It is rarely that a commentator in a communist country expresses himself frankly on developments in what has come to be known as the third world. Even when someone like Mr RA Ulyanovsky wants to communicate the message that the line put across in the Soviet mass media does not reflect the genuine views of the Kremlin on, for instance, problems of economic growth in India, he uses the familiar jargon. Mr. Wieslaw Gornicki has dispensed with that kind of claptrap in his recent article in the Polish journal Kultura and has written with a candour which is truly refreshing.
It will perhaps be somewhat of an exaggeration to say that Mr. Gornicki speaks for the entire Polish leadership or even a significant section of it. But that is not particularly relevant. He deserves attention even if he speaks only for himself and some other like-minded intellectuals in his country.
To begin with, Mr. Gornicki narrates how and to what extent Polish writers identified themselves with the aspirations and actions of governments in the third world so much so that “we swallowed without a word of protest many events in Iraq, Nasser’s concentration camps for Egyptian communists near Alexandria, the rise of colonial tyrants such as Banda”. During all this period, he recalls only two exceptions to this rule – “our reactions to the massacre of the communists in Sudan and the events in Indonesia in 1965.”
He is unhappy that even today Polish writers “begin to stammer” when it comes to informing the people “that a certain African president loves to mete out severe punishment with his own hands by caning the petty thieves in his own jail or that a certain Field Marshal orders his subjects to kiss the tips of his boots in public and has had the interesting idea of erecting a monument to Adolf Hitler.”
Convinced
But this, he is convinced, cannot go on. Mr. Gornicki is not solely or even primarily concerned over the fact that “ever more often we are witnessing the Right come to power in these countries.” He is disturbed above all by the resolution adopted by the Group of 77 and the speeches that spokesmen of developing countries have been making in the UN and elsewhere. He poses the question whether “the second decade of independence has not led a number of third world countries to a dangerous confusion of ideas” which threatens “the intellectual and moral premises underlying our mutual relations.”
Mr. Gornicki is angry at the demand for a “new economic order in which there would be a permanent system of economic preferences for less developed countries” and the talk of the necessity of “redistribution of wealth on a global scale.” And he asks: “Why the redistribution of wealth should not begin with the group itself since it displays the most striking contrasts in living standards.”
In this context the Polish writer pours scorn on the oil rich rulers who drive around in “Mercedes limousines with golden monograms on their shock absorbers” and build palaces “which would have made the Turkish Sultans green with envy”. He cites the figures of per capita income in Kuwait (11,000 dollars) and Haiti and Ethiopia (below 100 dollars) to make the obvious point regarding the vast income gaps within the third world and asks why the oil exporters have not dropped by even a single cent the price of a barrel of oil sold to India and other poor countries.
Like many Western writers, Mr. Gornicki argues that it is difficult to explain “what common interests actually link fellow group members such as Paraguay and Oman, Mali and Malaya” and goes so far as to say that “in the Group of 77 it would be difficult to find even five countries which are not in a state of conflict with their neighbours”.
Madness
Having said all this, Mr. Gornicki in a sense lets the cat out of the bag. For, he says quite bluntly that despite its heterogeneous composition, he would have had no objection to the Group of 77 if it had limited its efforts to seeking “compensation for hundreds of years of colonial exploitation” and to “dealing with the ruinous effects of the madnesses that sweep the stock exchanges and commodity markets of the capitalist world”. The real trouble in his view is that the third world has ceased to treat the concept of industrialised countries “in the historical context” and is increasingly using it “as a synonym for describing all the countries that have succeeded in climbing above the level of, say, an income of 1,500 dollars a head per year”.
The point is well made inasmuch as communist countries cannot be said to owe their relative prosperity to the exploitation of anyone. Their people have managed to build the foundations of industrial civilisation with “clenched teeth”, as Mr. Gornicki puts it. But this is not very helpful nor quite correct for third world countries to go on insisting that the West entirely owes its present prosperity to its exploitation of their resources and is therefore morally obliged to assist them in their economic development.
As for the facts, the acquisition of colonial markets for its goods did help Britain’s economic growth but was by no means its primary cause. And it had begun to lose to Germany by 1890, that is half a century before the beginning of the liquidation of its empire. In the case of France, it is open to question whether the empire assisted or hampered its economic growth. And it is indisputable that Spain and Portugal remained backward despite their possessions of large empires and the fairly ruthless exploitation of their dominions by them. Economic growth cannot, therefore, be said to be an offshoot of imperialism. Be that as it may, the Western countries do not suffer from a sense of guilt and constant references to colonialism can only irritate them.
But it is not possible to dispose of similarly the point made by Mr. Gornicki regarding the income gaps among countries of the third world itself. In fact on this issue knowledgeable Western commentators have been writing equally forcefully. Some of them have in recent months tried to make it out that the oil-rich countries have been quite generous in their aid to the less fortunate members of the third world. But Mr. Maurice J. Williams, chairman of the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD which includes all non-communist industrialised nations among its members, has made mincemeat of these apologias in his article “The Aid Programs Of The OPEC Countries” in the January 1976 issue of the Foreign Affairs quarterly.
According to Mr. Williams, the nominal value of the OPEC members’ oil exports rose from 36 billion dollars in 1973 to 113 billion dollars in 1974, and out of this increase of 77 billion dollars, about 11 to 12 billion dollars came from the non-oil third world countries. An additional 1.5 billion dollars will be added to the oil bill of the latter in 1976 on account of increase in prices last September. To this deterioration in their current account deficit must be added the additional cost of fertilisers and food because their prices, too, depend – this is specially so in the case of fertilisers – on those of crude.
Against a balance of payments deficit of around 20 billion dollars caused by the rise in oil prices, the net flow of resources originating in OPEC and available to non-oil developing countries in 1974 was about 4.6 billion dollars. This figure does not include the one billion dollars which the latter received from the IMF oil facility subscribed to by members of OPEC because the IMF does not regard it as a transfer of resources. (The amounts in question remain part of the foreign exchange reserves of the subscribers).
Assistance
The amount of 4.6 billion dollars was almost equally divided between budgetary supporting assistance and concessional credits on the one hand and the purchase of bonds of multinational development banks at an average interest rate of eight per cent on the other. Thus approximately only 2.2 billion dollars were disbursed as grants and concessional loans and of this 1.2 billion dollars went to Egypt, Syria and Jordan, that is countries which cannot be said to have been adversely affected by the rise in oil prices. Egypt is a net exporter of oil.
The situation did not change materially in 1975 and Mr. Williams draws the dismal conclusion that the OPEC assistance in the past two years has been equivalent to only 25 per cent of the additional burden imposed on the non-oil third world countries as a result of the rise in oil prices and that this aid seems even less impressive if allowance is made for the fact that in the past two years two-thirds of the direct concessional aid has gone to Egypt and Syria.
The Times of India, 8 April 1976