A modest proposal: southern Africa and the World Bank.

• Author: Fleischer, Anthony

Serendipity refers to unexpected benign coincidence, and the Summer 1995 issue of The National Interest exhibited it well. Taken together, remarks made by Nicholas Eberstadt and Clifford M. Lewis on one hand, and by Francis Fukuyama on the other, suggest a way to accelerate both economic development and regional political comity in southern Africa, to the benefit of an concerned.

In urging the privatization of the World Bank, under the new leadership of Mr. James D. Wolfensohn, Eberstadt and Lewis maintained that, "having outlived the problem it was designed to solve, this multinational institution has no defining purpose." They went on to argue that the World Bank should now abandon its "quasi-parasitic niche within the international financial community," and should instead "produce value-added services for its customers on behalf of its owners." This transition, they proposed, could be accomplished by an orderly and deliberate privatization of the World Bank and its subsidiary operations.

Some pages later, Mr. Fukuyama summarized the key element of his book, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, this way:

We can think of neoclassical economics as being, say, 80 percent correct.... But there is a missing 20 percent of human behavior about which neoclassical economics can give only a poor account. As Adam Smith well understood, economic life is deeply embedded in social life, and it cannot be understood apart from the customs, morals, and habits of the society in which its occurs. In short, it cannot be divorced from culture....

People in traditional cultures will follow the dictates of tradition and act very differently from people in industrialized societies, but that is because traditional culture contains embedded rules of behavior that are rational for that culture [emphasis in original].

In short, Eberstadt and Lewis implore the World Bank to let market mechanisms take their natural, healthy course, while Fukuyama warns that, 20 percent of the time at least, that course might be neither natural nor healthy if the proper cultural preconditions are not present. Taken together they suggest an idea.

The "80 percent" of the neoclassical argument -- the patterns of commercial conduct that generally govern economic activities -- is still thoroughly valid for southern Africa. But rather little trust resides in such models in Africa today. This is because both the national and regional economic of Africa are the distorted results of foreign intervention and, in South Africa itself, the social and economic alienation caused by the terrible...