A Third Way in the Third World

...or that the peoples of the Pacific rim would flood Europe and America with their technologically sophisticated products...

...Then there is the larger political context the third way engenders...

...In general, as many studies have demonstrated, numerous psychic qualities— tolerance of others, a dislike of hierarchical relations, a willingness to help the weak, dissent from conformity, a feeling of political efficacy—are much more pronounced among the members of the middle class in every region...

...Tanzania receives more aid than any country in the world, but it has gone backward economically since independence...

...The Ivory Coast, by calling in French troops as defenders, undermined its domestic officer corps...

...No single culture seems uniquely receptive or antithetical to liberalizing political trends either: An Islamic Malaysia has created a multiparty democracy...

...Decentralized decision-making and relationships with multinationals also reinforce the rule of law...

...Japan is about to complete a massive satellite capable of reaching hundreds of television channels around the globe...

...This deserves careful examination, for it allows fallen political leaders economic outlets, thereby moderating hostility...

...When agriculture takes off, certain social changes occur almost spontaneously: The desire for children primarily as field hands and sources of security diminishes, women enjoy greater freedom, there is a heightened interest in education...

...Third, in a host of ingenious ways civilian governments of the more successful regions have kept their armies on a strict leash...

...Perhaps equally important, for the proprietor efficiently reaping profits from his own land the lures of violent revolution lose their appeal...

...Exclusionist countries—Nigeria, Pakistan, Uganda, Maoist China—have foundered or retrogressed...

...As the 1980s wind down, the probable political impact of a new form of education is becoming apparent...

...Venezuela devotes more money to education than any other country in Latin America, and has emerged as the richest and freest...

...Venezuela and Colombia keep their armies out of politics by playing the intricate, dangerous game of buying military allegiance with generous pay and luxurious privileges...

...They do not support the contention that abundant natural resources or large sums of capital are essential at the first stage of development...

...Second, in distributing economic power throughout their societies, the third-way leaders have been remarkably adept at maintaining the symbols of the ancien regime...

...India and Malaysia limit their armies to a distinctly "professional" role...

...William McCord, professor of sociology at the City University of New York, iscurrently a Visiting Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge...

...They do not offer much evidence that the symbols of old cultures must be dismembered, or that old social structures must be revolutionized before the initial groping steps toward affluence can be taken...

...Clearly, economic development in itself does not necessarily lead to stable liberal government...

...An ex-colonial officer in Burma, he did not anticipate the growth of nationalism in Africa and Asia...

...Since almost every village has its own television today, this new source of universal knowledge cannot avoid breaching old bulwarks of authority...

...Malaysia benefits from a vigorous Chinese minority...

...and it avoids the social and political upheavals a concentration on heavy industry often engenders...

...India provides a natural study in the virtues of various roads to industrialization...

...Elsewhere, small farmers are producing for the giant domestic markets of India and China...

...it furnishes consumer goods to the rural population...

...Costa Rica simply disbanded its military...

...Singapore's presidents invariably come from minority groups, but the prime minister is from the dominant population and actually go verns...

...Now, buffeted by a depression in the world market, Singapore has begun to switch once again to service, emphasizing the financial, medical, educational, and communications sectors...

...The two other basic requirements for furthering third-way progress are fostering free trade and easing the debt burden...

...Where agricultural potential exists, for example, taking advantage of it can be the key to opening up other doors...

...There lies a rough quadrilateral with its corners 1 at Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin, and Hong Kong...

...andEurope...

...On the basis of the UN's measures of economic growth, Clark Kerr's index of the physical quality of life, and Amnesty International's reports of political tolerance, the "gradualist" Ivory Coast has surpassed Guinea and Ghana, "infidels" in Malaysia have moved ahead of Sukarno's and Suharto's Indonesia, peasant capitalists in the Punjab and Haryana have grown more food than Mao's fabled Dazhai commune, and Asia's city-states have produced far more goods than Maoist Shanghai or Canton...

...Venezuela, Colombia and Costa Rica in Latin America...

...Eventually, teams of UN experts furnished the methods of desalinization, tube-welling and canal maintenance which allowed the reconditioned land to blossom...

...Singapore and Hong Kong are examples of how the poorest areas, lacking both natural resources and agricultural possibilities, can benefit from association with multinational companies...

...India has launched its own satellite...

...Costa Rica has built schools while the rest of Central America has pandered to its armies...

...Possibly governments will develop "anti-information technology," but it appears next to impossible for any secret police to black out knowledge—or heresy or pornography or propaganda—that will soon reach the world at 186,000 miles per second through a fibre-optic thread...

...How can Islamic groups keep out "impure thoughts" from Malaysia and Indonesia...

...South Korea, Taiwan and South Africa have made as much economic progress as Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia over the last decades, yet their dictatorial structures have not disappeared...

...What we need most at present is knowledge of international economic law...

...It has experimented with state owned large industries, privately owned yet severely restricted heavy industries, and privately controlled light manufacturing...

...Significantly, all the third-way governments have placed exceptional stress on the development of human resources...

...The more successful regions, as I have tried to demonstrate in this series, have chosen a "third way" between the severities of pure capitalism (imposed for the sake of profit and efficiency) and egalitarian socialism (enforced in the name of social justice...

...The Punjab, Dengist China and the Ivory Coast used small-scale, labor-intensive enterprises to set the process rolling...

...With that kind of vulnerability, how can a future Chinese dictator protect his regime from criticism...

...Without all the injections of foreign knowledge, and the financing (plus, of course, enlightened policies in New Delhi), the Punjab and adjoining states would have remained the deserts they were in 1880...

...It is only when secular governments trample on ancient symbols that serious trouble starts in third-way countries...

...The Punjab and Haryana, through judicious investment in the Green Revolution, feed much of India and have freed their untouchables for work in rural industries...

...The small-scale industries have proven the most profitable...

...They include the Ivory Coast in Africa...

...But it does appear that several social and economic trends have tended to accompany political liberalization in the third-way regions...

...By 1985, the Asian nations traded more freely with one another (and in greater volume) than with the non-Pacific countries, thereby pumping additional energy into their home markets...

...a largely pagan Ivory Coast has encouraged free discussion and reconciliation...

...Over the past 30 years, Third World adherents of the third way have achieved substantial economic growth, sharply improved their peoples' literacy and health, and established a relatively open political order...

...That has been the case in the Ivory Coast, Malaysia, Costa Rica, Colombia, the Punjab, and Haryana (not to mention Deng Xiaoping's China...

...But the new seeds would have been useless if, in the '60s, the World Bank had not made available loans for modernizing a system of dams and canals built by the British in the 19th century to irrigate fallow lands...

...And the qualities are easily translated into support for a politically open regime...

...They do not suggest that self-sufficiency is a necessary, or even useful, stimulus for economic expansion...

...Thus Singapore, within the short span of 25 years, has moved from policies encouraging entrepot activities to labor-intensive enterprises, to assembly plants staffed with newly skilled labor, to a high-technology economy...

...The general significance of these successful areas is that they upset many of the popular theories of economic growth and political development...

...Whether transmitted by satellite or in a mud schoolhouse, though, education must have relevance to a country's needs and be of high quality to enhance economic growth...

...On the whole, as the mixed economies of third way nations become increasingly complex and diversified, army officers seem more willing to abstain from seizing political control...

...In Iran, rapid economic expansion merely led to the replacement of an arrogant Shah with an equally repressive theocracy...

...Another third-way lesson—rejected by Third World xenophobes who plead the purity of their race or the unique authenticity of their cultures—is that countries welcoming the influence of a foreign catalyst achieve the best rates of economic growth...

...These regions have forged ahead of comparable areas that originally commanded material advantages, greater resources, more charismatic leaders, and fewer privileges in the world market...

...All are basically hybrid economies that have four distinguishing characteristics : they pursue a strong private, market-oriented strategy in agriculture and industry...

...Venezuela has permitted aristocrats to retain their haciendas, but distributed their holdings in an ambitious land reform program...

...By the simple expedient of raising prices guaranteed to farmers and allowing them to cultivate private plots, Dengist China has stepped up food grain output at the rate of 12 per cent annually since 1977...

...it opens up the possibility of legitimate critics building their own means of mass communication in an atmosphere that hampers the central bureaucracy's ability to suppress criticism...

...In 1980, trade between the U.S...

...In June, W. W. Norton and Company will publish a book based in part on this series, to be entitled Paths to Progress...

...Indeed, it could be argued that in the Punjab economic development— particularly by elevating the status of Hindu untouchables and threatening the dominance of Sikh traditionalists— exacerbated religious and caste conflict, igniting violence...

...Indira Gandhi's fatal encounter with Sikhism might have been avoided if she had not ordered an attack on the Sikh extremists in the Golden Temple...

...Without this "immigrant ethic,' many of the third-way areas would never have escaped the vicious circle of poverty...

...that the Punjab, Shanxi Province and the Ivory Coast would outstrip the agricultural productivity of the American Midwest...

...The Soviet Union can broadcast programs throughout the world...

...Malaysia lets its nine dynastic sultans elect a king, while technocrats and entrepreneurs run the government...

...Ivory Coast crops oriented for export to Europe have augmented peasant income 11-fold over two decades...

...they tend to emphasize exports...

...How have they managed to progress and at the same time bring about a political environment characterized by critical debate and the rule of law...

...and a Confucian China has produced both the brutality of Mao and the tolerant pragmatism of Deng...

...Countries rich in resources start on this path by exporting basic commodities...

...In sum, in Asia and elsewhere, the leaders of the third-way countries have created robust economies and relatively open political institutions...

...McCord's previous articles in the series were "China's Hong Kong Experiment" (NL, August 6, 1984), "A Wager in West Africa" (September 3, 1984), "Singapore's Success Story," written with his wife Arline (August 12-26, 1985), "Malaysia's Improbable Triumph" (September 23, 1985), and "Venezuela's Determined Democracy" (February 10,1986...

...Quite the contrary, their very diversity demonstrates that under the right conditions many different cultures can sustain values emphasizing science, rationality, tolerance, innovation, and a belief in man influencing his fate...

...How have the third-way countries made their strides without repeating the horrors of the Industrial Revolution or the inhumanities of a Stalinist regime...

...These city states have achieved per capita incomes and a level of social welfare that exceeds Eastern Europe's and comes close to that of Japan...

...Kerala allots more of its budget to education than the other states, yet because the teachers are incompetent and win their posts by bribes, most of their students fail the all-India exams and Kerala is stagnating...

...In India, the lack of technical training has resulted in three-quarters of the university graduates becoming government employees...

...For good or evil, this vehement surge in political assertion— the most dynamic and, it has been argued, dangerously virulent force in the 20th century—produced a spate of new nations, some benevolent and peaceful, others more cruel and exploitative than their old masters...

...Others not so wellendowed by nature have made light manufacturing one of the first bases for industrialization...

...Politically, the third-way regions are proof that fairly open, even pristine-ly democratic regimes can stimulate economic growth as well and as rapidly as dictatorships, if not better and faster...

...they assign government a prime role in the creation of a supporting infrastructure...

...The majority of the third-way regions have similarly moved toward the creation of industries attuned to their comparative strengths, their human capital, and diversification...

...and the Pacific rim countries exceeded trade between theU.S...

...Singapore has instituted English as the real language of commerce and administration, yet continues to recognize Mandarin, Malay and Tamil as "official" languages...

...Simultaneously, the middle classes have provided the critics of the various leaders...

...the state owned enterprises, particularly in Bihar are languishing under bureaucratic control and suffer from corrupt practices...

...In Africa, the Ivory Coast spends the highest proportion of its budget on education—some 10 times higher per capita than the U.S.—and the country has prospered while its initially richer neighbors, Ghana and Guinea, have withered...

...Lebanese play a leading role in West Africa...

...Waves of Italians and Basques have invigorated Colombia and Venezuela...

...Many of the Malay students concentrate on Islamic studies, and later can find jobs only as petty bureaucrats...

...Further, the creation of liberal institutions need not await an economic boom and may, in fact, initiate one...

...Consider the sequence of events that resulted in the Punjab' s remarkable accomplishment...

...It matters little that their systems have been given different names—ranging from "Commodity Socialism" to "LaissezFaire Capitalism...

...A critical element is flexibility in the framework of a stable polity...

...it provides the skills needed for further modernization...

...Buffeted by world economic trends and the debt crisis, religious enthusiasms and ethnic conflicts, threats from the military on the Right and guerrillas on the Left, men of courage and moderation have shown that the task of world development need not end in defeat...

...From the ranks of the new groups came the statesmen—Felix Houphouet-Boigny in the Ivory Coast, Romulo Betancourt in Venezuela, Jose Figueres in Costa Rica, Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore— who focused on improving political conditions...

...These dissenters— Venezuela's Christian Social Party, Malaysia's Chinese Association, the Ivory Coast's teachers' union—cannot be easily dismissed, imprisoned or killed by a government that aims at both retention of power and economic growth...

...In 1986, the combined trade of "the little tigers" and members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations is, for the first time in history, running higher than Japan's...

...Yet Orwell, in his consideration of underdeveloped areas, failed to envision the future in its fullest terms...

...and the scramble for resources, human and material, still continued...

...There also are positive lessons to be learned from third-way experiences...

...Three out of the four top recipients of American aid—Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey—have made little discernible advancement economically or politically over the last 20 years...

...Nevertheless, experience demonstrates that in third-way regions foreign aid can have a beneficent effect when it is directed toward improving agriculture and education, it helps build roads, it does not go to the military, and it is bilateral rather than multilateral...

...it allows indigenous industries to take advantage of local opportunities...

...De facto cooperation to meet these requirements has nowhere been more apparent than along the Pacific rim, especially among the Asian nations themselves...

...After a dramatic breakthrough was scored in Mexico and the Philippines, the seeds were readily adopted in the Punjab, enabling its awakened peasants to bring about the Green Revolution that has saved India from famine...

...In the Ivory Coast and Malaysia, multinationals have been contributing to economic expansion by purchasing agricultural export goods like palm oil, cocoa, rubber, coffee, timber, and sugar...

...Cantonese migrants enliven Singapore and Hong Kong...

...The heroes of these farming revolutions are peasants who, knowing their own land and markets, are responding with their labor and intelligence to shifting demands...

...In the starving African nations, few universities offer training in agricultural research...

...So there are no magic formulas...

...Orwell did not foresee that a once humbled China would open its bamboo curtain and confidently declare itself ready to learn from and to compete with the outside world...

...Conventional wisdom offers little enlightenment...

...a predominantly Catholic Costa Rica has renounced the methods of the Inquisition...

...In an interdependent global economy where Singapore threatens to overtake Switzerland as the richest country on earth, the "coolies" are clearly beginning to exert their latent power...

...These countries have begun to fulfill one of Karl Marx's last and most perceptive prophecies: "The Pacific Ocean will then play the same role as at present the Atlantic and that of the Mediterranean in classical antiquity...

...Scientists at the Rockefeller Foundation in Mexico began conducting research on hybrid, highly productive forms of wheat and rice in the mid-40s...

...and they encourage a high rate of savings for future investment...

...No less likely an official than China's Minister for Justice, addressing the matter of dealing with multinational companies, has declared: "In the past the law was often disregarded by powerful institutions and individuals...

...Whichever power controls it," George Orwell predicted in his classic 1984," disposes also of the bodies of hundreds of millions of ill-paid and hardworking coolies, expended by their conquerers like so much coal or oil in the race to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, to control more labor, to turn out more armaments to capture more territory, to control...' On several counts, Orwell's prescience did not fail him: In the grim reality of 1984, many in Africa still starved...

...First, the early third-way leaders, consciously or indirectly, followed policies that gave rise to the emergence of autonomous middle classes who possessed independent economic bases and whose interests did not necessarily coincide with those of the ruling elite...

...They show, too, that such progress does not require extermination of the rich or increased exploitation of the poor...

...and it gives technocrats, industrialists, entrepreneurs, and skilled workers a voice that can only be stilled at the risk of economic paralysis...

...India's Punjab and Haryana State, Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong in Asia...

...Easing price controls over food, allowing small landholders or cooperatives a high degree of latitude, spreading land ownership widely, and investing in the agricultural infrastructure (dams, roads, seeds, credit unions, irrigation) expands not only commodity production but all sectors of the economy...

...These immigrants possess a willingness to take risks, an openness to new challenges and a raging desire for change that together inspire an entrepreneurial spirit...

...True, foreign assistance does not always have such happy results...

...it conserves precious capital...

...the world—not least the newly independent nations within the "quadrilateral"— still squandered money on weapons...

...At the beginning stages, a "small is beautiful" approach has many advantages: It creates more jobs...

...It is clear, however, that the transfer of funds, skills and technology from the wealthy nations, whether privately or publicly sponsored, will continue to be critical in building and strengthening the free institutions and the economies of third-way regions...

...that opec nations would try, with a degree of success, to dictate international energy prices...

...Although French technicians and a new Ivorian middle class keep the Ivory Coast's economy purring, the government convenes councils of traditional tribal leaders...