Bretton Woods Universalism

I greatly enjoyed reading Daisy Sibun’s excellent paper ("Can a leopard change its spots?") contrasting ILO’s Social Protection Floor with the World Bank’s Social Protection Flaw: namely the latter’s belief that “progressive universalism” is possible.

Nonetheless, I have one small semantic niggle. Her paper uses “universalism” and “universality” interchangeably. Yet the two terms mean, or should mean, slightly different things. Universalism is a theological doctrine that there are certain truths that are universal and that transcend the boundaries of religions, nations or cultures. So, for example, Christian universalism is the doctrine that all sinful and alienated human souls—because of divine love and mercy—will ultimately be reconciled to God. Hindu universalism conceives the whole world as a single family that deifies the one truth, and therefore accepts all forms of beliefs and dismisses labels of distinct religions which would imply a division of identity. And Unitarian universalism draws on a wide range of beliefs and practices from all major world religions and a variety of different theological sources.

Universality, on the other hand, implies the global application of genuinely universal constructs, such as human rights or international law. As its basis, the Preamble of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins: “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world… [emphasis added]”. So it is this term, universality, that should properly be used in the context of social protection, deriving as it does from the recognition, in the same Universal Declaration, that “Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security”.

Which makes me wonder why the World Bank uses “universalism” instead? Perhaps it is a Freudian slip? If so, it might explain a lot. Over the course of many decades working in social protection, I have met and worked with a large number of World Bank experts. Almost without exception, they have been intelligent, committed, enlightened and charming individuals. Yet, collectively, they continue to propagate a distinctive, and distinctly unedifying, blueprint of social protection – see, for example, my earlier Book Review on their “Revisiting Targeting”. Perhaps the explanation for this dichotomy is that they are all in thrall to a belief that there is a single universal truth that underpins social protection, a fundamental reality from which there can be no deviation: Bretton Woods Universalism.

This fundamental truth that transcends national, religious and cultural contexts is one that relies on a holy trinity of conditionality, poverty-targeting and proxy means testing, the three classic features that exist coequally, coeternally and consubstantially in the Bank’s vision of social protection. Like the Holy Trinity, these represent a homoousion (“the same in essence”, from the Greek ὁμός, or homós, meaning "same" and οὐσία, or ousía, meaning "being" or "essence") that is promulgated globally and unswervingly by members of the creed. And because it is a fundamental truth, no contrary evidence can shake its foundations:

• The fact that conditionality can very rarely be shown to increase impact, and usually then only in highly nuanced circumstances; while at the same time being complex to apply, costly to implement and morally bankrupt to enforce.
• The reality that effective poverty-targeting is impossible (as Daisy’s paper explains), while at the same time it generates substantial problems of damaging social cohesion, creating perverse incentives, encouraging dishonesty, inciting patronage and stigmatizing beneficiaries.
• The clear evidence that proxy means testing is seriously flawed, both in terms of its design and its implementation, giving rise to levels of inaccuracy that are unacceptable in any rights-based society.

Really, now is the time that the World Bank needs to make the tectonic shift from blind faith in the illusion of “progressive universalism” to a genuine endorsement of its stated commitment to universality in access to social protection.