The World Summit for Social Development (WSSD), or the Social Summit as it is being called, is to be held in Copenhagen, March 1995. The fifth in a series of six United Nations’ Conferences, it follows the Cairo Conference on Population and Development and precedes the Women’s Conference in Beijing. There is one singularly powerful reason why the Social Summit is being billed officially as occupying central position in the constellation of other UN-organized gatherings on global development issues. The Social Summit is about money.
In the original planning for the Summit, the official line was that “no new money is required,” that if all countries would sign the so-called 20/0 compact, the proposed human development plan could be financed. The 20/20 compact requires developing countries and aid donors to earmark a minimum of 20 percent of their budgets or 20 percent of Official Development Assistance (ODA) for human development priorities. “Three-fourths of the contributions would come from the developing countries, and one-fourth from the donors. No new money is required, because the compact is based on restructuring existing budget priorities” (United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Development Report 1994). Meeting resistance, the 20/20 compact has now been modified to 20 percent of ODA — an increased proportion of recipient countries’ national budgets (78(c) WSSD Draft Programme of Action).
So despite the original no-new-money-required theory, the Social Summit, in practice, is now about getting big new money. Commitment S in the Draft Document promises to “increase significantly” the resources assigned to social development, to strive for the agreed target of 0.7 percent of Gross National Product (GNP) for Official Development Assistance and to increase the share of funding for social development programmes commensurate with the scope and scale of activities required to achieve the objectives and goals of this Declaration and its Programme of Action.
International taxes for UN empowerment
There is a concerted push for the new money to come from two new additional sources. The first source is the proposed introduction of international taxes to be levied on international travel, telecommunications and all international financial transactions. The “Tobin Tax,” an international uniform tax on international currency transactions would generate, according to the UNDP promotional blurb, “substantial reliable funds for sustainable human development? The revenue potential of a 0.5 percent tax on foreign exchange transactions is described as “immense,” over $1.5 trillion a year. The Summit information Kit says, “It is appropriate that the proceeds of an international tax be devoted to international and humanitarian purposes and to be placed at the disposal of international institutions.”
The second source is to come from pressuring UN member countries into reducing annual defense expenditure and redirecting the savings to finance selected social programs. It’s called “capturing the peace dividend.” The theory is that with the collapse of the Soviet empire there is no longer a need for defense spending. But such a theory is based on a dangerously naive and unrealistic view of the power plays currently in progress. With many countries such as China, India, and Indonesia intent on building up defense capabilities, it is doubtful that this reasoning is going to wash. Be that as it may, the target being promoted by UN agencies, a reduction of three percent a year in global military spending for the next decade, were it to be achieved, would represent three percent a year of roughly one trillion dollars. Big Money.
But who is to get this big money? Which programs will be financed?
Well, organizers are saying the Social Summit is about alleviating poverty, unemployment and social disintegration. Certainly there are many worth-while initiatives on these issues in the Summit’s Draft Declaration and Programme of Action, such as:
- strengthening of international labor standards including those relating to child labor;
- review of structural adjustment programs that are causing so much hardship for the world’s poor;
- debt relief for African and other very poor nations.
A UN aid program with pink and green strings
On the face of it the Social Summit is a good program that is supposed to help the poor, the unemployed, and the social outcasts. But it is an aid program with conditions attached: that a pro-western feminist affirmative action should take effect in implementing and monitoring all parts of the program; that all programs meet development standards of sustainability (there is extreme poverty some short sharp bursts of unsustainable development would be permitted); and that nations agree to hand over to the United Nations, its agencies, and its non-government organization (NGO) helpmates, the financial power to implement the program.
It is an aid program with rules attached that seeks to compulsorily advance a number of causes that have nothing to do with the poor and the unemployed and the social outcasts. If all the extraneous causes were deleted from the Declaration and Plan of Action, it would be a much more slender but, I suspect, a much more effective program for alleviating poverty, unemployment, and social disintegration. Preoccupation with gender-adjusted Human Development Indices and other such radical nonsense detracts from the urgency and the single-minded determination with which extreme poverty and chronic unemployment needs to be tackled.
Typical of the direction of the Copenhagen Document is exhortation 41: “While all groups benefit from more employment opportunities, specific needs call from supplementary measures. Particular efforts by the public and private sectors are required to ensure that gender equity is practiced in all spheres of employment policy.” The inanity of quibbling over the gender balance of those employed in, say, urgently needed clean water and sanitation projects should be clear to all. It is crazy to attribute the dire problems of poverty and unemployment to the Western feminists’ imaginary draculas of patriarchy and male hegemony, which have to be destroyed and routed from all institutions including the family. Yet this is the thread of the folly that weaves its flaw into the very fabric of this Programme of Action.
One crucial item on the real agenda behind the Social Summit is to be found in Paragraph 86(g) which says: “United Nations development efforts should be supported by adequate financial resources, since reliance on voluntary contributions alone is no longer feasible, and since predictability in funding is essential,” Commitment 8(m) promises to “increase financing for operational activities of the United nations and specialized agencies in order to fulfill their responsibilities in the implementation of the agreements of the World Summit for Summit for Social Development.”
To control money is to control power. Under the guise of seeking money for the Social Summit’s ambitious social development plan, the document calls For international taxation on “financial transactions, air travel and telecommunications” (82). It is clear, from a careful reading of the document, that a great part of these international taxes will be spent on UN administration, on expanding the UN Economic and Social Council, on new monitoring bodies, on expanded consultation and research facilities, and on propagandizing media campaigns. There are two problems raising their ugly heads here. Just how much of the international taxes being raised ostensibly for social development will actually reach the poor and the unemployed? Secondly, the prospects of accountability for those taxes would appear to be grim, if current UN accountability records are anything to go by.
UN — from international body to supra-national government?
A UN that can draw freely on taxes levied internationally is not going to be required to be all that accountable to individual nations. At present, the running of the UN on voluntary Funds means that, essentially, nations retain the ability to withdraw funding if and when the UN fails to deliver on promises of efficiency, of transparency, etc. Such a radical new UN funding proposition as this Copenhagen caper presents surely needs open and careful scrutiny and discussion. It is a very serious matter. For if the UN, through international taxes, becomes financially independent of the nations that comprise it, then, in a very dangerous sense, the existing democratic process, however tenuous at present, will be severed. We must think long and carefully about whether or not we want a financially independent UN. One thing is clear: international taxes for the running of the UN should not be introduced in this sneaky way, piggy-backing on a Programme of Action that purports to be directed to the poor, the unemployed, and the socially alienated.
It is ironic that the document reiterates several times the wish to “create an enabling environment” for social development by encouraging “a strengthened role for the community and civil society” (8), but to the discerning reader, it becomes clear that the major direction of the Social Summit is a strengthened role for the UN and for selected non-government organizations. UN-selected NGOs are to share in the international tax bonanza. Paragraph T5 states that, “effective implementation of the Programme of Action requires strengthening of …non-governmental organizations enabling them to participate actively in policy-making .…” Money will be required for “establishing legislative and regulatory frameworks, institutional arrangements and consultative mechanisms for involving these organizations in the design, implementation and evaluation of social development strategies and specific programmes” and for “supporting capacity-building programmes for these organizations in critical areas such as participatory planning, programme design, implementation and evaluation, economic and financial analysis, credit management, research, information and advocacy,” After financing all this, where will the money be for the needy?
The trouble is that there are so many extraneous items that have little or nothing to do with poverty and unemployment and have more to do with social re-engineering than with social integration. Why, for instance, should the UN, in a document on poverty, employment, and social disintegration, be advocating that husbands do half’ the housework (55)? Paragraph 47(d) calls for improving opportunities and working conditions for “women entrepreneurs” by increasing child care…a far cry from what the document is supposed to be about, helping the poor and the unemployed. Many of the provisions are repeating and reinforcing items enshrined in earlier documents. There are so many provisions that regurgitate sustainability prescriptions from the Rio Earth Summit and women’s empowerment directives from Cairo. The Social Summit Draft Document specifically calls for full ratification of the whole mixed bag of’ worthy ideals and ridiculous Western feminist obsessions that compromise the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Nairobi Forward-Looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women.
We have to understand what is happening here. There is a push on to expand international government so that it reaches right down to communities and homes, there to dabble in “values reorientation” (4). Pluralism and diversity are the catchwords of the document. But there is an underlying analytical problem here: how can pluralism and diversity be reconciled with social integration as the objectives of a coherent international cultural policy? At what point does social integration dissolve in warring ideals, ambitions, and programs of action?
Nevertheless, in a massive project to reshape, regulate, and homogenize social mores and relationships, a fourth layer of government regulation, an international dimension of intrusiveness, is being added on top of national, state, and local governance. UN bureaucrats are seeking to justify this extension of their mandate by emphasizing and exaggerating interdependence and linkage of all social, economic, environmental and political factors. One small illustration of this is to be found in a very frank admission by Catherine Pierce, one of the United Nations Population Fund’s (UNFPA) top executives, In talking to an international women’s forum in Oslo 25th May last year, she said: “Our mandate does not entitle us to blur these areas, and to expand on the notion that all are mutually reinforced, the more helpful for us.”
Plethora of UN Declarations and Covenants
The intrusiveness of the United Nations into family and local community life and the hold that it is gathering on national governments is growing exponentially. International instruments adopted by the United Nations General Assembly and ratified by many individual countries, on occasion contradicting each other, many times repeating what has already been agreed, have become so numerous and so expansive that they are now in danger of becoming more hindrance than help. The thrust currently behind the latest declarations is to set up not only monitoring bodies, but enforcement agencies, to which individual and group petitions concerning perceived grievances may be mounted. The trouble is, as with many such complaint mechanisms, that it tends to be the well-heeled, pampered, and paranoid groups like the Tasmanian homosexuals that can best access such “justice,” while the genuinely oppressed in Vietnam, China or Rwanda remain voiceless.
The globalization of the economy has come about through “enabling” legislation that is fast transferring control of national economies to international bureaucrats of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and now the World Trade Organization (WTO). There is reason to doubt that national governments themselves, let alone the people being governed, understand the immense consequences of globalization. The current General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) agreement, in one huge and perhaps imprudent step, leapt beyond the specific trade agreements in previous years to establish the WTO in a document of 22,000 pages, filled with rules and regulations. The United States House of Representatives took a mere three hours to debate the document, and at least one of the senators, Senator Bob Dole, said frankly that no one had read it! The new WTO will have an appeals body to rule, and its judgments will have to be accepted. If reports are not adequately implemented within a reasonable period, sanctions can be imposed upon the recalcitrant country, On the other hand, individual nations are now divested, virtually, of the power to impose trade sanctions on other countries, even when very serious matters of dispute arise.
The standard of debate on these huge international documents, it seems, is erratic, very often disappointing. There is a little acknowledged problem here of how undemocratically UN consensus on programmes of action is achieved: very sketchy, patchy, and limited debate is allowed; full participation is often limited to those countries who have the funds and the organization to attend preliminary meetings; debate is often superficial, and agreement forced by less than impartial chairmanship. Such agreements are rarely allowed to be revisited, and the next UN conference builds quickly over the shaky foundations.
At Cairo, many agreed there was so much to be debated that nothing could be debated adequately. Both delegates and journalists complained vociferously that debate of the abortion paragraph, 8.25, wasted two whole days of the conference, The Egyptian delegate started the third morning’s debate with a loud complaint: “Mr. Chairman, we have been three days for only one paragraph!” Significantly, however, that paragraph with its promotion of abortion was in direct contradiction to the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child (1959) (“…The child, by reason of his physical and mental maturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth,”) The fact is, that as UN members sign with gay abandon a seemingly unending proliferation of conventions and declarations, immense inconsistencies and contradictions are showing up, and in the overwhelming plethora of ill-considered populist and contemporary biases, the timeless truths and essential values of the original charters are being swamped. Decision overload and issue contamination set in so that even wonderful goals like the infant mortality reduction program fall behind and are half forgotten as short attention spans and money are transferred to hot new issues.
Two-Day Social Summit debate — a rubber stamp?
The Copenhagen Declaration and Programme of Action has been allotted two days for discussion in the Main Committee. The shortness of allotted time, in effect, ensures that agenda control is substantially retained by the New York PrepCom meetings, dominated by the Northern countries and manipulated by the Women’s Caucus (a New York — based umbrella organization of women’s groups led by Bella Abzug), As in Cairo, it will be possible to pick out only one or two issues to debate at any depth. The two-day Summit meeting of the Main Committee promises to be merely a rubber-stamp. It is significant that, as with the Cairo preparatory meetings, there was a dearth of delegates and NGOs from many of the poorer countries to the New York meetings. A snippet from the Main Committee debate at Cairo gives an interesting little insight into the manipulative and dominating nature of the Prep Com meetings. The Algerian delegation, backed by Benin, on complaining about the insulting implications of the term “women’s empowerment,” was cut off abruptly by Chairman Fred Sai for not being at the New York meetings where “you could have got them to take better wording.”
Another comment that casts light on the power play was Bella Abzug‘s “We are here in huge numbers. We, the majority, which we have, have the right to get some concessions.” Indeed, at the Third Preparatory Session (Prep Com III), the Women’s Caucus fielded 280 representatives. Many of these found places on the delegations that went to Cairo, where they were instructed to take the very effective line that all the ideas that popped up for dispute were “developed collectively at Prep Com Ill” and should not be debated again or changed in any way.
There was one amusing incident that illustrates the penetration of the Women’s Caucus into the actual workings of these international conferences. I happened to be present when one of Bella Abzug’s group explained tearfully that one of the notes that she had passed into a closed meeting of a working group was intercepted by the Chairman of the meeting, the British Ambassador. He blew his top, saying the meeting was at a very sensitive stage and he upbraided the blatant attempt to influence the delegates, calling it “outrageous.” The unfortunate girl said in bewilderment, “…in Rio [the Earth Summit], we did this all the time. The delegates begged us for help, begged us to give them the exact preferred wording.” In Bella Abzug’s final caucus meeting in Cairo, she called on her troops to strive to get more of their own people onto the official delegations for the next conferences at Copenhagen and Beijing. “We introduced ‘gender’ and a short list and now they don’t dare challenge that…it is a process, a building. We have to get on the delegations. We have more and more members on the delegations and more and more NGOs on the delegations,” she insisted.
Australian position: 100 percent uncritical support
The Australian position for Copenhagen is all the way with USA, Canada, New Zealand, and the European Union (Japan tags along on most things). Typical of most of this group’s preoccupations and priorities are the Australian National Consultative Committee’s recommendations to the Australian delegation:
- Call for gender balance in choosing delegations for New York and Copenhagen.
- Proposal of a new point: “Ensure that more women are represented in senior level positions across the UN system and improve coordination of status of women issues by fully integrating them in UN bodies and agencies.”
- Calls for “the family” to be changed to “the family in all its diverse forms,” which could include homosexual unions.
- A call for an amendment to read “…promote equity, funding if and when the UN fails to deliver on promises of efficiency, of transparency, equality of opportunity and outcome for all women and men…”
- For the attachment to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women of anti-discrimination optional protocols that will allow individual and group petition.
- Support for representation of NGOs in UN bodies and support for a Human Development Index (HDI) adjusted for gender disparity.
This gender-adjusted Human Development Index, rigged up to measure how well a country is performing, needs careful scrutiny, One of the key indicators under Health is “the percentage of women using contraceptives? There is here a worrying attitudinal shift from ensuring contraceptive access to contraceptive usage. Since donor countries are being urged to use the HDI as the basis for aid allocation, we could see very soon some increased pressures by donor countries on poorer countries who do not have a high enough percentage of women using contraceptives. The Copenhagen Document does not specifically refer to HDI or the contraceptive-use indicator. But there are plenty of guardedly worded paragraphs that set the stage for and may be used to legitimize their introduction, e.g., 83 (e) “Strengthening the United Nation system’s capacity from developing indicators of social development”; 74(c) “Developing” indicators to facilitate monitoring and policy analysis…”; 73(g) “Developing quantitative and qualitative social indicators to assess poverty, employment, social integration, and other social factors, to monitor the impact of social policies and programmes, and to find ways to improve the effectiveness of policies and programmes and introduce new programmes? Gender-disaggregated statistical and other material on social development is urged in 16(c), and 23 (d) requires governments to establish “policies, objectives and measurable targets to enhance and broaden women’s economic opportunities”; 26(a) wants development and dissemination of “indicators of poverty and vulnerability…as well as indicators of the causal factors underlying poverty.”
There are also several paragraphs in the Document where it is made clear that assistance from UN agencies, the World Bank, IMF, and donor countries is to be conditional, tied to recipients’ performance. There is a push to introduce “debt swaps for social development, with the resources released by debt cancellation or reduction invested in social development programmes” 79{d).
A New World Order with NGO waterdogs
Big world government is taking shape and the Copenhagen Social Summit is doing its bit. The promotional blurb contained in the official People’s Summit Information Kit comes right out and says it: “A new global order is evolving in which national governments are having to share their authority with international organizations {especially the United Nations), transnational corporations (TNCs), and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).”
The NGOs are a relatively new phenomenon and they are accruing power and influence at a very rapid pace. Few people understand their power or their politics. The role that is being assigned to them is that of representing the people. Yet we must never forget that they are not democratically elected. There is a move afoot to cast NGOs as the moral watchdogs of both international and national governments. The Roundtable on Ethics, Population, and Reproductive Health, held in New York in March, 1994, in its Declaration of Ethical Principles for the International Conference on Population and Development said: “One important and effective way to eliminate coercion is to integrate responsibilities for population policies among government and the private sector. In particular, NGOs as advocates representing the community can play an important role in identifying and protecting against coercive practices.”
This is hopelessly out of touch with the real world, where NGOs and governments are often in cahoots with each other. For example, International Planned Parenthood Federation (second largest NGO after the Red Cross) has been shown to have cooperated shamelessly with Chinese and Indian governments implementing coercive policies. At the Oslo conference in May, 1994, very strong evidence was given that Indonesian NGOs do not have any status independent of government and are implicated up to their armpits in the widespread coercion in their country, In Indonesia, most so-called NGOs are not bona fide non-government organizations. They exist only by government favor and government largesse.
Other evidence given in Oslo testified to a different kind of problem, where, for example, in Mexico, externally-funded NGOs were used to subvert national sovereignty. Programs that the government considered as not acceptable by the Mexican community were slipped through to an NGO and implemented on the sly. Further, to understand the dubious role of NGOs as moral and democratic guardians we should consider very carefully the words of the Philippines’ Health Minister, Dr. Juan Flavier, addressing the NGOs at the NGO Forum in Cairo. Faced with the problem of introducing population programs not endorsed by the government or the people of the Philippines this is what he said: “I found out that I was very vulnerable because I was in government. All the senators and all the congressmen in one snap of the finger can cut my budget…so what did I do? Something that you must realize — the power of the NGO. I decided that I’1l do it through the NGOs…Why? Because when I do it they shoot me, but when you do it, they can’t talk. They can’t abolish you…you are the electorate, at least you pretend to be the electorate” (PRI Review, vol. 4, 110. 6, Nov./Dec., 18).
That pretence is being shrewdly encouraged by UN bureaucrats and by some countries like Australia. The western radical feminists’ agenda is writ large in the Social Summit Draft Document. It is being dictated from the New York-based Women’s Caucus, led by Bella Abzug. (I, myself, heard Bella Abzug boast of the Cairo Draft: “We wrote the document, This is our document. These are our words and we will not let them be changed.”) The Women’s Caucus continues to play a prominent role in the writing and fine-tuning of the Copenhagen Draft Document at the Preparatory Committee meetings in New York, the third and final meeting was held 16–27 January 1995.
Women’s empowerment agenda
The Women’s Caucus understands, as many of the delegates from developing countries did not understand at Cairo, that United Nations’ acceptance of the radical feminist language is synonymous with endorsement of and commitment to the agenda behind the language. To go from Cairo to Copenhagen is to go from the language of w0men’s empowerment to both the financing and the enforcing of the women’s empowerment agenda. The Cairo document established the concepts of “gender equality” and “the empowerment of women” (ICPD Document, Principle 4). Now the Copenhagen document is to provide the money for enacting the concepts and calls for a transition from national self-reporting to establishment of international mechanisms for monitoring and enforcement of enactment of these concepts.
Commitment 5 of the draft document is to “eliminate all obstacles to gender equity and equality,” to “establish objectives and measurable goals” to reduce gender differentials and to ensure “gender balance in decision making.” It also promises to “encourage the ratification, removal of reservations, and implementation of all the provisions of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, and other relevant instruments and implementation of the Nairobi Forward-looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women.” (The latter document includes many imprudent initiatives and immoderate denunciations associated with more extreme feminism.)
The Social Summit agenda for societal restructuring is based on the growing awareness of Western-based radical feminists that to gain true power they must gain control of money as well as political influence. At the recent international “Women, Power, and Politics Conference” in Adelaide, the major message was that money is more powerful than politics but women in general have as yet failed to confront the power of money. According to prominent feminist, Eve Mahlab, financial power is much stronger than political power because it is the investment of money which drives the world and the major task of radical feminists today is to target financial power in much the same way as they have targeted political power.
To this end, the Women’s Caucus is urging that the Copenhagen Draft Document include a commitment to achieving at least 50 percent representation by women in the analysis, design, decision-making and implementation of policies and programs at all levels of society and in all forums of governance, including the UN system, by the year 2000. In addition, the Women’s Caucus wants a goal set for achieving by the year 2000 women’s access to and control over a minimum of 50 percent of development resources. In a world beset by massive problems, these are the Westernized feminist priorities.
Distortion through New York-based feminist lens
But the world view through a New York feminist lens is very foreign and largely inscrutable to the majority of women from the developing nations. Preoccupations with conditions of work such as child care provisions, paid maternity leave, etc. are hardly relevant to the millions of women who haven’t a hope of a job, of any job. Paragraph 4.13 of the Cairo Document illustrates the primary concerns of New York feminists:
Countries are strongly urged to enact laws and to implement programmes and policies which will enable employees of both sexes to organize their family and work responsibilities through flexible work-hours, parental leave, day-care facilities, maternity leave, policies that enable working mothers to breastfeed their children, health insurance, and other such measures. Similar rights should be ensured to those working in the informal sector.
Fat chance! Such concerns are a farcical distance removed from the primary concerns of the one billion people who lack access to clean water, and of the two billion people who lack sanitation, who are forced to watch helplessly as five million of their children die each year from diseases related directly to unsafe water and bad sanitation. It is an insult when the Copenhagen Document prates of men sharing the housework to these people who have no house, only a few sheets of rusted iron and old cardboard. It is an insult to preach transformation of gender-prescribed roles within the production process and attitudinal changes to the division of labor based on gender (53) to people who have no jobs at all.
A further insult in the Copenhagen document is the implication that women who are full-time careers and homemakers are not “fully participating” in the development of their societies. This is nonsense, since so often it is the full-time mothers and homemakers who build and maintain the sense of local community with voluntary work and neighborliness, and who are at the heart of the community. It is they who are holding back the growing threat of social disintegration. As pointed out in the promotional paper “Why a Social Summit”: “The loss of intergenerational solidarity, and the bonds that unite communities, can create moral and cultural vacuums — and these vacuums become fertile ground for alienation and delinquent behavior.”
Yet the Social Summit has taken up the Cairo Document’s “economically enabling environment” terminology. It builds on the Cairo misconception that the voluntary work of mothers is economically, politically, and socially disabling, and constitutes a major source of gender bias and injustice. Commitment 5 aims to “promote changes in attitudes, policies and practices in order to eliminate all obstacles to full to full gender equity and equality and promote full participation of urban and rural women in social economic and political life .…” The problem is this: by far the most significant obstacle to “full participation” according to the Western-inspired feminist sense is the bearing and nurturing of children. To establish objectives and measurable goals to reduce gender differentials, clearly governments will need to reduce births, and to minimize the impact on women of the fewer children born to them. The Cairo campaign to eliminate poverty by limiting the children of the poor is carried on to Copenhagen (34(d)).
The Chairman of the Australian National Consultative Committee on the World Summit for Social Development, John Langmore, MP, said at Preparatory Committee [I (PrepCom II) that women must have access to “meaningful employment”; and it is clear from the context of the Social Summit agenda that unpaid mothering and care-giving are not deemed to be meaningful employment. While being work “of great social importance,” it is “not remunerated,” and so “efforts are needed to facilitate the combination of such work with formal economic life.… “(42) The Social Summit may claim to focus on the right of all people to earn livelihoods through freely chosen productive employment, self-employment, and other forms of work. But the gender perspective integral to the whole program of action makes it clear that pursuit of perfect statistical participatory equality with men in the paid workforce must override women’s traditional preference for voluntary work in the home and in their communities.
Proportional entitlement by gender
Not only jobs but also land and bank loans and all other social resources are to be allocated by gender grouping. What the Social Summit threatens to establish is the practice of proportional entitlements by gender. Anyone opposing this practice will be, accused of discrimination and will cop the full force of recommended anti-discrimination legislation. “Governments need to take firm measures to counter discrimination and to apply stiff penalties for infringement.” (People‘s Summit Information Kit)
Another key recommendation for “enabling” social integration is promotion of equality before the law. Very good. But on a closer reading of the background material, it becomes clear that the direction is primarily towards enhancing the basic legal rights of’ women over and above those of men. The argument is the same as is used to justify affirmative action — that historical injustice requires overcompensation as a corrective measure. Eventually, at some vaguely distant time in the future, we are to understand, judicial and employment practices will attain gender-blind purity and will be implemented scrupulously on merit. In the meantime, witch hunts are to search out and eliminate not only de jure discrimination but also de facto discrimination (14(c)).
At the heart of the Social Summit agenda is a hidden agenda for disaggregating families, or breaking up the family unit into individuals and for devolving the traditional rights of families to the individuals comprising the family. It is about loosening up family ties, and dismantling family integration and family members’ interdependence. The key objective is to make mothers financially independent of fathers. There is a Western-based feminist concern with establishing portability of income, of assets and of children, so that women can escape the patriarchal tyranny of marriage and family. Of course, the downside of portability is increased social disintegration — the undermining of the permanence of marriage, the facilitating of marriage breakdown over reconciliation, the creation of an expectation even that marriage and family relationships are no longer till death parts but more of an episodic, serial nature. Behind the concern for portability is the radical feminists’ campaign to sow distrust of husbands as breadwinners, and spread the politically correct new family model — the two-income family.
Unfortunately, this leaves many no-income families. It is dishonest to continue to deny that in a world of limited employment, the rise of the two-income family has nothing to do with the rise of the number of no-income families. Two-incomes-with-children-in-child care may be an acceptable life style choice for New York feminists and their compliant partners but is arrant nonsense when applied to urban slums and village life in much of the rest of the world.
The Draft Document reaches the height of absurdity when it intones that opportunities for small farmers and other agricultural, forestry, and fishery workers should be promoted by promoting research and development “taking particular advantage of women’s knowledge…!” Putting in place mandatory use of a new largely ephemeral Western feminist epistemology is the last straw.
Female individual, not families, focus of poverty relief
In answer to the question “Why a Social Summit?” and under the heading “Productive employment is decreasing,” it is decried that “Worldwide, about 40 percent of rural women work without wages on their families’ farms.” The plan is to give these women an independent income. They are to be moved into agro-processing, and the babies and toddlers into government provided child care. Ultimately, one fears, it will mean a further movement of rural women and their peasant or small-landowning husbands and fathers into near-saturated agricultural commodity markets where, losing their freedom and much of their dignity, they become cheap, movable labor for the big transnational firms that control those markets.
And so at Copenhagen, governments will be manipulated into promoting financial independence for women through affirmative action favoring employment of women over men and through provision of child care so as to “promote full participation of urban and rural women in social, economic and political life, including in the formulation and implementation of public policies” (Commitment 5(a).
All of this, we may need to be reminded, is absurdly irrelevant to the one billion people living in abject poverty, to the 120 million people officially unemployed. It is one of the great sleights-of-hand of the century that New York feminists have been able to disguise their own power grab as a genuine program of assistance for poor women.
Conclusion
To sum up, the most significant factor in the social engineering project is the crusade to make women financially independent. The isolated, individualistic female, rather than the family unit, is to be the focus of poverty and unemployment relief. It seems poor unemployed fathers and sons aren’t deserving enough.
Individual incomes and resources for women are to be given priority over family incomes and resources. This represents a radical shift from non-discriminatory access regarding employment and resource distribution to engineered outcomes.
Same totalitarian road: different ‘ditty’
It seems ironic that a world just emerged from massive human rights tolls and horrific economic and social miseries inflicted by the enforcing of one ideology, should be preparing to plunge into enforcement of another ideology. Communism and Western-based feminism have a great deal in common. Perhaps the most significant common factor is the readiness to employ force. Enforced redistribution of jobs and resources according to class or according to gender…what’s the difference? It is the same simplistic formula of all revolutions: confiscate from one lot and give to another lot. The oppressed become the oppressors. High-sounding rhetoric, whether communist or feminist, should not mask the fact that the world is set to march down the same totalitarian road — enforcement and government control of even the minutiae of daily living. The same road, but to slightly different ditties. Instead of “Down with the bourgeoisie!” it’s “Down with male power, down with the family, down with patriarchy, down with tradition!” It is significant that this nonsense has penetrated the highest echelons of the United Nations. The Secretary General of ICPD, Nafis Sadik, summed up the Cairo Conference like this: “…deletion of the word ‘traditional’ from the Programme of Action was good. I myself felt that the word ‘tradition’ had to go. Tradition is used always to put down women.”
Developing countries ripe for revolt on migration
Finally, consideration is needed of one last aspect of this international heist being attempted (and likely to be pulled off to a substantial degree at Copenhagen and completed at Beijing}. It concerns the developing countries. Pressures are building up there to be given increased migration quotas to the developed countries. Yet the Copenhagen text is still stuck on “facilitating return of migrants” 57(a), and on implementing “policies that address the root causes of movements of refugees and displaced persons” {70(f).
There is a disturbing deafness to the real urgency with which those root causes must be addressed. The truth is that the root causes such as civil war, corrupt systems of justice, incompetent governments, and a crying need for massive rapid right-now development (as opposed to future development), cannot be addressed quickly enough to obliterate the demand for immediate expansion of migration opportunities.
The developing countries are ripe for revolt on this one. For fifty years, the developing countries have gone cap-in-hand to the United Nations and said “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir” to whatever plans and conditions were devised for their aid by the industrialized countries via UN instruments like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
At a recent IMF meeting in Madrid, the developing countries rejected the 50 percent reduction of the Special Drawing Rights arrangement for financing loans proposed by the GJ countries. This rejection amounted to a revolt which observers described as “unprecedented.”
But anyone who was at the Cairo International Conference on Population and Development would have known that the developing countries’ revolt in Madrid was not entirely unprecedented. Indeed, it could be said to have been foreshadowed in the acrimonious debate at Cairo over family migration.
The most disturbing episode of’ the Cairo Conference was the session where the developing countries erupted in angry rejection of new “compromise wording” on family reunification. Their vitriolic plainspeaking was all the more startling, coming as it did at the end of a whole week of cordial, smoothly spoken diplomacy, and obliging “compromise in the spirit of consensus.” The developing countries rejected the compromise language crafted by Australia, New Zealand, European Union, United States, and Canada to downgrade family reunification from being a human right to being merely a matter “of vital importance.”
There was great anger as thirty-eight delegations spoke out against this withdrawal of the right of family reunification. One delegate said, “Mr. Chairman, there are double standards in this room,” Another began a tirade with “All the week, Mr. Chairman, we have gone along with you on reproductive rights, on sexual rights…” and ended with “We try not to feel bitter about it,” The Dominican Republic added very bitterly, “This is not consensus — this is bending. Developing countries deserve not to do so much bending. Thank you, your honor!” (with a mock obsequious bow towards the Chair).
After many other interventions from delegations expressing regret, sadness, frustration, unhappiness, and disappointment, the chair intervened. “I feel rather saddened. The common ground has created a lot of anguish…the world division is getting stronger on migration,” he said. The chair then tried to close the session but Benin persisted. “The overwhelming majority in this room feel frustration? Benin appealed to the chairman to get this point to the press and to the plenary, insisting that a human right had been violated.
I recount all this because it provides a reminder that the North’s current preoccupation with westernized feminist ideals is not necessarily shared by the South.
The Cairo consensus was seriously threatened and it took Fred Sai and Friends of the Chairman the final two days of frantic negotiation to buy off the developing countries with a promise of an international conference on migration in the very near future.
This promise appears to have been forgotten. Certainly the conveners of the Social Summit appear to have forgotten.
An alliance between Islamic and developing countries?
The Social Summit has made a mistake in ignoring the need to loosen up migration barriers; this was the key concern of developing countries as angrily expressed at Cairo. It is as though they hadn’t spoken. The migration issue nearly overturned the Cairo consensus. It could overturn Copenhagen, It may be forced to a vote — a two-thirds majority is required for formal adoption of the Declaration and Programme of Action. Such a majority would be impossible if poor countries of the South, rebelling against tightening migration barriers to the North, joined forces with Islamic countries who are still extremely nervous about the New York-formed feminist agenda. It was clear from the number of careful reservations made in the final plenary session at Cairo that the Islamic countries mistrust the reliability or perhaps the durability of the chapeau to the Cairo Document which confirmed each country’s sovereignty in interpreting the document according to the religious, ethical, and cultural values of its people. There is a similar chapeau applying to the Copenhagen Document (22).
Perhaps Islamic mistrust of such chapeaux is not unreasonable. If radical feminists are successful in recasting some of their more errantly foolish dogmas as human rights material, then the vastly different chapeau adopted at the Vienna Conference will come into play. The Vienna chapeau refused to allow religious or cultural differences to excuse human rights abuse. This is fine and fitting when applied to genuine human rights, but cause for worry if it is to be applied to the flimsy Western feminist constructs of pseudo-human rights.
Sustainable development too slow
Another wild card with potential for serious disagreement in Copenhagen is the North/South mismatch of primary concerns involving the right to development. Developed countries at Cairo openly questioned the validity of “the right to development as a universal and inalienable right and an integral part of fundamental human rights.” They insisted that the right to development be hedged about with strict requirements of sustainability. Chairman Fred Sai supported the North in this, saying that the world never wanted to see unsustainable development ever again. But as the North’s prosperous ecologists continue to argue for increasingly expensive and unrealizable eco-utopian ideals of what is to be deemed sustainable development, the developing world is understandably becoming somewhat impatient, perhaps even disaffected with the painstakingly slow sustainable development agenda.
As long as the North continues to ‘ enjoy unrestrained conspicuous consumption of the fruits of 200 years of unsustainable development, it is not hard to see why the South is bucking. While both the Cairo and Copenhagen documents reaffirm the right to development, one wonders just how much money, if any, will be available via Copenhagen for practical immediate implementation of this purely theoretical right. There was zilch from Cairo.
In the meantime, no doubt, we shall see more spirited spuming of the North’s not always wise or altruistic “charity,” as the South wrestles with debt repayment while infrastructures disintegrate and hospitals, health centers, schools, and universities run further downhill. The South is not going to be fobbed off much longer with overgenerous container loads of contraceptives. Official Development Assistance (ODA) is shrinking, and migration barriers are tightening. But complex world power plays promise radical new alignments, as Asian economic confidence, military capability and cultural arrogance rises and North American and European influence declines, While the old order passes and the new order looms, the poorer countries, in the throes of being structurally adjusted to death, are awakening to just how little they have to lose.
In the coming battle against an international totalitarian feminism backed by the UN bureaucracy, it may be that the Islamic countries and the poor countries of the South will be our best hope.
Rita Joseph is a well-known Australian journalist and public policy analyst.
