Beyond subtle Eurocentrism

A critique of the foreign policy assumptions of Jeffrey Sachs

Aug 04, 2023

As humans, our assumptions, understandings, and perspectives are rooted in experiences in particular nations and social locations. Therefore, what is understood to be true from the vantage point of one socially bounded horizon can be seen as totally nonsensical from the perspective of another. This cultural difference becomes ideological when particular social groups marshal evidence and ideas in defense of their particular understandings.

Freedom fighters or terrorists?

As a young college teacher in the 1980s, I observed that informal discussions among faculty frequently made reference to the cultural and ideological sources of understanding, noting that “one person’s freedom fighter is another person’s terrorist.” I found the oft-repeated phrase disturbing, as reflecting a lazy-man’s epistemology, entirely inappropriate for persons presumably dedicated to the academic life. It seemed to me that the cultural and ideological distortions to understanding were a challenge to be overcome, not a fact of life to be accepted. Surely there had to be some scientific, empirical, and objective basis for judging the difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist, however challenging the task.

I had first discovered the profound cultural and ideological divisions in understanding in the early 1970s. I was one of a handful white students in an M.A. program at the Center for Inner City Studies in Chicago (now the Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies), where an all-black faculty formulated a colonial analysis of the modern world, that is, the modern world as seen from the vantage point of the colonized. I took seriously their evidence and arguments, and I found them persuasive. At the same time, their analysis was fundamentally different from the teachings of my undergraduate history and social science professors at Penn State, whose commitment to truth I did not doubt.

Thus, I became aware of two fundamentally different and opposed understandings of the same world reality. What were the implications of this? Was human understanding unavoidably connected to social position and culture? Such a possibility I was unwilling to accept. Because, as I understood it back then, it would mean that truth was tied to power, that is, truth became what those in power say that it is. If such be true, there could be no reasonable defense of the people against the claims of the powerful, a situation that the Frankfurt School scholar Max Horkheimer, reflecting on Nazi Germany, described as the “eclipse of reason.” Today, I can observe other nefarious consequences of the dismissal of objective knowledge that I could not imagine back then, such as various social sectors in competition for power deliberately manipulating evidence in support of their political interests, without the slightest regard for the rules of knowledge with respect to empirical observation and logic.

Father Joseph Fitzpatrick, then a sixty-five-year-old sociology professor at Fordham University, had encountered a similar problem in the 1950s as a young Irish-American priest assigned to ministry in Puerto Rico. Father Fitz guided me to resolution of the problem through study of the cognitional theory of the Canadian Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan, who had discovered the structure of knowledge on the basis of study of a wide variety of human fields of investigation. Lonergan meticulously described the movement of the subject seeking understanding through the levels of experience, understanding, and judgment, during which questions relevant to the issue at hand are discovered. Such movement is conditioned on the commitment of the subject to understanding as the highest desire, as against other human desires, such as the desire for wealth and power. The drive of the subject must also include persons of other cultural horizons, in which further relevant questions are brought to consciousness, thus transforming understanding.

I synthesized Lonergan’s cognitional theory with my gradually expanding understanding of the anti-colonial movements of the Third World, with which I was continually encountering as a follow-up to my personal encounter in the black community in the early 1970s. I arrived to an understanding of understanding: persons of the modern imperial nations who seek to understand the modern world can overcome blinders imposed by their cultural horizon through a sustained process of personal encounter with the leaders and social movements of the neocolonized peoples of the earth, who describe their reality as above all a colonial situation. Persons committed to truth as the highest desire can discover through this process further relevant questions that previously were beyond consciousness, thereby expanding and deepening understanding. This understanding of understanding has been experientially confirmed in my ongoing process of encounter, in that the leaders of the Third World project today implicitly affirm that there are objective truths in the realms of both fact and value, and that the truth is attained through an ongoing “dialogue of civilizations.”

On the foreign policy assumptions of Jeffrey D. Sachs

The insights and universal truths formulated by the exceptional Third World leaders that I call “the virtuous servants of the people” are not known to Jeffrey Sachs, a fact that became clear to me as I read Sachs’ A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism, published in 2018 by Columbia University Press. This is lamentable, because Sachs is not without prestige or influence. He is President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and an SDG Advocate on behalf of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. And he is University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. It is yet one sign more of the decadence of the USA, when persons responsible for leading the people toward corrections in understanding do not themselves have the necessary understanding.

Sachs is not completely off base; indeed, he has it mostly right. He makes a useful distinction among three competing visions of America’s place in the world, today and throughout American history. First, exceptionalism, which maintains that the USA should strive to continue global dominance through unrivaled U.S. military superiority. Exceptionalism maintains that U.S. military dominance is both feasible and necessary, and it sees China’s rise as an unacceptable threat to U.S. dominance. Exceptionalists advocate investments of trillions of dollars for a new arms buildup in Asia, maintaining that this would enhance U.S. prestige and global leadership as well as protect U.S. investments overseas. They call for trade and technology measures to limit China’s future economic growth.

Secondly, realism, which maintains that the USA must accept a realistic balance of power rather than seeking to preserve U.S. dominance. Realists, Sachs maintains, are essentially in favor of “peace through strength,” inasmuch as they view a new arms race with China as necessary and inevitable to maintain the balance of power. Sachs views realists as “excessively pessimistic about the potential for cooperative diplomacy.”

Thirdly, internationalism, the view to which Sachs subscribes, which argues that “global cooperation between nations is not only feasible but also essential to avoid war and to sustain American and global prosperity.” In the view of internationalists, “global cooperation would spare the world a costly and dangerous new arms race between the United States and the emerging powers.” They maintain that “global cooperation would enable the United States and the world to seize the opportunities opened by today’s technological revolution to boost economic growth while overcoming ills that include global warming, emerging disease, and mass migration.” Internationalists believe in win-win cooperation, rejecting the assumption of win-lose competition of the exceptionalists and the realists. Internationalists maintain that the USA and China should agree to not expand their military forces and to invest in education, health care, and infrastructure. Internationalists note that the USA outspends China by more than two to one in the military arena, and that the USA has military bases in more than seventy countries, whereas China has only one military base on foreign soil.

Sachs’ internationalism, however, does not transcend the ethnocentric assumptions and perspectives of the American and Western European political cultures. Sachs escaped the limitations of exceptionalism and realism by immersing himself in the political culture of the United Nations and its related organizations, which is based in a filtered version of the Third World revolutionary discourse. Sachs, therefore, did not directly encounter the Third World revolutionary leaders and movements, and thus their most important insights are hidden from his consciousness. Sachs learned a soft version of internationalism, in which key insights of Third World revolutionaries were reformulated to accommodate to the interests of the global elite and the comfort of a relatively privileged global class. What is implied in the discourse of the United Nations is a reform of the neocolonial world-system, and not structural transformations that would bring the neocolonial stage to an end.

Sachs, as a result, does not grasp the logic of imperialism, which has been central to human progress since ancient times. Conquest, colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism have provided the material foundation for the great scientific and technological achievements of the modern era. As such, they were the material foundation of American economic dominance and world prestige of the period of 1945 to 1965. Sachs does not see that since ancient times, imperialism has been functional for the winners.

When the logic of imperialism is grasped, as it is from the colonial situation, the hardheaded defenders of imperialism are not seen as idiots, but as realists or realist extremists who discern the ancient game of power with its winners and losers, in spite of the lofty rhetoric. Grasping the essence of the power game, realists do not want to be on the losing side. To realists, those who call for cooperation are unrealistically idealistic; they ask, why would you want to place the future of the nation in the hands of the naïve?

When reformers or revolutionaries call for a change of national direction, they must demonstrate to their compatriots that they possess understanding of the world’s power games, which is precisely what the exceptional leaders of the triumphant modern revolutions have done. They have mobilized the people in the taking of political power and in exercising power in the construction of an alternative social order. Indeed, their capacity to discern the unfolding political contradictions in their nations and in the world is central to their exceptional insight. Sachs, however, not encountering these exceptional leaders directly, but only through the filters of relatively privileged sectors of the world-economy, was not able to learn from their insights.

Sachs, for example, reveals a limited understanding of the process of decolonization in the decades following World War II. “With Europe’s empires gone,” he writes, “the newly independent nations of Africa and Asia had a new opportunity to invest in their own futures, especially in education, public health, and infrastructure. At least some of the countries make good on that opportunity.” The People’s Republic of China, for example, he notes. “At least some of the formerly colonized countries began to adopt modern technologies, spread literacy and disease control, and generally achieve economic development at a pace faster than the leading North Atlantic countries through incorporation into global production systems.”

In this commentary, Sachs reveals no understanding of the peripheral economic function of colonized areas as exporters of cheap raw materials and of the persistent maneuvering of the world powers to ensure that the peripheral economic role was kept intact following independence. Which is to say, he demonstrates no understanding of the structures and practices of neocolonialism. Nor does he seem to recognize that the newly independent nations that were advancing economically were either those with sufficiently large economies to find domestic sources of capital for investment in new economic activities not assigned to them as colonies; or they were those nations that were led by leaders who could mobilize the political will to strike at the assigned peripheral role, leaders that were vilified, deposed, and assassinated by the world powers. Sachs’ obtuseness with respect to the structures and dynamics of neocolonialism was evolving precisely in the historic moment in which the leaders and intellectuals of the Third World revolutions have been continually writing and speaking, but Sachs apparently is among the world’s many blind and deaf.

In the same vein, Sachs has limited understanding of the New International Economic Order proposed by the Non-Aligned Movement and supported by the G-77 and the socialist bloc, approved by the UN General Assembly in 1974. Sachs characterizes the Declaration as a call for equity, citing its advocacy for export-commodity cartels. However, it was much more. It was formulated by the Third World countries themselves, and it affirmed above all the principle of the sovereignty of nations over their natural resources. It advocated a series of concrete steps: the creation of raw materials producers’ associations to give raw materials exporting states control over prices; a new international monetary policy that did not punish weaker states; increased industrialization of the Third World; the transfer of technology from the advanced industrial nations to the Third World; regulation and control of the activities of transnational corporations; the promotion of cooperation among the nations of the Third World; and aid for Third World development. It was a call for the restructuring of the international order, bringing an end to neocolonial practices and moving toward a more just world. It was ignored by the Western powers, which embarked in the late 1970s in the opposite direction with the neoliberal project, an economic war on the world’s poor, a project that is central to Third World consciousness but overlooked by Sachs.

Sachs does not appear to see the fundamental difference between the New International Economic Order of 1974, rejected by the USA; and the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions, established under U.S. leadership in the 1940s. The UN and the Bretton Woods institutions were designed by the USA and its allies to ensure a neocolonial world order under U.S. domination; in contrast, the declaration for a New International Economic Order was designed by the neocolonized with the hope of breaking the neocolonial world order. The United States could not possibly support the New International Economic Order, inasmuch as the USA was not investing in the productivity of its economy, and thus it was not prepared to participate in a just and fair world-system.

Having not directly encountered the movements and revolutions of the neocolonized, Sachs is unable to see through the deceptions that obscured the structures of the neocolonial world order. Sachs does not grasp that the United Nations was created as a neocolonial instrument, as is reflected in its unequal distribution of power between the Security Council and the General Assembly and within the Security Council. In spite of these evident limitations from the vantage point of the weaker states and poorer nations, the United Nations has been embraced by the Third World revolutions, because it gives all member states a voice, however limited; and because it has included progressive declarations of principles that are inconsistent with its neocolonial intentions, such as the UN Charter, the Declaration of Human Rights, the documents affirming the right of self-determination, and the Declaration for a New International Economic Order. And the poorer nations have actively participated in UN-related organizations, which have a voice of progressive reform, pointing to improvements in the neocolonial world order, without rectifying the inequities of power between the rich and poor nations. Because of these reforms in the United Nations, forged by the poorer nations, the UN no longer functions consistently as an instrument of U.S. neocolonial domination, and for this reason, the UN is rejected by U.S. voices that want to preserve American power in the world.

Similarly, Sachs does not see that there are different forms of regional integration. The European Union is a mechanism for the stronger economies of northern Europe to exploit the weaker economies of southern Europe. In contrast, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), established in 2010, seeks to promote mutually beneficial trade within the region as an alternative to U.S. directed integration, which is designed to take advantage and superexploit. CELAC is the culmination of the launching of an anti-imperialist regional integration in 2004 by Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro, with the establishment of ALBA.

Nor does Sachs discern the characteristics of socialism as it is being constructed today in China and the Third World. Such characteristics of real socialism include: structures of people’s power and people’s democracy, where various points of view are debated, and where policies are ultimately decided; state-directed mixed economies, with an emphasis on expanding productivity and providing for societal needs; and vanguard political parties that educate and guide the people, minimizing dysfunctional ideological divisions. The countries constructing socialism today in the Third World plus China are making important contributions to the common human legacy of knowledge, but their insights are ignored in the West, which dismisses these significant projects as authoritarian.

Sachs calls for cooperation with China, Russia, and the nations of the world. In this he is right. But his case would be enhanced if he could more fully explain the dynamics of the contemporary world, in which Western imperialism is in decadence, and in which China, Russia, and the Third World are constructing in theory and practice a more just and sustainable world order, and they are inviting the United States and Western Europe to participate in this alternative construction. However, Sachs could not possibly explain more fully, because he decided years ago against casting his lot with the virtuous servants of the people.

Sachs illustrates the extent to which Western academic and social service establishments are tied to the neocolonial world order, even as Western imperialism falls into decadence. The multidimensional crisis of the world cries out for voices in the West that have cast their lot with the virtuous servants of the people and their historic quest for a just and sustainable world order.

Knowledge, ideology, and real socialism in our times

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