Zapatero: My kingdom for a chair
By
Jorge Gómez Barata Read Spanish Version
With
some effort I rejected the temptation to use the image of the Hero of
Haarlem, a brave Dutch boy who, when he saw water trickling through a
small crack in a huge dike, plugged the hole with a finger, sent his
brother to warn others of the danger, contained the flood and saved
the city. The image is much too heroic and tender to serve as a
simile.
Lamentably,
bravery and determination were absent at the meeting of the Group of
20 in Washington, where frivolity, repetition and boredom
predominated. More than 80 percent of the information supplied by the
European (and part of the U.S.) press on the eve of last week’s
meeting dealt with the presence of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero
despite the objections of Bush, who doesn’t forgive the Spanish Prime
Minister’s for having corrected the position held by Aznar, who
committed Spain to Washington’s aggression against Iraq.
The
meeting, at which only a few hours were spent working, was not a
decisive gathering in the style of those where the key is put away
until an agreement is reached. This time, it was a hasty and
imprecise meeting of high-ranking political operators who were
worried more about preserving the neoliberal precepts of the system
(the same that presumably led to the crisis) than about moderating
them.
Instead
of betting on change — if not of essence at least of rules or
emphasis — the members of the G7 (plus China, Russia and several
major countries called emerging) stressed their determination to
defend the neoliberal bases on which the world economic order rests,
including the financial deregulation that led to the catastrophe. On
that field, the novelties were cosmetic.
The
idea that a profoundly unequal, unjust and asymmetrical world can
function effectively as a system where — despite the levels of
development, productive potential and priorities in the economic and
social development — all countries must accept the same rules, fixed
from a center, instead of seeking the hoped-for democratization,
reinforces the imperialist concept of a world economic order and
accentuates the neoliberal nature of globalization.
To
condemn protectionism in the abstract, forgetting that in different
stages of its development, even recently, it was practiced by all the
developed countries and that today it is camouflaged behind rigid and
effective nontariff barriers, is obviously wrong. To apply the same
commercial and fiscal rules to Germany or Japan as well as Honduras
and Costa Rica, and to assume that their economies are equally ready
to deregulate the import and export trade and the flow of capital is
abusive.
Bush
and Sarkozy attempted to state a doctrine when they said that both
capitalism and the market are innocent, without worrying about
establishing the responsibilities of those who, by hijacking the
State, the only instrument capable of arbitrating between the
economic and political actors and restraining the irrational greed of
the financial capital, disarmed society and left it at the mercy of
the barons of money, who know no limits and have no homeland.
Brazil,
Argentina and India nobly performed their expected role and did
enough to avoid the description of "guest of stone" applied
to the Mexican delegation. The latter, with half a government,
conservative, isolated from its natural Latin American surroundings,
and without any strength to confront the United States, could have
stayed home.
The
other objective of the meeting — to give the U.S. a chance to
pretend that it works to create an international consensus, give the
European Union (accomplice of the irresponsible deregulation of the
financial markets) a feeling a participation, and blame China and
Russia for faults they didn’t commit — was accomplished with the
presentation of a consensus nominally subscribed to by the Third
World, which was represented by a few peripheral countries with
barely any capacity to make decisions and, incidentally, selected by
the host power.
One
of the lessons of this encounter was precisely the subservient role
of the Third World nations, which, far from raising their own and
legitimate demands for a right to development, the war on poverty and
a quest for social justice, in fact joined a choir to which they
didn’t belong. They were out of tune and out of place.
Smarter
are those who recommend not expecting anything from the pleas to
maintain the bases, essences and, above all, the modus
operandi of
a failed system. Lamentably, however, there is neither a stage nor a
leadership capable of giving the underdeveloped countries
(three-quarters of the planet) the role that fittingly belongs to
them.
The
only really encouraging outcome of the Washington weekend was knowing
that the world’s finances, security and wellbeing will no longer
depend on George W. Bush, for whom all political opportunities are
over.
Jorge
Gómez Barata is a Cuban journalist and professor who lives and works
in Havana.
