GLOBAL EGALITARIANISM: CAN WE MAKE OUT A CASE?
Beitz, Charles
Why should global poverty concern the affluent? Why do the global poor have a claim on the sympathy, the political energy, and the economic resources of the rich? These questions take on a new...
...This point, obvious when stated so abstractly, is often forgotten in specific cases...
...but it can help to ease the way...
...Further costs of the NIEO will result from its impact on prices...
...Tucker's confusion is to take this possibility as an objection in principle to international egalitarianism, whereas the possibility, in fact, counsels caution about what can be expected from interstate transfers 63 unaccompanied by reforms inside poor societies...
...In the short run, at least, the visible result in the rich countries will be a loss of jobs, as a greater share of the world market is claimed by products of poor countries...
...4See my more extensive argument for this position in "Justice and International Relations," Philosophy and Public Affairs, Summer 1975, pp...
...I propose here to examine the main arguments customarily offered for supporting such programs as the NIEO, as well as some of the problems that might follow its implementation...
...One's immediate response is that those seriously deprived of the means of life have an automatic claim on our sympathy and, when appropriate, our political energy and economic resources...
...In any event relative to other government expenditures, the amounts involved are not inordinately large...
...in 67 the nature of the proposals, the costs would be automatically distributed among most of the rich countries...
...Without questioning the injustice of imperialism, present-day citizens of the rich countries might ask why they should bear the costs of rectifying injustices in which they took no part...
...The most obvious costs to the rich would be direct cash transfers...
...First, the gains to the rich from their relations with the dependent poor may not be very significant...
...Can the costs of economic adjustment be shared fairly within and among the rich countries...
...This is not to say that wage rates will be fair...
...Like the oil price increases of 197374, however, these would be one-time shocks, and, like the oil price increases, commodity price increases might be accommodated over time without creating impossible hardships...
...The reasons for asking these questions are not entirely Socratic...
...3 For an argument to this effect, see Michael Walzer, "In Defense of Equality," Dissent, Fall 1973, pp...
...But the temptation should be resisted to draw interferences about the limits of distributive obligations, since it is not clear how feelings of community affiliation are relevant to the argument of egalitarianism...
...What is important is that the reasons why some ways of imposing distributional conditions are preferable to others have little to do with sovereignty and much to do with such other moral concerns as personal and political liberty...
...It is not the demonstration of past injustices that is compelling but the implicit contention that these injustices continue to exist...
...Here the need for affirmative government action is most pressing, because the required adjustments represent adaptation to permanent changes in the structure of the world economy...
...These extraneous influences are among the main obstacles to egalitarian reform within poor countries, and they will not be removed by the NIEO proposals...
...But none of the NIEO proposals explicitly addresses the issue of income distribution inside the poor countries, and so they cannot be viewed as constituting a 64 complete attempt to decrease global interpersonal inequality...
...If this is right, then it is no longer clear that the reparations argument for the poor countries' claim is compelling, even if its empirical premises are granted...
...Whether these less desirable possibilities materialize depends, again, on how poor-country governments use the immediate flexibility that the NIEO promises, and on the extent to which extraneous political and economic pressures can be minimized...
...These arise mainly from two sources...
...The commodity-price stabilization scheme would even out cyclical fluctuations in prices, protect the economic position of small farmers, and increase the foreign exchange earnings of resource-rich countries...
...What is pictured is the contemporary equivalent of the "siphoning off" that was supposed to result from imperialism...
...For a useful, brief summary of the NIEO program, see Karl P. Sauvant, "The Poor Countries and the Rich—a Few Steps Forward," Dissent, Winter 1978, pp...
...These domestic injustices are compounded by international political and economic inequalities...
...This is a surprising conclusion, since at first glance the reparations argument seems plausible...
...For example, the position as presented combines two logically independent empirical claims, namely, that imperialism imposed net costs on colonial countries and that it resulted in net gains for metropolitan ones...
...At the same time skeptical and pseudorealistic voices are declaring that the claims of the Third World on the rest of us are in fact overstated or nonexistent...
...At best, there would follow a political backlash against the global poor that would assure a widening of global inequalities for the rest of the century...
...Official loan guarantees administered multilaterally would help insulate private and public credit markets from similar political pressures...
...For these reasons the NIEO program survives the objections most often directed at it...
...Preferential access to richcountry markets would attract foreign investment and lead to an increase in employment...
...They allow us to beg off when the costs of action are significant...
...More fundamentally, the NIEO would help minimize the risks faced by poor-country regimes that attempt internal reforms aimed at eliminating the causes of inequality...
...For a sophisticated and comprehensive recent statement, see Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978...
...In some cases there may be political reasons for heeding the objections, but these objections have no basis in the egalitarian principle...
...But the essential weakness of the argument does not really involve these empirical issues...
...One might be tempted to reply that their favored position is partly a result of these past injustices, and so the rich do not deserve their present, favored status...
...It is sometimes said that the affluence-poverty connection is historical...
...it is a group in which a division of labor exists such that no one (or almost no one) produces all that he or she needs...
...Failure to do so will leave the NIEO proposals stillborn...
...Again, the main problem would be distributing the inflationary burden fairly inside the rich countries...
...Correctly noticing that some forms of socioeconomic cooperation are more intense than others, he might want to claim that only cooperation within states is sufficiently intense to trigger the familiar requirements of distributive egalitarianism...
...the proposal for a series of commodity reserves financed by common funds, in particular, is designed to stabilize commodity prices at a level above their current average market levels...
...The affluent countries are said to be responsible for the plight of the poor countries because, to put it crudely, in the past the rich used their political power to extract large surpluses from colonial dependencies...
...The failure of many rich countries, including the U.S., to support these proposals is, therefore, especially perverse...
...Egalitarianism TO EACH of these possible objections to the dependency argument, there are replies of varying plausibility...
...In a world in which state boundaries do not set off discrete systems of social production, egalitarianism in one country does not make sense...
...Here is the recalcitrance of dependency at its sharpest...
...Can sufficient public resources be mobilized to finance the long-term structural adjustments that will be required in richcountry economies...
...But if it is present injustice that needs to be redressed, then the complicated moral arguments and even more complicated historical arguments about the nature of imperialism are beside the point...
...There is, however, a less promising aspect to these features of the NIEO proposals...
...Political imperialism was supplanted by economic imperialism, colonial armies by comprador military governments, and statebased trading companies by multinational corporations...
...I shall not pursue them, however, since there is another argument for the poor countries' claims, involving a straightforward appeal to distributive justice that builds on some elements of dependency theory while avoiding the problematic conclusion that dependency relations are the main causes of the extreme global disparities of wealth and poverty...
...Further proposals envision the creation of ostensibly new wealth to which the developing countries would have special access...
...Nevertheless, the NIEO constitutes part of a larger program that would make a modest contribution to the development of the poor countries...
...The problem of distributive justice is customarily considered in domestic society, so we might begin to think about it at that level...
...If the central thesis of dependency theory is right, a country's participation in the capitalist world economy increases resistance to efforts to attain domestic and global egalitarian goals...
...If so, it is implausible to suggest that the rich stay rich because they exploit the poor...
...It does not rest the demand for present remedial action only on assertions about wrongs done by previous generations...
...It is often pointed out, for example, that income from trade with the poor countries contributes only a small percentage of the combined national incomes of the industrial countries...
...Distribution of SDRs to poor countries and of the gains from exploitation of the seabed would also increase their income...
...62-65...
...In particular, can their domestic poor and their workers be insulated from bearing a disproportionate share...
...Nonparticipants would be far worse off than those in the most dependent of poor countries...
...Some involve direct transfers from the rich countries, such as increased foreign aid, increased credit at more favorable terms, and forgiveness of the poor countries' debts to public and private lenders...
...These costs can be borne without causing anyone serious deprivation, but only if political choices are made to share the costs fairly...
...For example, attempts by the U.S...
...These claims demand concerted and potentially costly action by the rich—action aimed at the sources of poverty rather than merely its immediate manifestation...
...There is no easy solution, but individual taxpayers might be compensated to some extent by returning to them the windfall profits that would be earned by commodity suppliers in rich countries who stand to benefit from the price-stabilization arrangement...
...For one 65 thing, some elements of the NIEO program will help to improve the distribution of income inside poor countries almost automatically...
...It is a confusion, he suggests, to apply an interpersonal standard internationally...
...The Third World program—much of which is embodied in proposals for a "New International Economic Order" (NIEO)—consists of reforms in the world economic system designed to increase the flow of income to poor countries...
...But perhaps Tucker means to press a different argument...
...9 q Notes 'See the statistical annexes in John W. Sewell, et al., The United States and World Development: Agenda 1977 (New York: Praeger, for the Overseas Development Council, 1977...
...Its main weakness is the unstated premise that the heirs of those who gained benefits unjustly have obligations to make restitution to the successors of the deprived...
...The main organizational problems concerning relations between rich and poor countries, therefore, might be seen as creating an international economic environment in which it will be safe for individual poor countries to undertake progressive domestic reforms without paying unacceptable costs...
...But it is not clear why Tucker's historical observation is relevant to the egalitarian argument...
...This argument has undeniable force, but not so much as one might think...
...A consistent egalitarianism must take the world as its subject.4 The egalitarian argument does not dispute another key thesis of dependency theory, namely, that one of the main mechanisms of inequality is the dependent state itself...
...As Sauvant argues in the article cited above...
...Congress to influence human rights policies of other governments by withholding military but not economic aid merely invites creative bookkeeping: economic aid replaces domestic spending on social services, which is redirected to military uses...
...such a challenge must come, if at all, from within individual poor countries, each following policies appropriate to its own problems and needs...
...In both respects, the poor countries have attracted many sympathizers among progressives in the affluent North...
...we have already seen major dislocations in shoes, textiles, clothing, and electronics, stemming in part from the flight of capital to South and Southeast Asia...
...Though familiar enough, all this is necessary to set the background for a more immediate question: why should distributive justice stop, as it were, at a country's borders...
...It can be argued (although I won't do so here) that the just society is one whose institutions distribute the social product relatively equally—"relatively" because some inequalities might be justified by considerations of desert, or need, or (as John Rawls has argued) the requirements of raising the absolute position of society's worst-off group...
...2 The moral critique implicit in these charges holds that poor people in poor countries are victims of a double injustice brought on by participation in the capitalist world economy...
...In particular, the argument seems to depend on the accuracy of saying that the relations 61 between rich and poor countries are exploitative...
...But this is clearly not a reason for opposing the NIEO proposals...
...It would be better to ask what is at present unjust about rich-poor relations...
...Any of these might, under imaginable circumstances, promote a more egalitarian distribution, but some ways of doing this are obviously preferable to others...
...Moreoever, it is not implausible to suggest that the goal of interpersonal egalitarianism might be served by promoting transfers from rich to poor countries...
...for example, if the U.S...
...A stronger reason for favoring the NIEO proposals becomes clear if we see the proposed reforms as part of a larger picture...
...More important, these measures would not reduce the gap between industrialized and developing countries, because none would bring about substantial changes in the world economy.' So viewed, the NIEO program is progressive but very moderate...
...Charity WHY DO the global poor deserve a better deal...
...This is not to say that rich countries would be justified in imposing any conditions likely to promote internal redistribution among the poor...
...These are the questions that partisans of global egalitarianism must answer...
...Second, it is claimed that participation in the world economy produces political distortions, by generating an outward-looking elite with disproporationate political affluence that prevents the local government from governing in the interests of all its citizens...
...At worst, domestic regimes could undercut attempts to address the majority's basic needs by fiddling with their national budgets...
...Arguments of charity have notorious limits...
...But the dependency argument also has weaknesses, although not fatal ones...
...As if each claim were not bad enough, the three taken together are mutually reinforcing...
...First, it is argued that participation in the capitalist world economy produces distortions in the economic structures of poor countries, for example, by encouraging the development of capital-intensive manufacturing where there are vast numbers of unemployed persons, or by discouraging local entrepreneurs from activities aimed at satisfying the needs of the bulk of the population...
...This has prompted some to suggest that a domestic distributional component be built into the NIEO program...
...Reparations HOW ARE global affluence and global poverty connected...
...This reformulation does not salvage his argument, however, because even domestic cooperation varies in intensity, and it is plausible that many to whom we readily acknowledge egalitarian distributive obligations make only marginal contributions to economic life and are only marginally affected by it...
...dependent states must be enabled to select development policies with greater autonomy than many now possess...
...It is one thing to demand changes in investment policies, another to interfere in an election, and still another to require compulsory birth control...
...Would that fact make any difference at all to our view that the present Rockefellers don't deserve all the wealth they inherited...
...5 This is a true, historical observation...
...The main thrust of the NIEO is to promote this goal...
...The egalitarian argument aims ultimately at improving the conditions of poor people...
...Thus it can be argued that the income of the global rich is being unjustly won, and that the world economy should be reordered to reallocate income to those being unjustly deprived...
...Third, it is alleged that the unequal power relations in the world economy force the poor countries to engage in trade and to accept foreign investment on exploitative terms...
...These questions take on a new urgency as the dimensions of global poverty come to be widely recognized.' Slowly, a consensus seems to be emerging that the affluent nations must undertake concerted action to help the "forgotten 40 percent" of the human population...
...Since poverty is seen as having been exacerbated by imperialism, the demand to reverse the flow of resources can be interpreted as a demand to rectify past wrongs...
...But it is a real question whether anyone deserves the social position that is inherited, regardless of the justice or injustice of the means by which the predecessors attained them...
...Thus, it seems unrealistic to expect even the most well-meaning of rich countries to challenge this built-in resistance to basic change...
...The Prospects I HAVE ARGUED that the NIEO is incomplete because it does not take seriously enough the need to reduce interpersonal inequality, because it pays insufficient attention to the need to increase agricultural productivity, and because it is insensitive to a variety of political and economic obstacles in rich as well as poor countries...
...That picture needs to be filled in by efforts in rich countries, particularly the U.S., to subject military and intelligence agencies to greater public scrutiny, and to restrain the political activities of multinational banks and corporations...
...But if the division of labor is global, then the logic that supports domestic egalitarianism appears to support global egalitarianism as well...
...The incentives necessary to keep domestic investment capital at home both contribute directly to present inequality and reinforce a class structure resisting future equalizing adjustments in income distribution...
...In fact, it makes clear that what is truly significant—and not in dispute—about dependency is that it characterizes a global division of labor...
...They involve the internal reforms that rich countries must undertake, and the costs they will incur, if the program is to be carried out successfully...
...Other concerns, closer to home, will compete for our resources, and in any event, there always lurks in the background the question, "Why me...
...Second, it is sometimes said that the dependent poor are only relatively (but not absolutely) disadvantaged by participation in the capitalist world economy...
...After all, the justification for direct transfers itself requires that the transfers be used to narrow the global gap between rich and poor persons...
...A complete analysis of the prospects for NIEO would end in an area that may be quite unexpected: in the domestic politics and economic structures of the rich countries...
...Tucker's reading of the history of states does not undermine this reasoning...
...3 The point is that relative equality is at least a rough approximation of what distributive justice requires...
...44-46...
...Domestic income inequalities exacerbate existing poverty, while inequalities of political power make it almost impossible for disadvantaged classes to improve their position...
...Some other elements of the NIEO program, such as increased aid flows and debt forgiveness, can be regarded as necessary if not sufficient conditions for a more egalitarian distribution of income...
...Indeed, such feelings are notoriously unreliable guides to the limits of moral ties, more often functioning as rationalizations for inaction than as true indicators of the reach of our responsibilities...
...Thus, their costs must be measured entirely in their indirect effects: relatively insignificant inflation in the case of SDRs, foregone profits for minerals corporations in the case of a seabed regime...
...Furthermore, such costs would not be borne disproportionately by any individual rich country...
...The focus on historical 60 considerations obscures this while it opens the argument to the sort of attack I have outlined...
...Reducing barriers to trade that will increase industrial employment in resourcepoor regions will distribute some of the gains from trade to one of the more impoverished segments of the domestic population, the urban unemployed...
...To some, like Tucker, it seems mistaken to advance the egalitarian argument in support of the poor countries' claims...
...Intercountry transfers must be viewed as means toward this end...
...Considerations about sovereignty ought not be used as an argument against imposing conditions favoring better internal distribution of transfer payments...
...Even trade liberalization, coupled with preferential tariffs for certain poor-country exports, can be viewed as a framework of options from which poor countries can select advantageous trading arrangements and within which they can increase their bargaining power vis a vis private foreign investors...
...Finally, and most fundamentally, there are the costs of adjusting to the global shift of employment that would result from more rapid industrialization of the poor countries...
...The NIEO would contribute to such an environment in several ways...
...2This is the baldest possible summary of views developed in a very extensive literature on dependency and economic imperialism...
...It is that the poor countries' claims are claims for equality among states, whereas the egalitarian argument given above urges equality among persons...
...The problem of distributive justice is to determine the morally best way in which the social product can be shared among the members of society...
...Moreover, since arguments of charity concentrate on immediate distress rather than underlying social structures, they define the problem in superficial terms...
...Indigenous social formations were broken down, economic structures distorted, and new needs created that could only be satisfied by the extractive, dependent relationship with the metropole...
...That is, "Why should I sacrifice when not everybody else will...
...q 68...
...If so, then the character of the connection may explain why the claims of the poor seem to carry more weight than the argument of charity allows...
...Our assessment of the NIEO proposals depends largely on why we think any such proposals deserve sympathetic attention...
...The NIEO cannot guarantee that poor countries will seek the internal reforms necessary to decrease domestic inequalities...
...And since affluence is seen as having been partly attained by taking advantage of unequal power relations, the same demand can be interpreted as a demand to restore to their rightful owners advantages unjustly gained...
...Suppose that Rockefeller's grandfather acquired all of his wealth in morally benign ways...
...The NIEO does little to challenge the constellation of dependency...
...As philosophers such as Aristotle and Hume have recognized, the problem arises because a society is not merely a collection of self-sufficient individuals...
...In any case, there are clear practical limits to the domestic distributional reforms that can be expected to accompany a program of transfers...
...1 1 would like to thank Douglas Bennett for advice and suggestions on the political economy of the NIEO proposals...
...Third, it is not generally true that the degree of a country's dependence varies with the depth of its poverty...
...as dependency theory makes clear, a country's domestic structure might keep large infusions from the outside from ever reaching the bottom...
...In evaluating the poor countries' proposals, we must not only ask whether they are consistent with their moral underpinnings but also consider how an attempt to carry them out might be subverted by powerful forces in the world economy and in the domestic societies of rich and poor countries...
...Between principle and policy lie political-economic practices and structures that could frustrate the reformers' best intentions...
...6 There is a confusion, but it is Tucker's...
...For example, successful efforts to stabilize commodity prices above current levels would have immediate inflationary results that would be difficult politically for rich-country governments to manage...
...6Tucker, The Inequality of Nations, pp...
...In this respect, the NIEO is deficient and needs to be supplemented by an aggressive multilateral effort to improve agricultural productivity...
...Countries with market economies, strong bourgeoisies, and relatively high past or present concentrations of private foreign investment are likely to experience strong internal pressures toward maintaining existing inequalities in the distribution of income...
...For example, multinational corporations with technological monopolies extract monopoly rents as the price of locating manufacturing facilities in poor countries, or they employ local labor at wages far below those paid in more developed countries...
...Presumably, the required funds would be raised from personal and business taxes and the question, whether these costs were fairly shared, would be a part of the more general question, whether the tax system itself were fair...
...The world's aggregate product is a social product, raising the question of how that product should be shared...
...One set in particular could be implemented without significant direct costs to the rich—that of the proposals for creating "new wealth" by increasing the flow of international liquidity to poor countries through creation of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), and by establishing an international agency to supervise the exploitation of seabed minerals and distribute the profits largely to poor countries...
...Sympathy for the poor South, therefore, must be based on more fundamental moral concerns than charity...
...For example, if a country's degree of dependence can be roughly measured by the percentage of foreign ownership of its capital stock or by the percentage of its national income attributable to trade, then it can be shown that the poorest of the poor countries are not the most dependent...
...The less basic is the fungibility of money...
...More far-reaching arguments for the claims of the poor result from taking seriously the relative as well as absolute dimensions of world poverty...
...The Poor Country's Proposals IT is one thing to endorse global egalitarianism as the moral principle underlying the poor countries' claims for reform of the world economy...
...Such arguments may seem to be satisfied when distress is relieved even though underlying causes remain untouched...
...indeed, we need have no special relationship at all...
...360-89...
...The rich are said to prosper because of their relations with the poor, and the poor to suffer because of their relation with the rich...
...And what does the connection imply about Third World claims...
...Full implementation of the NIEO program would certainly produce a transfer of income to the poor countries, especially via debt forgiveness and increased aid flows...
...Since countries contain people, international redistribution is interpersonal redistribution...
...Injustice done by previous generations seems irrelevant to whether members of present generations deserve what they have...
...A more basic problem has to do with the structural roots of inequality...
...but such conditions may be open to criticism on other grounds...
...The character of our relationship to those who suffer does not matter...
...Initially, displaced workers will need assistance in retraining and relocating on a far greater scale than at present...
...and it does assert that a connection exists between present affluence and present poverty...
...Some poor countries will doubtless object to the imposition of internal distributional conditions on the grounds that these violate their sovereignty...
...Neither does it help to point out the subjective differences between domestic and global societies...
...Distributive justice gets its grip on us as people who occupy positions in a social division of labor...
...But even such an incremental program will exact significant short-run costs in the rich countries...
...This consensus finds an echo in the widespread sympathy with which the Third World's program for a "New International Economic Order" (NIEO) has been received...
...They suffer the consequences of domestic social injustice because they live in societies characterized by acute inequality...
...On neither point does the charity argument 59 capture widely held views about the moral seriousness of the poor countries' claims...
...As a result, the questions posed above are now being widely discussed—not merely the problem of how to help the poor nations but whether and in what ways we are obligated to do so...
...At best, the basic needs of the poor majorities inside these countries would be more fully addressed, but domestic income inequalities would not be significantly narrowed...
...Distributive inequality is related to the political and economic structure of a society...
...If the mark of a community is the existence of a social division of labor and the economic interdependence it entails, and if the existence of community, so defined, is a precondition of distributive justice, then the facts of international economic life leave no alternative to accepting the egalitarian argument, globally applied...
...these include extension to poor countries of tariff preferences and lowering of nontariff barriers to trade...
...No one would seriously dispute that people generally feel stronger ties to other members of their own societies than to those elsewhere...
...5 Robert W. Tucker, The Inequality of Nations (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 153...
...Commodityprice stabilization agreements and constitutional changes in multilateral aid agencies would decrease the ability of rich countries and corporate interests to manipulate their relations with the poor for political reasons...
...All that matters is that suffering exists...
...Instead, it shows one respect in which the NIEO is only part of a larger picture...
...On the other hand, even if poor countries succeeded in reordering the world economy in a way that secured better terms of trade and investment, the disadvantaged classes in poor countries would still find themselves up against domestic social injustices...
...Dependency A NATURAL RESPONSE would be that the residue of imperialism is itself unjust...
...The Costs of International Egalitarianism THE BEST possible outcome of the NIEO reforms would probably make only small contributions to global equality, and even then, to supply only some of the many conditions necessary to improve the prospects of the poorest of the poor...
...No doubt, the picture sketched in the last paragraphs is overly simple...
...Even if it were possible for disadvantaged classes in poor countries to redress domestic injustices, they would still find themselves up against the overwhelming political power of rich countries and the economic resources of multinational corporations based there...
...Even if aid dollars are restricted to egalitarian policies that directly satisfy basic needs, a country wishing to keep an inegalitarian internal distribution can accept such aid but evade its intent by reallocating other funds to less egalitarian uses...
...It goes without saying that the main concern of distributive justice is not with setting terms for each particular transaction, but rather with identifying political-economic institutions most likely to yield just distributions over time...
...were to contribute 1 percent of its GNP as development assistance (more than quadrupling the present level), the annual cost would be less than $20 billion, or about 5 percent of the 1977 federal budget...
...TWO OBJECTIONS to this position recently have been voiced by Robert W. Tucker...
...in the longer term, one can envision a system of public enterprises cultivating new technologies to soak up the unemployment caused by the flight of industrial capital to the poor countries...
...Considered as the basis of an argument for the poor countries' claims, dependency theory has two advantages over the other arguments here considered...
...This includes a new round of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) in the International Monetary Fund and establishment of an International Seabed Authority to oversee the exploitation of seabed minerals and to distribute the proceeds to developing countries...
...Some reforms combine direct transfers with attempts to improve the developing countries' capacity to compete in world trade...
...27-40...
...Since these proposals involve wealth to which no one has an existing claim, their adoption would not directly deprive anyone...
...The real dilemma, and the ultimate uncertainty, of global egalitarianism is whether a political coalition can be mobilized within the rich countries for completing the picture of which NIEO is only a partial outline...
...All of this counsels modest hopes regarding attempts to impose domestic distributional conditions on unreceptive poor countries...
...To the extent that social structures in dependent states contribute to internal inequalities, global egalitarianism yields a moral case for internal reform as well...
...Do these proposals measure up to the demands of global egalitarianism...
...For example, no international economic order could have prevented the CIA or ITT from interfering with the domestic policies of Allende's Chile...
...Indeed, in the U.S...
...The range of choices available to poorcountry governments must be enlarged...
...Thus, a commitment to global egalitarianism need not limit itself to the reform of inegalitarian structures at the international level...
...These theories involve several claims about the effects on poor and ex-colonial countries of their economic relations with the rich, although none of these theories makes any essential reference to explicitly historical considerations...
...The flexibility that they afford to poor-country governments is double-edged...
...On the other hand, the commodity proposals, which are mainly oriented toward cash crops, will not necessarily help in the crucial effort to increase domestic production of food...
...Can security agencies and multinational enterprises be opened to public scrutiny, and their foreign political activities effectively be controlled...
...to lay claim to a larger share of global income without acknowledging a responsibility to address that gap is to make a claim without foundation...
...Clearly, the double injustice indentified by dependency theory means that adequate strategies of change must simultaneously address domestic and international injustices, and the structures that perpetuate them...
...This picture is controversial in at least three ways...
...Finally, the poor countries propose a series of constitutional reforms in international financial institutions to shift the balance of decision-making power in their favor...
...Not all of the poor countries' proposals will be equally costly...
...For example, the level of direct transfers might be made to depend partly on the adoption by recipient countries of appropriate redistributive policies, or on the use of assistance to satisfy the basic needs of their worst-off classes...
...The argument rests on considerations of charity: whenever we can help alleviate human suffering, we should...
...More generous aid policies at least make it possible for poor countries to pay greater attention to domestic poverty...
...At worst, they might lead to greater repression of workers and the poor in the rich countries as global capitalists exploit new opportunities for profit on a world scale...
...The most pressing dilemmas regarding the wisdom of these proposals lie elsewhere...
...If so, the point about the intensity of cooperation does not distinguish global from domestic justice...
...Of course, this goal will not be achieved by transfers alone...
...Tucker's second objection is more frequently heard and more easily disposed of...
...Either way, the poor countries' claims are claims for reparations...
...It is hard to be optimistic about the prospects...
...To take note of global distributive inequality is to suggest that the poverty of the many and the affluence of the few are somehow connected...
...If one believes that distributive claims rest on a person's participation in social production, it appears that one should assess 62 international distributive claims just as one assesses domestic ones...
...it does so through tariff preferences in the rich countries for poor-country products, increased capital flows, and transfers of manufacturing technology...
...Other reforms would enable poor countries to compete more successfully in world trade by assuring their products access to rich-country markets...
...Because these structural elements also help stabilize the environment for profitable foreign investment, it will be difficult for rich-country governments to exert effective pressure for structural changes...
...The egalitarian argument does not involve controversial premises concerning the particular costs and benefits of dependency...
...As I hope to show, a deeper understanding of the moral basis of Third World claims will in turn make clear in what respects the NIEO is incomplete, and illuminate some potential dilemmas involved in completing them...
...It is another to accept their policy proposals as satisfying this principle...
...The egalitarian argument not only does not ignore such reforms, but might require them...
...Because the NIEO is designed to promote growth of manufacturing, it might lead to increasing dependence on foreign goods and capital markets and diminish, rather than enlarge, the range of future options open to poorcountry governments...
...But the absolute amounts involved in the proposals for direct transfers are not large, and the trade measures, while on balance beneficial to the poor countries, will not produce great gains in employment in the short run...
...More serious still are the potential consequences of implementing parts of the NIEO proposals without making the necessary domestic changes in the rich countries...
...Tucker's remarks appeared earlier, in somewhat different form, in "Egalitarianism and International Politics," Commentary, September 1975, pp...
...Economic distortions perpetuate political ones, and both kinds reduce the ability of the dependent state to seek improvements in the terms of trade and investment...
...First, while recognizing the growth of a world economy involving an international division of labor, Tucker claims that state boundaries continue to delimit communities within which egalitarianism is a plausible distributive principle: "It is the state that, more often than not, has created the degree of interdependence identified with community...
...If so, it is not clear that dependency is an essential cause even of relative disadvantage...
...when it does, we should act to alleviate it...
...The colonial tie worked like a siphon: once the outward flow of resources was set in motion, it perpetuated itself, moving well beyond the temporal limits of the colonial period...
...This is the moral critique implicit in various theories of economic dependency...
...Yet, neither possibility invalidates the argument for NIEO-type reforms...
...399-408...
Vol. 26 • January 1979 • No. 1
