DEVELOPMENT OF THE WEST II RS I I To f I international ri | first/second qInternational Reformed Bulletin Issued Quarterly Editorial Committee Editor Dr. Paul G. Schrotenboer Contents page A Change in Command ... Peitepiana') cans Cy Modernity and the American Empire . International Interdependence Development .. Global Reach . INTERNATIONAL REFORMED BULLETIN Editorial and administrative address: 1677 Gentian Dr., S.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49508, U.S.A. Treasurer: Mrs. Gertrude Kok, 1677 Gentian Drive, S.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49508, U.S.A. Subscription: Single: 1 year, $4.00; 2 years, $7.00; 3 years, $9.00 Bulk: (10 or more) $3.50 per subscription Special issues still available: The Gospel and Modern Man — $.S0. The Spirit of Revolution and the Rule of Christ — $1.00, Rethinking Missions — $1.00. The Unity of Mission — $1.50. Man - God's Trustee in Creation — $1.25. Politics, Justice and Jubilee — $1.00. Missions — In the Reformation — And Now — $1.00. Training for Ministry — $1.00. Christ — Our Peace — $1.00. Confessing Christ Today — $1.00. Mission to China — $2.00. Justice and Latin America — $.75, Reformed Education on Six Continents — $2.00 Development of the West — $1.00 Number 67 — 19th year — 4th quarterA CHANGE IN COMMAND The publication of this issue brings to an end a third period in the history of the International Reformed Bulletin. This issue is the last to be edited by Paul G. Schrotenboer. The Bulletin is now in its 20th year. During the first period, 1958-1961, Dr. Philip E. Hughes, one of the founders of the International Association for Reformed Faith and Action, was the editor; in the second period, 1962-1967, Dr. Bernard Zylstra. They have each put their specific stamp on the Bulletin. During the last ten years Dr. Schrotenboer developed an editorial policy of his own in a very energetic and challenging way. Forty issues have been edited by him (out of a total of sixty-nine), of which several have been published as double-issues. Dr. Schrotenboer has left to us a monument of Reformed thought, which has not only served the Christian community in the past, but will also have its momentum for the future. In this way he has made an essential contribution “to proclaim the sovereignty of God, revealed in the Lordship of Jesus Christ, over the world and thus over every department of human activity” (IARFA Constitution, Article 2). For this we are very thankful. The executive committee of the IARFA met in September 1976 at the occasion of the International Reformed Conference in Scotland and considered the future policy for the Bulletin. The main elements in the editorial policy are: 1. The Bulletin will continue to publish substantial articles on basic matters of our time (2 or 3 per issue); 2. from time to time issues on special themes will be published; 3. the Bulletin will publish, as in former times, articles and comments on important developments and events in and outside the Reformed community as well as articles on the history and actual situation of the Reformed community and the larger Christian community; 4. information concerning the IARFA and its branches; 5. reviews of important books, reports, etc. Beginning with the next issue, the editorial work will be concentrated in Great Britain and will be closely connected with the international secretariat, in order to further the integration of the various aspects of the work of the IARFA. The following people have been appointed to the editorial staff: Dr. David R. Hanson, Leeds, general editor; Mr. Lance Bidewell, London, managing editor and treasurer; Mr. John Wilson, Motherwell, Scotland, news editor. We hope and pray that the Bulletin will continue to be a useful instrument “‘to promote God-centred living through faith in Jesus Christ.” Jan D. Dengerink Chairman of the IARFA executive committeeFOREWORD This is the second number of the Jnternational Reformed Bulletin on the topic of development. It does not, as we had hoped, deal with the development of the third world, but takes a second, harder, look at the development of the west. Justice, modernization, trans-nationals and development — these are the facets of the many-sidéd global issue on which this Bulletin touches. All of these sub-topics warrant much greater treatment. So all we can expect is that the essays will stimulate the reader to further thinking and to action. Perhaps we may express the goals of these two numbers on Development as simply being: 1) a better understanding of the colossal problems of global well-being and of the prevailing inequities in our present systems, i.e., Reformed thought; and 2) a much greater willingness to become involved so that we who are a part of the problem also become party to the solution. In other words, Reformed action. That is what the Bulletin is, namely, a vehicle for faith and action that, informed by the Word of God, grapples with society’s problems and seeks to bless God’s people as they live their lives in obedience (and often in disobedience) before Him. This is also the goal we have sought to achieve as editor for the last decade. We herewith leave the unfinished work. The year 1977 seems to have more unsolved global problems than the year 1967. It is not only that they seem to be greater; they are greater. Yet today as always Jesus Christ is the Light of the World and its Lord. Herewith we commit the on-going editorial work to the Lord whom we serve. We also wish the new team — once again British — the shalom of the Lord in the demanding task of showing God's people the way to go amid the maze of life today. Paul G. SchrotenboerMODERNITY AND THE AMERICAN EMPIRE Bernard Zylstra* In the twentieth century, especially since the second world war, social scientists generally discuss the development of Asia, Africa, South America, and the “underdeveloped” parts of the rest of the world, under the theme of modernization. This means that these social scientists, and their counterparts in the governments and economic enterprises of western civilization, look upon the evolution in the nonwestern world in the light of a movement from the particular historical phase it has reached to the stage of “progress” which the industrialized countries in Europe and North America have achieved. Modernization is the process of incorporating the attainments of western civilization. In this essay I would like to focus briefly on the concept of modernity — its spiritual roots and contents, its agents, and its consequences. . INTRODUCTION Since modernization is a matter of development within and between civilizations, a few comments about the meaning and texture of “civilization” are in order. One of the definitions of this term in Webster’s unabridged Third New International Dictionary of the English Language reads as follows: “the whole of the advances of human culture and aspirations beyond the purely animal level.” Apart from the question whether it is proper to speak of an “‘animal level” in human existence, this definition suffices for my purposes. It brings to the fore the important question as to what accounts for “advances” in human culture and aspirations. The proponents ‘of modernization have an explicit answer to this question. The content of this answer demands thoughtful analysis. My own approach to the question of what constitutes an advance in civilization can be explained in terms of three interlocking “layers” within civilizations. These are the layers of religion, culture, and society. Three definitions, taken from the same dictionary, are helpful here. Religion: “‘the personal commitment to and serving of God or a god with worshipful devotion, conduct in accord with divine commands especially as found in accepted sacred writings or declared by authoritative teachers, a way of life recognized as incumbent on true believers, and typically the relating of oneself to an organized body of believers.” . *Dr. Bernard Zylstra teaches political theory at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto.Culture: “‘the total pattern of human behavior and its products embodied in thought, speech, action, and artifacts and dependent upon man’s capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations through the use of tools, language, and systems of abstract thought.” Society: “a community, nation, or broad grouping of people having common traditions, institutions, and collective activities and interests.” My thesis is this: (1) religion is the most fundamental factor in the advance or regression of a civilization; (2) religion expresses itself in the matrix of the several cultures that can exist within a single civilization; and (3) the impetus from both religion and a civilization’s cultures is largely accountable for the structuration of the societies that exist simultaneously within a civilization. The main moving force in a civilization therefore is from religion to culture to society.! This does not mean that there are no influences from society to culture to religion. But I am concerned here about the fundamental direction. In the light of that concern I dare say that religion is the human condition; it encompasses mankind’s predicament on earth. This embracing character does not belong to culture, society, history, nature, existence, life, labor, evolution, behavior, etc. Due account must be given to the content of these words, but their significance is relative to that of religion. The most fundamental change in the culture and society of western civilization was the result of a radical redirection in the religion of the West which began five hundred years ago with the Renaissance and of which the defense of modernization is the globally expansive expression. An understanding of modernization therefore presupposes an understanding of this religious redirection. For more than a thousand years the Christian religion had been the major civilizational force in the West.2 This does not mean that elements of Greek and Roman civilizations had not been absorbed by the Christian civilization of the “middle ages.” The absorption of elements from earlier epochs at the level of culture and society was of course necessary to maintain civilizational order. As a matter of fact, at the fundamental religious level the civilization of the middle ages combined in a fascinating synthesis spiritual components from both Biblical and nonbiblical sources — Greek thought, Roman Stoicism, near-eastern gnosticism, etc. The nature-grace framework of the high middle ages, which incorporated especially an Aristotelian understanding of nature, endangered the spiritual authenticity of medieval Christianity itself and thus contributed to the weakening of the religious foundation of Christian civilization and its speedier disintegration in the face of the spirit of modernity — the new religious force that considered 4itself as the toundation of the culture and of the society in the “modern age.” ONE. THE NATURE OF MODERNITY Modernity is the post-Christian religion in the history of the West. It entails the abolition of Christianity. From a formal point of view, modernity in its radical essence negates the religious foundation of Christian civilization and rejects, in a more or less thoroughgoing manner, its Christian culture and society. Moreover, modernity posits both an alternative to the Christian religion as well as a more or less thoroughgoing substitute for Christian culture and society. As to the content of what it posits, modernity cannot be understood apart from the content of what is negates. To put it differently, modernity is an inversion of Christianity. In nearly every one of its tenets, modernity is linked to the Christian view of things, but in an inverted manner.? It turns matters upside down. What are some of its salient features? 1. Secularity Modernity is secular. By this I do not mean its legitimate concern for the saeculum, the span of time that men and women spend on earth. In the middle ages, this span of time often did not receive its proper due because of the depreciation of creation in the medieval juxtaposition, in which temporal and worldly matters were often considered merely as stepping stones to eternal and heavenly matters. Nor do I mean by secular what is commonly associated with this term, namely, the emancipation of nonecclesiastical realms from the dominion of the institutional church. These two instances of “secularity” do not at all have to be an expression of the abolition of the Christian religion. Rather, as in the early Reformation period, they could embody more authentic expressions of the biblical spirit. By describing modernity as secular I have in mind its repudiation of the divine revelation of the truth about reality and the rules about good and evil by which mankind is to live. In many ways the protagonists of modernity are interested not so much in the denial of God’s existence but in the denial of his revelation. As Hannah Arendt once put it, the secularization of the modern age “began with a turning-away, not necessarily from God, but from a god who was the Father of men in heaven.” * God in the modern age is no longer the Father in heaven who reveals his good will for his children on earth. To be sure, the protagonists of modernity in its radicalized unfolding found it increasingly imperative to deny God’s existence, for if he does not exist he certainly cannot reveal. Karl Marx especially insisted on this; for him man and nature are the only existent entities, the only “essential beings.”> But it is not necessary to be an atheist in order to be an agent of the spirit of modernity. What is imperative is the denial of the divine elucidation 5of truth and the divine explication of what is good for human life. In the place of divinely revealed truth about reality, modernity’ posits as its substitute autonomous reason, which expressed itself first in the great philosophical systems up to the time of Hegel, but then increasingly in positivistic science as the best instrument to control nature for technical inventions and industrial production. In the measure that positivistic science cannot fulfill the needs of persons, modernity is willing to speak of ideology. But this is purely the individual or collective opinion of the world or the justification of behavior. But this opinion or justification is not subject to the criterion of truth. Modernity places the content of classical philosophy and revelation in the category of ideology. This content is at best metaphysics, at worst superstition. In the place of divine revelation about the rules for human life — traditionally referred to as ethics — modernity substitutes the self-sufficiency of the human will, either in its individual or collective expression. Here modernity posits its conception of freedom. In the Christian religion, to be free is to act in accordance with the rules that fit human nature. In modernity, to be free is to act in accordance with rules established by the human will. Rousseau formulated this notion most pointedly. For him freedom is “to obey a law which we prescribe for ourselves.” In this sense modernity is at once an expression of humanism — man is at the center of the world — and liberalism — “man’s essence is his freedom.’"7 Because of this assumed essence, modernity in its radicality cannot endure rules that have their origin outside of man’s individual or collective will. The foundation of ethics or “normativity” is drastically altered. The ethics of modernity is one of “values,” that is, individual or collective preferences to guide our behavior. Here, as well as in so many other matters, we can learn from George Grant, one of Canada’s outstanding Christian thinkers. He formulates the difference between classicial and modern ethics as follows: (Dhe traditional western view of goodness is that which meets us with an excluding claim and persuades us that in obedience to that claim we will find what we are fitted for. The modern view of goodness is that which is advantageous to our creating richness of life (or, if you like, the popular modern propagandists’ ‘quality of life’). 8 2. Nature as object A second characteristic of the spirit of modernity is its view of nature. In the revelation of the Scriptures, nature is creation. It consists of an amazing variety of creatures, made “after their kind,” with intrinsic qualities that make human life on earth possible, that are to be unfolded in man’s cultural deeds, and that are to be 6respected and maintained in their creaturely integrity. In the sacred writings of the Christian religion, nature is not a world to be feared, as if it is inhabited by divine powers and deities which are not subject to the Creator. In this sense nature is demythologized in the Scriptures; and its qualities and potentials are opened to man’s cultural acts, including his scientific and technical acts. But in modernity, the creaturely character of nature is done away with. For this creatureliness both directs and limits man’s interference with nature. Modernity rejects that direction and these limits, and views nature as the object of man’s autonomous will, in his art, his science, his technology, and in his economic exploitation of nature’s resources for the satisfaction of his limitless needs. Nature in the Scriptures is the theatre of God’s glory. Nature in modernity is the arena of man’s Faustian conquest. Nature is the object of permanent change in accordance with the desires of the human will, by means of science and technique. While the biblical view of reality as dynamic creatior. provides a basis for science and technology, modernity’s conception of nature as object provides a basis for the attempted destruction of nature by means of science and technology. As a matter of fact, it is not inappropriate to say that the very word nature is scrapped from the terminology of the modern age. In its place we have changing process, which can be directed in one way or another. Even human nature itself does not escape this onslaught of modernity on creaturely stability. Human freedom cannot be limited by a given nature of man. Human nature itself must be the object of change. If modern man is to be genuinely free, he must be at liberty to change his own nature, “to remake himself altogether.” Here the Biblical revelation concerning God’s creation of the world is inverted so that man becomes a self-creator.'° The means for this self-creation are man-made means: science, technique, and labor. 3. Man as instrument The implications of this conception of human nature are of course phenomenal. Christian revelation depicts human personality as having its existential, spiritual center in the love of God and fellow- men. Perhaps the most significant casualty of the onslaught on the Christian religion is the elimination of this spiritual center in modernity’s understanding of what it means to be human. This does not mean that human nature no longer has this spiritual center in the modern age. Created human nature cannot change. But it does mean that individual persons can be treated as if they are objects without a spiritual center. In its radical excesses, modernity justified the instrumentalization of man, the use of one human being by another as an object. This potential instrumentalization of man is intensified by the 7elimination of the faith faculty from the modern view of human experience. Human nature is endowed with the faculty to receive divine revelation and to articulate the content of revelation in confessional symbols or creeds. Since modernity denies the existence of revelation, it cannot present a satisfactory account of this faith faculty, nor of the confessional symbols or creeds or acts of worship that are a normal part of ordinary experience. Because of its intense opposition to revelation, modernity rejects this openness to the divine in human experience and leaves us with a truncated conception of human personality. Every expression of man’s faith faculty is reduced to an intellectual proposition or, more likely, the ideological justification of behavior patterns or material acquisition. For without regard to man’s spiritual center, human personality can only be defined in terms of the faculties or functions or aspects of his experience. The center of his personality must be sought in one of these functions, or in a cluster of them. The faith function is eliminated as a possibility. So we are left with the so-called animal functions and with the supra-animal functions, ranging from the analytic to the moral dimension of human personality. Within this range, the debate about the nature of man in the modern age has focused on which aspects are central. In the earlier centuries of the modern age the emphasis fell on the rational-moral faculties; especially with the Enlightenment, man’s social functions received a good deal of attention; with Marx the view gained ground that man is an animal laborans; and with Darwin it became almost universally accepted that man is a psychobiotic entity. Eric Voegelin describes this process of change in the definition of human nature in these words: The rapid descent from reason, through technical and planning intellect, to the economic, psychological and biological levels of human nature, as the dominants in the image of man, is a strong contrast to the imposing stability of the Christian anthropology through eighteen centuries. Once the transcendental anchorage is surrendered, the descent from the rational to the animal nature, so it seems, is inevitable." The more conservative proponents of modernity tend to defend the rational-moral definition of man, while the so-called progressive elements tend to defend the psychobiotic definition of man. What matters most to us in this mind-body debate is that the defenders of the “body” have won. The satisfaction of the body’s material needs is given priority as “values” in our culture. And the institutions of society, notably the educational, industrial, and political, are restructured to make that satisfaction possible. Nearly every one of the major issues in the realms of education, industry, and government presupposes the primacy of man’s material wants. The inability of the leaders in these sectors of society to recognize 8themselves as tools of the idols of a materialistic civilization is one of the clearest symptoms of the profound spiritual crisis of the modern age in its contemporary manifestation. 4, Paradise regained: secular eschatology Biblical revelation instructs us about mankind’s path through time as beginning with the alpha of God's good creation, disturbed by man’s sinful rebellion against the Creator, restored in the right direction through the Father’s redemptive acts in Christ Jesus, and moving towards the omega of the final consummation. As we saw, modernity rejects the alpha of God’s good creation. Modernity’s inverted view of history is therefore a secular, immanentized version of the movement from sin to redemption and consummation. Man’s creaturely finitude is equated with his “sinful” predicament, from which he must be liberated through self-redemption, by means of the trinity of science, technique and production, in order to regain paradise lost. The happiness to be found in that paradise depends upon the particular view of man that commands the attention of the proponents of modernity. We saw that material happiness is the dominant motive in the later phases of the modern age. The pursuit of material abundance is therefore the most powerful current within modernity, proceeding as it does from Hobbes’s conception of man’s avoidance of death as the summum malum — the greatest evil — to Locke’s view of property, Adam Smith’s conception of man as a bartering being, Marx’s animal laborans, and the contemporary illusion of an inalienable right to leisure. In this movement towards the acquisition of material bliss, modernity locates the progress of its civilization. And in its radicality it will do nearly anything to accomplish that progress. S. Revolution If we now briefly place before us the main tenets of modernity, we will immediately recognize its revolutionary impact on the existence of civilizations, western or otherwise. Modernity negates the relevance of God’s existence, the enlightenment of revelations, the given structure of created entities (natural or social), the spiritual essence of man, his openness to God, the significance of cultural traditions, and the meaningful stability of the social order with its institutions of marriage, family, church and state. Modernity posits the autonomous human will as the final source of “values,” technical rationality in science as the most fitting instrument in extracting nature’s resources in industrial p-oduction, and the acquisition of material abundance for man’s bodily needs as the goal of progress in history. I choose the word revolutionary to describe the impact of modernity advisedly. The proponents of modernity have given their allegiance to a post-Christian, in many instances today to a 9posthumanistic “religion” as the foundation for a radical redirection in western civilization, which is increasingly becoming the civilization of this planet. This redirection entails a turnabout in the cultural and societal structurations of every existent civilization. And it must be admitted that modernity has been immensely successful in the realization of its revoluntionary intent. In the dismantling of the old and in the erection of a new cultural and social order, the adherents of modernity are of course not equally radical. There are recognizable gradations among them which in effect constitute the occasions for many of the battles within western civilization, philosophically, artistically, economically, politically, and militarily. The content of these gradations — usually described as left, center, and right — of course depends upon the local cultural and social situation. The content is different in the United States, Canada, England, Poland, China, Chile, Israel, Nigeria, etc. A second, related point is that the revolutionary impact of modernity is not the same everywhere. The modern age does not begin at the same time in every society. Roughly speaking, it began in northern Italy in the late fifteenth century, in France in the sixteenth, in England and Holland in the seventeenth, in Germany and the United States in the eighteenth, in Russia and South America in the nineteenth, in China, India and Japan in the twentieth century. The first great impact of modernity in the Arab world is occuring today, with the undermining of Islamic religion and culture as a consequence of the spread of technological materalism paid for by oil monies. A similar fate seems to be in store for the nations on the African continent, which, having shed the strictures of western colonialism and moving away from their indigenous religions, appear to be limited in their cultural and societal choices to the varying options of modernity. The representatives of these options are doing their utmost to help “modernize” the nonwestern world, as in VietNam and Angola. Thirdly, though modernity is revolutionary especially with respect to the religious foundations of civilization, it has not succeeded in eliminating Christianity in the modern age, certainly not in those countries where the conservative wing of modernity is dominant (Spain, South America), nor in those nations where the moderate modernists are in control (Western Europe, Great Britain, Canada, the United States, Australia). Even the most radical expression of modernism (in Russia, eastern Europe, and China) has not obliterated religion entirely, as the witness of Solzhenitsyn shows. For the nature of man, though manipulable by the political and economic ideologies and the experiments of the social and medical “scientists,” is not so readily revised. But it is of course true that the condition of individual men and women can be changed — from life to death. Our era has witnessed that too, especially in the atrocities performed during 1914-18 and 1939-1945. 10This confronts us directly with our next theme: the civilizational agents of the spirit of modernity. TWO. THE AMERICAN EMPIRE Empires are the main civilizational carriers of the spirit of modernity. An empire is a power constellation’ in which one state imposes its political sovereignty on peoples and nations outside its territory. Empires are not new with the modern age. Before the Christian era, the mediterranean basin witnessed the rapid succession of the Persian, Macedonian, and Roman empires, which Eric Voegelin describes as apparently “‘not organized societies at all, but organizational shells that will expand indefinitely to engulf the former concrete societies.” An empire is an “indefinite expansion of a power shell devoid of substance.” '? The introduction of the Christian religion into the mediterranean basin contributed to the breakup of the then existing imperial power constellation and for a thousand years prevented the rise of new empires. With the loss of the civilizational influence of the Christian church in western Europe and the rise of new nation-states, the possibility for the development of new imperial constellations became concrete. Because the spirit of modernity is one of limitless expansion, the imperial structure suits its realization best. In view of this the modern age has been one of imperial expansion and intensification of conflicts among nation-states with imperial goals, today equipped with nuclear arms. Because the territory of Europe was small and heavily populated, and because the military arsenal at the disposal of the new nation-states was relatively crude and immobile, the imperial goals were pursued not so much within Europe as in the newly discovered continents of the Americas, Asia and Africa. Here the seafaring nations of Spain, Portugal, Holland and England enjoyed great advantages. They were the initial instruments of the Faustian spirit of world conquest which gave them access to riches simply not available in a preindustrial epoch within their homeland territories. But proximity to the world’s oceans was mainly a convenience. The spirit of modernity will cause imperial pursuits almost immediately after each outbreak. Only a decade after the French Revolution we see Napoleon attempting to subject Europe to his domination. With the seizure of military power on the part of Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler, we are confronted with imperial pursuits and conflicts which, because they were fought largely within the limited space of Europe, inevitably climaxed in the tragedies of World War Two. The thesis that empires are the major carriers of the spirit of modernity brings all sorts of questions to the fore. If empires are not new with the modern age, what exactly is “modern” about this iepoch?!3 What explains the loss of imperial dynamismon the part of Spain and Portugal? Is Japan’s imperial role in the twentieth century a result of its contact with the West or a consequence of the secularization of its indigenous religions? Moreover, even if one accepts the crucial role of empires, what about other carriers of the spirit of modernity, such as nonimperial states, educational institutions, the professions, labour unions, the media, the secularized churches, the political parties, and especially the industrial and financial corporations? These questions are important, but I will not deal with them here. I will instead limit myself to one facet of the imperial phenomenon, namely, the role of the United States of America. 1. The stability of the center The USA is an extraordinary phenomenon in world history. How are we to understand its magnitude? Earlier I spoke of the three major gradations or directions in modernity: the radical left, the moderate center, and the conservative right. The USA is the vanguard, not of modernity, but of its moderate center. Because of its moderate stance within the ‘“‘spiritual” spectrum of modernity, the USA never so much as flirted with a radical, ‘‘once-and-for-all”’ revolution, which leaves the cultural heritage of the past in shambles and, because of the resultant social chaos and anarchy, establishes the need for a centralized dictatorship that occupied the seat of power, as in Paris after the French revolution in the 1790s. in Moscow in the 1920s, in Berlin in the 1930s, and in Peking in the 1950s. Why did the USA opt for a moderate, centrist stance within modernity? I will only venture a few suggestions. The main link between the USA and Europe was England. Ever since the time of the Reformation, Anglo-Saxon culture dealt with the spirit of the modern age in terms of moderation and accommodation. There always was sufficient continuity in cultural institutions and social structures to maintain civilizational stability. But at the same time there was a sufficient degree of change in religion, philosophy, science, technical inventions, and economic development (both via the colonial regime abroad and industrial production at home) to satisfy most of the material needs of the masses as well as the acquisitive demands of the socially powerful segment of the population. Because of the gradual absorption of the spirit of modernity (except for a brief hectic period in the seventeenth century which led to Cromwell's republic), England provided the proper setting for a slow but nonetheless fundamental political revolution and the ideal atmosphere for the industrial revolution. The French radical philosophes, in preaching freedom, equality and fraternity, prepared for the fratricidal practices of the guillotine after 1789. Meanwhile, the English scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs set 12in motion an industrial apparatus that provided labour for an uprooted proletariat, employed the colonies as suppliers of raw materials and as markets for the finished products, and thus substantially increased the material wealth of the nation. Rousseau’s Social Contract is a radical expression of modernity; Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations is a moderate expression. Rousseau continues to inspire modernity’s left wing. Adam Smith proved to be pragmatically effective. The spirit of gradual accommodation at the depth-level of religious direction in Great Britain accounts for the almost imperceptible shift from the Christian view of man as a being with a spiritual center to the modern view of man as a psychobiological entity with material needs. But this shift occurred nonetheless, as the entire tradition of British thought tellingly testifies, from Thomas Hobbes to David Hume to Charles Darwin to Bertrand Russell. The USA inherited the Anglo-Saxon centrist accommodation with the spirit of modernity. Here the puritan origins of the American mind should not lead us to romantic idealizations. The spirituality of the late Puritans, as exemplified in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim's Progress (1678), was in itself already a departure from biblical Christianity, in its view of redemption — the pursuit of individual soul salvation — and in its concomitant depreciation of creation. When this individualistic pursuit of salvation became secularized, as depicted in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and concretized in the life of a person like Benjamin Franklin, the realm of creation returned as the object of rational-scientific inquiry and the arena for the pursuit of life, liberty, and property.’4 In this light it is not a surprise that the Founding Fathers of 1776 were much more at ease with the “Christian” reasonableness of John Locke than with the radicalism of Rousseau and Diderot. Locke provided precisely what the eighteenth century centrist within modernity desired: rational religion and the rationale for property. But why then did the USA develop into an empire when its cultural ancestor declined, when the British Empire collapsed? There are many reasons. I will mention a few. In the first place, we should never forget that the United States is the only major nation whose entire history falls within the modern age. It has no roots of its own that nourish it from the premodern era. In_ its self-modernization, the USA did not have to deal with long religious traditions, a rich cultural matrix, and an interlocking web of societal bonds. The USA could almost start its history — and its empire — from scratch. The USA is in continuity with western civilization, but the break modernity brought into that civilization was most easily accomplished in the “new world.” 132. Revolution with a mission If indeed there were few historical roots from the past that stood in the way of America’s permanent revolution, what factors did the thirteen colonies have to cope with? The need of the hour was, of course, political severance from England. The American Revolution, as an historical event, was quite different from the French Revolution, since it entailed the declaration of independence on the part of a people that could well manage its own political affairs. The American Revolution, though of world historical importance, did not inflict the wounds in a civilization that its French counterpart did. The Declaration of Independence is a beautiful exhibit of the moderate position within modernity. It fused Christian reminiscence, reasonable deism, and the pursuit of happiness into a single creed.'>' After initial tension among different factions in the thirteen states, an excellently functioning constitution was adopted in 1789. There was a growing consciousness that what had transpired among the few million citizens of the United States was to be of immense future significance. Even the moderate George Washington, in a letter to Lafayette, expressed this exuberant consciousness: “We have sown a seed of Liberty and Union that will germinate by and by over the whole earth. Some day the United States of Europe will be constituted, modelled after the United States of America. The United States will be the legislator of all nations.”'6 Here we find an early description of the civilizational mission which one day the USA would strive for in the modern age. 3. An imperial home base But that civilizational role could only be assumed on an imperial basis at home. This none of the European nation-states was able to establish because of the limited space in Europe. It is possible for the United States, Russia, China and, in the future, perhaps India. Until today, the USA has made the most of this possibility, because the new land was inhabited by a new people. The native Indian population in North America was sparse, and could thus be killed off or placed in harmless reservations. This solution to the native problem was impossible to implement in Europe's colonies in Asia and Africa, and considerably more difficult in South America. (With respect to the matter of a new population, only New Zealand and Australia are parallels to the USA.) This meant that in the expansion of the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, it never had to cope with significant and legitimate nationalist aspirations of native people which were a major factor in the collapse of the Dutch, British, and French empires since the second world war. Slavery was another factor in the development of the American empire. While Christianity had contributed to the diminution of 14slavery during the middle ages, it is amazing to note how readily the spirit of modernity, despite its notion of the self as freedom, had reabsorbed this inhuman institution to advance its economic foundation of wealth.'? The European-based empires had never introduced slavery into their homeland economies, limiting it to their colonies. But when the thirteen British colonies became independent, they did not consider the negroes as recipients of the newly won freedoms. They were maintained as slaves, who contributed substantially to agricultural growth between 1750 and 1860, when the slave population numbered nearly four million. This clearly gave the homeland economy of the USA a distinct advantage during the first century of its history as an independent nation. This labour force was expanded immensely by what is probably the most important migration of peoples in human history: between 1820 and 1920 approximately thirty-five million immigrants entered the USA, mainly from old Europe. I believe that the meaning of this migration for the establishment of a ‘new society” in the history of western civilization generally escapes us. In any case, the social sciences, which deny the spiritual core of human personality and “neutrally” proclaim the “values” of cultural change and social mobility, obstruct an understanding of the meaning of this phenomenal displacement of persons, A first-generation immigrant, like myself, is as a rule least equipped to fathom the religious, cultural, and social uprooting of this migration into the permanent revolution of the “new world.” But 1 am beginning to sense what George Grant is saying to all of us whose ancestors left Europe to settle on this side of the Atlantic: Those who know themselves to be North Americans know they are not Europeans. The platitude cannot be too often stated that the U.S. is the only society which has no history (truly its own) from before the age of progress. English-speaking Canadians, such as myself, have despised and feared the Americans for the account of freedom in which their independence was expressed, and have resented that other traditions of the English-speaking world should have collapsed before the victory of that spirit; but we are still enfolded with the Americans in the deep sharing of having crossed the ocean and conquered the new land. All of us who came made some break in that coming. The break was not only the giving up of the old and the settled, but the entering into the ma- jestic continent which could not be ours in the way that the old had been. It could not be ours in the old way because the making of it ours did not go back before the beginning of conscious memory. The roots of some communities in eastern North Ameri- ca go back far in continuous love for their place, but none of us can be called autochthonous, because in all there is some con- sciousness of making the land their own. It could not be ours also 15because the very intractibility, immensity and extremes of the new land required that its meeting with mastering Europeans be a battle of subjugation. And after that battle we had no long history of living with the land before the arrival of the new forms of con- quest which came with industrialism.'8 4. Modernity’s new people By leaving Europe and settling here we left behind the better part of the arsenal to withstand the post-Christian spirit of modernity which, in its moderate expression, was the mainspring of the American way of life. The great majority of us did not come here for religious reasons. We came here for economic reasons. In this migration we lost our spiritual and cultural roots. And within a generation or two we learned to practise our religion and to maintain our cultural identity within the confines of the numerous sects and ethnic groups.!? Modernity will not permit the claims of religion to have an effect on the public realm. The claims of religion are radically privatized into personal value systems or ideologies. The migration of the European peoples into the USA goes a long way to explain the peaceful, nonviolent accommodation between Christianity and modernity. On this side of the ocean we do not fight religious wars, either by arms or by intellect. In the necessary societal distinction between the public realm and the private realm, this migration enhanced the allocation of religion to the private realm, with the convenient result that the claims of modernity could be pursued unhindered in the public realm. At the same time, the new immigrants did make an indispensable contribution to the public realm. In their readiness to join the pursuit of happiness which the “new world” promised the “old,” they supplied the labor necessary to conquer the West and to work in the factories that began to dot the land in ever increasing numbers after the Civil War. The United States of America — the immensity of its land, the riches of its earth, the wide horizons toward the Pacific, the relative peace at its frontiers, a “‘proper” mix of social stability and mobility, a sense of manifest destiny, a spirit of self-determination and self-reliance to achieve that destiny (“God helps those who help themselves”), the proof of progress visibly present in the creation of a great agricultural and industrial apparatus — the USA had at its disposal just about all the ingredients needed to solve the economic problem of modernity, namely, the establishment and maintenance of a system that can produce the material goods considered essential for man’s earthly happiness. The dynamism unleashed by the Faustian spirit of modernity requires channeling in a dependable system of expanding economic production. This the USA has managed to achieve in its bicentennial pilgrimage, and it has done so in a manner hitherto unparalleled in the history of the human race. 16CONCLUSION The accumulation of economic and political power at its home base has given the USA a superiority which no other nation-state has enjoyed in the modern age. When the crisis of the Civil War was passed, the process of industrialization at home and expansion of influence abroad increased rapidly. Already in the nineteenth century the USA began to play an important role in South America and the Caribbean, not by a direct seizure of governmental power but by economic dominance protected by political power, often in cooperation with the economic, political, and military circles in these foreign countries. The US involvement in the Phillippine war at the turn of the century revealed its expansion of interest in the Pacific arena. Its influence in Europe increased markedly by its participation in two world wars. Since 1945 the USA gradually moved into the vacuum of power left by the disintegration of the British Empire. The structure of the American empire is different from that of earlier empires. It has not been necessary to plant the American flag on foreign soil in order to guarantee the imposition of American will. That imposition was never total, since it was checked by nationalist aspirations on the part of the recently decolonized areas as well as by the expansion of Russian imperial intents. Moreover, even though the European states have lost nearly all of their colonies since 1945 they did not lose all of the influence abroad. But in a general way one can say that the USA is the vanguard of western industrial civilization, which relates to the third world in these ways: the third world functions as a supplier of raw materials not sufficiently available within the industrial homelands; the third world functions as a market for the finished products of western industry; the industrialized countries, again with the US at its center, controls the availability of capital, technology, and managerial know-how for the internal development of third-world countries. There are, of course, numerous exceptions to these key marks of economic imperialism; but they reveal the fundamental structure or pattern. The result of this economic imperial structure is the infringement on the internal political sovereignty of the third world-nations. Wherever the imperial “power shell devoid of substance” (Voegelin) expands, justice cannot flourish. The spiritual, religious, cultural, social, and national aspirations of nations outside of the heartland of the imperial structure are adjusted to the economic demands of the imperial center. This is the case to a great extent even in the relation between a relatively strong nation like Canada and the USA. Empires are the carriers of the post-Christian spirit of modernity. Today we see that nearly the entire world is becoming modernized, under the guidance of the USA, western Europe, and the USSR. The modernization — with its industrialization and homogenization — 17is our justification for the ‘‘progressive”’ role of the imperial regimes. This role must be subjected to a radical critique by members of the imperial centers. The heart of that critique must focus on the very assumptions of modernity as to what it means to be human on this earth. The disentanglement of Christians from the various options that modernity offers — right, center, left — is the first step of those whose path lies between the alpha of creation, the cross of Calvary, and the omega of the consummation. NOTES 1. See here Christopher Dawson, The Dynamics of World History (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956), especially the section on “Christianity and the Meaning of History.” 2. See Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1950). 3. For the theme of inversion in modernity, see Eric Voegelin, From Enlightenment to Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 1975), and the literature cited in B. Zylstra, “Voegelin on Unbelief and Revolution” in Een staatsman ter navolging: Groen van Prinsterer herdacht (A Statesman to Follow: Groen van Prinsterer Commemorated) (The Hague: Educational Centers of the Antirevolutionary Party, The Christian Historical Union, and The Catholic Peoples Party, 1976), pp. 191-200. 4. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959), p. 2. 5. In Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Marx wrote that socialism ‘proceeds from the theoretically and practically sensuous consciousness of man and nature as the essence.” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), p. 306. For the position of Marx within modernity, see B. Zylstra, “Karl Marx: Radical Humanist,” Vanguard, December 1973, pp. 9-14. 6. Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book I, Chapter VIII. 7. George Grant, Philosophy in the Mass Age (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1959, 1966), in the Introduction of 1966, p. iv. 8. George Grant, “ ‘The Computer Does Not Impose on Us the Ways it Should Be Used’, in Abraham Rotstein, ed., Beyond Industrial Growth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), p. 127. 189. Cf. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976), p. 16. For an assessment of Bell’s approach to modernity, see B. Zylstra, “A Neoconservative Critique of Modernity,” Christian Scholar's Review (forthcoming in 1977). 10. Marx is perhaps the most radical proponent of man’s self-creation within the spectrum of modernity. He claimed that “for the socialist man the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labour,” See Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 305. ? 11. Eric Voegelin, From Enlightenment to Revolution, p. 13. 12. Eric Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), p. 117. 13. Voegelin asks this question in The Ecumenic Age, p. 7f. 14. For a discussion of the relationship between modernism and Puritanism, see B. Zylstra, “A Neoconservative Critique of Modernity.” 15. See Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth- Century Philosophers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932); and Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). 16, Quoted in Voegelin, From Enlightenment to Revolution, pp. 181-182. 17. John Locke, who has profoundly influenced the Founding Fathers in their centrist position with respect to their view of the social order, had also provided a convenient defense of slavery in his Two Treatises of Government (1689). 18. George Grant, Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1969), p. 17. 19, Here again it was John Locke who provided moderate modernity with the rationale for the adjustment of religion to the overriding claims of secularity. See his A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). The United States Supreme Court decisions interpreting the First Amendment of the Constitution are the best example of the legitimation of post-Christian modernity as the civil religion of the public realm.INTERNATIONAL INTERDEPENDENCE AND THE DEMAND FOR GLOBAL JUSTICE “James W. Skillen For Christians taking up a serious discussion of international politics there is at least one high hurdle that arises immediately. It is the firmly placed hurdle of historical realism — a principle, a perspective, and an approach that has gained almost universal acceptance from scholars and statesmen alike. It is not necessary that one be familiar with all the arguments between different schools of liberals and socialists, nationalists and internationalists to be able to understand that the dominance of ‘realism’ means the rejection of so-called ‘moral ideals’ as irrelevant for the serious discussion of foreign policy and for any effort to obtain an accurate empirical description of the international state of affairs. Thankfully we do not need to approach this hurdle helplessly, as if for the first time, because a few others have already confronted some of the issues involved in this matter and have given some helpful suggestions that should aid us in our own attempt to jump.! For our purposes here let me state the problem very simply this way: if we want to ask questions such as “What direction ought American foreign policy to take in order for justice to be done to other nations and peoples?” or “What kind of legitimate world order ought Christians to be helping to build?” or ‘What principles ought to guide Christians in their decisions to support or to reject the foreign policies of their own governments?” then we must be prepared to face the criticism of those who would argue that the world order we might ideally wish to build may have no possibility of actual achievement. We must be prepared to answer the charge that idealistic discussions of moral principle may have some meaning in theological debate but are irrelevant for purposes of making real foreign policy decisions. In its simplest form the problem has been posed by the title of one of Reinhold Neibuhr’s early books, Moral Man and Immoral Society.2 In other words, while it may be quite legitimate and even realistic to discuss the moral responsibilities and possibilities of individuals, it is quite another matter when we deal with social institutions and especially with the relationships of states to one another in an international context that is essentially anarchic. In the latter instance we can only talk of international politics as amoral, at best, and at worst, or most realistically, as immoral. * James W. Skillen is professor of Political Science at Gordon College, Wenham, Mass., U.S.A. 20But before we adopt too quickly a defensive posture in face of this so-called realism in order to plead for the right to inject our morality into international political reality, let us stop to ask what it is that we are being asked to accept with this framework of realism vs. idealism, immorality vs. morality, power vs. justice. At first the realist argument comes across as sufficiently sound and plausible to win our uncritical acceptance. Morality, it is argued, is a personal thing which has meaning only if individuals can be held accountable for their acts. And within ordinary societies there are countless human communities and religious systems from the family to the courts, from the schools to the churches, that accomplish precisely this function of holding individuals accountable. But states are not individuals, in the first place; and in the second place there are not sufficient numbers and kinds of supra-national institutions to hold states accountable to and for one another in relation to some universal, supra-national moral principle. If a state were to attempt unilaterally to act on the basis of a moral code that is applicable to individuals, it would very likely run into the greater evil of endangering its own existence and thus the very lives of its citizens. Consequently, so the argument concludes, states must act as states, not as individual persons, and the result might appear to be quite immoral from the vantage point of the moral individual. There is more, however, to the realist’s argument. Having established what appears to be the impossibility of a completely moral state in the international arena, the argument goes on to try to legitimize a state's seemingly immoral actions on the grounds that states have no choice but to seek their own survival and self-interest. Now, whether one believes that self-interested acts are the result of man’s fallen nature, or whether one simply recognizes the reality of self-interest on empirical grounds, namely, on the grounds that states have always acted in a self-interested, self-protective, self- enhancing way, it remains the case, so the realist argues, that such is the reality of the international arena and states do not have the freedom to act as if this were not so. But think now about what was just said. How was the state described in the last few sentences? What was assumed about how states are forced to act? The word ‘self’ was used several times in connection with the idea of ‘national self-interest.’ And the word ‘act’ was used, clearly conveying the impression that states act as integral entities, making certain policies that express the state's “will.” But what is the meaning of these terms? Were we not told before that states cannot be treated as moral persons? How then can we be expected to think of states as immoral, or self-centered persons? If states are not ‘selves’ capable of moral acts and 21responsibilities, then why should we grant that they are ‘selves’ capable of immoral acts? What has happened, you see is that a framework of moral meaning has been rejected on the grounds that the state is not a moral agent; but at the same time a framework of clearly personal, behavioral meaning has been retained, however analogically or metaphorically, in order to explain and interpret a state’s actions in the international context. And in this context a state’s ‘self-interested actions’ are then justified as necessary and legitimate. The result is a very subtle swindle or self-deception. While our attention was focused on the question of morality, we concluded, or were led to believe, that states cannot be expected to act according to moral principle. But is we direct our attention not to this inadequately framed moral question but, instead, to the meaning of ‘person’ and ‘self’ and ‘will’ and ‘act,’ then we can see that the question of morality is not really at issue; for the more fundamental question is about two different kinds of ‘persons’ that can ‘act,’ and about two different sorts of principles that ought to guide them, given their respectively different identities. Upon closer examination in fact, we find that Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans Morgenthau and the others of their mindset have not relinquished morality and normativity at all. They have always argued quite normatively about how states ought to ‘act’ in order to preserve themselves and in order to preserve as much international peace and stability as possible. Realism, therefore, is clearly not anti-normative; it has merely tried to free itself from a kind of moralism that it finds unacceptable and to establish a normative framework for international politics that can justify self-interested acts on the part of particular states. It seems to me, then, that we must reject the problem in the way that the realists have posed it for us. It is not political ‘reality’ that has been clearly established, while “morality” alone remains uncertain, questionable, and out of bounds. Instead, it is the entire reality, the full reality, of international politics that is in question including the very identity of states and the principles on which states ought to act. Posing the problem this way might lead us, as T would agree that it should, to a rejection of a great deal of liberal, socialist, and ‘Christian’ idealism that is so much irrelevant nonsense for the life of states in the international arena, as that arena is presently constituted. But it should also lead us to reject a great deal of what passes for ‘realism’ which is, in fact, a dogmatically normed account of, and argument for, a particular kind of ‘best possible’ world order — an account and argument that we should find unacceptable if we are truly concerned with international justice. We should recognize, too, before going further, that the “palance-of-power’ realism identified with the names of Hans 22Morgenthau, George F. Kennan and others is deeply indebted to Christians from Reinhold Niebuhr on back to Augustine. And a great deal of liberal and socialist idealism, identified with the names of Woodrow Wilson, John Hobson and others, is equally indebted to a long Christian tradition.3 It is not the pagan humanists, therefore, who have maliciously swindled the righteous Christians in this case. Instead, we must recognize that serious ambiguities and inadequacies in the Christian conceptions of political order, from Augustine to the present, are partially responsible for our modern Christian failures to transcend the framework of the idealist/realist debate. If, as I have argued, we ought to approach the problems of international politics in a new way, it should be relatively easy for most of us to turn away from the moral idealism that realists have been criticizing for years. We should do so, however, not in the fashion of the realists, but by our own self-criticism which can demonstrate that Christian morality has nothing to do with abstract idealism. Our biblical tradition does not present morality as an abstract ideal but as a covenantal framework of concrete norms for all kinds of different real institutions — from marriage and the family to churches and kingdoms. There are no biblical grounds for treating kings and generals and judges as though their responsibilities could be defined by some ideal political system or as though their individual responsibilities could be defined apart from their political offices in real states. Nor does God’s word come to those generals, kings, and judges as if, in those offices, they were priests or fathers of deacons. Those of us who stand in the biblical tradition should be quick then to reject a ‘moral idealism’ which by its very abstract and truncated character proves to be inapplicable to nations and states as they really function in this world. If, then, we refuse to be deterred from our efforts to clarify norms for national foreign policies and international justice, it is not because we are pious idealists ever hopeful that one day people and states might become ‘good,’ but rather because we know that the reality of evil which manifests itself in every human institution and relationship can never finally escape the wrath and judgment of God who holds on to this one real world by His normative and gracious Word and who calls peoples and nations here and now to heed His demands for justice and mercy and faithful stewardship. A biblically grounded, normative framework that has meaning for international politics today will not be a pious ideal, a mere hope for a better world, an irrelevant legal or moral fiction that cannot work because it does not come to grips with the realities of political power. If we find it possible to turn away from moral idealism with relative ease, it may be more difficult for us to take our distance from political realism. It might be helpful, then, if, at this juncture, 23we deal directly with a figure who represents, at least to a significant degree, a realistic outlook and approach. Henry Kissinger is a complex figure, not easily reduced to a simple classification;- nevertheless, it is not improper to view him as a rm-minded realist. He has certainly approached his ities as theorist and statesman with the assumption that the reality of international politics is one of competing powers which are not free to act on the basis of irrelevant ideals. Moreover, Kissinger is the student, par excellence, of nineteenth-century Europe’s balance-of-power arrangement, and the statesman who has made perhaps the greatest effort to try to bring the United States to see the contemporary world for what, in his view, it really is today — a multipolar, global field of competing powers that must achieve some kind of stable balance if global peace is to be preserved. It is interesting to note, therefore, that in his earlist book, A World Restored (1964),4 Kissinger made a very strong case for the fact that political power is not all that exists in international politics. Statesmen cannot be satisfied with the mere ‘balance of power,’ argued Kissinger; they must attempt to build a ‘particular,’ ‘historical’ equilibrium which all of the states can accept as legitimate and healthy for the process of their ongoing interactions and adjustments. The problem at the Congress of Vienna is 1815, he wrote, was to create an order in which change should be brought about through a sense of obligation, instead of through an assertion of power. For the difference between a revolutionary order and a healthy legitimate one is not the possibility of change, but the mode of its accomplishment. A “‘legitimate” order, as long as it is not stagnant, achieves its transformations through acceptance, and this presupposes a consensus on the nature of a just arrange- ment.> In another writing Kissinger makes the argument universal and states it even more strongly: The stability of any international system depends on at least two factors: the degree to which its components feel secure and the extent to which they agree on the “justice”’ or “fairness” of exist- ing arrangements . . . Considerations of power are not enough, however, since they turn every disagreement into a test of strength. Equilibrium is needed for stability; moral consensus is essential for spontaneity. In the absence of agreement as to what constitutes a “just” or “reasonable” claim, no basis for negotiation exists.® It would be a mistake, then, for us to imagine that nineteenth-century Europe was stable merely because military forces were balanced, or to believe that the international situation in Europe during that period can be described accurately by reference 24merely to its shifts of power alliances and the relative absence of war. Unless one notices the moral legitimacy of the order, the acceptance of the order as essentially just by most of the states, one misses an essential part of the reality. What the statesmen of that day struggled with, and what the political scientists and historians of our day must take into account, is the full scope of that international situation which included the normative decisions taken concerning the nature of a mutually acceptable order. This insight alone would be enough to give us some clues to the perspective of the realist today. It is one thing to argue, as realists do, that independent states in an anarchic world cannot afford to ignore the reality of that anarchy. Agreed! It is quite another thing, however, to argue, as some realists also do, that the goal of balancing independent powers in order to maximize national interests is the correct, normative approach that ought always to guide the statesmen in his efforts to deal with the anarchic situation. Simply by describing the character of nineteenth-century Europe’s moral settlement, and by noticing that today there still remains a relative anarchy of states, one may not thereby arrive at the normative conclusion that the nineteenth century’s particular solution was what ought to have been established even then, nor may one thereby arrive at the normative conclusion that such a solution reveals the true norm that ought to continue to guide states today. The only legitimate conclusions at which one can arrive on the basis of such historical evidence are (1) that there is an international situation that does impose itself on individual states in a way that does not leave them free unilaterally to ignore or change it, and (2) that in attempting to deal with one another in an anarchic situation, states make decisions of a normative character that contribute either to a legitimate and healthy or to an illegitimate and revolutionary arrangement. Consequently, the moral or normative questions always remain open at every stage of political decision-making in every historical situation. As we noticed earlier, then, a realistic approach to international politics cannot in fact be amoral; to the contrary, whether it attempts to hide its normative judgments or not, it is an approach which assumes, and leads to, normative judgments about what ought to guide states in their foreign policy-making. The question that we must ask of a Kissinger, therefore, is what grounds he has for arguing that a given arrangement ot approach is the correct one? In a recent study that examines all of Kissinger’s major works, James and Diane Dornan explain that Kissinger’s position regarding the proper place or morality in foreign policy was clearly evident from the outset: “He rejected sole reliance upon the balance of power for purely pragmatic reasons, because it was inadequate to achieve stability, not because a ‘legitimate’ system was morally 25preferable.” 7 Kissinger, in other words, has been a moral relativist from the beginning, interested only in the mutual acceptance by states of whatever international order can be established with relative stability. The great task that belongs to the statesman, in Kissinger’s view, is not that of trying to maximize an international order of justice, but that of manipulating creatively the given situation in a way that allows for the transcending of that situation in the direction of greater stability. With the clarity of Kant’s moralism, Kissinger argues that the meaning of human life is found in the creative expression of personality; “‘. . . nothing can relieve man from his ultimate responsibility, from giving his own meaning to life, from elevating himself above necessity . . .”® For the statesman this means nothing less than acting on the basis of a creative ‘intuition,’ in terms of ‘his vision of the future,’ in order to avoid the danger of becoming a prisoner of events.? But how does one gain the correct intuition? What grounds are there for any particular ‘‘vision of the future?” Kissinger’s answer is that the autonomous creativity of the lonely statesman is the primary source of such a guide and norm. Unfortunately, says Kissinger, “a call to greatness is often not understood by contemporaries,” and “statesmen often share the fate of prophets, that they are without honour in their own country,” because “their greatness is usually apparent only in retrospect when their intuition has become experience.” Statesmen must have the courage of their convictions — they must ‘‘act as if their intuition were truth,” attempting to “educate” their countrymen in the process.'° Surely we are justified in arguing that if Henry Kissinger can appeal to the autonomous, creative intuition of the statesman for the guiding norms that should shape the actions of nations in Realpolitik, then we have every right to appeal to a communally responsible, historically rooted, publically debated Christian view of universal global justice as the source of concrete norms for the shaping of foreign policies. The debate that we Christians should now be forcing, without any defensive hesitancy whatever, is the debate over the correct norms and principals ana visions of the future which alone can lead to international justice and to the means by which states can cooperate to acheive the demands of global justice. We should spend no more time derailed by the realist/idealist pseudo-debate. If it is possible for Christians to get beyond a naive idealism that merely hopes for a more rational, legal, and peaceful world, and beyond a power-fixated realism that continues to approach international politics with a primary concern for enlarging and sustaining the national interest, then the most difficult next step for 26most of us to take may be that of gaining a sufficiently expansive view of public justice to enable us to get beyond the narrow confines of liberal formalities. By liberal formalities I mean those basic principles of Western liberal democracy which have relatively little to do with the positive, normative identity and substantive tasks of the state both domestically and internationally. The liberal formalities are those negative limitations and procedural rules which tend to take the place of substantive political identity in the West. Let me mention only three of these. First, there is the doctrine of human rights — those primarily individual freedoms which, it is believed, governments ought not to infringe or violate. Second, there is the doctrine of popular sovereignty which requires that some kind of formal, democratic, representative procedure be established for allowing citizens to control, in a major way, the government which tules them. Third, there is the doctrine of pacta sunt servanda, which is that compacts, treaties, once agreed to, ought to be kept. Now when I argue that we need to get beyond the confines of these liberal formalities, I do not mean that we should reject them. To the contrary, I believe that we should support those international efforts that will enhance the security of individuals in face of arbitrary governments — governments that do not respect basic human rights. And we should support international efforts that will aid the growth of responsible representative government. And we should continue to support the important principle of political trustworthiness that will encourage nations to abide by their treaty commitments. But we delude ourselves if we think that these formal principles alone are sufficient to define the normative framework of national and international justice. We are mistaken if we believe that these constitute the primary moral goals of foreign policy. The liberal formalities do not touch enough of the internal substance of public justice which comes into being not simply when certain protective tules and positive procedures have been maintained. Public justice in the twentieth century can become manifest only where there is an equitable and healthy development among many interwoven social communities in gradually differentiating and integrating societies — when all people enjoy adequate health care and education; when the proper balance is achieved among industries and agriculture, among educational programs and professional services, between social mobility and social stability, between rural and urban living centers; when a government can aid the growth of public harmony domestically in a way that does not require it to act unjustly against other nations and governments. Let me take just one contemporary example to illustrate my point here. The Trilateral Commission, of which President Carter and a number of his high officials have been a part, is an ZTinternational commission of North Americans, West Europeans, and Japanese who have become aware, since 1973, that the international economic arrangements established at the end of World War II with the International Monetary Fund, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and a few other charters and institutions, are inadequate to handle the international economic problems of today!'The chief principle of the post-war economic order was the doctrine of free trade which, it was assumed, was the best guide to economic efficiency and prosperity. But free trade leads to the increasing international integration of domestic markets which in turn increases international economic interdependence. Thus, by the time that the U.S. was escaping from the Vietnam war, and by the time that energy shortages and other problems began to surface, most of the free trading partners were experiencing serious economic and social disequilibria that could not be alleviated without government actions that were in violation of the free trade doctrine. The governments of these countries began to throw up protective tariff barriers and other temporary safeguards against free trade in order to alleviate balance of payments deficits, unemployment in certain sectors of their economies, and so forth. According to British economist John Pinder, the disruption of weaker sectors and economies, the instability ot commodity and money markets, and the transmission of inflation or deflation from open economy to another are now so pervasive that the exception (to the free trade principle) has become therule: unless governments provide strong economic management, struc- tural as well as conjunctural and externally as well as domestically, free competition fails to maximize welfare, largely because of the oligopolistic strength of many firms and trade unions and because of the immobility of many factors of pro- duction . . .12 From Pinder’s point of view, these economically interdependent states have only two options. They may either retreat to a full insulation of their economies from one another, or they can adopt common policies to deal with the common problems. “In other words, the integration of markets needs either to be replaced by a separation of markets or to be complemented by an integration of policies.”13 It appears at this moment that Carter (with the. Trilateral Commission) wants to follow the second route and attempt to coordinate and integrate policies rather than to go backwards to full market separation. This is the choice that Pinder would urge because he believes that the need for economic management by governments will continue to grow and that “technological and social forces are pushing the modern economies toward greater 28interdependence, so that the economic and social costs of market separation will (only) increase.”"'+ But, of course, as we also know, the governments of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan are no longer free to deal only with one another. They are not alone in their growing interdependence. The third world and even some of the communist countries are also involved in this growing interdependence. Thus the governments of all these nations are being driven to a serious reconsideration and probably to a re-creation of almost the entire international economic system. The decisions that will be made in the next two or three years in this regard may be more complex, and will certainly cover a broader terrain, than all of the SALT agreements. These decisions will play a very important role in determining the framework of international economic justice or injustice in every conceivable dimension of the world economy, for both the rich and the poor nations, from the conditions for loans to the limits of trade quotas, from development priorities to energy conservation, from the stability of commodity prices to the amounts of development aid, from the rate of industrial growth to the cost of pollution control. The point of this brief excusion into the contemporary international economy is to show that the liberal formalities do not even touch these questions of economic policy integration. U.S. efforts to encourage the protection of human rights in Uganda or the Soviet Union, or U.S. efforts to aid the emergence of majority rule in Southern Africa, or U.S. efforts to make sure that the Soviet Union abides by its treaty commitments, will not, in themselves, lead to substantive economic justice for the people in Uganda or Rhodesia or South Africa or the Soviet Union or Canada or Japan. Moreover, it is clear that the questions about national sovereignty and the formal independence of states are increasingly less urgent in the realm of economic interdependence to the point where the most crucial questions now are those that ask about the kind of interdependence that will be established not about whether there will be any interdependence. But what do we Christians have to offer at this point? Do we believe, for example, that economic justice for Latin America and Africa should mean serious curtailment of our own North American pattern of economic growth and an enlargement of foreign aid? And if so, how do we propose to argue our case concretely? Do we believe that an increasingly interdependent world should lead to an increasing degree of cooperation and political integration for the sake of public international justice? If so, then how would we propose to make our case and to act in order, for example, to transform or incapacitate the powerful convictions and influences of those who want to keep America Number One and on top of the 29world with sufficient independence to go its own way even if that does not lead to greater justice for others? Unless we can develop an integral vision of concrete, institutional, public justice, of global proportions, that can demonstrate its power in handling the details of economic interdependence, military and arms growth, nuclear limitations, health, hunger, and education, in the context of the growing interdependence of all states, then surely we are failing to develop one of our greatest opportunities and obligations for Christian service. If there is any religious movement on earth that should be carrying forward an international, cooperative effort to acheive global justice, it should be the movement of the Body of Christ which claims to know, love, and serve the King of the whole earth. If there is any religious movement that should be constantly at work demonstrating the concrete political implications of its global responsibilities, it should be the Christian community. Instead of that visible manifestation of Christian service, however, we typically find Christians locked into nationalistic, liberal, and socialist ideologies that drain the dynamic power from the heart of the gospel. I have argued to this point that Christian responsibility in the realm of international politics can become viable only if we approach that realm with a sense of the integral, concrete wholeness of political reality at the global level. No false, realist/idealist abstractions of power or force, of rights or reason, can be allowed. The responsibility for normative decision-making among states is an integral part of international political reality. I have also argued that in order to contribute something substantial and significant to an understanding of that framework within which those normative decisions will be made, Christians will have to transcend the limits of the liberal, democratic political vision. We will have to elaborate a different, more concrete, more institutional, more material conception of public justice if we want to address the full reality of international interdependence as it is now emerging.'> In the final analysis, therefore, we must, in one sense, both begin and end by resolving the deceptive swindle which we examined in our consideration of the realist hypothesis about immoral states. The most fundamental problem, in other words, is that of the nature of the political entity, the identity of the state which is not an individual person but which nevertheless acts out its will in the context of some kind of normative responsiveness. And, of course, this is closely intertwined with the question of the identity and unique limits of inter-state relations. A final illustrative issue might help us to grasp this problem more clearly. ‘An important study done in the mid-sixties by Johan Galtung'® described the international politicial domain as a highly stratified 30system in which a few topdog nations stand at the pinnacle of a hierarchy that shows a descending order of underdog states each with less power than the state above. One of the major findings of Galtung’s empirical work, as Marshall Singer sees it, ‘‘is that the less powerful states tend to interact less (or not at all) with each other and more with the powerful states, while powerful states tend to interact more among themselves than they do with weaker states.”"'7 This means, among other things, that the weakest states have only a very few foreign policy options and are quite dependent upon the more powerful states, while the most powerful states have a very broad range of options and opportunities and are relatively more independent. At every step up the hierarchy, the number of international inter- actions and foreign policy options increases. The U.S interacts most with Britain, Canada, and the EEC, but it also interacts with India, Sri Lanka, and even the Maldive Islands,. Conversely, the Maldivians can only interact with the Ceylonese, and even then on a limited rather one-way bais.'® Now one of the implications of Galtung’s study that I want todraw out is the detrimental consequences of this arrangement for the poorer and weaker states as concerns their ability to establish political communities of real public justice. A small state like Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) is very heavily dependent upon its tea for foreign exchange, as is Cuba on sugar. American commercial interests that deal in tea or sugar, however, are obviously only small interests among thousands of American international enterprises. Likewise we can see that for all its power, the American Army is only one powerful interest in the American government, along with a high powered Navy, Air Force, State Department, Labor Department, and so forth. By contrast, however, a very small Army, relatively speaking, in a weak state might be the one institution with overwhelming influence and control. What happens, then, when the American tea industry decides to carry out a policy in its own interest that puts tremendous pressure on the tea producers of Sti Lanka? The consequences may be practically unfelt and even unknown in the United States but earthshaking in Sri Lanka as regards not only the tea industry but the whole economy and the public order as well. Or let us enter the public governmental sphere and take the case of Chile, as Marshall Singer does, realizing that Chile is a stronger and more diversified country than many others. Salvador Allende, we know, was elected on a platform of social reform that was to include the nationalization of large American economic interests. We also know of the efforts of I.T.T. to get the U.S. government to intervene directly to overthrow Allende. After the nationalization process got under way, the U.S. government then cut off all 31economic aid to Chile. “What is less well known,” however, explains Singer, ‘‘is that despite termination of economic aid, the U.S. government increased its aid to (and training of) the Chilean military throughout the period of Allende’s rule.” After nationalization, in other words, the U.S. government figured that in the long run its interests might best be served by means of the Chilean military. Allende, of course, did not want to be dependent on that U.S. aid, but he could not cut it off without risking the alienation of the military which was essential for his rule. On the other hand, as we all know, U.S. military aid to the Chilean military did have the ultimate consequences that Allende feared and that the U.S. desired. The point is that what was a fairly small amount of military influence coming from the United States, and which was only one of the U.S. government’s thousands of foreign policies in operation around the globe at the time, turned out be a major influence and deciding policy in Chilean politics. While United States citizens enjoy the benefits of a relatively well developed and stable political system along with the freedom and diversity of a complex social order, most people in the weaker, smaller states are locked into a relatively confined existence that may be controlled in a very lopsided and unjust fashion by one industry or commodity market, or by a powerful military elite, or by a very small, relatively wealthy, upper class elite. When a state like the United States throws a small portion of its weight around without due consideration of the unjust consequences in states that are not similarly developed, it contributes to injustice internationally as well as in the domestic affairs of the affected countries. And in parallel fashion, when the U.S. government allows private American commercial and corporate interests to have free play in the world, even when that free play is powerfully disruptive of public justice in other countries, then the government and the American people as citizens bear responsibility for the public injustice caused by those private interests. If, then, we begin without a clear notion of what a state ought to be, of what a diversified and integrated community of public justice ought to look like, then we will only continue to make all the past mistakes of democratic liberalism which first attempted rather naively to export formal democratic structures to the third world, and now is meagerly and unevenly aiding the development of a so-called economic substructure in those countries, with the assumption that peace, health, happiness, and prosperity will somehow follow eventually. In place of these approaches, our conclusions about what will lead to international justice must be built solidly and carefully upon a clear understanding of what public justice ought to be within and among states. If we callously overlook the tremendously significant 32and complex array of social communities and institutions that need to grow together in a balanced context of public justice in new states, and if we simply assume that what is good for America is good for the rest of the world, then we cannot possibly gain a perspective on international politics that can be called Christian. Precisely at this point our own most serious political weakness in the West produces our blindness as well as our realist/idealist ambivalence. We lack a positive, concrete, normative understanding of what local, national, and international communities of public justice ought to look like. Thus, in the international arena we vacilate back and forth between tough, so-called realistic, nationalistic power plays in our own supposed interest, on the one hand, and idealistic, superficial, altruistic efforts to make the rest of the world safe for democracy and prosperity, on the other hand. International justice is both a norm and a substantive situation of health and harmony within states and among them. What might appear to be in one nation’s interest and at the same time possible today, may not be what is just for everyone in the long run. An immoral realism may make Americans proud and rich today, but it might lead to death and destruction for American grandchildren and their Canadian, Mexican, and Chinese neighbors in the year 2000. Yes, international diplomacy is difficult, uncertain, and not carried out by the unilateral acts of single, self-interested states. But the demands of justice remain nonetheless, by the grace of God, even if nations refuse to heed them. The normative question in 19th century Europe, in the world today, and in the smaller world of tomorrow will remain: “What are the nations of the earth doing to achieve justice for all?” And the question comes with the greatest force and the greatest demand to the most powerful nations on earth. NOTES 1, Most recently Robert DeVries has provided a helpful evaluation and critique of some of the problems and literature in this area. See his “Moral Principle and Foreign Policy-Making,” Christian Scholar's Review, vol. VI, no. 4 (1977), pp. 303-316. For some background material on the realist/idealist debate, see John Herz, Political Realism and Political Idealism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951); Thomas I. Cook and Malcolm Moos, Power Through Purpose: The Realism of Idealism as a Basis for Foreign Policy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1954); and James E. Dougherty and Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr., Contending Theories of International Relations (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1971). 2. Originally published in 1932 by Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York. 3. See the discussion of these different figures in Kenneth N. Waltz, 33Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954, 1969), pp. 20-41, 103-123, 145-158. Cf. also Reinhold Niebuhr, Christianity and Power Politics (New York: Scribner's, 1940); and Christian Realism and Political Problems (New York: Scribner's, 1953); Edward H. Buehrig, Woodrow Wilson and the Balance of Power (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955); John Hobson, Towards International Government (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1951). Subtitled, The Politics of Conservatism in a Revolutionary Age (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964), 5. Quoted from ibid in James E. Dornan, Jr., and Diane S. Dornan, “The Works of Henry A. Kissinger,’ The Political Science Reviewer, vol. V (Fall, 1975), pp. 53-54. 6. Quoted in Dornan and Dornan, op. cit., p. 54. 7. Ibid., p. 116. 8. Ibid., p. 121. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., p. 122. 11. For some perspective on the circumstances and developments that brought the Trilateral Commission into existence see Richard N. Cooper, ed., A Reordered World: Emerging Inter- national Economic Problems (Washington, D.C.; Potomac Associates with Foreign Policy, 1973). See also the Commission’s own bulletin Trialogue (345 East 46th St., New York, New York 10017). 12. Pinder, “Economic Diplomacy,” in World Politics, edited by James N. Rosenau, Kenneth W. Thompson, and Gavin Boyd (New York: The Free Press, 1976), p. 316. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., p. 317. 15, One example of some important thinking being done that Christians should be studying together and criticizing from an in- tegrally Christian standpoint is a collection of very fine essays edited by Saul H. Mendlovitz, On the Creation of a Just World Order: Preferred Worlds for the 1990's (New York: The Free Press, 1975). A very helpful start for Christians, particularly in the economic sphere, is Bob Goudzwaard’s, Aid for the Over- developed West (Toronto: Wedge Publishing Foundation, 1975); Hugh and Karmel McCullum and John Olthuis, Moratorim; Justice, Energy, The North, and the Native People (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1977); E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (New York: Harper and Row Perennial Library, 1973); Gunner Nyrdal, The Challenge of World Poverty (New York: Random House Pantheon Books, 1970); Ronald J. Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: A Biblical Study (Downers Grove, IL: * 34Intervarsity Press, 1977). 16, ‘International Relations and International Conflicts: A Socio- gical Approach,” and “East-West Interaction Patterns,” both cited in Marshall R. Singer, “The Foreign Policies of Small Developing States,” in Rosenau, Thompson, and Boyd, op. cit., pp. 271 ff. 17. Ibid., pp. 271-271. 18. Ibid., p. 273. 19. Ibid., p. 282. 35DEVELOPMENT: ITS DISAPPOINTMENT AND CHALLENGE Paul G. Schrotenboer In the early sixties mankind had a dream. Many economists in the industrialized nations and political leaders of the Third World explained like Joseph what the dream was. It was a dream like that of the ancient Pharoah of Egypt and came in a number of forms. In one of its forms the dream showed how all mankind could overcome poverty, especially hunger, by drawing on our unlimited resources and the infinite power of modern technology. As a result there would be enough material goods for all mankind. Victory over want would come about by sharing the existing wealth. The sign of the dream was an ever growing GNP (Gross National Product). One of the dreamers foresaw the day when one of the Four Horsemen of the Book of Revelation — Famine — would yield to’man’s efforts, just an another horseman, Pestilence, has already yielded. In another form the dream told of greater equality, justice, and peace. One such world ‘dreamer,’ the President of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, said, “Injustice and peace are, in the long run, incompatible. Stability in a changing world must mean ordered change toward justice, not mechanical respect for the ‘status quo,’ It is in this context that development has been called the new name for peace.” Even as late as 1973 Piero Gheddo said that, “barring some unforeseen natural catastrophe, (India) has passed the difficult point of its development and moved beyond the spectre of universal hunger” (Why is the Third World Poor, p. xiii). But now, 15 years after the first development decade began, the dream is over and man has awakened to the stark reality of an unjust and hungry world. The light of day has revealed that the resources of the world are not only limited but are swiftly diminishing. For instance it was estimated that the oil and gas reserves in the U.S.A. as of April 1975 were only 50% of what they were thought to be until recently. Less than a year later, even after strong claims by America’s political leaders for self-sufficiency, the U.S.A. passed the mark where it imported more oil than it produced. In his address to the Board of Governors of the World Bank Group (Sept. 1975) Robert S. McNamara reported that the per capita incomes of the one billion people living in the lowest income countries (average wage 60 cents per day) declined during 1974 an average 5%, “For the hundreds of millions of them already severely deprived, it meant hunger, illness and an erosion of hope.” This virtual stagnation in these countries means that for a billion people in the decade 1970-1980 the average per capita income will 36grow $3 — compared to a $900 increase in the developed world. Disappointment has set in also as mankind awoke from the part of the dream about equality and peace. This, we can illustrate, strange as it may sound, by looking at a part of the dream that did come true, namely growth in the GNP. In a dream turned nightmare even success spells failure: A growing GNP has led to greater inequality between nations and between rich and poor in nations, especially in poor countries. It should be recognized, we would first add, that disappointment has not been universal. There have in fact been some notable successes. Thus Barbara Ward points out that the average 5% growth in GNP in the developing world throughout the sixties was the largest sustained growth rate ever achieved by modernizing states in the early stages of technological change. It was at least twice that of the 19th century average. For this one can only be grateful. a success that failed The sad fact, however, is that the success in growth in GNP has been a success that failed. Success in economic growth brought failure in justice. Failure came when the development of the 60’s got locked into the vicious circle of ‘obdurate underdevelopment.’ The green revolution, to take one example, helped the rich farmers most. According to U Thant ‘The green revolution is likely to benefit primarily those farmers who are already engaged in commercial production rather than subsistence farmers, and among commercial farmers, big ones more than small producers.” In other words, greater production meant greater inequality. Another example is found in what is sometimes called the ‘protein empire.’ The report of the Bucharest 1974 conference on science and technology for human development explains it this way. “Despite some grain deliveries to needy countries, the protein exchange between the satisfied and the hungry world is in negative balance, both in quantity and quality” (Anticipation, Nov. 74, p. 7). One of the greatest famine areas of the world (India!) is a top ranking exporter of protein. The report then goes on to say, “There is something radically wrong about economic systems that result in protein being exported from where it is most needed” (p. 8). What is true of grain is true of fish also: half the ocean catch moves (much of it from the nations of the poor) as fishmeal to the feeding troughs of the satisfied world, much of it for cat food. In short it means that in spite of the 5% growth in GNP the 40% of the population at the base of society was actually worse off. With the realization of this fact of increasing inequality the dream of justice and peace vanished. In the aftermath of the dream of unlimited abundance for all, a mood of pessimism has taken hold of a sizeable number of 37development leaders. Robert McNamara called it an “erosion of hope." Today instead of security and human satisfaction there is a ‘sense of an ending’ that has resulted from a new awareness of the finiteness of resources and the limits of human technology (Anticipation, Nov. 1974, p. 5). We should look for a moment longer at this idea of limitless expansion, that led to such a disaster. There was a time when it was thought, by leaders in capitalist and socialist societies alike, that there was no end to the expansion of man’s ability to tap resources, harness nature, distribute goods, and thus meet human needs. Consumption was the key to the good life and Western technology shaped the key. On such an assumption the way to justice in an ever-expanding consumption of resources was to share the control of the process — let the poor, both the poor nations and the poor within nations — share in the process. That was yesterday. Today only a few believe in an ever expanding world economy. A few facts will indicate why people today take a much more sober view of the prospects of development than they did say 15 years ago. Even in terms of GNP the annual growth in Africa (South Africa not included) during the decade of the 1950's was 4.8%. But in the 1960's after the ‘development decade’ had started, it was only 4%. In 1971 77 developing countries arranged a meeting in Lima, Peru. The ‘group of 77’ issued a statement in which they registered their disappointment that in spite of an overall improvement in international trade and the world economy, as a whole, the relative position of the developing countries continued to deteriorate. They listed five distressing facts. (i) while during the 1960s the per capita income in developed countries increased by over $650, that in developing countries increased only by about $40; (ii) their share of world trade in exports declined from 21.3 per cent in 1960 to 17.8 per cent in 1970; (iii) their external debt burden is growing at such an alarming rate that it stood at about $60 billion at the end of 1969; (iv) the financial flows from developed to developing countries are declining in terms of the percentage of the gross national product of the former along with their component of official development assistance; (v) The technological gap between the developed and developing countries is steadily widening. the stones cry out That which exposed this idea of endless expansion for the nightmare that it has proved to be was, sad to say, not the voice of Christian prophets calling ‘greed, greed,’ nor Calvinists speaking from their rich tradition and calling mankind to be wise and thrifty 38stewards in the creation of God. Nor was it the liberal capitalist who was often orthodox in faith; nor yet the socialist who often paraded as the promoter of social justice. It was rather a case of the inanimate creation itself striking back and crying out against its exploiters. This ‘striking back’ took the form of pollution of the physical environment, of the air, the water and the land, of the obvious dwindling of basic resources, and the unexpected shortages of food at a time when technical advance in food production offered such great promise. The irony was that the green revolution was followed so swiftly by famine. This course of events has brought the whole idea of development into crisis — a crisis that calls into question certain basic assumptions. Speaking in Montreux in 1970 Helder Camara of Brazil said, “The present situation of mankind may be described briefly and objectively as follows: a sad reality, marvelous prospects, the possibility (even the probability) of a tragic conclusion” (Fetters of Injustice, p. 61). The Christian who is sensitive to humanity’s cry for bread, for a home, for peace, for education and the ‘quality of life,’ should not give way to pessimism for he knows that the drama of mankind is not determined in final analysis by the forces of nature and man. He sees in the events of recent years a sure indication that God is showing mankind the impossibility of the wastage and the intolerability of the injustice of our present way of living. He sees in the events of famine, poverty, and of an inequality in possessions such as the world has rarely even known a new call to all men to be good stewards, not squanderers of the creation. what went wrong? Believing that we must ask the hard and fundamental questions, we would here address ourselves to the reasons why the decade and a half of development has produced such wide spread disappointment. Just where was it, then, that the development of the Third World went awry? We believe it can be traced in very large degree to a wrong view of man, a faulty view of development, a faulty view of education, and a faulty view of justice. In short, a failure to see man as the responsible trustee of the creation. We would trace this in brief detail. man an economic animal When the UN declared the first decade of development in 1961 it was generally thought, by churchmen and secularists alike that progress and development were to be measured in terms of gross national product. It was assumed that if the growth in GNP would proceed in the Third World as it had in the West, those nations and 39their inhabitants would share in the material blessings of the West. Behind this view was the assumption that man is essentially an economic animal, and that his needs can be met through material provisions. It was as if man, as far as development was concerned, was one-dimensional. Perhaps no one has done more to discredit this erroneous view than Professor $.L. Parmar of India. He has pleaded at conference after conference and has stated in article after article that the prevalent view of man and development is utterly inadequate. In fact the disappointment in development can be traced in very large part to precisely the faulty view. In lieu of growth in GNP he proposes a three fold goal of development, namely of 1) economic growth, 2) national self-reliance and 3) social justice. Of these three, the over-arching and integrating goal is social justice. The tragedy of development is that the materialistic view of development has expressed itself in an attempt to apply the Western model of development to the Third World. the fallacy of following a Western model The Western model of development puts a premium on capital and technology, both of which, until recently, have been in ample supply in the West. The assumption was that if the Third World would also develop, it too needed industry like that of the West, capital intensive industry that was dependent on technology. The developers were hereby blinded to the total human situation, in fact to the general situation of the developing nations. These nations lacked capital and were not able to provide the technology. What they did have was an abundance of manual labor, precisely that which the Western model could not use. In short, the over emphasis on the economic dimension, especially as that came to expression in the West, kept the developers from seeing both the basic needs of food and clothing and the available resources (in this case manual labor) of the Third World. The energy and capital intensive technology of the West takes much of what the Third World lacks and uses little of what they have. Failure was written into the script before the act began. If we would summarize what we have said about the disappointment of development then we would say that even in terms of quantity it has not kept pace with human needs. The number of people below the absolute poverty line is increasing year by year. In India Prof. Parmar wrote in 1974 that 40% of the population was living below the poverty line which was set at $33 per year in the cities and $24 in rural areas. Robert McNamara, President of the World Bank reported in 1973 that one-third to one-half of two billion human beings suffer from hunger and malnutrition; 20-25% of the children in poor countries die before 40their fifth birthday and about 800 million are illiterate. In 1975 he reported that the over-all situation had deteriorated. In 1976 Professor Jean Mayer of Howard claimed that a half billion people, that is one in eight, suffers from malutrition. We should mention two other facts that increase the problem. The first is that the end of the development decade found the recipient nations not more self-reliant, but more dependent on the industrial West. In large part because of using energy-intensive technology that is advantageous to the West to export, the balance of payment deficits of the poorer nations are becoming so great that it is estimated that by 1980 their entire budget for imports from abroad will be used up in paying debts incurred earlier. Trade, says Parmar, has become an instrument of deprivation for the underprivileged. In terms of greater self-reliance in the poorer parts of the world, of helping the needy nations to help themselves, the West has failed miserably. A second fact, which is an integral part of the sorry picture is that the aid that was given had led in some respects to an increase of social injustice. This has occurred in that the development which the West promoted has led to a division within the developing countries between the relatively few rich (the modern sector, 10-30%) who have taken over Western economistic values and the many poor in the traditional sector where there is no progress or even deterioration. The theory held by many was that the benefits of the emerging society from the West would in time filter down to the poor. This, says Parmar, was laissez faire at best and deliberate deception at worst. There was a planning of the production process (Western model) and not of the distribution process. The existing framework gives more to those who already have more, an increase in GNP leads only to the concentration of wealth and economic power [The Ecumenical Review, Jan. 1974, p. 39). Trade, Parmar continues, has served as an “instrument of deprivation for the underdeveloped.” The poor countries, he says, have to squeeze surpluses in the form of exportable goods to pay for imported goods trom an economy ot scarcity by imposing curbs on consumption. Then, to make these exports competitive in the world market the poor nation has to subsidize them. The result is that the poor nationals contribute to the rich. Trade has not been of equal benefit to the weaker partner, rather “trom the time of colonial domination capital and technique have moved from the dominant nations into the weaker ones to foist on the later a pattern of specialization and trade that would serve the interests of the former. Subsequently, labor and raw materials were aldrained out of developing nations to serve as inputs for the dominant countries. This double movement of factors may appear to be compensatory but has been in reality a mechanism for the economic exploitation of the weak” [idem, p. 50}. The disappointment in development, we conclude, has not been small. It has come to the sorry pass of the “human condition of dependence and domination, of oppression and exploitation of the great majorities in large parts of the world" (Fetters of Injustice, p. 101). At the annual joint meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in September 1972, Robert McNamara stated clearly the alternatives before us. If the rich nations do not act — through both aid and trade — to diminish the widening imbalance between their own collective wealth and the aggregate poverty of the poor nations, development simply cannot succeed within any acceptable time frame. The community of nations will only become more dangerously fragmented into the privileged and the deprived, the self-satisfied and the frustrated, the complacent and the bitter. It will not be an international atmosphere conducive to tranquility. As late as October 1975 Lester R. Brown gave this sobering picture: The scarcity of basic resources required to expand food output, the negative ecological trends which are gaining momentum year by year in the poor countries, and the diminishing returns on the use of energy and fertilizer in agriculture in the industrial countries lead me to conclude that a world of cheap abundant food with surplus stocks and a large reserve of idled cropland may now be history. The present augurs a somewhat grimmer future, one of more or less chronic scarcity enlivened only by sporadic surpluses of a local and short-lived nature. Current dependence on North America will likely continue to increase, probably being limited only by the region’s export capacity. It is time to set new goals for development. new goals for development As we reassess our place and task in the world today as it relates to poverty, hunger, disease and famine, we keep in mind that the efforts of the nations during the past two decades have not met with nearly as great success as had been hoped. Our disappointment in not making the headway we should have ought to convey the sobering lesson that we must set new goals. It is to that aspect of development that we now direct our attention. 42In looking for these goals, we remind ourselves that the world is coming to the end of its resources in terms of arable land, stocks of grain, water, and other basic resources. We in North America are in a key position just because the world is becoming increasingly dependent upon our continent for its food. North America has a near monopoly in exportable food stocks. This means that the way we respond to the challenge of new goals will have a global effect, and that in a day when global food insecurity is greater than at any time since immediately after World War II. To us North Americans much has been given; from us much will be required. For this reason it is of crucial importance, not just for the USA, but for the world, how the American nation responds to President Jimmy Carter’s appeal to conserve energy. The setting of new goals in development moreover is not something that can be left to political leaders and boards of directors of transnational corporations. It is a task that faces all of us, if for no other reason that we all are involved just in the way we live. What is more, we may remind ourselves, we are all, even in our small corner of the earth, God-appointed world trustees, with great responsibility to our fellow human beings commensurate with the power and privilege entrusted to us. As we look for new goals in development, we should also bear in mind that the resources of this world, although limited and diminishing, in many instances, are enormous. There are alternative sources of energy. We do have enough food for 4 billion people. This means that the task is not hopeless. The problem is not at present so much one of greater production as it is one of more equitable distribution. It should also be kept in mind that the problem is exceedingly complex. It involves all areas of life, home, industry, school, state, church, recreation, whatever. It concerns the rich nations as well as the poor, socialist as well as capitalist governments, the elitist groups as well as the miserable masses of the poor. It also involves the middle class, that is you and me. We referred above to a success (in GNP) that failed (in a just distribution of the new wealth). Now, in speaking of new goals for development, we foster the hope that out of this failure there will come true success. We base this hope in part upon the increasing concern for greater justice in the process of development. Here we may refer to a host of declarations from agencies and churches. The papal encyclical Progressio Populorum makes a strong plea for social justice. In many emphases it parallels those of Protestant church groups. In World Council of Churches discussions one hears repeatedly of the need for a ‘just and sustainable society.’ James P. Grant and 43Susan Sammartano, President and Research Assistant, respectively, of the Overseas Development Council, have made a strong plea for equality and justice. Again, in a letter to then President Nixon, the Youth Task Force for International Development reported that the group had reached agreement with no reservation or equivocation “that the global inequities and injustices represented by the gap of wealth between the few rich and many poor nations (and people) of this earth are major obstacles to the creation of a more peaceful, prosperous, and just world community; indeed that we of the richest nation of all have no right to expect peace if we do not undertake bold and imaginative action and redress these imbalances of economic wealth and human opportunity.” We base this hope also upon the increasing recognition of the need for improving the quality of life. This is a shift from the one-dimensional approach of material goods only to multi-dimensional view that takes in man’s social needs as well. After Uppsala 1968 more attention has been given to ‘the criteria of the human.’ Our hope is tempered, nevertheless, by the fact that much of this concern for justice and the stress upon the total human, not just the economic, is of a secular nature. That is, it concerns man’s relation to man and to nature apart from his relation to God. This constitutes a specific challenge to the Christian community to submit a truly wholistic view that deals not only with the whole man but relates him to his environment and to his God. In searching for new goals for development, we do not claim to see the whole picture. What we do see, however, gives us a sensing both of failure and of hope. We share the blame for the despair of the poor. We may also, God willing, share in the hope for better things for better living through development. There has evolved a general consensus in ecumenical circles that development must be oriented to people not to things. It must meet the basic needs of people, not to let them copy the industrialization and consumptiveness of the West. A program oriented to people will seek to meet their basic social and physical needs with the resources at hand. This will mean, to give an example, the use of labor-intensive technology rather than energy and capital intensive technology in many non- West countries. Bicycles rather than Cadillacs; sewing machines rather than TV sets; oxen rather than tractors, etcetera. It will mean a program of development geared to the labor-rich but capital-poor nations. It will mean a technology that, geared to the human situation, dares to say that small is beautiful. 44Gone then (at least in some centers where development receives intense attention) is the idea that development can be determined in terms of economic growth alone, and that the Western model will everywhere fit the non-West. The consumerism of the industrialized nations, fostered both by capitalism (private enterprise) and socialism (state controlled consumerism) just cannot be followed. Emilio Castro has said that this earth cannot support a hundred countries with the average consumption raie of the United States or the European nations. It is highly doubtful if the world could support even two United States. In a study of the Misereor (an association of German Catholics dedicated to contributing funds to development projects in the third world) we read “The necessary arms to fight the underdevelopment are three: first, education, in order to change the mentality, to awaken the intelligence, to interest man in his future; second, cooperation, since man cannot develop by himself or change society by himself, but must work together with financial help and with technicians from outside, always helping and collaborating together; third, material help, to buy tools, to finance construction, and to create the necessary structures.” Development must be a communal effort that includes the changing of mentality and that provides the help that the needy require in order to help themselves. In an address presented at Montreux, Switzerland in December 1974, Dr. Jan Pronk, Minister of Development of the Netherlands put forth seven proposals for development in the 70's: 1, We should carry out those development policies that lead to more self reliance and more equality. 2. Aid should not be considered neutral and should not be given without strings. This means interaction. 3. Half of all resources for development should be spent on direct aid to people today. 4. We should ration basic goods, such as cereals, fertilizers and oils. 5. We should work out alternative growth production and consumption policies within the rich countries along the line of a selective de development. (Capitalism, he says, is the source of inequality in rich nations, between nations and in developing nations. Pronk himself is a socialist and is not as critical of consumerism, socialist style as of capitalist wastage.) 6. There must be equality within the industrialized countries via socialism as a precondition for an effective policy for promoting international equality. 7. There must be a conscientization program in the rich countries in which groups. churches included, fight the abuse of power. (The Ecumenical Review. Jan. 1978. pp. 16-23). 45We are not in a position as a ‘layman’ in the area to endorse these seven proposals as a whole. They are nevertheless worthy of our attention, as serious attempts by one who is an expert in the field and has a concern to help the poor. They show how far some people are ready to go to attain the new goals. Some comments on these proposals are therefore in order. Few would want to deny that self-reliance and more equality must assume a place high on the list of development goals. By self-reliance Dr. Pronk does not mean a self sufficiency that can tolerate isolationism. In this sense no nation, rich or poor, is self-reliant. Nor is self-reliance synonomous with national sovereignty. As Dr, Pronk describes it, self-reliance concerns the preference of societies as a whole, not just the elite and powerful rich in these societies. A self-reliant society then is one in which there is a fair distribution of. goods. Thus self-reliance, so defined, comes close to the idea of equality. Unless self-reliance means more than national sovereignty, there can easily arise a conflict between self-reliance and social justice. If independence on the part of the recipient nation means greater exploitation within its borders of the poor by the rich then justice is not served. The proposal that aid should not be given without strings is a switch from what was previously widely advocated. As a reaction against the remnants of colonialism, the recipients of aid often resented that help was given under condition that it be used in a particular way. Aid with strings was thought to be unworthy of a people that has become independent and mature. That aid should be given without strings is a proposal on which there is no general agreement. E.K. Hamilton, for instance stated at Montreux that the decision on what is good for the developing countries must be left entirely in the hands of the developing countries themselves [Fetters of Injustice, p. 29). With this Pronk would demur. In the United States a dispute arose and came to a head in 1974 in the relief arm of the National Council of Churches. It concerned whether the money earmarked for relief purposes abroad should be used for ‘correcting’ the social evils that were the cause of poverty and famine. When the Council said yes, James McCracken, the director said no and resigned. Lester R. Brown, Director of Worldwatch Institute, advocates establishing explicit guidelines for responsible, cooperative behavior in a world of food scarcity, insuring ready access for those countries that are following the agreed upon strategies on food and population and, when supplies are low, restricting access for those that are not. For example, the countries that are not following the World Plan of 46Action agreed upon at the UN Population Conference at Bucharest in 1974 and are not contributing to the stabilization of world population should not count on access to North American food supplies (Worldwatch Paper 2, October 1975, pp. 40, 41). The proposal that aid should come with strings, is in part at least the result of the disappointment of relief work given likely with the noblest of intentions but not attaining the desired results. It should surely not be rejected out of hand. The question remains, however, what strings may be attached? Does it mean that we give aid to India only if they will abandon their caste system? There are instances whererelief agencies had todigtwo wells in an area where one would have been sufficient because of the caste system. People of one caste would not allow people of the other caste to use the well. Does it mean that Indians, contrary to their religious belief, must agree to destroy rodents and unproductive cows as a condition to receiving grain? (It is estimated that rats destroyed 25% of the relief grain stored in Calcutta.) Does it mean that aid will be given by the U.S.A. to a rightest military government in Chile, after it refused it to Allenda’s socialist government shortly before he was overthrown? Nicholas Maestrini, in his foreward to Gheddo’s Why is the Third World Poor? explains why aid does not automatically set a nation on the road toward development. “The reason is that development is not something that can be imported from abroad; it is a process which must be undertaken by means of internal force through education, the changing of mentality and pretechnical social structures, the acceptance of a common discipline of work, political maturity, and learning of modern techniques and, above all, the acquisition of the concept of the dignity of man. That is the real, integral development without which there can be no development at all” (p. viii). The question is, have we any right to believe that integral development will occur without ‘interference’? On one kind of ‘interference’ we can agree. I refer to an example of the relief work done in Puson, Korea by U.S. missionaries. The missionaries distributed packages of clothing to village churches with the proviso that the clothing be given to the poorest family in the church. Without such a proviso the clothing might be kept by the local pastors and the elders, poor by our standards, but less destitute than many in the congregation. A second ‘string’ that should be attached to development aid is that the recipient nations endeavor to become self reliant. It may be politically more popular for them to accept aid from abroad while leaving domestic policies and structures intact than to change the structures and policies which contributed to the disaster. But the willingness to correct abuses should be a condition of receiving aid, 47no matter if it is unpopular. Else the nation’s dependence will only continue to grow. In any event, giving aid with strings, even if the strings are fair, is not sufficient. More must be done. Rationing, especially in the West, may be the best way to save some resources. Then again heavy taxation on the excessive use of fuels may have the same effect. Perhaps both will eventually be needed. In any case the goal must be equity in distribution, with an eye not only to the people of today but also for the coming generations. With a concern not only for people, but also for the environment. It should be clearly understood that this is a measure of more painful significance for the rich nations than the poor nations. For it is in the industrialized West where rationing or other restrictions will have to be imposed, simply because there the use and wasting of resources is concentrated. The chief goal should be to help the poor people of poor nations, not the rich in those nations who have accepted the West's style of living without concern for the poor. Development then should become resource-conserving not resource-destroying. It should become an instrument of economic and social upliftment, an avenue of justice both among and within nations, of equity and equality. Then development can become, what Pope Paul VI once called it, a new name for peace. 48book review GLOBAL REACH THE POWER OF THE MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS* reviewed by Harry Antonides * by Richard J. Barnet and Ronald E. Muller. Simon and Schuster, New York, 508 pp.. $13.95 Global Reach gives us a look at the worldwide operations of the world’s largest corporations and explains why the gap between the rich and poor countries is increasing. The growing disparity between rich and poor countries is crucial for the future of the multinational corporation. Its proponents claim that it is able to transfer capital and technology — both essential ingredients for economic development — and thus serve as the channel for a more equitable distribution of the world’s resources. Richard Barnet has taught at Yale and the University of Mexico; he is now associated with the Transnational Institute, an organization concerned with the problems of world economy and politics. He is the author of five books. Ronald E. Muller is an economics professor at the American University, Washington, D.C., who has written extensively in the areas of economics, political economy and sociology. He has written The Global Corporation and Latin America: Past. Present, and Future. Global Reach has been praised by a number of academics including Robert Heilbroner, Erich Fromm, John Kenneth Galbraith and Michael Harrington. On the other hand, corporation spokesmen have denounced the book as an unfair attack on business. Time has mildly scolded the authors for writing a book that is ‘an old blend of reasoned argument and far-out fantasy.” Whatever one’s reaction may be, this book cannot be lightly dismissed. Backed by years of research and an enormous array of sources — the book contains eighty pages of notes — Barnet and Muller provide fascinating information about a subject that is beclouded by secrecy and beset by controversy. Creating the Global Shopping Center The global corporations — a term the authors prefer to multinational corporations — are re-shaping the world economy. Operating in a number of different countries with centralized management in the home country, the rapidly growing global corporations have integrated production and marketing on a world scale. Shifting capital and products across national boundaries, they are transforming the nation-state and threatening its independence and sovereignty. The spectacular rise of the global corporations has *Reprinted from The Guide, May 1975 49been facilitated by revolutionary technology in transportation and communications. Headoffice can be in continuous touch with far-flung subsidiaries around the world. Executives are constantly travelling to provide personal contact. The authors of Global Reach, however, predict a rocky road ahead for the multinational corporations because of a plethora of enemies arraying themselves against the giant corporations. They predict that the confrontation between the multinational corporations and their opponents “promises to influence the shape of human society in the last third of the century more than any other political drama of our time.” The essential strategy of the new managerial revolution is cross-subsidization i.e., “‘the use of power and resources developed in one ‘profit center’ to start or to expand another.” This process occurs across industrial sectors and geographical frontiers and provides a new dynamic of the world political economy. A consequence of this trend is the ever growing concentration of wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands. Barnet and Muller demonstrate the increasingly important role of banks which have served to fuel the engines of concentration and cross-subsidiza- tion. Professor Howard Perlmutter has predicted that by 1985, 200 to 300 global corporations will control 80 percent of all productive assets of the non-Communist world. The total value of foreign direct investment is now estimated at $200 billion, of which about half is owned by U.S.-based companies. The authors single out three resources of economic life as the key elements in the rise of the global corporations: control over 1) the technology of production; 2) finance capital; and 3) marketing. It is this control which gives the multinational corporations a commanding position, enabling them to neutralize other centers of influence, (‘countervailing forces”), including small businesses, governments and labour unions. The commanding position of the multinationals — this book deals most with the U.S.-based corp- orations — has enabled them to make enormous profits thus leading to stepped-up internal growth. Success feeds on success. The motive behind the multinational corporations is the drive for maximum growth and profits within the framework of capitalism. The authors explain: “After all, greed is the oil of capitalism... The drive for ever greater accumulation is integral to that system and does not depend upon personal idiosyncrasies.” Professor Harry G. Johnson, and ardent defender of the multinationals, asserts that the purpose of the global corporation “is not to transform the economy by exploiting its potentialities — for development, but to exploit the existing situation to its own profit by utilization of the knowledge it already possesses, at minimum cost of adaptation and adjustment of itself.” This definition goes a long way to explain why the global corporations have not contributed to a healthy and balanced 50economic development of the poor countries. Why the Poor Get Poorer A favourite method to obtain maximum profits is the use of tax havens and manipulation of internal transfers. The latter practice enables a company to concentrate profits in a country where the tax rate is low or where for other reasons it may be advantageous to declare the profits. This is in the interest of the company, at least if it has narrowed its objective to profit maximization, but it obviously works to the detriment of the country that loses revenues. Companies are able to engage in these practices because a large percentage of their transactions are intra-company and therefore not subject to the market or outside scrutiny. Subsidiaries of multinational corporations in Latin America often overprice their imports (from their parent firms) and underprice exports. This enables them to repatriate profits in a hidden way. One executive interviewed by the authors admitted: ‘Oh, I know we overprice our imports but it’s the only way we can get all our profits out of the country, given repatriation restrictions. Besides, our headquarters needs the liquidity for expansion in other countries.” A vice-president of a U.S. multinational bank confided to the authors that his bank found it exceedingly profitable to lend what is substantially Latin-American capital to U.S.-based companies. He revealed that whereas his bank earns around 13 to 14 percent on its U.S. operations, it could easily count on a 33-percent rate of return on business conducted in Latin America. An Andean Pact economist, Constantine Vaitsos, has reported excessive overpricing by multinational corporations. For example, he reported the following average overpricing: in pharmaceutical firms 155 percent; in the rubber industry 40 percent; in the electronics industry it ranged from 16 to 60 percent. Another favourite method is double accounting. For example, economists at the University of Lund, Sweden, found that 64 mining operations of U.S. companies in Peru between 1967 and 1969 reported total profits of $60 million to the local government, whereas they reported $102 million on the identical operations to the U.S. government. Vaitsos found that the effective annual rate of return of fifteen wholly-owned drug subsidiaries of U.S. and European-based multinationals amounted to a range of 38.1 percent to 962.1 percent with an average of 79.1 percent. In the rubber industry it amounted to 43 percent. Barnet and Muller believe on the basis of various studies and their own investigation that the minimum rate of return of U.S.-based manufacturing corporations in Latin America during the 1960's could not have been much below 40 percent. Because of the commanding position of the multinational Stcorporations in terms of control over technology, finance capital and marketing, and because of the lack of strong challengers in the developing countries, the multinationals have succeeded in penetrating every key sector of the economy. In the pre-Allende days, 51 percent of the largest 160 firms in Chile were controlled by multinationals. In each of the seven key industries, one to three foreign firms controlled at least 51 percent of the productions. Of the top 22 corporations operating in the country, 19 operated free of all competition or shared the market with other oligopolists. This is a pattern found in many developing countries where the multinationals are operating. The multinationals often employ the kind of technology that is capital — intensive, over-priced and leads therefore to unem- ployment and structural imbalance within the economy of countries desperately in need of jobs. Furthermore, the consumption ideology exported by the multinationals to poor countries is destructive, The message beamed out is: “consumption is the key to happiness and the global corporation has the products that make life worth living.” This message is spread among some of the poorest people of the world with the result that these people are spending their meagre income on foodstuff of inferior nutritional value such as white bread and coca-cola. The poor are given a spurious feeling of being middle class. A survey conducted by Johnson’ Wax among the ‘“‘marginales” in Latin America found that a common reaction in house with dirt floors was: “I don’t have a floor to wax, but I can buy the wax if I want to.” Advertising is popular among the very poor in Latin American. An international advertising expert says that we must rid ourselves of “‘the conventional range of ideas about what will minister to the poor man’s physical needs. The psychological significance of his spending his money on a transistor radio may be more important than the physical benefit generated by spending the same money for basic foodstuffs.” Barnet and Muller conclude that the basic reason for the lack of development in countries where the multinational corporations play important roles is that the interests of the corporations and of the countries are in conflict. The former are interested in profit maximization and obtain that by repatriating high profits, importing capital-intensive technology and fostering a consumption ideology of all which militate against the genuine needs of the local population. The developing countries need to use their scarce supply of capital for their own development, they need labour-intensive technology, and furthermore, they are not assisted by the consumption ideology that holds a powerful sway in the rich countries. The authors are convinced that the transfer of wealth and technology directed by the multinationals results in the further impoverishing of the poor world. In effect, the prosperity and high 32standard of living in the rich countries is at least partly at the expense of the poor countries. In the face of this, it can be explained that the global corporations are not resolving but aggravating the three major problems in the poor countries; hunger, unemployment and inequality. ‘The developing countries are now fighting back. The action by the OPEC nations is their first effective cartel. Its effects have been traumatic. Other countries in Latin America and Africa are also taking counter measures. The Andean Pact countries (Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Equador, Peru and Venezuela) are cooperating in gathering information on the operation of multinationals, and they are working out a common policy to restrict foreign direct investment by, e.g., requiring that all foreign-based companies must divest themselves of majority interest within 15 years. The poor countries are in control of a great deal of the earth’s resources. That gives them immense leverage, as the OPEC countries have demonstrated. One thing is sure, as the poor countries learn to pool their know-how and to use their bargaining power more effectively, the rich countries will become increasingly vulnerable. Barnet and Muller raise this crucial question: “Whether there is enough statesmanship and true international spirit in the rich countries to recognize that changes in bargaining power and resource pricing (including human labour) are long overdue in the interest of global justice and global stability will determine the character of world politics in the coming generation.” The "Latin Americanization" of the U.S. The authors of Global Reach describe the effects of the U.S.-based global corporation on the U.S. in terms of drastic and structural changes. These changes result from economic concentration and cross-subsidization, especially between the banks and the other corporations, from the use of “export platforms,” or what the AFL-CIO calls runaway shops, and from the growing share of the foreign operations of U.S.-based global corporations. These changes have led to a loss of blue collar jobs and unemployment. This in turn has given rise to a redistribution of wealth and income which reflects the pattern of the poor countries. The decline in the production of a host of consumer goods in the U.S., such as T.V.’s, cameras and radios, has called for a greater reliance on agricultural and forest products to improve the U.S. balance of payments. The U.S. government, although the Internal Revenue Service and the regulatory agencies are much more sophisticated than the corresponding agencies in the poor countries, is unable to curtail the excessive power of the large corporations because both big business and big government are committed to the same ideology, namely, the celebration of growth and bigness. The government is 33entrenched in its dependency of big business by campaign contributions and the staffing of government positions by recruits from big business. Small, independent businesses are no match for the giants. The large number of mergers and takeovers bespeak the declining importance of small business in the U.S. The authors of Global Reach ascribe this phenenemon to the rise of a national, integrated market, replacing an earlier phase in which regional markets provided a healthy antidote to the large corporations. The third possible check on the power of the large corporations, the labour unions, are found wanting because the modern production system makes for human obsolescence. Unions are thrown on the defensive because of the excessive division of labour, the primacy of sophisticated technology and the mobility of the large corporations. The authors list four elements of modern large-scale business that are making the world’s richest society look more and more like an underdeveloped country: 1) the rise of the global corporation represents the globalization of oligopoly capitalism; 2) global profit maximization of these corporations require profit minimization in certain countries under certain circumstances; 3) the poor nations of Asia, Latin America, and increasingly Africa, are more and more becoming the principal sites of new production; 4) the global economic process results in a new concentration of political power in private hands. The resulting re-allocation of power and the new role of the American economy will, according to Barnet and Muller cause the U.S. economy to turn into a service economy. Furthermore, in the face of the growing demand for a new defensive alliance between government and business, they suggest that the following trade-off may occur: “tthe rest of the industrial world imports the global corporation and the United States imports the corporate state.” Proposals for Reform The authors of Global Reach assert that in view of the destructive effects of the global corporations on resources, on ecology, and above all on human existence itself, the overriding issue is one of the survival of mankind. They conclude that the global corporations are unable to match the high-sounding claims of their proponents. “Driven by the ideology of infinite growth, a religion rooted in the existential terrors of oligopolistic competition, global corporations act as if they must grow or die, and in the process they have made thrift into a liability and waste into a virture.” The authors are aware that merely technical or structural changes in themselves are not sufficient, but they insist that the $4present situation confronts us with a “‘series of fundamental choices about the purposes of human existence.” They call for a new attitude, which they describe as the holistic perspective. By this they mean that those who made decisions about the technique of production must take account of its effect on man and his environment. Destructive, though often profitable, production must make way for the kind of production that provides a healthy balance between a number of interests, including the need to do meaningful work and build wholesome human relations. They call for social balance which avoids the dangerous concentration of wealth and power by a few people, ecological balance which avoids the misuse of natural resources, and psychological balance which avoids human alienation, The specific measures recommended by Barnet and Muller center on the need to curb excessive power and to develop countervailing centers of power. They include the following: 1. All the books of the global corporations ought to be public documents. Information about the corporations’ property, claims and its shareholders, as well as all other vital information, must be readily available. 2. Global corporations must be regulated to restore sovereignty to government. This requires clearly articulated national priorities arrived at by open debate and public participation. 3. There must be more participation in the work place and in the political process. This calls for encouraging investment in the U.S. and the development of alternative technologies. 4. A more equitable distribution of income and wealth, not only in the U.S. but worldwide, is required. This demands decentralization of the economy to curb oligopoly powers. In this context the most concentrated industries must be broken up, and interlocking directorates between banks and industrial corporations should be prohibited. S. A reasonable level of self sufficiency in raw materials and manufactured goods must be achieved. This must not be seen in a narrowly nationalistic perspective. The authors plead for a more equitable redistribution in a world where 6 percent of the world population (the U.S. population) consume from 30 to 60 percent of the most vital resources. This requires exactly those policies to which the multinationals are opposed, namely, preferential trade agreements (with the poor coutries), divestment of foreign ownership, stimulating locally owned industry, and higher prices for raw materials. 6. Public institutions must be strengthened at many levels at the same time. Since the strategy of the global corporation makes it an 55antagonist of local interests, the local community must develop the power to protect the interest of the people, This requires much more participation by the local community in the affairs of the resident corporations. Barnet and Muller focus on knowledge as the key to a wholesome redirection of the U.S. and the world economy. They dispute the existence of value-free knowledge and advocate the cultivation of a profusion of alternative political assumptions and “a variety of analyses that attempt to deal with social, ecological, and psychological reality together.” Practical solutions are to be arrived at via “social experimentation.” They insist that man’s advantage is a “dynamic consciousness to match a changing environment.” Global Reach is of special significance to Canadians who are disturbed about the excessive penetration of American (and other foreign-owned) corporations into Canada. It provides a lot of ammunition. But this book also demonstrates that there is a segment among the American people who are seriously questioning the domestic and worldwide effects of the U.S. multinational corporations because of its narrow and destructive preoccupation with economic growth and technical innovation. That is all to the good. Barnet and Muller fail to articulate a radical, alternative basis to the one underlying North American (and European) society, inherited from the driving spirit of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. That spirit is represented in the belief that man is able to devise his own norms and values because he is a free, autonomous being. Over against that, the Biblical revelation presents us with an entirely different vision of man, namely that he is created by God and called to a life of stewardship in God’s creation. The Scriptures provide direction for all human activity, including the economic. It is exactly the rejection of this Scriptural perspective which lies at the root of the modern crisis. This crisis can be overcome not by human ingenuity alone but acknowledging the creation order and by again taking to heart the words of Christ: “Seek first of all the Kingdon of God and its righteousness . . .” Fortunately, the authors of Global Reach are aware that we must face the most fundamental questions of human existence. Their call for variety and alternatives is sound. For that reason, their book should be received as a challenge, especially to the Christian community, a challenge to be more open, more joyful and more obedient stewards of the gifts God has given us. Such a challenge needs to be taken seriously by the Christian community, since in all honesty and humility we Christians should admit that we have neither excelled in being true witnesses to the Good News nor in being a genuine community.International Association for Reformed Faith and Action Established in 1953 Council President: Dr. J.D. Dengerink, Xaveriuslaan 4, Driebergen, Netherlands. Vice-President: Prof. Dr. W. Stanford Reid, Department of History, Univer- sity of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada; Rev. Dr. P. Ch. Marcel, 10 Rue de Villars (Place Louis XIV), 78 Saint-German-en-Lay, Yvelines, France. General Secretary: Dr. David R. Hanson, Milverton Lodge, 3 Ottawa Place, Chapel Allerton, Leeds, LS7 4LG England. Treasurer: Mr. J. J. Molenaar, Potgieterweg 46, Heiloo, N.H., The Netherlands. Members: Dr. L. Coenen, Krautstrasze 74, 56 Wuppertal-Barmen, Germany; Prof. G.N.M. Collins, 19 Roseburn Cliff, Edinburgh 10, Scot- land; Dr. David R. Hanson, Milverton Lodge, 3 Ottawa Place, Chapel Aller- ton, Leeds, LS7 4LG, England; Dr. J.H. Malan, Posbus 1824 Bloemfontein, South Africa; Prof. Raden Soedarmo, Dj. Persahaba-Lan Raya 6, Rawa- mangun, Djakarta, Java, Indonesia; Dr. P.G. Schrotenboer, 1677 Gentian Drive, S.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49508. Doctrinal Basis The Association proclaims the sovereignty of God, revealed in the Lordship of Jesus Christ, over the world and thus over every department of human activity. In accordance with the historic Reformed confessions of faith, the Association submits unconditionally to the authority of Holy Scripture as the Word of God, thereby recognizing it as the sole standard of reformation in this and in every age of the Church. The Association accepts, as being consonant with Holy Scripture, the ecumenical symbols of the ancient Church; namely, the Apostle’s Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed. Thus the Association asserts that it is in true succession, in faith and doctrine from the Apostles, through the ancient Church, and down through the Reformers to the present day. It is the confident hope of the Association that God will grant to the Church of this age the gifts of the Holy Spirit in order that, in obedience to Holy Scripture, it may respond to the needs of this age, as our fathers in the faith responded to the needs of their age. Purpose To promote God-centered living through faith in Jesus Christ. To this end the Association regards as its special task: (a) the strengthening and advancement of the Reformed cause throughout the world; (b) the encouragement of fellowship between Reformed Christians of every land: (c) the facilitation of the interchange of Reformed thought and experi- ence.NATIONAL SECRETARIES AND CORRESPONDENTS ARGENTINA: Dr. Sidney H. Rooy, Ciudad de la Paz 873, Buenos Aires, Gk AUSTRALIA: Right Reverend D.W.B. Robinson, c/o Moore Theological College, Carillon Avenue, Newtown, N.S.W. 2042. AUSTRIA: Rev. E. Gyenge, Ref. Pfarramt, Oberwart/Burgenland. BELGIUM: Rev. Paulo A. dos S. Mendes, Place A, Bastien, 2, 7410 Ghlin- Mons, B-Belgique ou Belgium. BRAZIL: Prof. Dr. Waldyr Carvalho Luz, Av. Brasil 1093, 13100 Campinas. CANADA: Dr. W. Stanford Reid, Department of History, University of Guelph, Ontario. CHILE: Rev. Walter G. Cross, Casilla 373, Quillota, Chile. ENGLAND: Dr. David R. Hanson, Milverton Lodge, 3 Ottawa Place, Chapel Allerton, Leeds, LS7 4LG England. FRANCE: Pasteur A. R. Kayayan, 14, rue Clavel, 75019 Paris, France. GERMANY: Rey. Dr. L. Coenen, Kraustrasze 74, 56 Wuppertal-Barmen. INDONESIA: Prof. Dr. Raden Soedarmo, Dj. Persahabatan Raya 6 Raw- amangun, Djakarta, Indonesia, JAPAN: Rev. Ryuzo Hashimoto, Secretary, Japan Calvinist Association, 8-5-1 Uenodori, Nada, Kobe. KOREA: Rev. John K. Hunt, Secretary, World Presbyterian Mission, P.O. Box 23, Taejon, Korea. MEXICO: Dr.Derk Oostendorp, Apartado 21-866, Coyoacan 21 D.F. THE NETHERLANDS: Mrs. L.M. Dengerink-De Jong, Xaveriuslaan 4, Driebergen; Drs. Ph. Brouwer, secretary International Reformatorisch Verbond, Afdeling Nederland, Nic. van der Steenstraat S1, Mijdrecht; postgiro t.n.v. International Reformatorisch Verbond, nr, 290193. NEW ZEALAND: Keith C. Sewell, 26 Awamutu Grove, Lower Hutt, New Zealand. NIGERIA: Rev. John H. Boer P.O. Box 261, Jos. PERU: Rey. William Mackay, Apartado 930, Lima. PUERTO RICO: Rev. Arnold Rumph, 16 Meadows, San Patricio, Caparra Heights 00920. PORTUGAL: Rev. J. Soares Carvalho, Secretary, Uniao Portuguesa de Fe Reformada, Rua de Goa, Lote 2, Linda-a-Velha. SCOTLAND: Rev. A. Sinclair Horne, Secretary of Scottish Reformation Society, 17 George IV Bridge, Edinburgh. SOUTH AFRICA: Dr. J. H. Malan, Direkteur Studie en Navorsing, Die Vereniging vir Christlike Ho&r Onderwys, Posbus, 1824, Bloemfontein, SWITZERLAND: Rev. R. Grob, Auf der Grueb 30, Obermeilen, Zurich. ULS.A.: Dr. Gordon J. Spykman, 1715 Griggs St., S.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49506, WALES: Rey. Geoffrey Thomas, The Manse, Buarth Road, Aberystwyth, Cardiganshire, Wales. Sass bse aes ee