implications of corporal punishment and teachers' insensitivity to child rights. Almost 90 per cent of corporal punishment cases in India go unreported because parents think their child's mistake must've been the "provocation", or because they fear for the children.
"No violence against children is justifiable; all violence against children is preventable", is the key message of the Report of Independent Expert, Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, appointed by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, to lead the first comprehensive global study on violence against children in 2003. The target for prohibition of all violence is 2009.This study, a landmark effort, should mark a turning point — an end to adult justification of violence against children, whether accepted as "tradition" or disguised as "discipline".
But why is it difficult for many people to accept the human rights imperative for challenging and ending all corporal punishment? An expert feels, "Corporal punishment is in most countries a deeply embedded traditional practice, a deeply personal issue. Most people were hit as children; most parents have hit their children. We do not like to think badly of our parents or our parenting."
Lagging behind
Till last month, in Tamil Nadu, the absence of a State Act specifically "banning" corporal punishment was said to have "prevented departmental action from being initiated". And most States in India are "light years away" from global initiatives, feels Vidya Reddy, of Tulir, a Chennai-based NGO working to prevent violence against children, "The questions that need to be addressed wherever a ban is in place are: What support is the State's Education Department giving the teachers who have to manage a class of 50-60 children? Are there any aspects going to be addressed in classroom management for teachers? And does corporal punishment refer only to physical beating or include other methods of humiliation like kneeling down for hours in the sun, etc? Are clear guidelines laid down about what a parent/adult should do if such a ban is violated in school — whom to approach, how to raise the issue at different levels? There is a dire need to look at the issue holistically."
Though the National Policy on Education (1986, modified 1992) states in section 5.6 that "corporal punishment will be firmly excluded from the educational systems", Rule 51 of Tamil Nadu Education Rules (amended in 2003 ) records, "Corporal punishment shall not be inflicted in schools except in case of moral delinquency such as deliberate lying, obscenity of words or act or flagrant insubordination which shall be limited to 6 cuts on the hand and shall be given only by headmaster or under the supervision of headmaster." And ironically, a research study conducted in 2006 in Chennai on corporal punishment in Schools records:
Students who are not "bright" are made bright through terror tactics, a method that parents too seldom object to.
Many teachers take pride in striking terror in the hearts of their students, reinforcing the collective belief that inflicting pain can make children study/ perform better. Thomas Jairaj, Director, Centre for Child Rights and Development, an NGO for child rights initiatives, says, "Despite an affirmation at policy level, nothing comprehensive has happened against corporal punishment at ground level. For instance, a `ban' only means that a certain section in the Rules that `permitted' corporal punishment has been removed. We need to reinforce child friendly environments by now enacting laws to prohibit corporal punishment." "That the easiest `shortcut' to silence/ control others is a thrashing was a British legacy that has been used regularly in schools. But the truth is that punishment never ever made children learn or behave better — they only harden inside their hearts and minds", says Dr. S.S. Rajagopalan, Education Consultant.
Inhuman system
Ahalya Chari, veteran educationist, says, "This whole issue is related to the place of teacher's power in a school. In a large class, the teacher is not able to `control' without exercising authority. And the system is such that it does not permit a humane approach to education. That every child has to be respected, and treated with dignity and helped to awaken in himself or herself a sense of responsibility is important. We talk of a democratic citizenry with freedom to think and express themselves; but how will they develop these qualities if they're not allowed to disagree with a teacher in class?"
The fact is, we don't have a national level legal prohibition of corporal punishment in schools. Isn't it time we realised that children should not have to wait any longer to enjoy the basic right to respect for their human dignity? And without co-ordinated action to disseminate information on legal reform and public education campaigns and a drastic relook at prevailing classroom management techniques, any kind of change just cannot happen.
Tens of thousands of people being treated for AIDS will suffer if Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis succeeds in changing India's patent law, the humanitarian agency Medecins Sans Frontieres warned on Monday.
Novartis is challenging a specific provision of India's patent law that, if overturned, would see patents being granted far more widely, heavily restricting the availability of affordable generic medicines, MSF says.
"If they hit India it basically cuts off the lifeline for generic medicines. They're going for the jugular," MSF spokesman James Lorenz added.
India's generic drugs form the backbone of MSF's AIDS programmes, in which 80,000 people in 30 countries receive treatment.
"We are reaching a quarter of the people who need antiretroviral treatment in sub-Saharan Africa," says Ivy Mwangi, an MSF doctor. "Rapid scale-up in treatment is only possible with the availability and affordability of generic drugs, most of which are produced in India."
Profit over life In 2000, antiretroviral (ARV) treatment cost was estimated at $10,000 per patient annually. But the availability of generic drugs produced mainly in India, allowed costs to plummet to about $70 per patient per year, Mwangi adds.
India has long been an important source of affordable generic medicines as it did not grant pharmaceutical patents until 2005, when it was forced to comply with World Trade Organization rules on intellectual property (see India surveys aftermath of new patent law).
"If Novartis gets through with its case our lives are at risk," Monique Wanjala, a woman who has been living with HIV for 13 years, told a news conference in Nairobi. "We want this case dropped," she said. "If we die because affordable generic drugs aren't available, where will they sell the drug? If profits are going to be put before peoples' lives then we have a serious problem."
Novartis argues that the principle of intellectual property protection must be safeguarded if innovation is to flourish.
MSF says spurious patents on "new" drugs of insignificant difference – like a drug becoming a capsule rather than a pill and no longer requiring refrigeration – are threatening lives in the developing world.
How did we come to the very recent idea that children must never be left at home alone?
John Gummer was on Radio 4's Any Questions last week. The Tory veteran who famously stuffed a burger into his daughter's maw at the height of the BSE crisis was predictably gung-ho both in his support for the embattled turkey industry and his criticism of the decision to close Birmingham's schools because it was snowing. It was a straightforward, populist one-two against the nanny state that, in his view, (a) tells us what to eat and (b) shuts everything down at the slightest risk that a child might come to some harm.
But then he said something odd: he raised the plight of "perfectly decent people who would have gone to work, who couldn't go to work because they had to stay back, because their children were not able to go to school." Gummer, it seems, was quite prepared to have a child crack her coccyx on an icy path: but the notion that said child might be left alone in her own home was simply unthinkable.
A few days before, work and pensions secretary John Hutton was criticised for floating the idea that lone parents on benefits might be required to seek work once their youngest children reach the age of 12, as opposed to 16. Most 15-year-olds, one infers from the reaction, need the supervision of an adult at all hours.
Children no longer play outdoors, we are constantly told, because a risk-averse society perceives danger in snowballs and conkers, or imagines a paedophile skulking under every lamp-post. We have the modern phenomenon of the school run, a deliciously perverse response to the risks posed by so many cars on the road. But where did we get this notion that children are not even safe at home unless a responsible adult is there to look out for them?
I certainly don't recall this being the case when I was growing up. Both my parents worked full-time, and from the age of about eight or nine, I was expected to make my way home after school, feed myself and my younger sister, and wait for my mother's return, maybe a couple of hours later.
If either of us was ill with anything that didn't seem life-threatening, we were left in bed. My mother would try to come home at lunchtime, when she'd usually find me sipping tomato soup on the sofa, watching Crown Court. (I should protect my parents' egalitarian, Guardian-reading credentials by clarifying that the responsibility only fell to the female parent because she worked closer to home.) By modern standards, we were latchkey kids, but nobody suggested we were abused or at risk.
Now, the half-term holidays are upon us, and thousands of parents will feel the need to arrange childcare, or take time off work to tend to their offspring - even if those offspring are nearly adults. Perhaps we need some modern equivalent of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, the structure that would enable a single prison guard to keep an eye on hundreds of felons. Big Mother is watching you.
There is clearly increasing disgruntlement over the notion that modern children are becoming fat and antisocial because they no longer scrump apples or fall into rivers. The success of the Iggulden brothers' Dangerous Book for Boys shows that there's a critical mass of parents who don't see a grazed knee as reason to be rushed into intensive care. But is there any point in spending half-term building a tree house if you have to do it in the kitchen, with your mum looking on?
In the spring of 2003, across a field of rubble in Baghdad, a young Iraqi journalist accosted me and demanded: "Why did you stop broadcasting substance and substitute music?" The year before the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the government entity in charge of radio broadcasting, had shut down the Voice of America's Arabic service, and it ended most of its Farsi service in 2003. Voice of America had been broadcasting features, discussions of issues and editorials reflecting U.S. policies. But now it filled 50 minutes of each hour on Arabic-language Radio Sawa and most of the time on Persian-language Radio Farda with Eminem, J. Lo and Britney Spears.
This change in format provoked other angry questions: Are Americans playing music because they are afraid to tell the truth? Do they not have a truth to tell? Or do they not consider us worth telling the truth to?
We did not fight communism with pop music. In fact, during the Cold War, America used its government media institutions to broadcast its ideas and beliefs. So why are we not refashioning those successful broadcast strategies and trying to spread our ideas in the Muslim world, the breeding ground of much of the world's terrorist threats?
Members of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) have shared their answer: Radio Sawa's progenitor, media mogul Norman Pattiz, was still serving his Clinton-appointed term in 2002 when he told the New Yorker that "it was MTV that brought down the Berlin Wall." (Not Ronald Reagan, Lech Walesa or Vaclav Havel, of course.) President Bush's appointees did not improve the board's outlook. In October 2002, Ken Tomlinson, then the board's new chairman, approvingly quoted his son as saying Spears's music "represents the sounds of freedom." It seems that the board transformed the "war of ideas" into the battle of the bands.
So, is MTV winning the "war of ideas"? After years of the United States broadcasting Britney Spears to the Levant, the average radical mullah has not exactly succumbed to apoplexy or come to love democracy. A State Department inspector general's draft report on Radio Sawa (the final report was never issued) found that"it is difficult to ascertain Radio Sawa's impact in countering anti-American views and the biased state-run media of the Arab world." Or, as one expert panel assembled to assess its value concluded, "Radio Sawa failed to present America to its audience."
The BBG has achieved part of its objective in gaining large youth audiences in some areas of the Middle East, such as in Amman, Jordan, where it has an FM transmitter. But as the Jordanian journalist Jamil Nimri told me: "Radio Sawa is fun, but it's irrelevant." We do not teach civics to American teenagers by asking them to listen to pop music, so why should we expect Arabs and Persians to learn about America or democracy this way? The condescension implicit in this nearly all-music format is not lost on the audience that we should wish to influence the most -- those who think.
Some, of course, suspect that the United States is consciously attempting to subvert the morals of Arab youth. Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes told columnist Cal Thomas in December that our "view of freedom is sometimes seen as licentiousness. . . . And that is only exacerbated by the movies and the television and some of the music and the lyrics that they see exported from America." Especially, Hughes might have added, since the BBG, on which she sits as an ex officio member, promotes this very image.
Becoming a caricature of ourselves is bad policy and bad public diplomacy. The job of U.S. international broadcasting is to present, before we are attacked, what much of the world saw only after Sept. 11 -- the sacrifice, bravery and piety of the American people -- as part of a complete picture. By presenting this aspect of our culture, we might even prevent the miscalculations of those who believe they should attack the United States or can do so with impunity because we are a weak, irreligious, morally corrupt country.
We need radio broadcasting in the "war of ideas," but it has to deal in ideas to be effective. The "MTV message" is something that commercial broadcasting can do and would do better than government-funded radio. Government broadcasting is needed when the United States must communicate a message to a key audience that that audience otherwise would not hear.
Music may have a role in this kind of broadcast mission, but only if it is part of a larger, idea-based strategy. Where are the ideas that will help us win this war, and why are they not being deployed by all available means to the places that most need to hear them? Isn't it time to change our tune?
Women are not going to vote for Hillary because they are not rational; they make decisions on impulse. Blacks are not necessarily going to vote for Obama since he’s not really African American -- not in the way we have come to understand it anyway. Clinton and Obama are in a death struggle for the black vote; they are going to neutralize each other and leave an opening for the lurking John Edwards to slip through... Blah, blah, blah.
Enjoy the silly season, this time of unbridled speculation and meaningless conjecture; a time when knowing something about something is hardly a prerequisite for being absolutely certain of it.
Now that the winners and losers of the 2006 campaign have settled into the more difficult task of actually trying to govern the country, the rhetoric surrounding the 2008 campaign for president has taken on an urgency that belies the fact that the first votes won’t be cast for another year and that the election itself is more than 18 months away. (That's two Labor Days, two July 4ths, two Memorial Days.)
Such urgency also belies the reality that every possible factor which might determine the outcome of the presidential election could change radically -- and maybe more than once -- between now and the time when it does matter. The only things we know for sure are: 1.) George W. Bush is not going to be president when we wake up on that third Wednesday in January 2009, and 2.) there are a lot of people who want to replace him. Beyond that, all the tumult and racket is just tumult and racket.
That, of course, will stop no one with a keyboard or a microphone from going on at length about the crucial importance of what they know and think at this very moment. And not all of this is coming from some lunatic fringe or the outer reaches of the blogosphere. Obama’s problem with the ambivalence of black voters was detailed first on the front page of The New York Times. Hillary’s woman problem was revealed on the op-ed page of The Washington Post.
The Times’s Obama story, under the headline, "So Far, Obama Can’t Take Black Vote for Granted," authoritatively posed the question: "So why are some black voters so uneasy about Senator Barack Obama?" The story went on to cite varied, if not numerous, voices of black unease about the Obama campaign to illustrate the distance between the Illinois senator and what would presumably be a natural constituency for him. It quoted the black writer Stanley Crouch saying: "When black Americans refer to Obama as 'one of us,' I do not know what they are talking about."
It’s OK to laugh. I do not know what Stanley is talking about, but I’m sure it does not matter.
African Americans, more than most people, understand the cosmic damage that can be done when people are judged simply by the color of their skin. So having spent a few centuries insisting that the criteria for judgment be set higher than race and skin color, they are the last people to say they will vote for someone just because he is black. You can be sure, however, that to the extent that Obama positions himself as a serious contender for the nomination, no one will appreciate, or embrace, the historic nature of that candidacy more than African Americans. You can count on that. If Obama turns out to be serious, African Americans will take him seriously. But chit-chatting about it now, before there is much real to discuss, produces aimless chatter about whether he is "black enough" or whatever other idle speculation we care to offer up.
Indeed, with the election so far off and so many people running, we remain in danger of slipping into ever-deeper levels of ridiculousness. Feminist Linda Hirshman, writing in the Post discounted the idea that women will rally around Hillary Clinton in sufficient numbers to win her the presidency: "If Clinton is going to attract the women she needs, she's going to have to do something more that simply have a pair of X chromosomes herself." Who can argue? Alas, Hirshman then proceeds to make this argument: "[W]omen don’t decide elections because they're not rational political actors -- they don't make firm policy commitments and back the candidates who will move society in the direction they want it to go. Instead, they vote on impulse, and on elusive factors such as personality."
We could all agree that no one demographic group decides elections by themselves, but I have to admit I was intrigued to hear about this new voting bloc in American politics -- "the rational political actors." Round them up! Find out what they’re drinking!
Here's the bottom line: Both Clinton and Obama have threshold questions to answer about their candidacies that have nothing whatever to do with their race and gender. The process by which they try to answer those questions will bear heavy scrutiny -- and will of course play out in the national headlines with special intensity, since they look different from the last 43 American presidents. But if and when those questions are answered, voters who see a chance to have -- for the first time -- the president look like them or share their chromosomes, are going to flock to the candidate in droves. The good news for Democrats is that they could come out of the primary season with the entire base of the party electrified. And that has been shown to decide an election or two.
Eleven years ago today, on February 8, 1996, 150 photojournalists across the globe joined to document the vast and vaguely defined new thing called “cyberspace.” Over 24 hours, they photographed Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn working on a website, lanky-haired Dutch twentysomethings smoking hashish in Internet cafes, and a robed Coptic monk clutching a laptop in an Egyptian desert to write e-mails to schoolchildren in Michigan.
“24 Hours in Cyberspace” was the brainchild of Rick Smolan, the former National Geographic photographer behind the popular “Day in the Life” series of coffee-table books. His production company, Against All Odds, coordinated the project. He said he was doing it because he wanted to “capture the human face of cyberspace.”
For 24 hours, the photographs were posted on a website where people could search all 200,000 images as well as add their own pictures and stories. Over the day the site was active, 4 million people visited it. “The speed and scale of this project are unprecedented,” Smolan told the press.
Far from a collection of bland snaps of monitors and hard drives, the resulting photographs and stories were moving, absurd, and frightening. In Annapolis, Maryland, a father with an autistic child found support in an online mailing group. In Portland, Oregon, look-alike strippers called the Lick Sisters promoted themselves on their self-designed site. In Toronto, Holocaust deniers celebrated their freedom to post anti-Semitic material. The vast catalogue of photos was subsequently edited down to a couple of hundred and published in a book, 24 Hours in Cyberspace.
“The Internet is passing through an awkward adolescence, rebellious and plagued by gawky interfaces, too-slow access times, and more than its share of pointless banality,” wrote Paul Saffo in his preface to the book. But the project was infused with near giddiness over the digital revolution. Saffo added, “Moreover, [cyberspace] is a shape-shifting, borderless medium firmly in the hands of ordinary citizens bent on turning it to extraordinary ends.”
In 1996 the World Wide Web still felt very new. The Internet had existed in at least primitive form since the late 1950s, but it hadn’t been accessible to everyday users until the Web became available in 1993. People were just beginning to understand the new medium’s powers and pitfalls. Schools were struggling to regulate their new Internet connections, public libraries fretted about the future of books, editorialists worried about “online-aholics” and when the Web would “mature,” and people wondered if the Internet would ever much affect politics.
That year the World Wide Web had approximately 40 million users; today the number is in the billions. A lot of the emerging trends the project documented in 1996 now seem almost everlasting. The “Open for Business” section of the book declared the Internet to be an “emerging marketspace.” By 2006 e-tailers reported more than $102.1 billion in sales.
The way news is consumed—and made—has dramatically changed in the 11 years since Smolan’s project. Today 40 percent of Americans say they get at least some of their news online. 24 Hours in Cyberspace called “online diaries” a “genre in the making”; today almost everyone is a blogger, and they not only comment on the news but make it, as when Matt Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky story, in 1997, and when thesmokinggun.com revealed that James Frey had fabricated much of his memoir, A Million Little Pieces, in 2006. YouTube was undreamt of even three or four years ago, yet it has already showed the world Virginia Sen. George Allen’s “macaca” remark and the comedian Michael Richards’s racist meltdown at a comedy club, among many other things.
What would “24 Hours in Cyberspace” look like if it were done again today? It would be a daunting undertaking, with nearly 30 times more Internet users out there now than in 1996. But it would probably find many of the same stories, with kids in classrooms clustering around a monitor, strippers at work behind their webcams, people browsing personal ads, and doctors searching databases for organ donors. It would also show that the Internet has grown exponentially, become far faster, more sophisticated—and basically ubiquitous.
Not so long ago, I spent a term teaching at a university in California. I turned up, heavy with jet lag, on the day British universities call the freshers' fair. But while here such events are all about the chance to join Beer Soc or Queer Soc or Rugby Soc, things looked rather different on the carefully watered lawns of Californian academe. There, the majority of groups vying for the freshman's attention were Christian and other faith-based groups. It was a timely warning that I was in a country very different from my own.
I soon forgot the warning. The students I taught were all liberal in their attitudes, and as far as I could see none of them had any strongly held religious convictions. The theatre department encouraged the study of theatre from a basis of identity politics: the rainbow world of diverse sexualities, ethnicities and cultural backgrounds.
Later in the term, a production of my play Citizenship - a play that contains a rather innocent kiss between two boys - was performed by the drama department. The performance was assigned to a large group of theatre students to attend and report on. "I won't be coming to your show," one young man told me in a matter-of-fact way. "Oh, why's that?" I said. He smiled at me, placidly: "I can't," he said. "I'm a Christian."
I was seeing the consequences of the culture wars that have played themselves out across American society for the past 20 years. The social conservatives, closely aligned to the churches, have fought - and in some places defeated - a perceived liberal bias in the media, arts and the entertainment industry. And liberals, who had come to see their own values as simply common sense and the inevitable result of human progress, have realised that those values have to be fought for.
A truce has been reached in some areas of US society, whereby the liberals can have their culture so long as anyone - such as the student I met - could opt out on the grounds of conscience or religious belief.
It's a truce I am uneasy with. In signing up for the theatre course, that young man was opting for a course of work set by a professor. Surely the professor should have the courage of conviction to say that the young man has to attend all the performances assigned to him, not just those that accord with his own views. If you graduate from university believing exactly what you believed in your freshman week, then hasn't very little in the way of real education occurred?
It's easy to see these as peculiarly American problems, but it seems to me that they are becoming our problems, too.Just three weeks ago I met a woman who has been directing a production of my play Mother Clapp's Molly House with final-year students at a British university. It's a less innocent play than Citizenship, and contains not just gay kissing but a great deal of enthusiastic sodomy. "It all went very well," she said. "But unfortunately our lead boy had to pull out at the last minute. His mum is a Christian and she found a copy of the script, so he had to withdraw."
I recognised in this the same placid acceptance I had experienced in California - an acceptance that the values of education and culture, and the authority of the teacher, must come second to religious conscience and parental authority. Liberals, so used to tolerating all beliefs and cultures, haven't got the strength to defend the values of a liberal institution. And, let's be honest, most of our institutions are liberal. University drama departments are liberal institutions. We teach liberal values. The BBC is a liberal organisation, promoting the values of a liberal establishment. This much Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail, got right. But it's time we stopped apologising or pretending this isn't so.
A friend who teaches in a British university drama department tells me that a young woman has asked not to attend certain classes because they would require her to touch male students. Nothing sexual. Nothing intimate. Just touch. But her religion won't let her, and so she has been allowed to opt out of those classes. Surely the university should declare itself a liberal organisation, and insist that those joining it must abide by its liberal values? Culture wars, so long avoided in the UK, are brewing. Liberals are going to have to fight hard. There should be no opt-outs when it comes to culture. We believe in our values.
Cuba has announced it will send a group of doctors to help Castro's old ally President Daniel Ortega bolster the health system in Nicaragua. Castro also sent about 1,700 physicians to Bolivia in 2006 to lend aid to the government of Evo Morales. Why does Cuba have so many doctors to spare? Well, because Castro said so. The Cuban constitution guarantees every inhabitant the "right to health protection and care." After the revolution in 1959, half of the country's 6,000 doctors fled the island. The new government promoted medical education as part of a national project to revamp the health-care system, and by 1984, Cuba had enough doctors to put a physician and a nurse in every neighborhood. Some will tell you Cubans become doctors because they believe in universal health care; others emphasize the social and economic rewards. (Doctor aren't paid much, though—some make less than $40 a month.) Whatever their motivations, Cuba has more doctors per capita than any other country: 70,000 for a population of 11 million.
As a result, Cuba's national health-care system—there is no private care in Cuba—is widely praised, and the Latin American School of Medical Science in Havana attracts students from around the world. But some say the system has been crippled by a lack of supplies. The combination of the U.S. embargo and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba's primary financier and supplier, have hurt Cuba's access to medical equipment. Some critics of Castro cite his own dire medical condition—and the decision to bring in a Spanish doctor to treat him—as evidence of a failed system. But the numbers suggest Cubans lead healthy lives. Life expectancy in Cuba is the same as that of the United States, and its rate of HIV/AIDS is one of the world's lowest.
In fact, Cuba's medical prowess may be its ticket out of poverty. In the 1990s, Cuba was the first country to develop a meningitis B vaccine. In 2005, Cuba provided cancer treatment technology for a new biotech company in China. Then last year Washington agreed to make an exception to the trade embargo to allow a California firm to test a Cuban cancer treatment. Thanks to an increase in biotech exports, Cuba raised its health budget a couple of years ago to $300 million.
So, if having all these doctors has helped Cuba, why does Castro send so many of them abroad? Part of it is Cuba's commitment to internationalism, another ideal of the revolution. (Political opponents say the government is showcasing one success of an otherwise botched revolution.) "Medical diplomacy" is also a way to win and keep friends, and to trade services for goods that Cuba wouldn't have otherwise. For example, about 15,000 Cuban doctors and dentists currently work in Venezuela, while President Hugo Chavez supplies Cuba with oil. Castro even offered to send a group of 1,600 doctors to the Gulf Coast after Katrina, but he said the United States didn't respond.
A few days ago I carried an elderly neighbour's shopping up three flights of stairs. Even when the lift in our block of flats works, it is so rickety that I mentally distribute my worldly goods. Actually, my (heavily mortgaged) flat is my only worldly good so I'd better see the lift gets sorted so my loved ones don't stand at the Pearly Gates before their time. Oh, look at me, I'm writing for New Humanist and already I've made a religious reference. Jesus! Damn! I mean oops.
My neighbour was very grateful and as I bade her goodbye, she thanked me again then spoiled our beautiful moment by saying, “That was very Christian of you.”
Was it? Is it just Christians who help with shopping? Do Muslims have a clause that forbids the carrying of Tesco bags? Is it written in the Torah, “Carry it yourself, what am I? Your butler?” What about Buddhists… too busy meditating to heave three bags of cat food up the stairwell?
I wanted to explain to her that I worked out all by myself that walking past a struggling neighbour wasn’t very nice. I've been known to put myself out occasionally. My parents never even had to warn me of eternal damnation for me to do a good deed.
I wanted to reassure my neighbour that, despite not being a Christian or any other religion, I have managed to steer clear of murder and adultery. I have never coveted my other neighbour's wife.
Of course, I said none of these things and instead smiled Christianly and said it was no problem.
I don't have a religion. That's not to say I'd call myself an atheist. Most atheists I know seem to have been raised with a religion, then, after considerable thought and discussion, gone, “Nahhhh, you're all bonkers” and rejected it. Some are so militant that they all but knock on people's doors on Saturday mornings and try to convert them to non-believing.
I wasn't raised with a religion or notion of God so have never had to explain to my parents that I wasn't going to Mass, Mosque or Synagogue any more. When I asked if my hamster was going to heaven, my grandma told me, “No, he'll become dust and be made into pots.” Poor Fifi.
If you are beige, though, people often can't accept that you were not raised in religion. The amount of times I have been asked by journalists my views on something “as a Muslim”. I bet Jo Brand is never asked to comment “as a Christian”.
Yet it was Christianity I was the most exposed to as a child through school. I sang hymns every morning in assembly and promised “to do my duty to God” in Brownies. In the nativity plays I was not allowed to be an angel: little blonde girls were angels, little brown girls were shepherds. The slightly slower kids were Wise Men to boost their self-confidence.
I loved Christmas carols and hymn practice and the “tea and biscuits” which seemed to be at the core of every Christian event. I never got past the refreshment stage, though. No amount of custard creams seems to make me see the light. I managed to learn very little about the nuts and bolts of the religion despite the best efforts of, well, pretty much the whole of my schooling. When I was sixteen, a devout Christian friend of mine told me she was going to Eucharist one Saturday. I nearly went with her. I thought it was a trendy club night.
An Asian cab driver once asked me where I am from. I never say “London” in that hoity-toity way that second-generation immigrants sometimes do. The question can be a useful start to a friendly conversation. I find it more interesting than “what do you do for a living?” Nine times out of ten these days the answer to that is “I work in IT” and that's pretty much the end of the conversation. Seeing as I was born in Iran, I told him, “I'm from Iran.” “Ah!” he said, “you are my Muslim sister.” It was early in the morning. I didn't want to get into this. I told him I was Jewish. He didn't seem as keen for me to be his sister after that. The rest of the journey was in silence.
I could have been Jewish; there are lots of Jewish Iranians (or 'Jeranians' as I call them). I was once asked to perform at a Jewish Iranian singles night in LA. The second I was off stage, I was paid, bundled into a cab and whisked home. I wasn't allowed to stay and flirt. I guess they didn't want me as their sister-in-law.
The other day, when the lift was mended, my nice old neighbour held the door open for me as I heaved my shopping bags in. I was tempted to say, “That was very Humanist of you,” but I held my tongue. She might have thought I'd eat her up then run outside to howl at the moon.
Humpty Dumpty said to Alice, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” So let me explain first what I mean by “globalization.” In his excellent book Why Globalization Works, Martin Wolf remarks, “Globalization is a hideous word of obscure meaning, coined in the 1960s, that came into ever-greater vogue in the 1990s.”
I think of globalization as a process of increasing international economic integration accompanied by political agreement on the rules of the game that govern that process. The rise of China and India as trading powers is an example of increasing integration. And the accession of China into the World Trade Organization is an example of the application of the rules of the game.
Global impact
Globalization is the driving force of many of the most significant changes in our economies. But it is far from a new phenomenon. It is as old as the human race itself. The European settlement of Australia represented the globalizing forces of migration and capital flows over several centuries. To me, one of the most poignant symbols of globalization is the Australian War Memorial at Hyde Park Corner in London.
In the first half of the twentieth century — described by Isaiah Berlin as “the worst century there has ever been” — thousands of Australians went to fight on the other side of the globe and to give their lives to a cause that transcended national interests.
One of the consequences of globalization is that the impact of change in one part of the world on the lives of people in other parts is growing. In areas as diverse as trade, energy, combating terrorism, climate change and the economic consequences of massive global imbalances with capital flowing from poor to rich countries, there are now growing spillovers from decisions in one country to the lives of people in others.
Surmountable challenges
In contrast to the horrors of two World Wars and the Great Depression, the strains and stresses of today’s world do not seem insurmountable. How can we best deal with these challenges? When the movement of people in Manchuria from subsistence rural agriculture to industrial employment influences which industries flourish in Manchester and Melbourne — and when changes in attitudes toward asset management in Beijing affect currency values and hence living standards from Birmingham to Brisbane — it is in the interest of all nation states, recognizing their growing interdependence, to make commitments to each other about what they will and won’t do.
International commitments
Such commitments are embodied in international institutions. They are the rules of the game. Impressive offices and grand meetings are not the test of whether our international institutions are successful. The test is whether member countries are ready to make genuine commitments to each other.
Without that, the institutions lack any real purpose. So the subject of my talk today is why we need rules of the game to govern globalization, and the institutions that are necessary to oversee those rules.
At the end of the Second World War, a new global order was put in place by the United States, Britain and their allies. One of those primarily responsible, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, described his time as being “present at the creation” of a new global order. New institutions
A range of new international institutions was created — the United Nations, the two Bretton Woods institutions (the IMF and World Bank), the OEEC that implemented the Marshall Plan (and later became the OECD), NATO and GATT (which has subsequently been succeeded by the World Trade Organization).
Those institutions are now, for the most part, past their 60th birthdays. And there has been much heart-searching over the past few years as to their role and governance. Unless the spirit of the original founders is rekindled, there is a real danger that the present institutions will wither on the vine, leaving us with a more unstable and fragile international environment.
The need for reform
As Martin Wolf pointedly wrote, “To defend a liberal world economy is not to defend the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization or any specific institution. These must be judged — and reformed or discarded — on their merits.”
My argument is simple. Existing institutions were designed for a world radically different from that of today. The cost of closing them down and building new institutions is high. So we must work with our existing institutions and make them more relevant to today’s problems. Unless we do so, it will be harder to defend an open and liberal international economic order that has brought benefits to hundreds of millions of people around the globe.
The generic challenge facing all the post-war institutions is to find a role relevant to present circumstances and to decide on the operational capabilities and instruments which that role requires. Holding meetings and issuing communiqués is not enough.
Protecting standards of living
It is worth noting the scale of the challenge. The specific commitments made at the end of the Second World War are no longer relevant. The shared experience of the Great Depression, protectionism and two World Wars has faded. And the majority of current nation states were not “present at the creation.”
Those changes have meant that, over time, the post-war settlement has become less relevant. But the need for international institutions has increased. Our own standards of living are now, more than ever, affected by decisions elsewhere.
Comparative advantage
And many people already feel they are worse off from globalization. The number of workers in the world trading system has more than doubled in a short period, with inevitable consequences for real wages of the unskilled in the industrialized world. Governments are having to work harder to explain what the principle of comparative advantage means to people in their daily lives.
In fact, most people are winners from globalization. China is now the second-largest buyer of Australian exports. And the Australian terms of trade have risen by 40% since 2000, providing a substantial boost to the growth rate of real incomes.
Nothing could be more damaging to the prospects of developing and developed countries alike than the abandonment of further trade liberalization. But protectionist sentiments are abroad again, even with high employment rates around the world.
Europe's protectionism
In Europe, protectionist sentiments are concealed as cries for “national champions,” in Latin America as populism, in the United States as complaints about unfair competition. But the damage that protectionism can wreak is clear. The experience of the Great Depression should be enough to ring alarm bells.
If that is to be avoided and we are to maintain widespread support for an open international trading system, it is in all our interests to establish clear rules for what we will and won’t do in areas where our decisions affect stability elsewhere. And if those commitments are to be upheld, we will need international institutions.
Five principles on reform
Changes to the number of nation states and the way they interact mean that reform of our multilateral institutions is needed. But piecemeal reforms are unlikely to work. In my view, there are five principles that should be followed.
First, create international institutions only when there is a need to do so. International institutions should focus on those areas of global governance where we need to tackle problems collectively — whether on trade, the environment or large spillover effects of changes in macroeconomic policy. Second, ensure that the commitments countries enter into are clear. The job of institutions is to support those commitments. In many cases, like an umpire, their job will be to uphold them. That will only be possible if the players — countries — are very clear about the agreed rules of the game. Without that, any further design is pointless.
Third, provide institutions with the necessary tools to umpire the commitments of nation states. But, just as umpires are accountable for their performance to the whole community of cricket-playing nations through the International Cricket Council, the staff and management of the international institution should be accountable to the whole community of nation states for their performance in upholding the rules.
Fourth, recognize that we do not start with a blank sheet of paper. We must accept the constraints of history. Existing institutions have an institutional memory, talented staff and much of the infrastructure that will be needed in the future. But that is not to say reform will be easy. There are far too many vested interests for that to be the case.
Fifth, avoid unnecessary duplication. Because the cost of abolishing institutions is high, the number of international groupings and institutions has proliferated in recent years. Many of them tread on each others' toes. As a result, the IMF, World Bank and OECD have all been bruised. Duplication of roles is wasteful of time, money and focus. Each institution should have one very clear remit — and focus on it. Of course, countries which play a role in one institution but not in another will have an incentive to build up the role of the former at the expense of the latter. So it is up to the member countries to limit the battle for turf.
Failure at Doha
There are few examples where all these principles appear to have been followed. The World Trade Organization has been an effective umpire of countries’ commitments about trade restrictions and comes close.
But the example of the WTO highlights the importance, above all else, of clear commitments from nation states themselves.
The failure of countries to conclude a multilateral trade round since the WTO was formed more than a decade ago is worrying. The Doha round has continued past its expected completion date — and only a brave commentator would forecast eventual success.
The fault does not lie with the WTO. Instead, it reflects the fact that national governments have not been willing to make the necessary commitments.
Spillover effects
Likewise, the surveillance activities of the IMF have been criticized because they pay insufficient attention to spillover effects and instead examine in unnecessary detail microeconomic issues. For example, the sharp rise in oil prices over the past two years has posed a risk to economic stability in many countries.
But there is no reference in the IMF’s Article IV report on China to the role that Chinese demand may have played in pushing up world oil prices. And the report on the United States this year singled out the electricity sector and competition among auto manufacturers and airlines as areas warranting special examination by IMF staff.
Unnecessary duplication
It would be better if those microeconomic issues were examined within the OECD, and, in turn, issues of macroeconomic spillovers and global “imbalances” were left to the IMF. But even when IMF surveillance has been well-focused, as in the analysis of Thailand’s exchange rate policies in 1996, it has not always carried sufficient weight to influence countries’ policies.
Unnecessary duplication is a waste of both time and money. I have already spoken about the respective comparative advantages of the IMF and OECD. There has also been some discussion about the roles of the IMF and the G7 in respect of exchange rate issues.
Over the past three years — especially since the Boca Raton G7 summit of February 2004 — the inability of the G7 to deal with the major spillover effects in the world economy has become more and more evident.
Defining clearer roles
Adding new members, even if they were willing to join, is not the answer. More productive would be to use the IMF as a flexible forum to bring the relevant group of countries together to handle issues as and when they arise.
The meetings of the IMF in Washington and Singapore this year marked the beginning of an attempt to define more clearly the role of the Fund in the world economy. Whether that will prove successful is too early to tell. But the challenge is clear.
Flattering illusions
Globalization increases our dependence on each other. It is no longer sufficient to rely on the commitments made sixty years ago. The world has changed too much since then.
It is up to the member countries to make a multilateral trading system work. As Joseph Conrad wrote a century ago in his great novel Nostromo, “Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.”
The frenetic activity of international meetings and the flattering illusions of a stream of communiqués do not add up to a coherent set of commitments.
Failure to reform the international institutions will condemn them to irrelevance and obscurity. We are at that point. If this generation fails, then the work of those who were “present at the creation” will have been undone. It is our duty to re-create the institutional framework that we inherited.
