As former director of research for the World Bank and current Director of the Center for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University, Paul Collier has spent a lifetime working to end global poverty. Collier’s background also lends credibility for his withering criticism of international development agencies such as the World Bank, whose administrators often prefer to work in “developing” countries which (without the help of the World Bank) are already moving toward prosperity on their own. In fact, Collier observes that global poverty is actually falling quite rapidly for about eighty percent of the world: One billion of the world’s population are already wealthy; four billion are, albeit at varying pace, on the way to becoming prosperous; the real challenge is the “bottom billion,” composed of about 50 failing states whose problems defy traditional approaches to alleviating poverty. Notably, these are states which are excluded, or exclude themselves, from the global circle of productivity and exchange. Seventy percent of them are in Africa.
Following Collier, Neuthaus notes that these failing states are caught in a four traps: the conflict trap, the natural resource trap, the trap of being landlocked with bad neighbors, and the trap of corrupt government in a small country. These “traps” virtually guarantee that they will be poorer in the years ahead–“a ghetto of misery, disease, and discontent on an otherwise flourishing planet.” Collier writes:
“Change in the societies at the very bottom must come predominantly from within; we cannot impose it on them. In all these societies there are struggles between brave people wanting change and entrenched interests opposing it. To date, we have largely been bystanders in this struggle. We can do much more to strengthen the hand of reformers. But to do so we will need to draw upon tools—such as military interventions, international standard-setting, and trade policy—that to date have been used for other purposes. The agencies that control these instruments have neither knowledge of nor interest in the problems of the bottom billion.”
In other words, Collier advocates for increased U.S. and European intervention among the poorest billion, including (controversially) military intervention. Collier contends that such intervention is necessary to ” restore order, maintain post-conflict peace, and prevent coups.” Collier is not unaware that intervention is dangerous, and requires a (politically and emotionally) strong stomach. Writes Collier:
“Don’t get me wrong: it is terrible when peacekeeping troops get killed, and it is magnificent of a nation to send its troops into a dangerous situation. But that is what modern armies are for: to supply the global public good of peace in territories that otherwise have the potential for nightmare. . . . Armies cannot operate at zero risk. . . . [P]ost-Iraq, the fact that the United States pulled out of Somalia as a result of a mere eighteen deaths looks even more bizarre. The consequence for Somalia were miserable: more than twelve years later it still has no functioning national government. By 1991 around 300,000 people had died, and beyond that there are no estimates of the deaths from continuing conflict and the failure of health systems. But the biggest killer consequent upon the withdrawal was not what happened in Somalia but the lesson that was learned: never intervene. . . . Remember that 1994 was the year of Rwanda. We didn’t want a second Somalia, with another eighteen American soldiers killed, so we got Rwanda, in which half a million people were butchered, entirely avoidably, because international intervention was inadequate.”
But military intervention is not to be equated with colonization. Neuthaus notes that “Collier is not advocating military intervention to advance grand geopolitical goals but simply to give development a chance among the bottom billion.”
The conclusion of Neuthaus’ outstanding review:
“The phrase ‘policeman of the world’ was presumably discredited during the Vietnam era. But even the best neighborhoods have policemen, and the worst cannot survive without them. Policemen operate under the law to prevent the depredations of the lawless. The really poor live in a large and lawless neighborhood, and, if the United States, Britain, and France—and, increasingly, Germany and Japan—do not police the neighborhood, who will? This is among the questions raised and arguments advanced by one of the most important books on world poverty in a very long time, Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It
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