Sun, desert, people, education, misery, AIDS/HIV, history, health, nature, food, wind, water, prostitution, cultures, poverty, death ... - but where exactly? When I think of this description, I recognize hundreds of countries, spreaded all over the continents. It is not just Africa, it is not just Middle East that we are witnessing these and many other realities.
But how can you define these countries? Are they really problematic? How can we apply the concepts of globalization and development and categorize something that is not in (most of us) our own cultural range and understanding?
All of these thoughts remind me of the great philosopical dilemma of I.Kant - the rose, as a subject, is it really a rose? How can we define beautiful and ugly, right or wrong?Who has the power to recognize them?!
I think the answer to this questions is hidden in every one of us. So everyone has it’s own truth about the world. But a lot of people are uninformed about countries in this situation just because they don’t have enough information and rely on the others peoples opinion. I wish good luck to all of you in spreading the knowledge you posses for one better world.
The concepts are really quite problematic… somehow I feel that the phrase “the developing world”, implies that these countries are on their way to become like us, and that we are already developed. Which is not true - the developed world is changing as fast and as thorough as the developing world.
My understanding of these things is that we cannot recognize the real problems if we are not living them. Essentially all aid and sympathy is useless unless we can’t see the root of the issues people around the world face.
A typical example of this is the financial aid that many African countries used to get, which resulted in nothing else than more hunger. Ironically, when you give someone money, you don’t actually help them, you plant the seeds of a begging society and a even more corrupt government.
Seeing these issues, many have realized that micro crediting is a better concept, but it too is not universally applicable. Therefore we need to analyze each case separately, instead of working out a “global strategy”. Globalism does not work for aid, it works for companies that cause the problems themselves.
As Daniel said, we start from the awareness that we are developed and that we have to help those that are less developed, to become developed. But the latters, looking at us from their eyes, could believe that they are those that are already developed. I believe that it’s not a matter of more or less development, but only a question of differences in culture, society structures, etc.
It therefore depends on what we consider for development.
Thank you for the comments!
I would like to make some remarks in the above-given context of globalization, development and help. We need to admit that we are on different historical stages when making comparison about Africa and Europe. This aspect cannot be just so easily ignored. Keeping this in mind, it may sound logical that development has actually different meanings for me and for you, just because of many and complex historical, cultural, political and economical connotations.
This all means that the only thing that matters is the will to communicate and the will to listen.
It’s not just the meaning of development, it’s about our own understanding of free market and freedom of expression. In Europe we allow companies to go out and do business with poorer countries. We regulate how they make business in the EU, what goods they sell and how they treat their workforce, but we barely do that outside the Union. There are certain declarations of corporate social responsibility, but those are mostly PR and are nearly impossible to prove as a hoax.
Meanwhile, our governments are trying to balance their policies between the free market principle that allows companies to keep up the economy and the multiple NGOs that have been beating the bell of emergency for the past few decade. We need to choose either of the sides that will be hit by that greasy black tar ball of reality. There are serious suspicions that many of the crisis in Africa, south-east Asia and the middle east are cased by corporate interests. Many of those come from EU companies. What do we do about that?
In the end the choice would be either to share our progress and lower our standard, or to keep the unsustainable advance of our own economy.
The process of development is verry dificult and individual for every country, but what is equal for all societies all over the world is the process of evolution . It doesn’t matter like an individuals or like society but on every stage of evolution we repeat almost the same existencial , historical or political behavior toward achivement of our goal.So it’s clear that this stages can be predicted and followed by societies which are not so developed like ours.