Tracking Development final conference

Toespraak | 12-12-2011

Ladies and gentlemen,

It won’t come as a surprise to you that Christmas is coming. Even if you forget, or are desperately trying to forget, music on the radio and in shops in the Netherlands will relentlessly remind you. ‘Last Christmas’ by Wham! and Chris Rea’s epic ‘Driving Home for Christmas’ are as inescapable as fireworks on New Year’s Eve.

Interestingly, the Band Aid song ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ also ranks among the biggest Christmas evergreens in my country. The song was recorded in 1984 to raise money for the starving people of Ethiopia.

Band Aid and similar charities have deeply entrenched our present-day conviction that extreme poverty and hunger is and always has been an almost exclusively African problem. But I vividly remember a time when Asian countries were utterly poor, poorer than the countries of Africa — then newly independent.

In the 1960s and ’70s, not Africa but Asia was synonymous with deprivation. Just recall the first big charity pop concert, organised by a member of the legendary band the Beatles, George Harrison. This was not a concert for Ethiopia or any other country in Africa.

This was a concert for Bangladesh.

What happened? Let me answer this question by comparing two book titles. In 1968, a famous book on Asia by Gunnar Myrdal was entitled Asian Drama. Only twenty-five years later, in 1993, the World Bank published a very influential report called The East Asian Miracle. This tells the whole story in a nutshell. In twenty to thirty years’ time, hundreds of millions of Asians escaped from extreme poverty.

Africa, despite progress, did not keep up. So as Asia became richer, public attention almost imperceptibly shifted towards the African continent. And so did our development efforts. Today, for example, ten out of fifteen partner countries for Dutch development cooperation are African.

The Gunnar Myrdal book that I just mentioned, ladies and gentlemen, had a subtitle: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations. This, of course, is a reference to the classic by Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

Ever since Smith published his book in the eighteenth century, the question why one country or continent is richer than others has been debated intensely. Just think of the international bestseller by the Harvard historian David Landes, a book that — indeed — is called The Wealth and Poverty of Nations.

In his chapter on Europe, for example, Landes places the continent’s takeoff in the seventeenth century. He singles out three sources of success. First: the growing autonomy of intellectual inquiry. Second: a serious pursuit of knowledge and truth. And third: the routinisation of research and its diffusion. ‘All of this took time, and that is why (…) the Industrial Revolution had to wait,’ he writes. ‘The technological basis had not yet been laid; the streams of progress had to come together.’

Oddly enough, the question why Asia took off in the twentieth century and Africa did not has attracted little attention. My country is no exception. When a history of fifty years of Dutch development cooperation was published in 1999, it said that Asia’s success had not been taken into account in our development cooperation efforts.

In fact, the history said, people working in development cooperation had little clue about what allowed Asian countries to escape from poverty. This is more than unfortunate. Shouldn’t we study how Asian countries reduced poverty and increased their peoples’ average income? Shouldn’t we discuss why there are Asian tigers, but no African lions?

Of course we should.

Eventually, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs acknowledged this. Five years ago, in 2006, the Tracking Development project started, truly one of the most remarkable research projects ever undertaken with our Ministry’s support.

This project, concentrating on Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, was set up in an extraordinary way. Eight countries were selected, so eight participating research institutes were involved in the project: four from Sub-Saharan Africa, four from Southeast Asia. The combination of these two conditions ensured a unique, third one: all the work had to be done by a researcher from Africa in cooperation with a researcher from Asia.

Two institutions in the city of Leiden, the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies and the African Studies Centre, have led this network of scholars from Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam on the one hand, and from Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania on the other. Together they tried to identify the real preconditions for development success by studying turning points in the history of Southeast Asian countries.

As a historian, ladies and gentlemen, I am fascinated by turning points in history. Take the most recent Russian revolution, for example. This summer, the American expert Leon Aron published an article in Foreign Policy, stating that everything you think you know about the collapse of the Soviet Union is wrong.

I quote: ‘Certainly, there were plenty of structural reasons — economic, political, social —why the Soviet Union should have collapsed as it did, yet they fail to explain fully how it happened when it happened.’ Close quote.

In Aron’s view it was an intellectual and moral quest for self-respect and pride that within a few years hollowed out the mighty Soviet state, deprived it of legitimacy, and turned it into a burnt-out shell that crumbled in 1991. Now, this yields an interesting analogy with turning points in development.

Roel van der Veen, a professor of international relations and the senior academic adviser at the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has argued that feelings — both negative and positive — have a profound impact on development. He compares countries in the age of globalisation to sports teams competing with other countries. Governments in this view are like coaches that should motivate their teams, not discourage them.

Van der Veen gave a striking example in his inaugural lecture at the University of Amsterdam. In 1965, Singapore became an independent city-state against its will. Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew appeared on television in tears, telling his citizens that Singapore had been excluded from the Federation of Malaysia.

The city was poor then, in turmoil and living in a hostile environment. Nobody would have given a dime for the future of Singapore, not even its own prime minister. After appearing on television, Lee Kuan Yew called in sick and stayed in bed.

But after a few days he pulled himself together and got back to work – his life’s work, as it later turned out. Within one generation Singapore went ‘from third world to first’, as the title of Lee Kuan Yew’s autobiography puts it. The average income in Singapore is now higher than in the United States or the Netherlands.

The recent history of the Soviet Union and Singapore shows how crucial elusive factors like the ‘quest for self-respect’ or a positive attitude can be in turning history upside down. This should be an important lesson for those who believe in grand designs or blueprints for development. But this does not mean that policy preconditions for development success cannot be identified.

Ladies and gentlemen, Leon Aron wrote that everything we think we know about the collapse of the Soviet Union is wrong. After hearing the results of the Tracking Development project, one could argue that the same goes for development.

Foreign aid has not been essential for development success; neither has the eradication of corruption, the liberalisation of the financial system, the privatisation of public utilities, or the emergence of an indigenous middle class. Even industrial policy, long assumed to be crucial, was not of central importance to the development of Southeast Asian countries.

One could easily get depressed by these conclusions. All these wasted years, all this wasted energy. Let’s not go down that road. In fact, the Tracking Development results are a good reason for optimism. Because they show that the success of most Southeast Asian countries was not predetermined by geography, history or their institutional heritage.

No, the Asian miracle was merely due to policy choices: sound macroeconomic management, economic freedom for peasants and small entrepreneurs, and pro-poor and pro-rural public spending. The socially engineered society is clearly not dead after all.

And there is more good news. For a long time, development was an ideological front in the Cold War. Nor did the ideological battle end in the 1990s after the Iron Curtain came down. Just recall the long drawn out debate on the Washington Consensus, for instance.

Well, according to the Tracking Development researchers, governments that made the right policy choices gave priority to redistributing income and assets. But — and this is interesting — their motives were far from identical. Some governments aimed at social justice; other successful governments were motivated more by nationalism. Sometimes political pragmatism was involved; in other cases their policy showed foresight. So development is not about ideology after all.

If I may I would like to mention one more encouraging outcome of the Tracking Development project. Successful governments understood that market forces are essential for development. Moreover, these governments acknowledged that in the development process markets and states are complementary, not alternatives. I hope this insight will put an end to the tiresome state versus market debate.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me sum up. In many ways Tracking Development has fulfilled its promise. I am proud that the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs had the courage to make it possible. In fact, the Tracking Development project has already influenced Dutch development cooperation in several ways.

Can I give you an example? I can indeed. In a letter to Parliament, I have set out my new development cooperation research policy. Five research platforms will be erected, one for each of my four priorities — water management, food security, sexual rights and health, and the rule of law in fragile states — and one for innovative intervention strategies. It goes without saying that Tracking Development fits neatly into this last category.

Let me finish on a more personal note. I know that among scholars in history and international affairs there has always been – and still is – a temptation to see history through the lens of rise and decline. With all the tensions that go with it. You can find bookshelves full of titles on the decline and fall of empires, of Europe, of the United States. In France, they even have a name for scholars with this focus: ‘les déclinistes’

But I am strongly convinced these are concepts from the past – they don’t fit into a globalised world. In this world, ideas, industrial concepts and fashion trends are fast-moving and footloose, in a way that defies old-fashioned, static conceptions of nations as well-defined, closed entities. In a world where Facebook is the third biggest country after China and India, international relations are a fast-changing phenomenon.

This is one reason why the significance of a project like Tracking Development goes beyond current policy. Development is no longer a monopoly of donor countries and aid organisations. We need to discuss the role of development cooperation in a globalised, strongly interdependent world. In my view, development cooperation is moving slowly towards playing a coordinating role in tackling global challenges.

Government as a broker in international responsibility. The Tracking Development project is a shining example of this new direction. That is why there will be a follow-up project: a new, slightly smaller research project, together with the African Politics and Power Programme of the Overseas Development Institute in London. Because the future of development cooperation is a future of cooperation.

Thank you.