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Rights or Economic Growth



The following artilce ran in the New York Times on 3/1/96

=========================
DO RIGHTS OR ECONOMIC GROWTH COME FIRST? ASIA 
AND EUROPE CLASH

The New York Time
3/1/96
By SETH MYDANS

BANGKOK, Thailand, Feb. 29, 1996 -- "I can think of at least 10 issues to 
seriously
embarrass the Europeans," the Indonesian Foreign Minister, Ali Alatas, said as
the leaders of 25 Asian and European nations converged here for a meeting on
trade and economics that opens on Friday.
Those pugnacious words highlighted a political culture clash between East and
West that has led to weeks of wrangling over the meeting's agenda, with some
Asian officials saying the Europeans only want to preach to them.

The bone of contention is human rights and its role in economic development --
and its relevance to the two-day conference.

Western governments argue that questions like labor standards, the environment
and political freedoms are inseparable form economic shop talk, while many of 
their host nations insist that there is an "Asian way that puts group welfare 
and
rapid development first.

The Straits Times in Singapore, often a standard bearer in this debate, said 
recently: "Should certain civil and political liberties be put on hold while 
collective
economic and social interests are advanced? Do you give a starving man a loaf of
bread or a milk crate to vent his spleen on the passing world?"

The contrary view came from Amnesty International this week in a statement that
said, "Any dialogue which does not include a recognition that the protection of
civil and political rights is complementary to sustained economic growth and
development would be a hollow one."

In the interests of harmony, and in their own economic interests in this fast-
growing region, the Europeans have agreed to keep these delicate issues off the
loosely structured agenda of the conference. Instead, the participants are 
expected simply to reaffirm their commitment to the United Nations Charter
and the Convention on Human Rights.

Tough questions may be brought up in private, but officially, it appears, there
will be little talk of child labor, omen's rights, deforestation, pollution, 
intellectual property rights, a free press or civil liberties.

The differences are more than philosophical. As Southeast Asian countries race
to develop, their societies are undergoing the stresses of rapid change and
the political challenges that those stresses create.

Alex Magno, a political scientist at the University of the Philippines, said it 
was not 
greed or hard-headedness or even an "Asian way" that propels leaders here to 
avoid discussions of human rights. Rather, he said, these leaders re the 
prisoners
of their own success and cannot dally in their push for rapid development.

"Most of the East Asian governments are in what you might call the cult of 
growth,"
he said. "Economic growth has become the single most important source of
political legitimacy. So it is not some exotic Asian-ness that is in question 
here.
It is a thoroughly modern obsession with growth, which you might call the East
Asian culture of the 1990s."

Growth itself is creating new middle-class constituencies that demand 
performance
if their leaders are to stay in power, Mr. Magno said, and "growth produces
legitimacy."

If these still-developing countries accede to the demands of environmentalists, 
for
example, and install expensive pollution controls on new power plants, raising
the cost of electricity, the price could be not only economic but political as
well.

"The fastest-growing sector is the middle class," Mr. Magno said, "and that 
middle
class is not an Islamic or Buddhist or Catholic middle class. It is a middle 
class
that is intoxicated with growth, whose own personal fortunes depend on the
G.N.P. rate."

The "Western" and "Asian" points of view at the meeting are far from uniform.
The conference will include the leaders of the 15 nations of the European Union
and the 7 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, as well as of
China, Japan and South Korea.

There is a home-grown human rights lobby here that argues strenuously that
human welfare and the environment should not be sacrificed to economic
development.

On the eve of the meeting, many of these groups from around the region gathered
here this week for a noisy airing of precisely that contentions issues their 
leaders
seek to avoid.

One of the organizers of that meeting, Somchai Homlaor, a Thai who heads a
group called Forum Asia, rejected the notion that standards of human rights are
Western imports and said they go hand in hand with the economic growth that
is sought by government leaders.

"Actually they are the ones who are importing their development policies from
the West: consumerism, capitalism, investment, industrialization," he said in an
interview. "Human rights violations in their country are a byproduct of that
development: environmental problems, deforestation, the displacement of 
people, the gap between rich and poor."

The conference organizers made it clear that style will be as important as
substance at this initial meeting of the two economic blocks.

"What we shall be doing is stressing the things we have in common," said
Jacques Santer, president of the European Commission. "I want to avoid
all confrontation."

One of the commission's vice presidents, Leon Brittan, conceded that there
must be some flexibility on human rights, but he also said there are limits to
the cult of growth.

"For some countries the choice may be between child labor and child starvation,"
he told reporters. "But as they develop, they get to a point where it's 
reasonable
to say: you've got to stop now."