12 - Sovereignty

Popular opinion is right. Countries like the Dominican Republic and Haiti are “not like us”–they are not like Canada or the United States. They have significantly more poverty. They frequently, but not always, have less democratic, more repressive governments than most contemporary Northern nations have had to deal with.

But they are also different because they have had less control over their own sovereignty, their own destinies, than the more developed nations of the north have had.

It might be argued that in the contemporary world of globalization, multinational corporations, and free trade agreements, no country has real sovereignty any longer. But the situation for developing countries is clearly more pronounced. Other–stronger, richer–countries still feel they have the right or authority to intervene in Lesser Developed Countries when they disapprove of the current leadership. The United States, in particular, has had a history of such interference, actively brokering the collapse of governments which they disapproved of (Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, Lumumba in the Congo in 1961, Allende in Chile in 1973). Often the administrations which the US then supported were precisely those undemocratic and repressive governments mentioned above—for example, the government of Mobuto Sese Seko in the Congo or that of Agosto Pinochet in Chile, who instituted a reign of terror comparable to those of the Duvaliers in Haiti and Trujillo in the Dominican Republic.

Similar interventions continue to occur, such as the US and British decision to attack Iraq as part of the so-called War on Terror in order to unseat Saddam Hussein. Regardless of whether Hussein was a dangerous leader or not, the justification for the war (weapons of mass destruction) was specious and the predictions that the Americans and their allies would be welcomed as “liberators” were wholly inaccurate.

There has not only been political interference in the nations of the developing world; just as disruptive are the examples of the loss of financial sovereignty.

Because of their economic vulnerability, countries like the Dominican Republic have had, from time to time, to agree to what international creditors call “structural adjustments” imposed upon them by external institutions such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. Structural adjustments are internal changes that have to be brought about in a country before its government is able to borrow the money needed to continue operating. One of the structural adjustments imposed on the Dominicans in 1997 was the privatization of power generation. The immediate impact of this was a 51% increase in the cost of electricity to consumers, but there was no corresponding improvement in electrical service. In fact, the country began to suffer from almost daily blackouts.

But perhaps the most significant way in which these countries are different “from us” is that they are discounted in our discourse. In fact, our attitude seems to be to keep them out of sight and out of mind.

Certainly judging from the popular media one would not assume that countries such as these make up the majority of the world’s population, that–in effect–their lifestyles are the actual “norm” for the planet. That’s a fact that people in more developed countries don’t want to face too directly. It could make us very uncomfortable. So–as with the decision of the Dominican government to build a wall in order to conceal Maquiteria in 1992–we prefer to have the barriers, the blinders, up.

One of the intents of this series of reflections is to peek behind those walls.