"American political scientist Samuel Huntington had expressed apprehension way back in 1996 that the post-Cold War 21st Century would be marked by conflicts between Islam and the West, a throwback to the Crusades of the Middle Ages. This projection was also described in Western scholarship as the Jihad versus McWorld scenario, an eventuality that would test the resilience of the free world against the forces of fundamentalist insurgency . . . American [foreign] policy-makers should realize that it is high time they begin dismantling the country's strategy of cultural isolation and indifference. It is a disquieting fact that an average urban student of the Third World knows more about the US than an average American undergraduate knows about other peoples and other cultures. Dissemination of multi-cultural knowledge should be facilitated both within and without the American academia, industry and social service sectors. Familiarity can also breed understanding and help expand worldviews of an entire people. The logic of globalization more often than not has worked in an discriminating manner, provoking even Western scholars to come up with insightful expressions like McDonaldization, Coca-Colonization and The US is us!
"Moreover, the US should discontinue backing wrong horses and should realize that Less Developed Countries in the Third World may be impoverished but are not, however, bereft of dignity. Likeminded liberal democratic countries like India should be cultivated as reliable long-term allies on a level playing field by a series of confidence building measures. The US should also discontinue its interventionist policies that have generated such universal animosity and condemnation. Not for nothing has the expression Ugly American become well-known! Nobody has quite forgotten the acts committed by US Marines in Vietnam or the useless display of mind-boggling violence in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Third World has not yet come to terms with the missile attack on a children's hospital in Baghdad during the Gulf War, to cite an example. Have the Americans themselves forgotten the faces of helpless women and children at Kosovo only a couple of years back? Americans should realize that the lives of non-Americans are also valuable in the context of the entire human civilization, and should also engage in soul-searching to understand the roots of this anti-US attitude around the world.
"The clash of civilizations has only just about begun - it is now the obligation of a more conscientious American people to learn from their mistakes of the near and distant past to salvage the future of their free and sanitized and once-impregnable World. They should talk less about Human Rights and should work more to safeguard Human Rights as the self-appointed policeman of the world. Those who do not learn from history, demonstrably and most regrettably, are often condemned to repeat it."[4]
State and Market and Education
Economist John Williamson's prescriptions that had informed the Washington Consensus were fiscal discipline, redirection of public expenditure, tax reforms, financial liberalization, adoption of a single and competitive exchange rate, trade liberalization, elimination of barriers to Foreign Direct Investment, privatization of state-owned enterprises, deregulation of market entry and competition and ensuring secure property rights.
The concept of distant education has taken a while to be accepted in the popular imagination in India and elsewhere where it has been traditionally accepted since Independence that the State will pay for higher education irrespective of the market, merit or even financial status. But the pinch is now being increasingly felt in the job market where virtually "unemployable human resources" equipped with almost useless graduate or postgraduate degrees are being churned out year after year by our colleges and Universities. India is a welfarist country where subsidies [non-merit public expenditures] more or less benefit the privileged middle classes and higher education is considered to be a tool that facilitates proliferation of democracy. But "democratization of education" [read proletarianization of meritocracy] can never be a solution to the problem of unemployment and a stagnant job market.
Add unemployment and youth discontent to a serious population growth scenario and you get an explosive combination where the entire nation happens to sit on the top of a dormant volcano, apparently idling away time watching the World Cup of Cricket, while permanent employment and social security are fast becoming obsolete in a society where a job is supposed to be like your mother in terms of security and sustenance.
However, the open school or University system can address this simmering tension and disturbing state of affairs in an effective manner only if more professional courses are designed by professionals to accommodate our educated generalists, that is students with degrees in the humanities, literature and social sciences. One such option can be social work where the catchment area may cater to students from sociology, history, political science, anthropology, public administration and the like. The job market here is specific: the NGOs who sponsor the so-called third actor intervention, public action and civil societal advocacy.
Self-help and Youth Capacity-Building[5]
Science and commerce graduates may even be taught entrepreneurial and microcredit financing skills so that they may also contribute to the nation's self-help movement in the professional services sector. Netaji Subhas Open University, Calcutta is one of the foremost Indian educational institutions in this area, according to Professor Asish Guha, Director of Study Centres, NSOU.
The University Grants Commission's sponsored teachers' training programs in India like refresher and orientation courses for college and University lecturers are more or less like academic picnics where precious public money is wasted in a meaningless manner over a period of three weeks or so. As such our generalist colleges and Universities produce man power that is often not employable without any further skill enhancement in areas like computer literacy, management or any other technical training. But India's tax payers have to still bear the brunt of an expensive higher education system that almost entirely runs on subsidies and without any material returns to produce in exchange. Doctors and engineers and management professionals join the country's bureaucracy after their professional attainments, thus resulting in huge losses in terms of human resource management.
The UGC should seriously rethink its system of awarding scholarships, funding seminars, symposia, workshops, travel grants, book and equipment purchase and so on and so forth. Refresher and orientation courses are almost entirely useless as after completion of these programs the only people who happen to benefit [at the cost of the people] are the teachers themselves so far as their Career Advancement Scheme is concerned and nobody else. High theory is flaunted at these programs with no regard to the UGC's guidelines that undergraduate courses should primarily be brought into focus. Let's face it: the commonplace and average student doesn't really need to read about Plato or Aristotle - he or she is much better off studying how commodities are produced for and exchanged in the market. This may sound unduly harsh but students or trained human resources are, in the very last recourse, commodities in the market to be bought and sold against a value defined and determined by forces of demand and supply.
State versus Popular Initiatives: A Case Study
West Bengal's venture into microcredit for the rural poor has failed to make any real headway [unlike the case of neighboring Bangladesh] but the state government, notwithstanding empirical and readily available evidence, continues to contest this charge. Amalendu Halder, project coordinator of the Loknath Divine Life Mission, a Calcutta-based NGO, has recently claimed that the failure was evident in 'the many loopholes' in the below-poverty-line and the above-poverty-line official estimates. 'The venture has dismally failed,' he confirmed.
State government mandarins, however, shot this serious allegation down promptly enough [shaking out of their habitual inaction and indifference bred by an impersonal Weberian culture of red tapism] without any supporting data whatsoever. They said that the Loknath Mission and other similar NGOs operating in the emergent area of microcredit and self-help groups have not yet adequately familiarized themselves with the working of the various governmental schemes.
[It is a most regrettable fact that civil servants in the Third World more often than not act as if they are the masters of the people rather than being their servants which, in constitutional terms, they actually are. This perverted phenomenon is a spillover from the colonial days when the questionable legacy of the "steel-frame of the administration" was passed down generations of bureaucrats. They were brainwashed at the administrative training college in Haileybury, England by the East India Company nabobs that they were about to return to India - the Brightest Jewel in the Crown - to assist the British in their self-appointed task euphemistically called the White Man's Burden. This was nothing else but a sustained exercise over a couple of centuries to systematically fleece this once-rich country and its defenseless people like nobody's business. This "drain of wealth" resulted in the man-made Famines of 1770 and 1943 when sheer hunger provoked cannibalism and human tragedies like selling off one's wives and daughters into prostitution.]
'Loopholes or problems are situation-specific. At times they do vary widely but we try to sort these out as thoroughly as practicable by way of government monitoring and supervision,' said Bhaskar Pal, a senior official in the Bishnupur area.
Broadly speaking, the Swarna Jayanti Gram Swarojgar Yojana [a rural self-employment project jointly launched by the Government of India and the state government] has been in operation for two years. Potential beneficiaries either directly approach the district rural development cells manned by West Bengal Civil Service officers for approval or their individual cases are forwarded by NGOs.
Haldar said the project faces subsidy and incentive-related financial irregularities that also bedevil many other schemes of the panchayats [three-tier institutions of decentralized local governance at the district level]. BPL groups receive subsidies ranging from INR 7500-10,000 per INR 100,000 loan granted by cooperative banks. There have been major complaints that bank loans so extended to self-help groups under this project are not free from irregularities and currying of political favor [West Bengal is being ruled since 1977 by succeeding Left Front Governments, a coalition almost exclusively shepherded by the Big Brother, namely the Communist Party of India (Marxist). This is an unprecedented "record" worldwide.]
Pal, however, said only nationalized, cooperative and rural banks are authorized to extend loans and so far no reports of irregularities have reached the government. Sources in the State Institute of Panchayats and Rural Development, notwithstanding this self-explanatory and upbeat attitude [albeit unsubstantiated] of the state administration, confirmed there are widespread irregularities so far as implementation of the scheme is concerned. 'It's a fact that there are serious grievances among self-help groups regarding APL and BPL estimates although there exist clear-cut Planning Commission guidelines in this regard. Anomalies have distorted the lists, thanks to vested vote bank interests of rural politicians,' said an SIPRD official on condition of strict anonymity.[6]
Negotiating Globalization
Contemporary state systems guided by the dynamics of globalization are like so many Januses - the phenomenon assumes a most robust character in the developed North but an almost impotent identity in the developing or still underdeveloped South. So globalization necessitates a dialog between the rich and the poor outside its essentialist assumptions of an uneven power discourse as conditions of Good Governance and Structural Adjustment Programs (Gary and Mayo, 1995) benchmark most Third World postcolonial democracies today (Ray, 1989, 1996).
While there are contentions that aggressive market forces make it difficult for welfarist governments to protect their citizens from transnational actors that are as elusive as their hot money, there are also counter-arguments (Keohane, 1998) that institutions like the International Monetary Fund or the World Trade Organization actually safeguard citizens from the administrative limitations of their respective national governments. There appears to be a consensus, however, that powerful markets tend to undermine political 'lites at home (Barber, 1996; Cox, 1993; McGrew, 1992; and Slater, 1996).
Global Village
John Echeverri-Gent (1997) has pointed out that if globalization, on the one hand, facilitates decentralization then, on the other, it also helps develop pockets of dynamic Free Trade Areas in large developing countries like China and India by reorganizing their economic geography, Foreign Direct Investment and global commodity chains. This process, however, creates large hinterlands of economic backwardness and entrenches economic inequality within the developing South. Globalization, therefore, intensifies regional disparities in the Third World. John Rapley (1996) has found that Structural Adjustment Programs have varied widely in the results they have yielded. While Latin America has partially benefited from structural adjustment, Africa has not. Rapley has also argued that Rolling Back the State - that is less government as an imperative of contemporary globalization - does not always lead to enhanced economic growth.
Globalization, therefore, would appear to be an open-ended journey toward a globalized world order whose weightless economy (Huws, 1999) may be described as one that defies both national and international borders so far as economic transactions are concerned. This is a situation where freight charges are nil and trade / tariff barriers would disappear. Such a pilgrim's progress, however, is nothing new. Technological innovations during the past five centuries have steadily helped integrate the global community into an emergent global civil society. Transatlantic communications have developed from sailing boats to steamships, to the telegraph, the telephone, the commercial aircraft and now the Internet where even nationalism as a conventional political ideology has been reduced to "banal nationalism" (Billig, 1995).
State and Civil Society
Liberal democratic r'gimes like India or even the US can only be politically successful, deliver the common good and thereby continue in power in a more stable [read pro-people] manner if they are able to correctly read the obtainable ground realities and problems thereof. These problems are more or less popular in nature, and have a propensity to develop into discontent of the ruled actors against their ruling institutions. So the actors in power have to continuously shuffle and delicately balance priorities of human development, well-being and accessible freedoms like the ever-important agenda of human rights and civil liberties, a responsive and responsible administrative machinery, transparency at all levels of public expenditures and domestic and international peacekeeping projects rather than playing mutually harmful "spy versus spy" games.
Eminent political scientist Subrata K. Mitra (1997: 23) has quite rightly cautioned that "If the wielders of power concede the point to those who challenge established values and norms, they risk losing their legitimacy. On the other hand, the failure to give satisfaction to the discontented might deepen their sense of outrage and alienation which can further reduce their legitimacy."
Powers-that-be ["Cabinets or Foreign Offices"] will do well to continually redress grievances of political actors at the grassroots in a political manner by establishing and ably handling pro-people institutions. Only then organic identification would bind actors with institutions - only then the incipient involvement noticed at the level of "actors and institutions" would, arguably enough, transcend itself to the level of "actors in institutions", consolidating both the level and the quality of progress of freedom in the process.[7]
Conclusion: Fear of Freedom?
