IN one of my critiques of the Stabroek columns of Guyanese expatriate, Dr. Bertrand Ramcharan, I argued that he is not familiar with non-Western scholarship which is required reading to understand the world we live in, and to comprehend the huge difference in success between nation-states.

I remember, in another column, I remarked that the standard academic journal that International Relations (IR) scholars in the West use to the point of obsession is “Foreign Affairs.” This is a journal that comes close to high-level sophisticated propaganda. It is a journal owned by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

The CFR consists mostly of the super-rich corporate leaders in the US, former presidents and former Secretaries of State. The scholars who write in Foreign Affairs do not recognise concepts like imperialism, neocolonialism, Western hegemony, among others.

These are concepts that Third World scholars employ when they look at relations between the Global South and the West. Almost a 100 percent of the academics that contribute to Foreign Affairs take the position that the USA is the pivotal force in world affairs that preserves the global order.

I don’t think any IR professor in South Africa and the continent of Africa would subscribe to that theory. I taught IR classes at UG, and I used Foreign Affairs only once with Fareed Zakaria article. One can be harsh enough to say most of the essays in Foreign Affairs are a rehash of previous ones over the past 60 years.

Dr. Ramcharan is at it again last Saturday. I noticed he has changed his credentials to inform us that he once taught at Harvard. I don’t think people should be deterred by that appellation. Dr. Ramcharan is an apologist for Western interpretation of the world. Last Thursday he eulogized the 2012 book “Why Nations Fail.”

The book is old political jargon that posits a tight relation between open political institutions and economic growth. I went to UG in 1974, and since then political theorists have argued that there may be no law in political theory that connects open, democratically run institutions with economic growth.

Back then the case study that my professors cited was Singapore. Since its independence from Malaysia, Singapore has experienced over 40 years of authoritarian rule, in which elections and a free press were denied. Yet Singapore is an economic gem in the world and is considered more developed than some nations in Europe.

The authors of Why Nations Fail published their book before one of the most successful academic texts was published. To date, Thomas Piketty, “Capital in the 21^st Century” is the most successful text published by Harvard University.

Ramcharan should read it. If he did, he would see capitalism far from breeding democratic weeds can create enormous inequalities that threaten the very arguments for growth that Why Nations Fail postulates. Piketty with phenomenal statistics shows that since the 18^th century the gap between the rich and poor in Europe and the USA keeps widening.

We don’t have to emphasise Piketty when there is China. Has Ramcharan seen China recently? There can be no comparison between China and the United States. China is in a class by itself when it comes to everything that is modern.

You see the infrastructure in China and it makes huge parts of the US and Europe look like the Third World. I was told by several persons that Manhattan is a Third World ambience when compared to Shanghai and that John F. Kennedy airport is old stuff when compared to Beijing’s.

The rise of China now as a challenger to the US and Europe cannot be explained by the thesis of Why Nations Fail. You cannot extrapolate trends in the Western world hundreds of years ago that led to growth and stable institutions and project them onto other nations. The comparison of South Korea with North Korea is flawed. The south got enormous resource assistance from the US.

After the Second World War, the Marshall Plan of the US helped to build back Western Europe while the USSR which suffered the most damage was not given one cent for post-war rehabilitation.

Why Nations Fail is guilty of overlooking the role of imperialism in Africa when the book looks at the underdeveloped economy in Africa.

But this is the problem with Western scholars. They do not employ concepts that could lead to efficacious results in the study of why some nations falter and why some progress. Ramcharan is Guyanese and no doubt may know the Guyanese international economist, Dr. Maurice Odle. I would advise Ramcharan to read the recent autobiography of Odle before he pens another column in the Stabroek News.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.