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| The late Prof Norman Girvan who died on April 11 this year |
Influences on my
choice of subjects and approach
Norman Girvan -
Autobiography written in October 2007 – shared by Dr Trevor Golding
My field is the political economy of development. My
work has been mainly concerned with the harmful effects of certain metropolitan
institutions on the development of the Caribbean and other areas of the Global
South, leading to strategies for independent development and self-empowerment.
Within this broad approach, I have addressed issues and case studies in foreign
investment and multinational corporations, dependency, technology, the IMF,
debt, social development, Caribbean integration and the relationship between
power and development knowledge.
I realise that this is a somewhat wide range of
subjects, but one thing always led to another, and the connecting thread is
there. I get particular satisfaction from examining inter-relationships among
issues that are normally compartmentalised; and relating them to a bigger
picture. Over the years I have also mixed academic work with forays into the
world of government and international organisations related to these subjects.
I was born in Jamaica in the early 1940s; a time when
the society was emerging from colonial rule. My father had thrown himself into
the community development movement spearheaded by Jamaica Welfare and the
nationalist project of ‘building a new Jamaica’; I think much of his passion must
have rubbed off on me. At Calabar High School in the 1950s, we were
fortunate to have a group of talented and capable teachers, possessed of a
nationalist ethos and devoted to their calling. I learnt about the Arawaks and
Rastafari in second form and about Toussaint and Christophe in the fourth; was
immersed in the great Shakespearean political dramas; and studied the momentous
political movements of the 20th century.
Class sizes were relatively small and there was
intense student-teacher interaction, which lent itself to what is now called
‘critical thinking’. History, literature and Spanish were my favourite
subjects; evidently this was a major influence on the issues I later to chose
to address and on the way I addressed them.
In 1959 I won a
scholarship to study economics at the University College of the West Indies.
There was much excitement—Arthur Lewis had just been appointed Principal, and
the West Indies Federation had been launched. In remembering C.L.R. James and
New World and its Critics, I try to evoke the spirit of my Mona days.
Significant intellectual influences included Roy Augier, M.G. Smith, Lloyd Best
and Alister McIntyre. Fellow students Orlando Patterson and Walter Rodney were
among my closest friends.
I entered Mona as a Jamaican nationalist and left as a
Caribbean regionalist. I have never recognised a contradiction between the two;
the one melds into the other seamlessly; and I believe that anyone who thinks
otherwise either does not know our history, or chooses to deny it. Regionalism
is a passion and a recurring subject of my work.
In 1962 I received
another scholarship to do my doctorate at the London School of Economics. My
thesis was on the contribution of foreign capital to Jamaica’s economic
development in the post-war period; this was motivated largely by the
‘industrialisation by invitation’ policies of the time. Jamaica had experienced
a growth boom due largely to investment in the bauxite industry; but I
concluded that the growth was not self-sustaining because the required
structural changes in the economy had not taken place (this was confirmed after
1972, when the investment cycle in bauxite came to an end). I attributed this
in part to the effects of foreign-owned institutions in the economy,
particularly in the bauxite industry and the financial sector, and to the
pattern of public expenditure financed by foreign loans.
But it was the subject of bauxite and the
multinational corporations (MNCs) that most excited me; and this was what I
pursued in my early post-doctoral work. My thesis was that corporate
vertical integration of the MNCs discouraged the kind of integration of the
mining sector with the host economies that was required for it to realise its
potential contribution to development. Inputs were sourced externally, raw
materials were processed abroad, production could not be adequately taxed, and
profits were reinvested abroad. So I argued that regional bauxite exporters
should form an association to negotiate jointly with the MNCs, increase
taxation, secure state participation in ownership, and implement a regional
industrialisation strategy. My monograph on the subject was part of the UWI
Integration Studies best known for the seminal study by Havelock Brewster and
Clive Thomas and was meant to be one element in a comprehensive programme of
regional economic transformation. I subsequently generalised the analysis to
the case of multinational corporations in mineral-export economies in the
Caribbean and Latin America; this paper was prepared for the plantation economy
study project of Lloyd Best and Kari Levitt.
My work on bauxite became associated with policy
initiatives such as the nationalisation of bauxite in Guyana and ownership
localisation in Jamaica, the formation of the International Bauxite Association
and Jamaica’s bauxite production levy (I acted as a government adviser for the
first two of these). My book on Corporate Imperialism represents a kind of
synthesis of this line of my work.
Immediately after
completing my doctorate in early 1966 I had joined the UWI Economics department
at St Augustine; later that year I transferred to Mona, where I taught until
1973. During those years I was active in the New World Group (I served as
Chairman of the Mona Group in 1966-1969) a Pan-Caribbean intellectual movement
that aimed to indigenise economic and social thought in the region. I was also
associated with the Abeng newspaper during its brief existence in 1969,
which combined Black Nationalism and Marxism in a radical race/class
perspective on Jamaica.
In 1969/1970 I spent time in Latin America (mostly
Chile), on a Ford Foundation/ISER Fellowship and then at the Economic Growth
Center of Yale University on a postdoctoral fellowship to further the work on
MNCs and the mineral industry. The study of Chilean copper was one of the
results.
My interest in Latin American dependencia
thinking was a natural outgrowth of work on MNCs and Caribbean dependency; the
similarities were obvious, and I returned to Chile for two months in 1972 to do
research comparing the Latin American and Caribbean dependency schools. Another
product was a think piece on the Political Economy of Race in the Caribbean and
Latin America that has attracted some interest. Contact with Latin America
heightened my awareness the region’s rich intellectual tradition and more
sensitive to the cultural prejudices that cause the Anglo-Saxon world either to
ignore it or to belittle its importance.
In 1973 I resigned from UWI to take up an appointment
at the UN’s African Institute for Development and Planning (IDEP) in Dakar, on
an invitation from Samir Amin, then Director. My main responsibility was to
develop IDEP’s research and teaching on multinational corporations. It was
around this time that I began to work on the subject of technology transfer--I
had earlier done a study of transfer of technology arrangements in Jamaica, and
MNCs were the main channel in which this was supposedly taking place. When I
returned to the Caribbean in 1975 it was to coordinate a regional (University
of Guyana/UWI) project of technology policy studies that had been developed by
Maurice Odle. The task was intellectually challenging in that the team of
researchers was both regional and multidisciplinary. My contribution was to
propose a conceptual framework of technological dependence, technological
underdevelopment and technological dysfunctionality for interpreting the
Caribbean situation; and then to identify policies for capability development
to break the vicious cycle. My own book on the subject was one of four which
resulted from this project (Owen Arthur, the current Prime Minister of
Barbados, was a member of the project team and co-authored of one of these).
By the time the
studies were published the policy environment had changed, and the kind of
active technology strategies we proposed were discouraged by the Washington
Consensus of the 1980s and prohibited by the TRIPS agreement under the WTO in
the 1990s. The TRIPS agreement is now widely recognised as being inimical to
the interests of the developing countries, as I pointed out in my Patel
lecture. I believe that the conclusions of the CTPS studies are relevant today.
Around the time
that the technology studies were being completed I got caught up in the
ideological debates over democratic socialism in Jamaica and the role of the
IMF. By early 1977 I had joined the Michael Manley administration in Jamaica as
head of the government’s planning agency, in order to oversee the preparation
of a ‘people’s plan’ as an alternative to the proposed IMF programme. The plan
was completed in record time, with several thousand suggested projects coming
from the general population. The government nonetheless negotiated an IMF loan,
believing that it was the only means of staving off complete economic collapse.
I stayed on to prepare a five year development plan.
Within less than four years, and after two failed IMF
programmes, the Manley administration was voted out of office. The experience
taught me a great deal about the real world of government, economics and politics.
My reflections on the lessons learnt continued for several years: initially I
focused on the role of the IMF; subsequently I emphasised the nature and
dynamics of the internal political economy as decisive factors in the failed
experiment. My paper for the Conference on the 1970s, Not for Sale, should be
read by anyone with an interest in that turbulent period and in my
interpretation of events.
Shortly after the fall off the Manley Administration,
in 1981, I accepted an appointment in the research arm of the United Nations
Centre on Transnational Corporations in New York. This was my first experience
as an international civil servant. The work was interesting—I prepared a
chapter in the Centre’s Third Survey on TNCs, and studies of TNCs and the transfer
of technology and of their role in non-fuel primary commodities; the last being
a kind of reprise of my earlier work on bauxite.
But it was also frustrating—although the Centre was
created to strengthen the hands of developing countries in dealing with
transnationals, we were not allowed to publish anything that might offend the
Americans or the Russians. During this period, I also directed a series of
month-long training workshops on technology transfer and development in Africa
and the Caribbean; my book with Kurt Hoffman distils the substance of what we
learnt and tried to communicate in this project.
In 1985, I was happy to return to Jamaica and to
academic life at the Consortium Graduate School of Social Sciences on the Mona
Campus of the UWI; first as a faculty member, and then as Director from 1987.
Here I was challenged to provide leadership for an experimental
multidisciplinary programme of postgraduate training in the applied social
sciences. I view with satisfaction the fact that under my stewardship the CGS
produced around 100 graduates, many of whom went on to make notable
contributions in academia and government; and established a reputation for
excellence in research and multidisciplinary studies.
The responsibility
also encouraged a degree of cross-disciplinary excursion on my part. I found
myself engaged in Rethinking Development as well as discussing Jamaica’s
external debt; in reflecting on Jamaica’s experience in community development
as well as researching the impact of new information technology; in speculating
on the relationship between economics and the environment as well as bemoaning
the social consequences of Jamaica’s currency liberalisation.
Cross-disciplinary orientation is most explicit in a
book resulting from the conference on Poverty, Empowerment and Social
Development and a monograph on the Caribbean rather provocatively entitled ‘Societies
at risk?’
During my CGS years I began to think of myself as a
kind of ‘transdisciplinary political economist’--a hybrid creature that does
not command ready acceptance in an academic environment marked by increasing
disciplinary specialisation and compartmentalisation. For the same reason my
idea that the CGS model of postgraduate training could form the basis for the
creation of a single graduate faculty in the social sciences did not find
favour with colleagues in the regular departments. The epistemological
issues related to inter-, multi- and trans-disciplinarity were explored in a
paper I co-authored with Kirk Meighoo. Although interest in this subject
appears to have died; I believe there would be value in revisiting it. My
recent report on a Vision for Caricom employs a holistic multidisciplinary
perspective; and its positive reception suggests that this might be an effective
approach for building stakeholder consensus around developmental goals.
Another aspect of
my work in this period was Caribbean integration. In 1987 I had helped to found
the Association of Caribbean Economists (ACE), the brainchild of my colleague George
Beckford, as a pan-Caribbean association of economists in the critical
tradition of the New World Group. ACE has held regional conferences and
workshops and published books on structural adjustment, the social aspects of
development, alternative development strategies and regional integration.
I was particularly interested in strengthening links
between the English and non-English speaking countries of the region as a means
of enhancing their sovereignty in the wider world and especially vis-a-vis the
hegemon of the North. For instance, there was the need for collaboration in
confronting the challenges posed by the FTAA project.
The opportunity to work on this ‘from the inside’ came
when I accepted election as the Second Secretary General of the Association of
Caribbean States (ACS) to serve from February 2000 to February 2004. My efforts
were aimed at rationalising and prioritising the ACS’s programme by focusing on
functional cooperation in trade, transport, sustainable tourism and natural
disasters; and to ‘build bridges’ between the English- and non-English speaking
countries.
I succeeded in the first task but not as well in the
second. Caricom countries tend to give priority to building the CSME and to
their extra-regional trade relations; the Central Americans opted for a trade
agreement with the US (CAFTA-DR), and the countries of the Group of 3 and Cuba
have preferred to pursue their regional goals through bilateral programmes. The
ACS experience is evaluated in my book, Cooperation in the Greater Caribbean.
During these years I did a number of occasional lectures on various aspects of
Caribbean integration, and wrote a weekly newspaper column; many of these can
be still be found on the ACS website or in the book.
On leaving the ACS I returned again to academic life;
at the UWI’s Institute for International Relations in St. Augustine, Trinidad,
as Professorial Research Fellow. I have continued to work on Caribbean
integration, specifically the Caricom Single Market and Economy (CSME), focusing
on the problem of the ‘implementation deficit’, issues of sovereignty, and the
limited benefits expected from a purely market-centred approach to integration.
I have proposed that the vision for the Community’s development should be
all-encompassing, and not just about trade. My report on this subject was
approved by the Caricom Heads of Government as a framework for the future
development of the region. Currently I assist the Caricom Secretariat by
coordinating the preparation of a Regional Strategic Development Plan.
I have also deepened my interest in the development of
Caribbean economic thought and on issues of knowledge and power. This subject
has become topical because of growing disenchantment with neo-liberalism (and
its correlate, corporate-led globalisation) and renewed interest in
contextually grounded economic analysis. It was interesting to revisit
Caribbean dependency thought after a break of over three decades and to
speculate on its contemporary relevance. This review led to papers on the New
World Group, on the contribution of Arthur Lewis, and on the relationship
between Lewis’s work and that of the plantation school. I have drawn on this
work to explore issues of policy autonomy in the Global South.
A recent paper on power imbalances and development
knowledge is an overview of North-South relations from a political economy
perspective and on the use of knowledge as an instrument of
domination/empowerment. I subscribe to the view that true sovereignty begins
with independent and critical thought, which this must remain the goal for
those who have been subjected to centuries of colonisation and metropolitan
imposition of one kind or another.
One particularly
enjoyable offshoot of my work has been preparing tributes to outstanding
individuals with whom I have been associated in one way or another. These
include George Beckford, Lloyd Best, John and Angela Cropper, my father D.T.M.
Girvan, C.L.R. James, Kari Polanyi Levitt, Arthur Lewis, Michael Manley, and
Surendra Patel. These appreciations have helped me to better understand
the intellectual, social and political currents that shaped me personally and
the times in which I lived.
The years have passed quickly: I am still startled
when I meet young people who were not yet born at the time of the New World
Group, the Rodney Riot in Jamaica, Trinidad’s Black Power Revolution, or the
1970s. Absence of personal memory is understandable, less so is absence of
knowledge of these and other events, and of the people who helped to make them,
among the younger generation. We cannot chart our future unless we know our
past; nor can we see further than those who came before us unless we ‘stand
upon their shoulders’.
Reading is a constant source of pleasure and
discovery; and I enjoy writing even more now that the pressures of academic
publication are absent. The world has obviously changed a great deal since the
1960s: to old problems, such as global inequality, have been added new and
infinitely more complex issues, notably the environmental crisis. In my youth
the fear for the future of mankind was of nuclear annihilation; today it is of
damaging our planetary life-support systems beyond repair. It is also
astonishing to me that the kind of 19th century imperialism that was
thought to have been banished by the middle of the 20th century, has
returned with renewed force in the 21st. I do not see how thinking
and informed people of today can fail to address these issues; or at least can
fail to take account of them in the work that they do.
Norman Girvan
October 18, 2007
