Rediscover the Brandt report, forty years after its publication, can become very useful for current political actors as for the public sphere in general.
This is the purpose for which Jacopo Perazzoli, researcher at the Feltrinelli Foundation and professor of contemporary history at the University of Milan, edited the volume For a alternative development model which collects the writings of Fernando D'Aniello and Domenico Romano as well as the words of Willy Brandt himself.
A book that does not want to be a mere hagiographic exercise nor an attempt to research current elements in that document. The fortieth anniversary of the publication must be, in the intentions of the editor, a moment to understand that great proposals can be realized if they are based on solid empirical analyzes of the framework to which they refer. And that these proposals can only have a concrete future if the political sphere takes charge of them with conviction. In other words, the exact opposite of what happened after the publication of the North-South Report, a Program for Survival, known as the Brandt Report, in February 1980 and the second memorandum of 1983, Common crisis. North-South: cooperation for world recovery.
Today, exactly and perhaps even more than then, it persists the need to find a new global development model capable of combining the needs of industrialized countries, those of developing countries and poor ones, including raw materials. Or, as Perazzoli summarizes, connecting different perspectives with the aim of identifying balanced growth.
A debate that engages economists and scholars, today and yesterday. Joseph Stiglitz and Bruce Greenwald, convinced supporters of the need to abandon the prevailing neoclassicism in economics and focus on a model of economic growth based on learning, take up and marry the economic theories of Kenneth Arrow.
A major rise in living standards could prompt a learning society much more than they do and have hitherto made small and isolated gains in economic efficiency or the sacrifice of current consumption to intensify capital, especially in developing countries. A large part of the difference between the per capita incomes of these countries and those of the more advanced countries is attributable to a knowledge gap. Adopting policies that transform their economies and societies into learning societies would enable them to bridge this gap and gain significant income growth.
If a lesson can be drawn from the long work of the commission chaired by Willy Brandt, Perazzoli identifies it in the ability to analyze in depth and without prejudice the global state of the art, avoiding the "dangerous inclination to identify those who, rightly or wrongly, can be held responsible for today's complicated conditions”.
The way forward was inspired by Ostpolitik, carried out by Brandt himself during the period in which he was chancellor of Federal Germany (1969-1974), with which he believed he had demonstrated the possibility of bringing out areas of common interest even in the presence of irreversible ideological differences. If it had been possible to apply this principle to the dialogue between the capitalist world and the communist world, then it would have been possible to apply it also to the negotiation between the various countries, developed or not.
James Bernard Quilligan, former policy advisor and press secretary of the commission, working in 2001 on an update of the results produced, had identified twelve chapters on which the Brandt group had expressed its opinion: fight against hunger and poverty, family policies, women, aid, debt, armaments, energy and environment, technology and corporate law, trade, money and finance, global negotiations.
The solutions to these problems, recalls Domenico Romano in his speech, should have come through four types of intervention:
• Cooperative reforms of the international economic order.
• A very intense transfer of economic and technological resources from the north to the south, through multinationals and through an increase in the share of GDP destined for development aid by the countries of the north.
• Support for the disarmament process and new international peacekeeping mechanisms, not so much and not only for ethical reasons but to free up space for investing resources in the growth of the southern hemisphere.
• An international energy program that would keep oil prices and supplies stable at a generally satisfactory level, in connection with the search for new sources and forms of energy.
All this should have taken place through global negotiations between the protagonists.
Romano underlines that, beyond the individual solutions, the central aspect of the Brandt Report can be identified in a conceptual pair: interdependence and common interest.
Interdependence created the space for mutual interest between north and south. The main of common interests it is “simply” the survival of humanity.
In the current economic context of the industrialized countries, also affected by high unemployment and vast processes of transformation, there is undoubtedly a strong desire to protect the national economy at the price of an imbalance in the international economy. But Fernando D'Aniello recalls that this mistake was made by the United States and Europe already fifty years ago, when "theThe colonial world went bankrupt, North America was ruined, Europe was engulfed in flames”.
For Willy Brandt, a fundamental change cannot be the result of correspondence but the result of what, in a historical process, takes shape or is sketched out in the minds of men. Changes and reforms cannot take place in one direction: they must be favored by governments and peoples, both in industrialized and emerging nations. And, in this regard, he felt it was his duty to invite more intense collaboration the People's Republic of China, to enable others to benefit from its experience as a leading developing country.
Only through a true global democracy, which is able to listen to and also involve the nations of the southern hemisphere, will the latter accept to bear their share of global responsibility and will not feel like just pawns on a chessboard.
Kishore Mahbubani also says the time has come for the entire West to abandon many of its short-sighted and self-destructive policies and pursue a completely new strategy towards the Rest of the World. A strategy that he summarizes with three keywords and precisely defines the 3Ms: minimalist, multilateral, Machiavellian.
• The Rest of the World does not need to be saved by the West, nor erudite in its government structures, nor convinced of its moral superiority. Certainly then it does not need to be bombarded by it. The minimalist imperative will have to be to do less but do better.
• Multilateral institutions and processes provide the best platform to hear and understand different positions worldwide. The Rest of the World knows the West very well, now this must learn to do the same. The best place, for Mahbubani, is the UN General Assembly, the only forum where all 193 sovereign countries can speak freely.
• In the new world order, strategy will serve more than force of arms, which is why the West must learn from Machiavelli and develop greater shrewdness to protect its long-term interests. 2
Usually, Brandt continued in the introductory speech to the Report, war is thought of in terms of military conflict if not annihilation. But the awareness is increasingly spreading that a no lesser danger could be posed by chaos, the result of widespread hunger, economic disasters, ecological catastrophes and terrorism.
All aspects with which not only the less or less developed countries are forced to deal with on a daily basis, but increasingly also the more developed ones.
The continuous tensions that agitate Western societies seem unstoppable due to wars and terrorism that have a direct and indirect impact through attacks or migrations, financial and economic crises and, last but not least, pandemics that attack the whole system. And yet, once again, it seems to witness an attitude that is the opposite of what they wanted to indicate Brandt, Kishmore or Stiglitz. The strongest or least affected who find it difficult to meet the less strong or most affected.
Suffice it to mention, by way of example, what is happening in Europe to the idea of implementing a Recovery Fund which should help the nations most affected by Covid-19 to emerge from the crisis. Countries such as Austria and the Netherlands immediately showed their opposition to any form of debt sharing, while such a prospect would be welcomed by the most affected countries, such as Italy and Spain. France and Germany, on the other hand, have put forward a proposal for non-repayable grants.
The latter position in particular was also supported by the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics as well as professor at Columbia University Joseph Stglitz who has publicly declared that he finds it worrying that there are still countries in Europe that want to impose conditions on assistance, preferring to disburse loans rather than thinking in terms of transfers or in any case of other and different forms of aid.
Brandt himself in the 1980 Report underlined how the mere granting of loans for development it would only increase the debt burden of third world nations, if they serve to create industries without at the same time ensuring the means of repayment.
For the most part, that's exactly what happened. A further increase in debt is certainly not desirable, and not only for the so-called third world countries. In general for all southern countries, including Europe.
Reference Bibliography
Fernando D'Aniello, Domenico Romano, Jacopo Perazzoli (eds.), For an alternative development model. Forty years after the Brandt Report, Milan, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Foundation, 2019.
