The Big Picture

Faculty-Authored Books Get a Read on a Complicated World

By Erik Esckilsen

The world may indeed feel, at times, like a global village -- thanks to border-transcending communications technology. As recent books by Champlain College faculty members illuminate, however, not all global villagers are good neighbors or enjoy equal access to good health.

In Piecing a Democratic Quilt? Organizations and Universal Norms (Kumarian Press, 2006), professor Scott Baker, who teaches in the International Business and Social Sciences programs, along with volunteering with a non governmental organization (NGO) assisting schools in Africa’s Niger Delta, offers an in-depth look at regional organizations around the world that are working -- some more diligently than others -- to foster democratic reforms in their member states.

A global health issue is the focus of Tim Brookes’s The End of Polio? Behind the Scenes of the Campaign to Vaccinate Every Child on the Planet (American Public Health Association, 2007). The professor and Professional Writing program director explores why, in an era of profound medical advances, a disease for which a vaccination has been available for decades persists in the developing world.

ALPHABET SOUP

People who follow current events with even a passing interest are likely familiar with the UN. But what about the EU, NATO, and OAS? Who are the people behind these abbreviations, and what roles do they play in the unfolding drama of global democracy? These questions and others formed the core of Baker’s research in writing, along with coauthor Edward R. McMahon, Piecing a Democratic Quilt?

Their work began with an observation: “an almost worldwide consensus,” Baker says, “that a democratic form of government is the preferred form.” What followed was a question: “How do you implement it, and how can regional organizations help or hinder that implementation of democracy?”

Piecing a Democratic Quilt? is broken down into an analysis of eight regional organizations, with each coauthor taking up a share for investigation. Baker’s beat was the European Union (EU), the Commonwealth of Nations, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). McMahon covered the Organization of American States (OAS), the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the Arab League, and the Organization of African Unity/African Union. Baker and McMahon collaborated closely on the theoretical underpinnings in the first two chapters as well as on the final two chapters, which compare and contrast the organizations.

After interviewing heads of the regional organizations and researching organizations’ initiatives, Baker and McMahon observed compelling strategies for democratic reform as well as challenges confounding the effort. One key finding concerns differences in how regional organizations promote democracy and, once it has taken hold, protect it from erosion. Baker points to the EU and the Commonwealth of Nations as demonstrating contrasting strengths and weaknesses. The EU includes the relatively wealthy, industrialized nations of Europe. The Commonwealth is a grouping of more than 50 nations scattered across the globe, geographically speaking, and linked by a shared British colonial past.

“The EU is the best at promoting democracy because they attach ‘carrots’ to membership,” Baker says, with carrots meaning trade incentives and benefits that stem from signing and abiding by the 15,000-page acquis communautaire -- a kind of “how to” document for democratic social, political, and economic relations. Although the EU is good at defining membership criteria, the organization discovered itself unprepared to address the question of what to do if a member state becomes less democratic, as appeared possible in Austria in 2000 with the emergence of ultra-right-wing politician Joerg Haider. “That paralyzed the EU for a little bit,” Baker says. “They didn’t know what to do.”

Professor Scott Baker with school children in the village of Bodo, Nigeria

The predominantly less-developed countries of the Commonwealth, owing to their diversity, “have to be very flexible on the promotion part,” Baker says. “And they’ve got some countries in their membership that are anything but democratic.” They rectify this problem by adopting clear protocols on how to deal with countries that backslide on democratic commitments. “What was most surprising,” Baker says, is that “here you have the most powerful, most wealthy EU, which is great at the front end of it, paralyzed by the back end of it. And then you have the most beleaguered, most diverse, poorest organization, the Commonwealth, which is absolutely fantastic on the back end.”

These varied approaches, Baker suggests, may imbue regional organizations with the potential to enhance the work that today we see being carried out, with limited success, by large nations acting on their own behalf -- such as the U.S. in Iraq -- and the large, centralized UN trying to monitor some 200 nations. Regional organizations possess the ability to resolve regional disputes more cooperatively -- and more insightfully. “If the UN or Washington or London wants to try to help promote democracy in a South American country, why not enlist the support of a regional organization, the OAS?” he adds. “Aren’t they the experts? Don’t they have a better grasp of what’s going on, what might work?”

The pitfalls of not adopting that approach are the stuff of dismal headlines and news reports. Piecing a Democratic Quilt? illuminates viable steps toward more hopeful outcomes -- while making sense of abbreviations that may one day reveal the secret code for a more peaceful world.

NOW YOU SEE IT…NOW YOU SEE IT

Coauthors Brookes (right) and Khan (left) with Dr. Abraham Mulugeta polio eradication team leader, in Peshawar, Pakistan

Tim Brookes had written books about public health before he traveled to Pakistan in November 2005 to report on polio eradication efforts there. Among his seven previous books are Behind the Mask: How the World Survived SARS (American Public Health Association, 2004) and A Warning Shot: Influenza and the 2004 Influenza Vaccine Shortage (American Public Health Association, 2004). What made The End of Polio? a unique endeavor was the prospect of witnessing and writing about a disease eradication program while it was under way. As Brookes recalls, at a conference in Washington, D.C., earlier that year, David Heymann, executive director of the communicable diseases program with the World Health Organization, told him that, if he acted quickly, he might have a chance to see the last case of polio in history. “The urgency was very interesting,” Brookes says. “It was also, in retrospect, very interesting that [Heymann] was confidently saying we could have the whole thing licked by next April. ‘You’d better hop in the field quick and see this thing in action because otherwise you won’t see it, and nobody will ever see it.’”

Although Brookes made the trip as soon as he could, he and coauthor Omar A. Khan did not witness the vanquishing of the last case of polio. They were not too late, though. Rather, public health officials such as Heymann had been overly optimistic. “Sadly, polio wasn’t eradicated by April ’06, and it’s still going on,” Brookes says. “What we’re discovering is that, as the number of cases gets smaller and smaller, the difficulty in stamping out those last few cases becomes exponentially higher.”

Some of the obstacles to complete eradication of polio in Pakistan are unique to that country, but Brookes sees a few patterns in the problems that bedevil health initiatives carried out on a global scale. For one thing, the perception of NGOs based in the developed world but working in the developing world is that NGO workers fail to understand, from a local perspective, the problems they’ve arrived to solve. For another, NGO postings tends to be temporary -- often contingent on funding -- reinforcing the image that aid workers may not be in the fight against disease for the long haul. What’s more, remote towns and villages where aid is to be administered are often inaccessible by roads. This is a particular complication for efforts to deliver vaccines, such as the polio vaccine, that are unstable at high temperatures, which occur in some of the world’s poorest, most disease-wracked regions.

Moved by the hardships he witnessed in rural Pakistan, where even sanitary water was a rare commodity, Brookes uses a metaphor to describe the challenge of global health initiatives. “I have this image,” he says, “of someone blowing out a plume of cigarette smoke. There’s all this energy that goes into it, and when it first comes out, it’s sort of a concentrated stream with one direction. Almost immediately, it begins to swirl and diffuse, and eventually it’s moving literally chaotically in a number of different directions, and the amount of the initial force behind it has been reduced to a minimum.”

While Brookes is describing the challenge of administering aid in a part of the world where aid is needed desperately, his and Baker’s books open lenses onto why such challenges persist. The image that comes into focus is surely complex, but, in Piecing a Democratic Quilt? and The End of Polio? facets are also fascinatingly clear.