Notes

1 ‘Draft Preliminary Outline of the World Report on Culture and Development’, UNESCO, CCD-III/94/Doc. 2, Paris, 7 Feb. 1994, p. 16.

2 It has been pointed out that the idea of growth not as an end in itself but as a performance test of development was put forward by economists as early as the 1950s: Paul Streeten et al., First Things First: Meeting Basic Human Needs in the Developing Countries, Oxford, 1982 edn.

3 François Perroux, A New Concept of Development, UNESCO, Paris, 1983, p. 2.

4 Ibid., p. 180.

5 ‘Growth normally means quantifiable measure of a society’s overall level of production or incomes such as GNP or GDP per capita, while development involves qualitative aspects of a society’s advancement such as under- and unemployment, income distribution pattern, housing situation, nutritional level, sanitary condition, etc.’: UNDP Selected Sectoral Reviews: Burma, December 1988, p. 333.

6 Human Development Report 1993, UNDP, Oxford, 1993, p. 1.

7 Towards a New Asia, a Report of the Commission for a New Asia, 1994. p. 39.

8 ‘The logic of an economy governed by solvency and by profit, subject to the increasing value attached to capital and to the power of those who command it is to reject as “non-economic” everything which cannot be immediately translated into quantities and prices in market terms’: Paul-Marc Henry (ed.), Poverty, Progress and Development, London, 1991, p.36.

9 Streeten et al., First Things First, p. 19.

10 Henry (ed.), Poverty, Progress and Development, p. 34.

11 The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, Chicago, 1993 edn, vol. 16, p. 874.

12 Edward Said comments that governments in general use culture as a means of promoting nationalism: ‘To launder the cultural past and repaint it in garish nationalist colors that irradiate the whole society is now so much a fact of contemporary life as to be considered natural’. See Edward Said, ‘Nationalism, Human Rights and Interpretation’ in Barbara Johnson (ed.), Freedom and Interpretation: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures, 1992, New York, 1993, p. 191.

13 Harry M. Scoble and Laurie S. Wiseberg (eds.), Access to Justice: Human Rights Struggles in South East Asia, London, 1985, p. 57.

14 See Clinton Rossiter’s introduction to Hamilton, Madison and Jay, The Federalist Papers, Chicago, 1961. I owe thanks to Lady Patricia Gore-Booth for the original quotation on which Rossiter presumably based his words: ‘Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary,’ from Reinhold Niebuhr’s foreword to his Children of Light and Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of its Traditional Defence, London, 1945.

15 ‘The best government is that which governs least’ are the words of a westerner, John L. O’sullivan, but more than a thousand years before O’sullivan was born it was already written in the Lao Tzu, a Chinese classic, that ‘the best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.’ The notion that ‘in a nation the people are the most important, the State is next and the rulers the least important’ is to be found not in the works of a modern Western political theorist but in that of Mencius.

16 Ehran Naraghi has shown in his memoirs, From Palace to Prison: Inside the Iranian Revolution, London, 1994, that a critical attitude towards the monarch, decentralization of power and division of responsibilities were part of oriental tradition. His fascinating conversations with Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi throw into relief the dangers of cultural and development policies divorced from the aspirations of the people.

17 Ronald D. Renard, ‘Minorities in Burmese History’, in K. M. de Silva et al. (eds.), Ethnic Conflict in Buddhist Societies: Sri Lanka, Thailand and Burma, London, 1988, p. 79.

18 Towards a New Asia, p. 40.

19 ‘Practically any human behaviour can be, and historically has been, rationalized as threatening to damage the security of the nation’: Scoble and Wiseberg (eds.), Access to Justice, p. 58.

20 Human Development Report 1993, p. 53.

21 Ibid., p. 5. In Access to Justice, Scoble and Wiseberg (eds.) point out the difference between fundamental reform that ‘involves a redistribution of power, a broadening of participation and influence in the making of authoritative decisions’ and contingent reform that ‘involves a sharing of the benefits of power holding, or the uses of power, in order to avoid the sharing of power itself’.