DISCOVERING SOLIDARITY

It took two world wars to get people to sit down and fix the world economic order. As Britain, America and Russia struggled to overcome Hitler in the early 1940s, they faced the awful conclusion that they had created a mess in the peace arrangements in 1919 which had much to do with provoking the 1939-45 conflict. As a result and taking a deep breath, around 730 delegates from 44 countries met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, USA, in July 1944 with the aim of ‘creating an efficient foreign exchange system, preventing competitive devaluations of currencies, and promoting international economic growth’ (Google). Two of the instruments created for these goals are still with us: the International Monetary Fund and the Word Bank.

We celebrate the founding, a few years later, of the United Nations and the organs it created, like the World Health Organisation whose president was on our screens nearly every night of the Covid crisis, and rightly so. But the Bretton Woods agreements have had an unsung beneficial leaven effect on the living standards of vast numbers of citizens of the planet in the past eighty years. They did not solve all the problems – the poor are still poor and there are more of them – but they did prevent the sort of financial crisis and depression we experienced in the early 1930s.   

It is striking that 44 countries could do something like that. Coming to the present and our own corner of the globe in Southern Africa, we had, a month ago, an orchestrated renewal of our government’s mandate to rule. At first there was resigned acquiescence, but now it seems some governments in our region are reacting and possibly moving in a new direction – searching for ways in which to create and shape the solidarity to proclaim that if one country is failing, all are affected. States in the region have, only relatively recently, won their independence and there is an understandable bias towards building national ‘sovereignty’. It is an alluring concept but it carries a ‘best before’ date that is rapidly approaching. The sort of ‘give and take’ that marked the tough negotiations in New Hampshire eighty years ago, is earnestly needed.

The workers in the vineyard, in the gospel story, thought they could grab the land for themselves. They could not think beyond their noses. They rejected all the promptings of history and ended up losing everything. The 730 delegates at Bretton Woods dug deep into their individual and collective memory and came up with policies that, though far from perfect, brought peace and development to many for decades.

8 October 2023     Sunday 27A          Is 5:1-7       Ph 4:6-9      Mt 21:33-43