If we let things slip, the Millennium Goals will become just another dream we once had, and we will be switching on our TVs and watching people die on our screens for the rest of our lives. We will be the generation that betrayed its own heart.
Gordon Brown Britains Iron Chancellor who presides over the finances of a $2 trillion economy, and a long-term close colleague (and possible successor) of Tony Blair is a politician who seeks to combine ambition, pragmatism and compassion. All were on show in his speech to a conference in London this week: Making Globalisation Work for All.
At its core was a call to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. These goals, agreed by all United Nations member countries in 2000, set world targets for human development by 2015: ensuring education for every child, eliminating avoidable infant and maternal deaths, and halving the number of people living in extreme poverty.
On present trends, said Gordon Brown, the education target will not be met until 2129 and the health target until 2165. Failure to meet the targets by the achievable date of 2015, he said, will not be the result of a lack of knowledge, drugs or expertise; it will come down to a lack of political will and finding the money.
Browns solution is a fund, an International Finance Facility (IFF), created with money borrowed by governments on capital markets as much as $50 billion a year, enough to double aid flows from the richest countries to the poorest.
This initiative can be seen as a pragmatic means to an idealistic end. Alternatives, such as a Tobin tax a tax on financial speculation would take too long to put into place because all the sovereign players would have to agree. (This criticism doesnt stop the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva , from continuing to support it. Joining Gordon Brown and others by telelink, he argued that hunger which kills 24,000 people every day, eleven children every minute is the real weapon of mass destruction). Similar difficulties would affect the issue of a new tranche of Special Drawing Rights, advocated by George Soros, Joseph Stiglitz and others. Better half a loaf than no bread?
With or without you
It was more than a year ago that Gordon Brown started pushing for an IFF. So far his proposal has been met with polite interest, but no commitment. Hes still hopeful that Britains partners France, for example will also endorse it. One of the proposals great merits, he says, is that some countries can start now, borrowing their share of the new rich country fund, while others join later. Call it an a la carte, two-speed, coalition-of-the-willing approach to saving the world.
But coalitions of the willing need leadership; and the IFF will never be sufficient unless the United States joins. Currently, the US administrations position is that it will honour the Millennium Development Goals with its own Millennium Challenge Account. This will not, however, deliver sufficient funds.
Will enough people notice the shortfall, and could their pressure lead to change? As Gene Spurling of the Council on Foreign Relations explains, the overseas aid programme is not high on the US foreign policy agenda. But it may be that for this very reason, that the Brownian notion a comparatively painless way of raising extra money without making it look like tax will hold some appeal as the November election approaches in the US.
The current US administration, if returned to power, is unlikely to lose the habit of relying on debt. A Democratic incumbent (see, for example, here) constrained by tight federal finances might be happy to embrace a proposal from a British ideological ally who has maintained a cautiously progressive economic balance: increasing taxes on higher earners, raising welfare benefits for the poorest, and keeping government debt under control.
In his conference speech, the Iron Chancellor evoked the spectre of continuing to watch people die on our TV screens if the Millennium Development Goals were not achieved. In a contemporaneous article co-written with James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank, he chose to emphasise a wider threat:
We must act, not only because it is morally right, but because it is now essential for stability and security. Many of us grew up thinking there were two worlds the haves and the have-nots and that they were quite separate. That was wrong then. It is even more wrong now. So the approach is to appeal both to sympathy and self-interest (its the fear, stupid). Sympathy, and the familiarity with others on which it depends, is a limited quantity even perhaps especially in a hyper-globalised world. In this, not much has changed since the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith (with whom Gordon Brown shares a hometown, Kirkaldy) argued in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) that a man of humanity in Europe might sympathise with million of victims of an earthquake in China but he would, provided he never saw them, be more distressed at the prospect of losing his own little finger.
But self-interest narrowly defined leads to real dangers. Take for example, the way that US policies designed to eradicate terrorism in Afghanistan have created conditions that foster this security threat (see Ahmed Rashid, New York Review of Books, 12 February 2004). The approach to fighting insurgency developed since last summer (see here for a short overview) may deliver short term gains, perhaps even including the capture of Bin Laden just before the US presidential election, but it is not sufficient to build long term stability.
Veteran commentator George Packer, writing in The New Yorker, says that the reconnecting sympathy and self-interest requires a new political vision one that avoids grand postures and pays close attention to detailed, incremental change. It is embodied in pragmatic initiatives like that of US Senator Joseph Biden:
When Biden returned from Kabul, he wrote a proposal to build, staff, and supply a thousand schools in Afghanistan, at a cost of twenty thousand dollars each. By thinking small, Biden believed, he had a better chance of success: You could shove twenty million dollars anywhere in a two-trillion budget, and this was something specific. Joseph Bidens initiative was struck down. Gordon Browns initiative is still there for the taking.