‘Reparations’ & The Global Economy

Recently Making It Plain (MIP) had a discussion with Dr. Horace Bartilow (HB), Professor of International Economy at American University, Washington DC. The discussion covered a number of critical issues including the global economy and developing countries, Pan-Africanism, and non-capitalist development. This is the first part of the series discussing those issues.

 MIP: Based on the progressive social movements developing across the Caribbean and Latin America, and we have had a couple of international meetings, UN meetings and so on. I have noticed throughout that not one word has been said about poor people, or about poor countries. And I know that at one time the question of a New World Economic Order was high on the agenda, it is no longer there. So, my first question has to do with, is it an outdated concept?

Dr. Horace Bartilow: The New International Economic Order (NIEO) as you know was first conceived at the Bandung Conference back in 1955 in Indonesia and it was really part of a larger decolonization strategy. You had a lot of newly independent countries that were basically saying that the current order that they found themselves in was a post-colonial order of global trade and they wanted to change that. So, the NIEO was basically part of the anti-colonial struggle. Fast forward now to 2020/2021 if you do not see the NIEO as lots of people talking about it, there are a lot of reasons for that. First reason is that the initial discussions about the NIEO was basically stymied. The industrialized countries, the former colonizers themselves basically said no, we are not going to change this order and, of course developing countries did not have the power to enforce that.

I should also tell you that quite correlated with the NIEO was also another discussion taking place at the same time, and we now call it the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And what we understand to be the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is actually a political process because, developing countries at the time were not just talking about the right not to be tortured,  the right not to be imprisoned for your political views and things like that. You know this Declaration of Human Rights now is about the right not for your physical integrity to be abused whether it is torture, disappearance, or extra-judicial killings, but they were also talking about the right to develop and  put the burden on the former colonizers to assist those countries in development. The argument was our development has been compromised, because of the atrocities of colonialism..

MIP: So, it was a kind of quasi reparations then?

HB: Yeah, I mean in a way. I do not like to use the term reparations you see, and I will tell you why. I do not like the concept of reparations and the reason is that reparations, put a price tag on decades of atrocities. I mean if the west were to say, “ok how much did it cost to enslave African people and all of the atrocities and the mental and psychological trauma?” Can you put a price tag on that, really? So, if you say, well, it is X trillions of dollars, you are doing a great disservice to the billions of people, African people and generations from those people who do today still bear those scars. I do not think you can put a price tag on that. The question is that I have a problem with it. The other one is if you could put a price tag on it, you now have relieved the descendants of the colonizers, you relieve them of any responsibility; their thought is “I’m paying you off already.” You give them an ‘out’ to pay for something that cannot be paid for and going forward, the conditions in the world; the world that you still live in is still shaped by the atrocities of the past.

The problem is that even the people who are talking about reparations are talking about it from a colonial mindset. You know as Black people we really, really do not understand, I do not think we fully grasp the depth of white supremacy; we do not understand it. We experience it but we really do not understand the depths of how it affects us; even those of us who think we are enlightened. We do not understand the depth hold. It still affects our thinking and a lot of other things so that is a problem. The issue of reparations is very problematic. I know what people are trying to do; but you are equating it to reparations being paid to the Japanese and other groups but that is a false equivalence.

MIP: This goes much deeper.

HB: Yea It is a false equivalence; Japanese civilization was not destroyed. How do you pay reparations for a civilization that has been destroyed; how does reparations cover that? This is what people should be talking about, discussing. They should be saying to the Europeans and the west in general; the atrocities of colonialism are so deep, and we are still living it today. To address the crimes of the past, you cannot do it by simply writing, writing one big check. Instead of asking for one big check they should be saying that it must become a legal part of an international order that at least 2% of the Gross Domestic Product of the United States, Britain, France, Spain and all who those countries that participated in and benefited today from colonialism, must be given as developmental aid assistance to the African Continent first. That is right, every single year.

These countries have now accumulated a lot of wealth in their museums; you know that is one of the psychological aspects of white supremacy, which is quite interesting in that, they like to place in their museums the artifacts of their conquest and it serves as a reminder to them of their superiority over other people. A lot of these artifacts are worth billions of dollars. I want you to think about this, my brother. That is like If I came to your house rape your wife, rape children, murdered them, took all of your possessions; then take it back home with me and I build this big museum with all of your things in it. I do not hide my crime I celebrate it and I charge people A FEE TO COME AND SEE IT (emphasis MIP). And the people who talk about reparations do not even mention those things.

For me and I do not know about others, but when I see these things, in all these European museums it is trauma, psychological trauma. No one is saying anything, that is now normal practice in the world; not one thing. That is normal in the world. Quite normal. Nobody raises the question that I raise that you are basically celebrating genocide, murder, and pillage and if I did that in the world today, I would be hauled off to prison in no time. You commit a crime, and you are celebrating it; you are showing off all the goods stolen, you are not hiding it.

And so, these are the people whom the representatives of the Bandung Conference, the NIEO had to deal with, of course what are they going to say? To accept the demands of the NIEO it would be to accept responsibility for colonialism, they are not going to do that. And the sad thing is the only way to change that system because we are dealing with people who the only thing that they respect is counter-power. You have to take it back from them by force. You cannot reason with them, that is the other thing we do not understand about power; power is not something you negotiate it is not a negotiation.

If power negotiates with you it shows two things one is the realization that they cannot overpower you, like what they did in Afghanistan. They negotiated with the Taliban why? Because they realized that they cannot kill them they realized that they cannot do that exactly. So that is one thing, and the other thing is that if they negotiate with you, it is also a reflection that they see no more benefits in exploiting you and so you get a kind of so-called independence where the colonizer says, “I’m tired of exploiting you so, I’ll give you your freedom.”

MIP: It is so ridiculous, ironic, yes.

HB: But look at other countries like Jamaica. Jamaica did not earn its independence; it was given to it.

MIP: It did not come through struggle

HB: No, and that is one of the big problems of independence in the post-colonial world with Black people in particular, in that in those countries where freedom was not achieved by their own hands; It was given to them you get a certain kind of post-colonial deference to the colonizer. Ok! There is something to be said about revolution; there is something really to be said about revolution.

 Part 2 will follow next week