Abstract/background:
I’m a part time graduate student in IUPUI’s Communication program. I am focusing on Critical theory and rhetoric. In a rhetorical criticism class last semester, we had to write critiques using formal rhetorical methods to examine various artifacts (speeches, movies, songs, etc.). For one critique, I chose to examine the ideology present in a speech by Robert Zoeller (the current President of the World Bank
Robert Zoellick wants you to believe that the World Bank’s globalization strategy will the cure the world’s ills. The free trade package outlined in his April 2, 2008 address focuses on important issues from deals to moderate rising food prices to an initiative to ensure “responsible” extraction of a developing countries natural resources. It is true the ideology of globalization and its antithesis, protectionism, have complex impacts on a developing country and the world around it. However the basic components must be summarized into conversation if we are to understand the impact Western consumption has on the rest of the world. That being said, protectionism must be understood as an opposing ideology to the dominant ideology of globalization. Where globalization proponents favor opening the economies and natural resources of the developing world to loosely monitored and control private investment, the protectionist favors more traditional approaches to private development in the form of government subsidies, tariffs, and when needed, direct government intervention. Protectionism is designed with the populace in mind while the current incarnation of globalization favors the private entity first and treats the protection of the citizen as a side-benefit. In this critique, I will how identify how Mr. Zoellick, current president of the World Bank, attempts to redefine and negate the ideology of protectionism to maintain a dominant globalization ideology. First, I will explain the ideological rhetorical method. Next, I will discuss the rhetor and the rhetorical situation. Then, I will examine how the artifact articulates its ideology. Finally, I will elaborate on the rhetorical mechanisms used by the artifact to promote the ideology.
Dominant ideologies inherently attempt to obscure opposing positions. This natural act of self preservation is demonstrated in a dominant ideology’s attempt to ignore, trivialize, or re-define other challenging ideologies. Foss states that this approach of marginalizing or ignoring opposing view points, referred to as hegemony, “provides a sense that things are the way they have to be as it asserts its meanings are the real, natural ones.” Ideologies become dominant when they consistently and effectively invalidate opposing un-natural thought.
Rhetors use linguistic units, known as ideographs, to influence an audience’s understanding of a dominant or obscured ideology. The ideograph functions as a “forceful signifier of a political ideology” that is used to re-enforce a set of beliefs (Delgado). Ideographs enable an audience to easily identify with an ideology, either deliberately or unconsciously.
After describing the ideological method above, I will discuss some background on the rhetor Robert Zoellick, current President of the World Bank Group, and the rhetorical situation around his remarks on April 2, 2008. Mr. Zoellick biography, posted on the World Bank’s web page, lists a history of junior and senior level U.S. roles at the U.S. Treasury department and the State Department before moving on to help architect and influence the World Trade Organization (WTO) for U.S. interests. Before accepting the position as Chief Executive of the World Bank, Mr. Zoellick briefly served as chairman for various board of directors for Goldman Sachs Group from 2006-2007.
Mr. Zoellick speaks to an audience at the Center for Global Development ahead of the Spring 2008 meetings between the World Bank Group and its sister organization the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In these meetings he will call for reviving negotiations with the developing world and detail the organizations next offer to the developing world in exchange for de-regulating their markets for private investment. His background and audience demonstrate a preference from the U.S. public and private sector while technically required to represent the interests of over 160 countries in the world.
It is important to understand the rhetor and the rhetorical situation listed above to realize the influences on the nature of the artifact, the first step of the ideological method. The goals and values exemplify the nature of Mr. Zoellick’s beliefs and are defined in his April 2008 speech. Application of the method will illuminate how Zoellick attempts to re-define and negate the opposing ideology of protectionism.
Nature of the ideology
Goals
Mr. Zoellick communicates five goals in his speech: a global food policy, re-starting the Doha negotiations, a new transparency initiative aimed at monitoring mining, and an equity investment plan for Africa. Of these goals, global food policy and a new mining transparency initiative demonstrate Zoellick’s hegemonic attempt to reshape the ideology of protectionism into his dominant ideology of neo-liberal fair trade (i.e. globalization).
Zoellick cites recent statistics around the increased price of food and appropriately links them to a rising death toll related to malnutrition. He invokes the New Deal, as an ideograph of an earlier Keynesian domestic ideology focused on government programs and aide directly intended to assist people. His goal of a New Deal for Global Food Policy has a number of redeeming qualities endorsed by many ideologies. Fighting malnutrition, improved food delivery systems, addressing the marginalization of women in the system, and monetary assistance are all cited as goals of Zoellick’s New Deal. The opposing protectionist ideology shares many these goals, but disagrees with the implementation strategies. Zoellick calls for immediate investment into “agribusiness operations in Africa” and for the world to leverage the experience of “Brazil and most of all, the private sector.” His ideology’s goals aim to lean heavily on large agribusinesses at the expense of the smaller scale, usually poor, farmers. Zoellick packages this relatively small concentration of power in the agribusiness forces with an as of unyet claimed $500 million investment from the Unites States, the European Union, Japan, and others. Zoellick claims this phantom humanitarian aide and more influential of act privatization will manipulate food prices to more affordable levels for the world’s poor. The marginalized ideology of protectionism would favor subsidies and other forms of government intervention implemented in the domestic U.S. Zoellick provides an alternative approach to realizing an affordable cost of food (i.e. private investment in the developing world’s natural resources). He employs a strategy to juxstapose the goals of his ideology with the an ideology he wishes to suppress.
The second goal of Robert Zoellick and his ideology of unrestricted global trade is the promotion of the World Bank’s new regulatory initiative. Like the New Deal for Global Food Policy, it shares the same goals of the protectionist ideology by promising economic respect and sustainability in a developing country with valuable natural resources. Like his Global Food Policy it still favors a privileged few. Mr. Zoellick describes the new initiative as aimed at transparent economic compensation for a developing nations resources and open monitoring of sustainability practices to ensure the future of those resources. This goal, launched by Tony Blair in 2001, seeks to “strengthen citizens confidence in their governments as fiduciaries for a commonwealth.” The goals are admirable and are shared by the negated protectionist ideology. However, the protectionist would most likely not create a new mining and extraction oversight body that evolved into a “coalition of governments, the World Bank, oil, gas, and mining companies, industry bodies, investors, and civil society organizations.” A developing government possessing a protectionist ideology would intervene and assume ownership of the resource to hopefully ensure its people directly benefit from its natural resources. Like Zoellick’s New Deal for Global Food Policy, this new mining transparency initiative claims to possess the same ideals of protecting the health and well being of the developing world as the ideology it seeks to re-define and negate.
On the surface, Zoellick’s goals appear to be genuine. Only the application of proposed his policies will determine how much he respects an ideology in conflict with his own. Perhaps these goals, centered in an American ideology of globalization, signal a shift away from favored Western consumption in favor of equality for producers in the developing world. Or, perhaps his intentions to extend a New Deal to foster relations with the developing world are more a reaction to a decreased hegemony of the United States (a phenomena he discusses early in his speech). Regardless, the goals of Zoellick’s ideology, as demonstrated in his recent remarks, indicate continued favoritism toward Wall Street obscured by the adopted goal of his opposing ideology.
Values
A core value of Mr. Zoellick’s ideology includes the belief that if the countries of the world were open to private investment, the citizens of those countries would experience lower food costs and an increase in accumulated wealth. Zoellick’s speech does not indicate that the market will somehow accommodate and assist the developing world’s food and economic woes. Instead, he offers humanitarian food aide and the intervention of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the sister organization of the World Bank. In an ironic twist, these offers in Zoellick’s speech represent the basic ideals of the protectionist ideology as opposed to the un-regulated free trade ideology globalization proponents espouse. Calls for more than $500 million dollars in food aide and cash disbursements to farmers represent an intervention into the food markets of the developing countries.
This conflict lends insight into Mr. Zoellick’s ideology. This interevention in the market in the name of un-regulated free trade indicates Zoellick’s disregard for true free markets so long as the World Bank facilitates the privatization of valuable natural resources in the developing world. Again, the interest in protecting the well-being of the developing world could be genuine or a response to a decreasing U.S. hegemony. Unfortunately, past performance indicates the globalization ideology’s value of privatization and the concentration of wealth it creates is the core value of Robert Zoellick’s ideology.
Strategies to promote the ideology
Now that I have articulated Mr. Zoellick’s ideology through its goals and values, I will leverage Foss and identify certain mechanisms used to “advocate for and defend the ideology.” The size of the audience and the nature of the ideology serve as instruments to defend Zoellick’s ideology. All countries, developed to Third World, serve as the audience for this ideology.
However the richest countries in the world, usually represented as the Group of 20 (G20), are influential audience members attributed less for their population size and more for their economic might. These countries pool their resources to present the developing world half million dollar food aide packages and thirty billion dollar economic growth packages for Africa who can focus only on fighting for human basic battles like malnutrition. The size of the audience’s coffers ensure the ideology of un-checked free trade is the only choice, thereby negating other ideologies.
Another defense of Zoellick’s ideology is its core nature. Globalized free trade is based on the fundamental idea that everyone is granted the freedom to seek wealth. While at this basic level, this appears to be a natural set of beliefs all purveyors of democracy and patriotism endorse. Globalization uses patriotism to blur the lines of what is fair and reasonable. It extends this notion of freedom above all else to the economic world that it will lead to equality. Some would argue that freedom and equality are opposing forces in our social structure. The economic size of Robert Zoellick’s audience and his ideology’s nature to not differentiate between freedom and equality perpetuate globalization as a dominant ideology.
Conclusion
This critique focused on how Robert Zoellick, President of the World Bank, attempted to redfine and negate the ideology of protectionism to maintain a dominant globalization ideology. I explained the ideological rhetorical method before discussing the rhetor and the rhetorical situation. Then, I applied the ideological method by examining first, how certain aspects of the ideology present in the speech redefined its opposing ideology, then two mechanisms used to promote his neo-liberal economic policy ideology.
Applying the ideological method to this artifact falters when the determining if the artifact demonstrates a factual or coherent message. This question is particualry important when examining this artifact as the World Bank is attempting to redefine a negated ideology by adopting its goals. When attempts are made to reshape our reality, we must ask ourselves if this re-positioning is factual and logical before considering adoption.
For many supporters and opponents, globalization is the next natural step in the evolution of a mercantile ideology dating back thousands of years. Though, the case could be made that an element of fairness has all but vanished in this world economy. It is only natural that the richest, most developed countries in the world naturally seek to maintain that status. However, if we value our culture as humane and fair, we must rise above and be willing to sacrifice cheaper prices in the name of global fairness. Private entities cannot be allowed to infiltrate a country in economic or political upheaval, buy up resources, and use Caveat Venditor as a defense for fleecing a country of its natural resources. Consumers must influence the private sector and demand fairness or take their money elsewhere.
