Internationalism under Strain: The North-South Policies of Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden 9781487579869

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INTERNATIONALISM UNDER STRAIN The North-South Policies of Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden

Canada, the Netherlands, Norway. and Sweden have , to varying degrees, earned a reputation for being more responsive to Third World needs and aspirations than other developed industrial societies . This greater measure of humane internationalism is a product of the combined influence of a wide range of factors that includes religious. political , economic, and diplomatic traditions. But Cranford Pratt cautions against exaggerating the internationalist thrust of the North/South policies. particularly in the case of Canada. In this volume a number of senior scholars offer interpretive essays on the North/South policies of these four middle powers. The contributors have all worked extensively on these issues; they are neither naively optimistic nor fatigued and despondent about what has been accomplished or what lies ahead . The concluding chapter is a comparative study of the role of humane internationalism in the policies of these four countries and a prognosis of the influence which a humane middle-power internationalism may yet have on Northern responses to the challenge of global poverty. is Professor of Political Science , University of Toronto. His earlier books include The Critical Phase in Tanzania, 1945-67: Nyerere and the Emergence of a Socialist Strategy; Towards Socialism in Tanzania, co-edited with Bismarck Mwansasu ; and Human Rights in Canadian Foreign Policy, co-edited with Robert Matthews . CRANFORD PRATT

INTERNATIONALISM UNDER STRAIN The North-South Policies of Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden EDITED BY CRANFORD PRATT

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 1989 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada Reprinted in 2018 ISBN

0-8020-2695-8

ISBN 978-1-4875-8093-3 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Main entry under title: Internationalism under strain ISBN

0-8020-2695-8

Economic assistance - Developing countries . Economic development. I. Pratt. Cranford, 1926-

1.

2.

HC6o.157 1989

c88-094887-6

Contents

Preface I vii 1

Humane Internationalism: Its Significance and Its Variants / 3 CRANFORD PRATT

2

Canada: An Eroding and Limited Internationalism /

24

CRANFORD PRATT

3

The Netherlands: Principles and Pragmatism / 70 CHARLES COOPER & JOAN VERLOREN VAN THEMAAT

4

Norway: The Hesitant Reformer / 104 HELGE HVEEM

5

Sweden: Towards a Realistic Internationalism / 155 BO SODERSTEN

6

Middle Power Internationalism and North-South Issues: Comparisons and Prognosis I 193 CRANFORD PRATT

Contributors I Index I

223

221

Preface

The possibility of a major international research project which acquired the title , The Western Middle Powers and Global Poverty Project, was first discussed at a workshop held at the Development Centre of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris in October 1983 . It was attended by some twenty scholars from eight middle powers. A research proposal was then developed which for practical and financial reasons focussed upon the North-South policies of five of these countries: Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. As the project proceeded, two more workshops were held and were attended by almost all of the eighteen scholars who have been participants in it. The project has had as its objective the production of three volumes on the North-South policies of the countries on which the project has focussed and a fourth volume of thematic essays relating to middle power internationalism. These four volumes are:

Internationalism under Strain: The North-South Policies of Canada, the Netherlands, Norway. and Sweden, edited by Cranford Pratt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1989) Middle Powers and Global Poverty: The Determinants of the Aid Policies of Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, edited by Olav Stokke (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies 1988) The Other Side of International Development Policy: The Non-Aid Economic Relations with Developing Countries of Canada. Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden, edited by Gerald Helleiner (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming)

viii

Preface

Middle Power Internationalism: Experience, Opportunities and Constraints, edited by Cranford Pratt (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press I 989) As this volume went to press, we learned of the death of Joan Verloren van Themaat. A person of transparent integrity and great ability, Joan, the youngest of the contributors to this volume, had already won wide international respect as a scholar. All of us who were associated with him in the preparation of this volume are saddened by this premature loss of a fine colleague who had already given much but who had still much more to give. No research and publication project this ambitious could proceed without much help and good will . The project began with a grant from the Development Studies Programme of the University of Toronto, financed from its own Connaught Development Grant. The project is thus indebted to the University of Toronto and to its Development Studies Programme for this allocation. We are particularly grateful to Richard Sandbrook and Susan Roberts, director and administrative assistant of the programme , for their constant support and continuing interest and encouragement. We are as well grateful to Dr Just Faaland and Dr Louis Emmerij, the past and the present presidents of the 0Eco's Development Centre for their personal interest in the project and for the institutional support of the Centre . Dr Guilio Fossi, Mme Valerie di Giacomo, and Ms Christine Johnson each in tum ensured that this institutional support was imaginative and efficient and always extended in a most cordial fashion . My debt to them and to their colleagues at the Centre is considerable. Additional institutional support and generous financial support for the volume on aid determinants was received with appreciation from the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. Finally, we acknowledge with pleasure and appreciation the generous grant from the Donner Canadian Foundation which made the project possible. We also express particular appreciation to Dr Gerald Wright, who was then vice-president of the Foundation and who dealt with our application . His ability to combine unfailing courtesy, encouragement, and genuine interest with a calm impartiality makes him, for supplicating scholars, the ideal foundation officer. I would like also to express my gratitude to Gerald Helleiner and Olav Stokke, my chief collaborators in this project, for their sustaining support, shrewd criticisms, and constant cordiality. Rik Davidson and Virgil Duff have provided fine assistance at the University of Toronto Press, and Marion Magee, not for the first

ix

Preface

time , has been meticulous and enormously helpful in the editing of this volume . Finally, I am delighted to acknowledge my continuing debt to Renate Pratt, who, amongst much else, helps me not to forget the contribution which compassion and, at times, indignation can make to socially responsible scholarship . Cranford Pratt / Project Director I June 1988

INTERNATIONALISM UNDER STRAIN

1

Humane Internationalism: Its Significance and Its Variants CRANFORD PRATT

THE ORIENTATION OF THE STUDY

The publication in 1980 of the report of the Brandt Commission, NorthSouth : A Programme for Survival,• and , even more, the lack of any significant policy response to its arguments represented a moment of truth for those who had hoped for concerted Northern leadership in a serious effort to achieve sustained and equitable development in the Third World . The report was in many ways a last-ditch effort by an international group of prominent individuals, hand-picked by Willy Brandt, to reverse the tendency within the Western industrial world to slacken its development assistance efforts and to abandon even the pretext of serious negotiation with the South on a new international economic order. The Western members of the commission were not fully representative of Western opinion. Strong spokespersons of either the European or the American right were conspicuously missing. Instead, with such members as Olof Palme, Edgard Pisani, Jan Pronk, Goran Ohlin, and the chairman himself, the dominant orientation of the Western members was social democratic. Similarly, the powerful Southern individuals on the Commission - Shridath Ramphal, Amir Jamal, Lakshmi Kant Jha and Eduardo Frei - were all committed to a more just integration of the South into the world economy rather than to a Southern withdrawal from it. The production of an unanimous report was a major achievement, but it was surely facilitated by the fact that the commission's members included no strong supporters of either the paramountcy of market forces or autarkic selfreliance. We live now in a quite different climate of opinion than that in the 1970s. Few write forcefully that global poverty could be eliminated by the year 2000 or that major reforms to the international economic order

4

Cranford Pratt

TABLE I Population and gross domestic product per capita. 1984

Population (millions) per capita (us$millions)

GDP

Canada

Netherlands

Norway

Sweden

25 13.400

14 8.533

4 13.217

16 11,370

World Del'elopment Report 1986 (New York: Oxford University Press 1987), table 25, pp 228-9; National Accoullfs Statistics: Analvsis of Main Aggregates 1983-4 (New York: United Nations 1987). table I. pp 4-6

SOURCE:

TABLE 2 Average rate of growth of GDP per capita

Canada Netherlands Norway Sweden EEC

1970-5

1975-80

1980-4

4.1 2.8 3.9 2.0 1.5

2.2 2.0 4. 1 0.7 2.7

0.0 - 0.5 1.6 1.0 0.7

SOURCE: National Accounts Statistics: Ana/_vsis