Critique of "Rich World, Small World"
Rich World, Poor World, by Mick Moore is a perfect example of an American writing a piece that attempts to explain why parts of the world struggle with extreme poverty and lack of stable government without properly taking into account the role that countries like England, the United States and other European countries have played in creating this situation. In his article in the Boston Review, Moore critiques State-Building, a book written by Francis Fukuyama. The purpose of the book is to look at why certain states have failed. Moore and Fukuyama are British and American respectively and both of them are attempting to explain why non-western states have failed. There is a brief mention of the cause of these issues being due to imperialism by England and the United States, but at least in the article this is referred to as “powerful and rich foreign countries, the international institutions they have created, and the rich markets for natural resources they provide impinge directly on governance in the South and East today”. This is a typical example of using rhetoric that manages to explain imperialism by the west as a result of markets. Moore also blames many of the problems not on western political leaders exploiting states, but puts the blame on leaders within the countries that are being exploited. Moore spends the majority of the article blaming poverty and failed states on leaders in these countries and at one point describes people who finance coups as “entrepreneurs”. Articles, such as this, take a modern situation and manage to ignore the last 500 years of history to try to make a point that takes the blame off of Europe and the United States and puts it on the countries that have been colonized and conquered. Aljazeera, a media outlet with headquarters in the Middle East has an article in which the title sums up the point very well. The article is titled “Rich countries drained $152tn from the global South since 1960 Imperialism never ended, it just changed form”. If someone were to look at why certain states have failed while taking into account history, they would realize that it was not too long ago that the world was dominated by European empires. These empires conquered and looted many of these countries that today are described as “failed states”. This is not to say that some states have failed because of reasons outside of western imperialism, but to write an article about failed states without doing due diligence in explaining the relationship between European imperialism and failed states is bad journalism. People in the west like to look at the history of imperialism as some distant memory and not acknowledge that the impact of imperialism still lives on today. Many countries became independent in the 20th century and the United States and Europe still benefit from paying workers extremely low wages in order to maintain cheap prices domestically. Moore blames failed states on being poor saying, “A second possible explanation of why bad governance is so prevalent in the global South and East derives from the fact that these countries are also poor”. Maybe these countries would not be so poor if countries like the United States were willing to use their surplus of wealth to pay people livable wages that would surely help stabilize governments. Instead of contextualizing this statement with the fact that this is largely due to choices made by the global west, Moore makes this statement and then goes on to give more reasons why certain states have failed without giving proper blame to Europe and the United States.
When we think about imperialism and the era of colonies, I feel as if we tend to think about these events occurred well in the past and does not effect our present day world, however has we can see from this argument this is not the case. North Americans and Europeans tend to have a skewed view on the effects of imperialism and as we can see from your argument, they often believe that it is the poorer countries fault for being poor. However, this is not the case at all, because in the 18th, 19th, and 20th century, these richer countries exploited the labor and resources from these poorer countries to further themselves. Moreover, richer countries continue to do this today by making use of cheap labor laws in other countries to mass produce their goods for profit. When looking at the rich world and poor world, it is important to ignore the Eurocentric bias and look at the problems imperialism caused rather than blaming the countries who were taken advantage of.
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ReplyDeleteI think it is a good point that many Americans and Europeans tend to forget how recently colonialism was in our history and how the effects of colonialism are still negatively affecting many of the countries of the global south. I would also add something that I learned in my Political Economy class from last semester that many of the deals and negotiations that American and European countries/companies have made to extract resources from countries in the global south cause a similar effect as colonialism. We often referred to this as "modern colonialism" given the fact that it does not put people from these countries in the global south in a position to capitalize off of the presence of these materials and resources in their land. They are often paid to extract said resources and give it to American/European countries. This modern-day worker exploitation is, in ways, synonymous to the worker exploitation that took place during past colonial practices.
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