Iraq and human development: culture, education and the globalization of hope.

• Jurisdiction: United States
• Author: Ismael, Jacqueline
• Date: 22 March 2004

HOW DO THE ARAB HUMAN DEVELOPMENT Reports relate to Iraq? The international discourse on human development, championed by the United Nations, came into being in 1990 with publication of the first Human Development Report. The UN initiated the discourse to buffer, with a human face, economic development theory and the neo-imperialist thrust of corporate globalization. While sanctions had removed Iraq from the purview of the human development approach for more than a decade, war and occupation reopened the examination through the discourse of post-conflict reconstruction. Although these two discourses of human development and post-war reconstruction provide recipes for rebuilding, there are crucial missing ingredients.

This essay reads human development and post-conflict reconstruction discourses against the grain to reveal, on the one hand, their inadequate conceptions of how to achieve more democratic and egalitarian societies, while also exposing the promising openings they nevertheless afford. The abstract humanism, without historical or cultural content, that characterizes the human development reports in general, and the first AHDR in particular, has the effect of masking new forms of assertive Western parochialism as universal civilization. However, even this hollow humanism does place the category of history and culture, albeit conceived in abstract terms, on the agenda of development and reconstruction, and thereby creates latent internal contradictions that can be exploited. In a departure from practices elsewhere, the human development reports for the Arab world were written by Arab intellectuals of standing who represent a wide spectrum of opinion in the Arab world, rather than the functionaries and specialists of international agencies. This departure has had important consequences. The second Arab Human Development Report, published when the implications for the Arab world of the American reaction to 11 September were clearer, takes greater advantage of the opportunity to give the human development discourse real Arab historical and cultural content.

The Arab authors of the report transcended the limitations of the neoliberal framework within which they wrote by intruding the unavoidably collective dimensions of both Arab history and culture into the analysis, notably with references to Palestine and Iraq. They also took pointed exception to the anti-Islamic animus of the American-led War on Terrorism.

This article aims to push exploitation of these internal contradictions in human development discourse further, by clarifying the ways in which Iraqi history and culture, in particular, can be made into resources to expose the dangers of an externally conceived and imposed mandate for educational reform. It then suggests alternative possibilities for mobilizing transnational resources in support of self-defined educational reform, with the specific example of a collaborative Iraqi-Canadian project that will rely on the people-to-people networks made possible by the Information Revolution. The project's goal is the establishment of a non-profit international university with global linkages to complement Iraqi national universities. This instance of grassroots globalism links Iraqi academics with their counterparts in Canada and around the world in the service of a project designed to meet self-defined educational needs that respond to the imperatives of Iraqi history and culture. It envisions spontaneous networks generated from below, including non-governmental academic associations, which are broadly inspired by anti-war, anti globalization, human rights and environmental movements--all urging action to mobilize human and capital resources in the human interest. In broadest terms, such efforts all contribute to anti-systemic struggles on behalf of a world, as Wallerstein puts it, that is "relatively democratic and relatively egalitarian". (1) Such efforts, even the most modest, localized, and experimental ones, are all part of what some have begun to call "the globalization of hope." (2)

HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

With publication of the first Human Development Report in 1990, the United Nations announced the initiation of an international discourse on development to "contribute to the definition, measurement and policy analysis of human development." (3) In effect marginalizing the intense theoretical debates on development that raged throughout the eighties, the discourse was launched with the "hope that this Report--and its annual sequels--will make a significant contribution to the development dialogue in the 1990s and lead to a serious exploration of human development programming at the country level." (4) The first Report initiated the discourse with a humanist perspective, drawing a relational distinction between human development and economic development:

People are the real wealth of a nation. The basic objective of development is to create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy, creative lives. This may appear to be a simple truth. But it is often forgotten in the immediate concern with the accumulation of commodities and financial wealth. Technical considerations of the means to achieve human development--and the use of statistical aggregates to measure national income and its growth--have at times obscured the fact that the primary objective of development is to benefit people. (5) Specifying economic development as necessary but not sufficient, the human development paradigm outlined by the Report in effect transposed the social problems of development--poverty, inequality, inequity--from economic to human development issues. However, the linkage between social problems and the international political economy of development was obfuscated by defining human development as a process of enlarging choices, tying the concept directly and in limiting ways to liberal individualism: "Human development is a process of enlarging people's choices. The most critical ones are to lead a long and healthy life, to be educated and to enjoy a decent standard of living. Additional choices include political freedom, guaranteed human rights and self-respect ..." (6) This discursive ploy opens the door to what Naomi Klein has called "the privatization of every aspect of life, and the transformation of every activity and value into a commodity." (7) The second Arab Human Development Report remains mute on how the political will and the financial resources will be found to advance the laudable goals in education it puts forward. That silence means that dominant political and financial forces, with their privatization agenda, will have unchallenged access to Iraq. At a time when a neo-conservative agenda is steering the American drive for global hegemony, the consequences of that silence are clear for the reconstruction of Iraq and the larger American project of remaking the Middle East.

Initiation of the international discourse on human development, specified ideologically in unambiguous neo-liberal terms, presaged the intensification of globalization in the 1990s (characterized by sharply increased private capital flows resulting from direct foreign investment in developing countries). (8) With unfettered capitalism poised to flood the developing world, the United Nations initiated its new international discourse; implicit with the promise of the good life, understood in individualistic terms, and made possible by economic development in the new conditions of globalization. A scorecard for the new approach would take the form of annual reports that ranked countries by their performance on the Human Development Index (HDI).

The HDI is based on three indicators--life expectancy, education, and GDP per capita. "Longevity and knowledge refer to the formation of human capabilities, and income is a proxy measure for the choices people have in putting their capabilities to use." (9) The purpose of the annual ranking of countries based on HDI is to provide an assessment of both attainment and shortfall--indicators of successes and failures from one period to the next. In other words, the HDI provides a ready measure for successful human development outcomes of economic development. Shortfalls, according to this evaluation system, are not indicators of the poor human development outcomes of economic development. Rather, shortfalls reflect failure to meet targets, and indicate either insufficient economic development or poor choices by policymakers in terms of the investment of income.

The first Arab Human Development Report, published in 2002, was unlike all other Human Development Reports: as noted above, it was prepared by Arab intellectuals and policy analysts, not by UN civil servants. This departure, as suggested, created the possibility of undermining the new human development discourse from within. In addition, unlike the national, regional or development issues foci of the others, "the focus of this Report is on the people of the Arab world, the citizens of the 22 member states of the Arab League." (10) The ethno-cultural focus and Arab authorship constituted an indigenization of the human development perspective, without the intent of changing its implicit liberal assumptions. The actual report, however, exceeded these expectations and raised the spectre of transcendence of the narrow ideological parameters that had been prescribed by the international discourse on human development. This unintended consequence was reflected by the Arab authors' emphasis on "strengthening of Arab co-operation in order to maximize the benefits of globalization and avoid its perils." (11) More pointedly, this unintended consequence was manifest in the explicit attention to the context of conflicts "driven by regional and extra-regional factors." (12) The inclusion of Palestine and Iraq in the Arab Human Development Index (AHDI) emphasized the link between international politics and regional...