ABSTRACT
A staple and familiar critique of international liberalism is that it has worsened the plight of the world’s poorest countries. Of course, trends are mixed. China, India, Brazil and others have made great strides forward in economic development and are catching up with the developed nations. In this sense, overall global inequality is diminishing. At the same time, the poorest states are falling even further behind. And the progress in combating poverty that has been made now stands on the precipice of serious reversal. The double whammy of the food crisis followed by the financial crisis has halted many of the improvements registered in developing states’ trade, investment, growth and social indicators in the early 2000s. Scepticism extends beyond the ubiquitous critique that economic globali-
zation is bad for development. Defence of the ‘development state’ model has come back into vogue. It is argued that the kinds of rights necessary for development – property rights, free information – can be best guaranteed other than through liberal democracy.1 A similar argument gaining profile is that development aid has not worked because donors have insisted too much on liberal politics while overlooking the corruption of external funding itself – exactly the opposite of what is required, it is suggested, for development.2
Assessments of European development policy admonish the European Union (EU) for a ‘non-reflective belief in democratic values … a new and subtle form of imperialism’, that has led to development becoming ‘a matter of power politics’.3
