wide eyed wonderings of the undecided

Earlier this week I had the ‘honour’ of sitting alongside Peter Mandelson in an EU Commission meeting about the (so called) Doha ‘Development’ round of WTO Trade negotiations. The meeting with representatives from ‘civil society’ was supposed to enlighten us all on the current ’state of play’ in the negotiations. Having written, read and ranted about development for so many years from an outside perspective, I was genuinely excited to see how things worked in a ‘closed meeting’.

Civil Society has always been a rather opaque term. Lying between business and government it tends to be made up of unelected groups representing various parts of the ‘general public’. NGOs, trade unions, community groups -in short, the good guys. Clearly what passes for civil society outside of my textbooks was rather different. As I mumbled and bumbled myself into the meeting I was faced with a room made up almost entirely of suited white men from all walks of… the business lobby. From Biscuit Advocacy to Chemical Manufactures,  this was a wide landscape of diversity.

I cowered myself into a corner, desperately trying to avoid the perpetual one-minute networking that passes for conversation. When ‘Commissioner Mandelson’ strode (late) into the room the hubbub immediately subsided. The supremeo had entered.

Clearly dear Pete had better things to do with his time than sit around with us lot. He, word for word, stumbled through a speech clearly prepared by his assistants. In it he warned of the ‘negative popularism of protectionist measures’. He cooed lovingly about the prospects of genuine market opportunities in ravished developing countries, and the need to ensure that ‘world economic growth, above all else’ is pursued. It was in answering questions from the floor that he showed why he is such a successful politician. Carrying a library of information in his head he deftly reassured each concern raised by business about each particular article of legislation.

When an issue about worker rights raised by the church group, who like me had slipped through the net into ‘civil society’, they were skilfully and powerfully shot down. After some well placed mocking, Petey (as he is to me these days) patted us on the collective head with the invisible hand. ‘The rising tide of world economic growth will raise all ships’. Exactly, why place safegaurds about worker rights? Why place safeguards over environmental standards? We’ve got high living standards in the west, and it’s not like we had to fight for unions, democratic rights, safety standards etc during our industrialisation…. oh no wait.

It continues to amaze me, under the guise of rationality we place enormous faith in whatever ‘the market’ actually means. Trading, over not trading can lead to greater economic welfare and growth for all parties concerned. The research yields very mixed results – the direction of causality is always a problem, as is trying to control for other factors such as geographical conditions. Dani Rodrik at Harvard writes lucidly about the need for strong institutions required for trade to have a positive effect. Where strong education, health and actual civil society institutions exist, we all benefit. This entails demanding strong standards over workers rights – to toilet breaks, safety at work and enough of a wage to send kids to school, to name just a few.

Development though, will always be a power issue. When a group of white men can carve out ‘economic opportunities’ without voice from the very people who live the economic realities, you will never have development. Economics will never escape the political, and that’s why the facts of the market will never reveal the truth about the world.