IN Jihad versus McWorld, a book that has already assumed something of a cult. status in the US, politics professor Benjamin R. Barber argues that today's world is convulsed by two opposing tendencies.
Just as we thought we were all coming together in one globalised economy we are faced with the unleashing of such passions as religious fundamentalism and xenophobic nationalism which threaten to tear us apart.
We see something analogous happening in today's Ireland. As we bask in the adulation of international commentators for our economic success and accept with a bashful pride the appellation "Celtic Tiger", we are also aware that the "feel good" factor is skin deep for many sectors of our society. For, as a recent report by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) and Combat Poverty published just before Christmas showed, relative poverty in Irish society has increased since the economic upturn of the late 1980s.
These contradictions take us to the heart of what is perhaps the greatest dilemma facing development experts today. The end of the ideological divisions which divided the world into two camps for most of the post War period was widely hailed as removing obstacles to the real task of economic growth.
Yet, as governments everywhere get down to the task of promoting free market, export led development, the very urgency to achieve material growth is throwing into relief deeper needs which, if not satisfied, make material progress a parody of development. Among these are the needs for community, identity, security, and an environment free of serious pollution.
This alerts us to a fundamental fact: economic growth does not necessarily lead to development. As I argue in my [forthcoming book, Poverty Amid Plenty: World and Irish Development Reconsidered*, development is a dynamic process involving not just wealth creation but also the ability to ensure that the benefits of growth flow equitably throughout society.
In examining 50 years of development efforts in the first half of my book, I conclude that the ideological divisions of the past have not so much been transcended in a new consensus in favour of freemarket approaches; rather, the collapse of the old socialist paradigm has allowed to emerge new and often more radical critiques of mainstream approaches to development, namely the feminist, cultural and ecological critiques. These critiques, I argue, constitute a plea for inclusion on behalf of huge numbers of the world's people.
In the second half of my book, I apply development theory to the case of Ireland. It is remarkable that, given Irish people's widespread interest in Third World development, no one has yet systematically applied to Ireland the lessons to be learned from development experiences worldwide. This is a good time to undertake such a task because, apart from the lessons we can learn, as a high growth economy we now constitute a valuable lesson from which countries throughout the developing world can learn.
The application of development theory to Ireland also alerts us to questions too little asked in discussions of Irish development. For example, it prompts a questioning of the accuracy of the term "Celtic Tiger" and alerts us to the seriousness of the deep rooted problem of social exclusion which has emerged in our society.
The "Celtic Tiger" label is derived from an implicit reference to the East Asian "Tigers" of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. In contrast to the Irish case, however, these countries success was based on concerted government effort to build up a strong, high tech and innovative indigenous industrial sector capable of winning markets overseas. Irish industrial policy has instead been largely preoccupied with getting multinationals to establish here.
The result of this policy has been a dualistic industrial structure of high growth, export oriented multinationals side by side with a relatively low growth and contracting indigenous sector.
While problems of poverty and social exclusion in Ireland are not of Third World proportions, the growth in poverty since it has begun to be consistently measured in the early 1970s indicates a tendency which has been traditionally associated with underdeveloped countries.
WHILE this is no longer regarded as unique to the Third World, the extent of social exclusion in Ireland and its entrenched nature do situate us somewhere between the First and the Third World in this regard.
These problems have increasingly been recognised by governments here as requiring redress. Recent approaches to tackling social exclusion have been more far reaching, but until we see evidence of a trend towards greater equality and social inclusion we cannot afford to be complacent.
In Ireland, therefore, we can identify writ small some of the main developmental challenges facing all late developers. Yet we are still far from being in a position to offer ourselves as an exemplar in the key task of translating economic growth into sustainable and equitable social development.