On Human Security

On Humane Governance:
Toward a New Global Politics
By Richard Falk. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. 304 pp., $45 cloth, $16.95 paper.

The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognized as inalienable a broad array of civil, political, economic, and social rights, including access to education, health care, and an adequate standard of living; it also established the right of every person to "a social and international order" in which those rights could be achieved.

Forty-eight years and at least 130 wars later, world military spending exceeds the combined incomes of the poorest half of the world's people. More than 1 billion people live in abject poverty, lacking adequate food, shelter, clothing, health care, education, and, most critically, control over the political and economic decisions that affect their lives.

Why the gap? Why has the international community, and its representative, the un, failed so spectacularly? And why does it continue to fail in the post-cold war setting? Most important, what can be done to empower international institutions to move toward the goals set forth nearly half a century ago?

Richard Falk, a prominent international law professor and passionate defender of human rights, tackles these and other questions in his dense but inspiring work, On Humane Governance. Falk argues that the un and other international institutions have failed to uphold their moral commitments because their actions have been subject to the geopolitical calculations of powerful states. Certainly this was the case during the cold war, when the two superpowers' opposing strategic objectives marginalized the Security Council. Falk convincingly maintains that the 1990s have seen the continuing subordination of moral and legal considerations to geopolitics. Thus it is that the Security Council, following the United States' lead, can respond to Iraqi aggression with overwhelming force yet remain paralyzed when genocide is perpetrated in Bosnia and Rwanda.

Double standards may well be the defining feature of realist geopolitics. Imperial powers--from sixteenth-century Spain to the superpowers of the cold war--have always decried the imperialism of their rivals. That the United States can ignore the 1986 World Court condemnation of its belligerent acts against Nicaragua, and then invoke international law and order to justify the war against Iraq, shows that it is not the law so much as the power of the law's interpreter that matters.

The key, then, to establishing the international rule of law is to make the institutions responsible for its enforcement more powerful than the states or other actors that might violate it. Despite the lamentable results thus far, Falk sees the potential for doing just that.

Since the seventeenth century, the sovereign, territorial state has been the defining feature of the world system. That sovereignty has for some time now been eroding, mostly as a result of globalizing forces but also because of fragmenting pressure from within states. What is emerging, according to Falk, is a politically, economically, and culturally integrated global reality that he calls "geogovernance."

The form geogovernance will take is the subject of political struggle throughout the world today. The strongest force undermining state sovereignty has been the globalization of market activity, facilitated by new information technology. Market forces--and in many developing countries, international lending institutions--have severely curtailed states' ability to set economic policy; virtually every country now pursues export-led growth, cuts in government spending, corporate-profit-enhancing tax policies, and a regulatory and labor environment similarly favorable to capital.

Thus far, economic globalization has taken place in a virtual regulatory vacuum, as Falk notes. To the extent that a framework governing the global market does exist, it is rigged in favor of capital and against people: precedence is given in most agreements, including development loans, to ensuring the free mobility of money and goods; and institutions like the World Trade Organization, whose officeholders are unelected and unaccountable to any body politic, can exert tremendous pressure on governments to reverse national policies that impede trade or constrain profitability. This is true even when the policies in question are meant to promote social well-being, economic equality, or environmental sustainability-all of which have been affirmed as universal goals in a series of declarations by the international community.

This framework, which Falk calls "globalization from above," is increasingly being challenged by transnational networks of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) representing disparate groups of people and expressing a wide range of concerns. Falk calls this countertrend "globalization from below" and sees in it the possibility of pushing the present, unjust world order in a more humane direction. Though NGOs most often arise in response to specific needs or local problems, their outlook is increasingly global and their politics sophisticated. Furthermore, despite their myriad concerns, these groups agree on broad goals: universal observance of human rights; broad access to health, education, and gainful employment; democratization of the political arena at all levels; long-term investment in human security through the protection of the environment; progress toward equality; rejection of nationalism as the primary foundation for political identity or allegiance; and, perhaps above all, commitment to nonviolence or near nonviolence in their struggles. This last is one of the most promising features of the present historical moment, and embodies in Falk's view a nascent "post-Leninist revolutionary politics" that values peace, reconciliation, and constitutionalism over ideological purity.

The explosion over the past 15 years in the number of NGOs and the extent of their transnational cooperation can be attributed partly to advances in information and communications technology. This growth has also been aided by a series of un conferences on social and environmental issues, by a tremendous increase in the acceptance of democratic ideals worldwide, and by the decline of divisive and stale ideological debates on the left. NGOs have been especially successful in carrying out humanitarian operations and legitimating and even protecting human rights. They have also prodded governments into action (as well as taking action themselves) on environmental issues, disarmament, family planning, the fight against apartheid, and the rights of indigenous peoples. And, most significantly, their very existence constitutes the beginning of a global civil society, which often produces the only legal- or ethically-based voice in international debates.

Falk believes that this global civil society offers the best hope for a democratic and humane world order. By invoking the normative framework set forth in international agreements and precedents, NGOs can pressure state and market entities to consider the human consequences of their actions. Human rights groups have long operated in this manner, and peace, environmental, and labor groups have begun to do so as well. These movements can also push international institutions to extend the normative framework. (A notable example is the recent success of NGOs in extracting from the World Court a ruling on the illegality of the use or threat of using nuclear weapons.) International institutions still lack enforcement capacity, particularly in relation to strong states. Falk advocates a movement to establish such capacity; in the meantime, the forces of global civil society are making it increasingly difficult for states to ignore international norms and commitments.

On Humane Governance is animated by a moral clarity and a passionate commitment to justice; unfortunately, a similar clarity does not extend to the author's prose. One frequently gets the impression that Falk has three more ideas for every one he articulates. No doubt a reason for this is that the book, while written by Falk alone, draws heavily on the thinking of dozens of individuals associated with a five-year study of the emerging global civil society. In trying to offer a comprehensive and cohesive argument while also including diverse perspectives, Falk often jumps from one point to another, or returns to an earlier point; the result is a somewhat circular, nebulous discussion. The essential themes, however, emerge time and again, and the whole is united by an overriding commitment to a moral objective: to "allow the varied peoples of the whole world to participate in the reflourishing of social, political, and cultural life in the century to come."

Falk's vision is utopian, and has been criticized as such. But his is a humble utopianism: he acknowledges the impossibility of creating a perfect world, but affirms "the validity of establishing political horizons on the basis of what is desirable." This is the essence of the humanistic tradition. For Falk, humane governance and democracy are by definition not end points but processes that sometimes yield surprising results: the relatively nonviolent overthrow of repressive governments in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and tremendous worldwide progress-unforeseen when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948-in the attainment of civil and political (though not economic or social) rights. In an era when the only idealism not scoffed at is that of free marketeers, Falk's principled voice is invaluable, and his levelheaded assessment of the prospects for a humane world order deserves a close look from scholars and activists alike.

Douglas Watson



The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank, and the Idea that is Helping the Poor to Change Their Lives
By David Bornstein. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. 370 pp., $25.

Women at the Center: Grameen Bank Borrowers after One Decade
By Helen Todd. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996. 248 pp., $49.95.

Started in Bangladesh in 1976 by economist Muhammed Yunus, the Grameen Bank is a human development project that seeks to enhance the earning capacity of rural villagers by extending credit to establish and support modest enterprises. It has lent more than $1.5 billion to the impoverished villagers of Bangladesh and is being replicated in other countries in Southeast Asia, Africa, and North and South America. The bank is noted in development circles for a number of unique features-it focuses on the traditionally powerless women members of the poorer half of the population as its primary clientele, uses group pressure in place of traditional material loan collateral, and maintains itself as a viable capitalist enterprise with a successful 97 percent loan and interest repayment rate.

Journalist David Bornstein's book is an attempt at both a history and a portrait of the Grameen Bank, its founder, and some of the clients Bornstein came to know over the course of his four years of research on the bank. To this end, Bornstein pursues a distinctly personal approach, portraying Yunus's odyssey in forming the bank and the effect that the loans and the schooling in Grameen philosophy that comes with the loans have had on the lives of the bank's borrowers. At first glance this is a warm and engaging story, told with an eye for detail and sensitively observed changes wrought by the austere elegance of the Grameen Bank in action, but as the book progresses a sense of moral instruction begins to cloud its objectivity.

Bornstein does have critical moments. Yunus's errors at the outset of the bank's development are discussed, and Bornstein reveals his sense of Yunus as personally unapproachable as well as his initial discomfort with the Grameen ideology that requires from its members a special salute, mandatory exercises, and the chanting of the bank's "Sixteen Decisions" (ranging from maintaining "Discipline, Unity, Courage, and Hard Work" to a promise to boil unclean drinking water) at the beginning of each group meeting. Yet inevitably even these relatively minor criticisms are quickly retracted. Yunus is a visionary to be described in the same words of esteem that Einstein applied to Gandhi; the Grameen salute is a means of allowing a friendly greeting between men and women in a society that does not allow contact between the sexes; and the chanting of slogans is traditional in the largely illiterate Bengalese society.

Bornstein's tendency to uncritically accept Yunus's account, and the neat way in which almost every section ends like the neighborhood feature stories in the local newspaper--"Indeed, the Grameen Bank has marketed small loans like burgers and fries. With millions served"--are so unrelenting in their glowing positivity that they arouse skepticism in the reader. The cumulative effect is to raise doubt as to whether Bornstein's work is an accurate description of an innovative and effective means of ending poverty or the effusive praise of a convert.

Neither a journalistic background nor a professed belief in the cause need prevent a more balanced approach to the subject, as Helen Todd's book shows. A journalist who edits a newsletter for the Grameen-style lending project in Malaysia known as cashpor, Todd, like Bornstein, relates the Grameen Bank's performance in large part through personal narrative, but in the context of a more comprehensive theoretical approach.

Todd addresses head-on the challenges of Grameen's critics, showing that the bank gives many of its long-term borrowers the opportunity to buy land, which ensures future security, and disputing claims that Grameen-style lending does little for the women themselves and serves only to make them conduits of aid to husbands and children while increasing the woman's workload and assigning her the role of debt collector. The picture that emerges is one of an organization that uses practical means to work within existing social structures to make a real difference in women's lives, an achievement more readily endorsed on the basis of hard evidence and clear argument than it is on grounds of praise and exhortation alone.

Megan J. Breslin