To understand the extraordinary impact of the Johannesburg Earth Summit on Europe and the Europeans, consider one of the memorable moments from this week's first-ever TV debate between Gerhard Schroeder and Edmund Stoiber, the two main candidates for the German Chancellorship in next month's elections.
Perhaps my opponent would like to explain, said current Chancellor Schroeder in icily polite tones, why amid all the economists and statesmen he has assembled for his vaunted "team, of experts" in the new government, he has failed to include a single environmentalist -- when every German knows the overwhelming importance of the environment.
Precisely, replied Stoiber. It is because the environment is so overwhelmingly important that I intend to take charge of it myself.
The Europeans in general, and the Germans in particular, do not just take environmental issues very seriously; since the fuss over the Kyoto Protocol, they have very nearly come to define themselves in terms of ecological virtue. So in global labels, Americans are powerful but ruthless; Europeans are rich but sensitive, civilized and caring. They seem intent on promoting the image that Americans are from Mars, but Europeans are from Venus, portraying themselves at events like the Earth Summit as the global economic giant who is also Mr. Nice Guy.
Similarly in dealing with Saddam Hussein or Yasser Arafat, the Europeans seem comfortable in this kind of role, as if defining themselves as the soft and furry non-Americans. The United States may have the biggest defense budget; Europe has the biggest aid budget. The Americans reject the Kyoto Protocol on global warming; the Europeans rush to ratify it. President Bush snubs the Earth Summit; European leaders are arriving in droves.
The very concept of "sustainable development', which is the guiding theme of the Earth Summit, first saw light in the preamble of the European Union's 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam, where it is supposed to hold the kind of iconic status that Americans have for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." (The difference is that very few Europeans have heard of the Treaty of Amsterdam, let alone read it.)
Because most serious European and American officials and politicians do not want such stylistic or even cosmetic differences to disrupt the underlying importance of the Atlantic Alliance, strenuous efforts have been made to find ways around them. And on the issue of foreign aid and Third World poverty, a consensus has been reached, and formalized at this year's G-8 economic summit in Canada under which the Bush administration and the Europeans have agreed a common vision.
Stripped of the rhetoric, it says that one of the most important causes of Third World poverty (and thus of de-forestation and environmental abuse) is bad government. Much foreign aid in the past has been useless, because corrupt or simply bad governments have simply stolen or wasted the money or spent it on wars, weapons, Paris shopping jaunts or socialist-style state planning that ends up with useless steel plants rusting in the African bush, which is what happened in Ghana. When Ghana became the first British colony in Africa to gain its independence in 1957, the country had the same income per head as South Korea. Ghana, which the British called the Gold Coast, is now poorer than it was then; South Korea, better governed, is more than ten times richer.
The key to making aid work is to have honest governments carrying out sensible policies on the basics of the economy, health care and education. For Africa, the G8 summit agreed on a new framework for aid, NEPAD, or the New Economic Partnership for Africa, whose guiding principle is that governments abiding by these simple rules get preference in aid.
South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki, the Earth Summit host, cleverly used his opening day speech to hijack an environmental summit for his own development agenda, saying, "A global human society based on poverty for many and prosperity for few, characterized by islands of wealth surrounded by a sea of poverty, is unsustainable."
He's probably right. So he should be put to the NEPAD test. So far Mbeki and other African leaders who back NEPAD have ducked the opportunity to get serious with the most outrageous case of bad government in Africa -- the crooked dictatorship of Robert Mugabe in next-door Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe is starving because Mugabe insists for racist reasons on dispossessing the white farmers who produce the bulk of the food' International food aid is being hijacked by Mugabe's thugs and delivered only to those communities who voted for him in this year's stolen election, which EU observers said was marked by "outrageous violations." Mugabe's opponents are left to starve, and their leaders kidnapped, tortured and 'disappeared' by the Libyan-trained secret police. Journalists are imprisoned, critical newspapers blown up and their presses burned.
If there is one place in Africa where Americans from Mars and Europeans from Venus can fruitfully work together and in harness with African governments it is in Zimbabwe, a once prosperous country, ruined economically and ecologically by bad government.
