East, West Stonewall the Southern Agenda

Pope John Paul II’s encyclical, “The Social Concern of the Church,” has struck a nerve in key sectors of the U.S. foreign policy debate.

Both the reporting on the document and later commentaries have focused on the same papal theme: The joint responsibility the superpowers bear for human suffering in Third World nations.

Conservative columnists worry that the encyclical may be infected by the intellectual virus of “moral equivalence.” Carriers of this malady are thought to be incapable of distinguishing the radically different impact of the United States and the Soviet Union on world affairs.

Yet anyone surprised by the encyclical’s judgment that “the logic of the blocs” has been “an important cause of the retardation and stagnation of the South” has not paid attention to this papacy. The Pope knows the difference between the polity of East and West; there is in his writings and speeches no simple collapse of systems or even a “convergence” theory about the future. Precisely because he does distinguish between the structure and style of politics in East and West, his designation of the superpowers as equally at fault in the Third World is all the more striking: “Each of the two blocs harbors in its own way a tendency toward imperialism as it is usually called, or towards forms of neo-colonialism . . . “ In this assessment the Pope makes as his own a judgment often expressed throughout the Third World, particularly in the Catholic countries of Latin America and the Philippines.

Development is the basic theme of the Pope in this long letter to the church and the world. Writing 20 years after Pope Paul VI’s encyclical, “The Development of People,” John Paul II echoes the call of his predecessor for authentic development. But he also places the struggle of developing countries in a geopolitical context. In the Pope’s view the conditions of development are “ostensibly worse” today, in spite of efforts to improve the lot of the poor. The causes for the decline involve failures by Third World governments and elites, but the Pope refuses to see the problem of famine, illiteracy and debt as purely a responsibility of the less-developed world.

John Paul II draws a wider circle of accountability for human suffering and he presses for a more complex political analysis. He wants to establish a link between the East-West and North-South issues. Unlike many debates in international forums, he refuses to let the East escape criticism for its role; unlike many Western analysts he refuses to see the Soviet Union as the principal cause of unrest, violence and persistent instability in the South.

The Pope’s proposal to link the two major themes of world politics could catalyze a needed debate in the United States with much more significance than a rehash of the “moral equivalence” argument that has been the case so far. In the past decade two different views of the East-West and North-South relationship have been proposed, neither of them able to capture the complexity of the world today. President Jimmy Carter announced early in his term that the East-West conflict was being replaced by the North-South questions. The statement--absolute and devoid of distinction--haunted the Carter presidency. Equally misguided and perhaps even more dangerous has been the Reagan Administration’s effort to view the Southern hemisphere--from Central America to South Africa--through the lens of the East-West competition.

The Carter formulation could not be sustained in light of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Moscow’s efforts to establish itself in the Horn of Africa and the Persian Gulf. The Reagan conception failed to understand, account for or respond to the local routes of poverty and conflict in the developing world. Presently, there is little effort in the U.S. policy debate to relate the East-West axis to North-South questions. For most of the 1980s, the solution adopted has been to focus on the East-West competition and to stonewall the Southern agenda of issues. Both the moral urgency and the political saliency of the problems of developing countries will make it impossible to ignore these questions in the next Administration.

Three different issues cited in the encyclical illustrate the need for serious sustained reassessment in U.S. policy.

Take John Paul II’s assertion that the industrialized nations owe disinterested assistance to the poor countries. The U.S. foreign-aid program is in shambles. It lacks coherent design, it is hardly “aid” at all and it has no constituency. These defects are related; there is ample evidence from private charitable organizations that a well-defined need, adequately explained to the American public, will evoke great generosity. Two-thirds of the U.S. aid program is now military or security-related assistance; the principal beneficiaries are Egypt and Israel, and the other recipients are selected not according to human need but in light of their strategic significance to the United States. It is hardly surprising that the program generates neither domestic support for foreign aid nor a papal commendation. The aid program has always been a mixed menu; it is now so devoid of content as foreign assistance that it needs to be redesigned from scratch. Third World debt presents a different kind of policy challenge. Failure to provide disinterested aid will mean economic tragedy for the poor of the South and a moral tragedy for the North. But failure to address the debt of the South threatens the economic stability of the North. The debt is not about humanitarian politics but hard economics. In spite of its potential for economic disruption for both the North and the South, the debt crisis has been treated as a banking problem, not a human emergency or a geopolitical crisis. Principal attention in the United States is focused on protecting the vulnerability of private banks. This is an element of the problem but clearly not a satisfactory prospective for addressing global debt. Readjusting the assets and liabilities of the banks does not provide any debt relief for the South. The urgency, moral and political, of the debt crisis calls for the kind of integrated political action of governments, international institutions and the commercial banking system that a few U.S. commentators have called for, but with little effect or influence on prevailing policy.

Finally, the Pope addresses an issue that has been allowed to run free for years--the arms trade from both East and West to the South. John Paul II describes it as a “trade without frontier,” which reverses the normal logic of East-West competition: “While economic aid and development plan meet with the obstacle of insuperable ideological barriers . . . arms of whatever origin circulate with almost total freedom all over the world.” This problem is not only an East-West competition, but a West-West race to sell to the South. There has been no systematic effort to restrain the arms trade since talks between the Washington and Moscow broke off in the late 1970s. The trade is now judged to be normal; the Pope will not abide this complacency: “In today’s world . . . the prevailing picture is one destined to lead us more quickly towards debt rather than one of concern for true development . . . “

The encyclical yields little comfort for East or West about recent performance as responsible leaders of an increasingly interdependent world. But the papal criticism could catalyze a productive debate about the future. This would be a more useful response to the encyclical than testing the Pope’s moral equivalent.