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Nov 04, 2022 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom
Kaieteur News – By the time he got into office in October 1992, Cheddi Jagan was wise enough to know that he could not endear himself to the international community by proposing policies which could be conceived as not being socialist.
By then the socialist empire had crumbled. Jagan, long an avowed socialist, knew that the building of socialism was no longer possible in his country. This was so not only because of the demise of the communist empire but also because of the state of the Guyanese economy which was being stifled by growing external debt and a devastated economy. However, Jagan could not abandon his left wing global outlook. The New Global Human Order which he proposed was an attempt to disguise his socialist ambitions. His choice of a name for his proposal was uncreative. But the NGHO’s main flaw was that it was not properly conceptualized.
These defects would have contributed to it not being well received. Another reason was that the NGHO sounded much like a heralding back to the call for a New International Economic Order (NIEO). The Declaration for the establishment of the NIEO was actually adopted by the United Nations in 1974. It underscored the point that the then global order had been shaped by the pre-decolonization order. Most of the developing countries argued that the then existing global economic system had been created at a time when most of them were still colonies and as such was in conflict with the new global order which was being shaped by the increasing numbers of newly-independent states in the international system.
The NEIO therefore was essentially about the newly independent states being able to exercise sovereignty and the freedom to develop their countries, and for the developed world to support that development through making assistance available. The New International Economic Order represented a call for greater recognition of the sovereign equality of states, the right of countries to be free to develop the economic systems of their choice, full control of states over their resources, the right to self-determination and liberation from foreign domination and oppression and the need for developing countries to have access to resources which are to be used for their development.
Jagan’s NGHO was different. It was underscored by the need for developing countries to acquire resources to eradicate poverty and inequality. It was not simply about the right to development but securing human development. Thus it was not only about resources for development but the content to which those resources should be applied – eradicating poverty and reducing inequality. Jagan did not advocate the dismantling of the existing capitalist order, as so many of his left-wing colleagues had done. He was much wiser. Instead, he borrowed extensively from a number of critics of the capitalist and imperialist system and used their proposals to call for a reform of the international order.
Jagan’s NGHO was not original. The idea of a pollution tax was not his suggestion. It had been touted for a long time. But that tax was not the centerpiece of his tax proposals. That honour went to the Tobin Tax. The Tobin Tax had been proposed by Nobel Laureate, James Tobin and was intended to stabilize the value of the currency. At the time the tax was proposed, it would have been impractical to implement. But that did not diminish its attraction to Jagan more than a decade later. He saw as the main means to generate a pool of resources to finance development. In his NGHO, Jagan called for the imposition of a tax of speculative transfer of currency. But he wanted a 0.5% tax. This tax he estimated would have raised some US$1.5 trillion annual. A 3% cut in military spending would generate an US$ 460 billion annually. He did not bother to put a dollar figure to his environmental tax; it was a peripheral measure dwarfed by the significance of the Tobin tax and cuts in military expenditure.
Jagan’s NGHO did not gain much traction. Its title gave the impression that it was aged and outdated concept dug up from some old archive. . It needed a modern touch which Jagan was never able to provide. But his timing was bad also. If he had been alive during the Asian financial crisis, perhaps his adoption of the Tobin Tax may have gained greater traction. But in the early post-Cold war years, with neo-liberalism basking in the demise of communism, Jagan was never going to be taken seriously.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not this newspaper.)
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