The case for an Anti-Paris Club
Ian on Sunday
Development designations have become more and more varied and exactly descriptive. Long gone are the days when a country was either rich or poor, developed or undeveloped. Very soon a distinction came to be drawn between undeveloped, underdeveloped and developing countries. And as time goes on more and more sophistication of phrase is being applied. Now we have a whole host of designations: least developed; sub-Saharan undeveloped; median-developing; mixed developed; newly industrialising; maturing industrial; Hipics; Cologne category poor countries; even "failed states"; and I don't know how many other categories. I have lost track. I think there is a little man in a big office in the UN whose sole job it is just to think up new categories and types of poverty. But you will notice that all these proliferating terms seek to measure poor countries against what seems to be assumed is the single summit of achievement -- the so-called "developed" country. It is taken for granted that to be a "developed" country pure and simple is the holy grail all are pursuing. The progression runs from desperately poverty-stricken through the whole gamut of aspiration to the high and mighty point where a country is anointed as "developed". The progression stops there because presumably you cannot be more perfect than perfection. This sort of thinking seems to me profoundly mistaken and a prime example of the brainwashing which afflicts everyone in rich and poor countries alike. There is a tilt given to our thinking because the term "developed" has not been subjected to the sort of detailed analysis which has been applied to the term "undeveloped". The trouble is that the term "developed" as currently used covers far too wide a spectrum of countries. Some no doubt are developed in a good sense of the word but many countries in the developed category are by no means examples any self-respecting nation would wish to emulate. What is badly needed is a full-scale reassessment and redefinition of the term "developed". When this is done it will be found, for instance, that just as we have underdeveloped countries so also do we have overdeveloped countries suffering from their own terrible imperfections. Indeed, the term "developed" will have to be separated into a good many categories and it will be found that in many of the new sub-categories there will be countries needing significant assistance if they are to make progress towards a genuinely civilised status. An overdeveloped country is easily recognisable. It is suffering from too much of everything materially -- too much food, too much waste, too many consumables, too many distractions, too many frantically proliferating fads and fashions disguised as amusements and important inventions. Ultimately the over-developed country is one suffering from unutterable boredom, spending more and more in desperate attempts to discover new diversions and titillations, and so distracted and self-centered that it thinks less and less of what it holds in common with the rest of humanity. An overdeveloped country has developed out of reach of the simple joys, the solid truths, the original freshness of the world. It has gone beyond development into decadence. There is an tilt given to our thinking because the term "developed" has not been subjected to the sort of detailed analysis which has been applied to the term "undeveloped" The job of redefining "developed" country more carefully is one for whole teams of experts from the UN, World Bank and UNESCO, but even in a short column I think I can suggest some new definitions. Apart from overdeveloped, there are, for instance, one or two categories which give particular cause for concern. There is a category of Lop-Sided Developed, or LSD country. Lop-Sided Development is where average per capita wealth is high but the gap between the rich and the poor yawns wide. LSD countries do not possess happy societies and need help badly. Then there is Militarily-Angled Development or MAD as it might be designated. MADly developed countries are the most ominous of all. This type of development impoverishes their own people and endangers other counties and whole regions. MAD countries require emergency attention from the rest of us as urgently as sub-Saharan poverty requires universal aid. When this work of redefining development at the top end of the scale is completed all sorts of possibilities will open up. Just to name one, we could surely have a sort of Anti-Paris Club whose function it would be to divest over-developed economies in a sensible, staged way of their burden of surplus wealth just as the Paris Club now reprogrammes the burden of debt in poor countries. Why, I wonder, is reprogramming the burden of wealth not considered just as important as reprogramming the burden of poverty? Surely in an even half- civilised world the two should go together. Needless to say countries approaching the overdeveloped category or already in the categories of lop-sided or militarily-angled development are not examples anyone would want to follow. Every developing country, therefore, as it strives to become developed must be very careful into which category of development it may be falling. As currently used the signpost crudely marked "developed" indicates a way forward full of blind alleys and treacherous highways.
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