Simpson, E. (2018b, forthcoming). A Canadian professor’s perspective on disaster capitalism. Peace Review. Special theme issue on disaster capitalism. May/June 2018. [Refereed paper].
Was Nicholas alive, dead, or injured in the earthquake in Nepal? Nicholas
DiClemente, an intern working in Nepal for the United Nations, had completed a Master of Arts degree in political science under my supervision in 2012. Since then, we had seldom been in touch—unless he wanted another reference letter. One of my most important tasks is writing references so students can go onto graduate school, obtain internships, or pursue careers. Like Nicholas’, most of the internships are outside Canada, due to the lack of opportunity here.
A few days after the April 25 earthquake, Nicholas wrote to me: “I was
in fact in the middle of the earthquake and nearly died. It was a surreal expe-
rience. I am finally safe now in Malaysia, I haven’t slept in three days. Off to
Thailand still. I’ll be back in Kathmandu on Monday.” Later, when he caught up on his sleep, he wrote again: “I will never forget the sounds and images of the two major tremors. The people I’ve met in Nepal have shown me such an incredible capacity for compassion that I couldn’t bear simply leaving. The situation over here however is dire and to be quite frank with you, I think this may become far worse. If it gets to the point where I fear my own safety, I will leave.”
The April 2015 Nepal earthquake killed 9,000 people and injured nearly
22,000. But Nicholas saw damage beyond the physical. “The media tells
the tragic story of the lives and monuments lost, but what they have failed to
mention is the growing anti-government sentiment among the people. Prior to the earthquake, there was already widespread political unrest. Quite often,
there would be “bandt.” People would not be allowed to go to work and cars were not allowed on the roads; those who did not comply would be punished,
their shops destroyed and their cars burned. Due to the earthquake and the
dismal response by the government, Nicholas wrote that the situation was reaching a breaking point: “On my way out, I witnessed a mob attack police and military caravans. I feared for my own car, but we were allowed to pass with no issues.
Nicholas completed a six-month internship in Kathmandu with the
United Nations Regional Centre for Peace and Disarmament in Asia and the Pacific. My former students often send hard-earned advice to the next generation of students. Nicholas’ advice was valuable: “I have learned many lessons whilst searching for work in this field and I believe I have some advice for your students who may come to you for career advice: Intern. Don’t bother looking for paid work. Find an internship or co-op and get real professional experience. Even if you have to pay for the placement, such as you do with the UN and other organizations, it will pay off.” We can all be proud of the next generation of young people, like Nicholas, who work hard to help others caught in all types of disasters. Nevertheless, it is also a professor’s responsibility to teach them how capitalism abroad profits from such environmental catastrophes, natural disasters, and the imposition of undemocratic regimes due to extraordinary circumstances.
As a postmodernist professor who teaches undergraduate and graduate students to question the implicit assumptions and biases of established theories, my task is to help them undermine traditional hierarchies and deconstruct reality.
We often begin by talking about how the “capital” in capitalism refers to
a set of goods that are used in producing other goods; so a factory produces
goods, just like a university produces students, and a government produces
military soldiers (and well-meaning interns). In the race to acquire more consumption goods, like yachts and cell phones, such goods may have value but they do not directly contribute to the production of other goods and services. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels explained in The Communist Manifesto that capitalism is the system of private ownership of capital that relies on market forces to govern the distribution of goods. Nowadays supply and demand forces and market forces include the stock market; thus a stint working for an investment firm trading stocks will contribute more to the growth of capitalism, say, than a job screening potential refugees entering the country. Naomi Klein is famous for writing about the demerits of capitalism and consumerism, and generations of professors have taught development theory using class system theory. Young students are no longer much exposed to Marxist literature that explains the rise of the proletariat and references classes such as the bourgeoisie. The notion that when the cycle of accumulation produces a surplus, it should be called profit, and reserved for the owners of the capital that produced the surplus (after the government takes out the taxes), tends to be unquestionably accepted, not critiqued. Even the strongest
defenders of capitalism in the university classroom can appreciate that coun-
tries like Canada and Sweden offer an impure mix of capitalist and socialist
policies, but capitalism still rules the international system in the Global North.
The flow of capital becomes a problem, however, when it moves around from less productive countries and firms to more profitable economic sectors, as it did during the Mexican peso and Asian Tigers crises. Canadian university students visibly lose interest when shown screen shots of the philosophers who conceived of Communism, namely Marx and Engels (more “old white men” with flowing beards). And when they are told about the stages of feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and how communism never came to fruition, they tend to assume communism will never come about through the proletariat’s battle to overthrow the capitalist oppressors (in this context they have already forgotten about the Occupy Wall Street movement). Few young people know that socialism (not capitalism or communism) fomented the concept that workers should wield more political power; the principle that regimes should favor considerably more government planning; and the idea that states should help redistribute wealth more equitably. Socialist parties and governments abound around the world, including in the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia with New Democratic Party governments rooted in socialism. Still, the idea that China, Cuba, and Russia are Communist and not socialist remains more deeply embedded in enemy stereotypes, and so difficult if not impossible to question or undermine. Since their professor bicycled on a ten-speed all through Eastern Europe before the Cold War ended and the Berlin Wall came down, grainy pictures of threadbare Communist apartments in Budapest and Sofia, as well as privatized and bountiful markets in Yugoslavia interest them. Nevertheless, whether and how the superstructure shapes the economic base of countries and the mode of production, are the sorts of questions better left in the past annals of time.
What about Marx’s classes? Would they venture to say their parents are members of the petty bourgeoisie? Is the lumpenproletariat confined to prison cells and row-houses in suburban concrete cities? Why did the peasant class in China—never predicted by Marx to be influential—rise to power? Asked to identify a union leader, like Lech Walesa in Poland, or to consider why blue-collar workers wore indigo overalls in the Communist world (including in present-day North Korea), students like to fasten their interest on the personality cult of Lenin because his concept of imperialism resonates in a world many of them see as ruled by American hegemony. Lenin predicted European capitalists would invest in colonies, and competition over scarce resources would lead to war—World War I. Compared to Lenin’s intellectual legacy, however, it is most exciting to learn about Leon Trotsky, whose grand plan to militarize Russian industry gave rise to the epithet Trotskyism (and my own Russian grandfather’s attempt to assassinate him!). Students can appreciate world system theory that explains how class divisions are regionalized according to the center-periphery concept, so the core concentrates surplus from the periphery, and inside the periphery, there can be a core. Confusingly, the semi-periphery can be an area in which some manufacturing occurs and some capital concentrates, but to a lesser extent than in the most advanced core. Could it be that Canada and Mexico are part of the semi-periphery, along with the Asian tigers (Thailand, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan)? Sooner or later in their intellectual development, they lose attention to capitalism and Marxism, seduced by the tenets of postmodernism and constructivism. Frankly, radical Marxism’s effect on modern-day feminism and postmodernist feminist theory is more fun to debate, along with the conundrums confronting essentialist feminism and liberal feminism. It seems more relevant to debate issues related to equal pay for equal work, and how women were excluded but could be included in positions of power. I daresay the next generation of disaster specialists and stock brokers will be more passionate about whether female politicians—Margaret Thatcher, Canadian Prime Minister Kim Campbell, Hillary Clinton—are more peaceful and cooperative than men in higher places, and whether if more women held positions of power, world politics would relate differently. Future cohorts will have less patience for Marxist and dependency theory, and their sympathies may lie more firmly in the European tradition (Foucault,
Habermas) as well as postmodernism and critical theory (Derrida and R.B.J. Walker), as opposed to positivism and political “science” types of thinking.
Where do we go from here then?
A caravan of gypsies surprised me once, when I was biking through
Eastern Europe. Their horse-drawn carriages, with gigantic wooden wheels,
passed me on a country road somewhere in Yugoslavia. The Roma caravan towed three brown bears in straw-laden trailers. Because it was swelteringly hot, the three bears looked forlorn and definitely not in the mood for dancing. I think about those internally displaced people with their dancing bears whenever I lecture about the persecution of refugees—and how our semi-capitalist country handles natural and human-made disasters overseas—along with the people that claim refugee status. An official refugee is a person (and not a dancing bear) who is outside his or her country of nationality and has a well-founded fear of persecution in that country based on one or more of five grounds: race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. Most desperate people crossing borders illegally do not fit the legal definition. They may be victims of immense hardship. They may suffer persecution or death. But if they have not been singled out on one of the five grounds—if, for example, they have not been persecuted because they are of a certain ethnic origin or religion—they are not UN Convention refugees under international and Canadian law. Wars, climate change, conflict, and persecution are forcing more people than at any other time to leave their homes and to seek refuge and safety elsewhere, according to a 2015 report from the UN refugee agency. Globally, one in every 122 humans is now a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum. At the end of 2014, that meant 60 million people. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States will take only a handful of those millions. Successive Canadian governments—Liberal and Conservative—have accepted about a quarter-million immigrants and refugees a year, with refugees making up only a small, fluctuating portion of that total. Since Canada’s population is declining due to our low fertility rate, we need more immigrants and arguably more refugees. In more than 40 countries, including Canada but also in Eastern Europe and Asia, population size is expected to decline in coming decades. About 95 percent of world population growth
will occur in the developing countries. The combined population of the 49 least developed countries is projected to double by 2050. World population growth means that every second—60 times a minute, 3,600 times an hour, 86,400 times a day—three babies are born into the world. That is more than a quarter-million babies a day and more than 100 million babies a year. Millions of those kids will move into mega-cities, each with a total population in excess of 10 million. The UN projects that by 2025, 630 million people will live in 37 megacities, including Tokyo-Yokohama, with a population of 38 million, Mexico City with 21 million, and Delhi with more than 30 million. Conversely, Canada’s official medium-growth scenario projects the total Canadian population will increase from a relatively paltry 35 million in 2009 to 44 million by 2036 and then to 53 million by 2061.
There is a strong case for opening the country’s doors and creating
incentives to help nurture many thousands more official refugees—
not only more Roma from Hungary, but also more Afghans, Bangladeshis,
Chinese, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Iranians, Libyans, Nigerians, North Koreans,
Pakistanis, South Sudanese, Syrians, Ugandans, and so on. Perhaps by 2061, a few world-class multicultural cities will emerge in the country with the second-largest land mass in the world. Still, we will live in an ongoing state of emergency that will not be solved by band-aid solutions. It will not be enough to train more students to serve overseas as interns, to accept many more refugees, and to build more megacities in North America. On the one hand, the human species is good at setting goals and achieving them. We have walked on the moon, sent a rover to roam Mars—and many years ago the United Nations General Assembly agreed to pursue an ambitious set of Millennium Development Goals. Good progress on the goals since 2000 has meant that the proportion of people living in extreme poverty has halved from 18 years ago, more than two billion people have gained access to improved sources of drinking water, and remarkable gains have been made in the fights against malaria and tuberculosis. As well, the UN’s target for reducing hunger is within reach and the proportion of slum dwellers in the metropolises of the developing world is declining. On the other hand, the UN’s new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed on in September 2015 have more than 169 objectives and 17 broadly thematic objectives. Sustainable development has become a common global ethic since 1987 when the Brundtland Commission’s report, “Our Common Future,” drew links among poverty, the environment, and peace. Back then, the importance of “meeting the needs of today’s generation without compromising future generations”—as the report said—was not well understood. Now, a new motto—“No one should be left behind”—is being matched with the enthusiasm from a growing sense of global citizenship, fostered in an increasingly connected world. The proposed goals, however, that range from “ending poverty in all its forms everywhere,” to “opposing unsustainable consumption,” to tackling “gender inequality,” have a hefty budget. To achieve all 17 goals is estimated
at more than $1 trillion US a year—although to put this in perspective that is
less than the $1.7 trillion US spent annually on militarism. All global citizens need to be reminded of humankind’s shared aspirations as we consider the new and expensive SDGs. Moreover, we need to keep that outlook in mind as we think about the factors that should determine where and how countries distribute their development aid.
Foreign aid is one of the instruments of Canada’s foreign policy, but voters seldom contemplate capitalism’s priorities when they decide how to vote. For those who do take an interest, however, questions continue to swirl about whether Canada’s disaster assistance should be “tied” to the purchase of Canadian goods and services. This practice requires aid funds provided by the Canadian government to developing countries—some of the world’s poorest countries—be used to procure only Canadian goods and services. The Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) and various UN studies estimate that donor money with these kind of strings attached cuts the value of aid to recipient countries by 30 to 40 percent because they cannot search the international market for the best price. Usually only four countries—Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom—are singled out as donors breaking away from the concept of tied aid. As well, the UN urges each donor country to contribute 0.7 percent of its gross national income to official development assistance. But in Canada, successive federal governments—Liberal and Conservative—have consistently eroded the official development aid budget until today it is a paltry 0.24 percent and still declining. Canada is not alone in falling short. Only five countries have achieved the goal: Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. In 2015, however, a historic debate and vote in Britain’s parliament committed its current and future governments to spend at least 0.7 percent of its national wealth on development aid, currently around $23 billion Cdn. It joins Belgium, Finland, France, and Spain in making a commitment to a timetable to reach the target.
North America is a wealthy, resource-rich continent, with the world’s longest coastlines and the most fresh water, so North Americans could afford to give more. Civil society leaders are calling on the United States and Canada to align their development agenda with the proposed sustainable development goals, tackle inequality, integrate environmental concerns into decision making, and take a more holistic approach to development. This means tackling these issues not only abroad but also at home, where
we will one day have to answer for the poverty endured among Indigenous
communities. To reach the next 15-year goals by 2030, we will need politicians
with the courage to keep their promises and we will need to keep watch on whether those promises are delivered. In the meantime, critics see larger objectives of neo liberalization, private sector development, and mining in the Canadian government’s approach to aid. Ottawa’s strategy of “economic diplomacy” has formalized and expanded what our country’s diplomats have been doing through the federal government’s Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). Until 2013, CIDA was the federal government organization that administered the budget for Canada’s official development assistance. Then it was merged into the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development, which was renamed the Department of Global Affairs. The department is now a complicated hydra with four cabinet ministers—the ministers of foreign affairs, the minister of international trade, the minister of international development, and the minister of state (foreign affairs and consular)—at its head. The question is: should “dollar diplomacy” trump Canada’s traditional foreign policy values? Arguably, Canadians are entitled to derive benefits from Canada’s aid money. More university students could undertake subsidized internships, like Nicolas’ stint in Nepal. Indeed, North American mining projects in Africa and Latin America could be templates for future development work. And in Canada, CIDA’s so-called “corporate shift” could
reflect the necessity for Canadian investments to also promote Canadian values, Canadian business, and the Canadian economy. On the other hand, the danger is that governments make investments and economic interests the driving force behind the country’s entire foreign policy, not just foreign aid funneled through foreign aid institutions, like CIDA. Previously, Canada’s priorities for economic and social development overseas emphasized the importance of helping the poorest of the poor. That approach changed and now diplomats must ensure Canadian priorities abroad
favor Canadian economic interests, first and foremost. Critics of the new policy have already assailed the Canadian government for dangerously lower ing Canada’s traditional diplomatic priorities, such as aid, diplomacy, human rights, and peacekeeping, in favor of promoting Canadian industry overseas, especially in China. They say the battle for democracy in development areas will become a dangerously low priority compared to Canadian business interests, especially the mining sector.
Canada is now the largest state actor in the global mining industry. At the same time, the overseas operations of Canada’s extractive companies—now carried on with support from our diplomats—are expanding and thus undergoing increased scrutiny and mounting criticism. Canada’s purportedly unethical behavior is seen to be setting a bad precedent in the international community. Instead Canadian official development assistance should be used for proper development, not to facilitate extractive industries
in developing countries. Critics would prefer the country’s aid money continue to go to fighting poverty caused by natural disasters, such as the typhoon in the Philippines and the earthquake in Nepal, instead of helping Canadian businesses extract natural resources from the developing world. Advocates of the new policy, however, argue Canadian taxpayers should benefit from this “tied aid,” which promotes the Canadian economy as well. They argue Canadian aid money should be more effectively used, for example to assist in the technical redrafting of mining legislation in poorer countries. But others say the redrafted laws will help mining companies put in place business plans that do not benefit lower-class populations in those poorer countries. These critics are concerned that financial aid provided to mining companies in various forms by the Canadian government will be used to subsidize corporate lobbying against the corporate responsibility movement in Canada, which counsels using more ethical development strategies to help local populations. Questions are already surfacing about whether diplomats in Foreign Affairs should be used, directly or indirectly, to subsidize lobbying in favor of Canadian businesses abroad. It is probably not a good idea to use any country’s embassies as a primary vehicle to promote broad neo-liberalization measures. Neo-liberal ideas tend to percolate on their own without diplomats having much say. Those who say that using mining as a tool for development is an efficient use of aid
money are countered by those who argue that it is worse than inefficient—it is helping to create the kind of protection for investment that includes reductions and exemptions for corporate taxation. This will result in more problems than solutions for true long-term development. The worry, too, is that if wealthy countries like the United States and Canada act more forthrightly to help prohibit local sourcing requirements in poorer countries, such questionable practices will become the norm rather than the exception.
Already, many experts are cautioning that Canadian values should not include 100 percent foreign ownership of mines; instead, locals should be expected to manage and direct their own natural resources, even if they do not have an ownership share in the Canadian businesses operating on their own soil. Development should not mean unrestricted repatriation of profit for corporate companies; arguably arranging mining royalties of only 1 percent to 3 percent for developing countries will spell trouble for our broader interests in those countries. The record so far of extractive-sector activity as the primary vehicle for economic and social development is poor and might not improve much in the near future. Instead, the stated goals of diplomacy should be to lead international efforts to help people living in poverty. A country’s economic priorities should not hold sway over its traditional diplomatic interests abroad. Canadian disaster relief forces have helped in many places, most recently in Haiti, the Philippines, and Sierra Leone. It does not make sense to reshape foreign policy to prioritize capitalism’s interests abroad.
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