This week marks the 100th anniversary of Willy Brandt’s birth.
Born December 18, 1913, on the cusp of World War I, Brandt lived to see the fall of the Berlin Wall before his death in 1992. He left a legacy of seeking to steer his twentieth-century world away from war and division and that still has the potential—as was his ardent hope—to define the twenty-first century as a time of response to global poverty and injustice.
In Germany, Brandt continues to be celebrated as the Social Democratic battler against Nazi totalitarianism, the courageous mayor of a divided Berlin, the chancellor who began a process of East-West reconciliation that anticipated the day when “what belongs together will grow together” and the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for dialing down the tensions of the Cold War.
But another lasting legacy of Willy Brandt that must never be forgotten—in Europe or internationally—is that of the Brandt Reports. The product of an Independent Commission on International Development initially chaired by Brandt in the late 1970s and early 1980s, those reports challenged world leaders to think anew about the underdevelopment and neglect of the Global South.
The Brandt Reports considered inequality on a global scale, and argued that it threatened the future stability of the planet. Radical in their analysis and vision, the pair of reports—North-South (1980) and Common Crisis (1983)—sought to address the long-term challenges of what Brandt described as “a world in which poverty and hunger still prevail in many huge regions; in which resources are squandered without consideration of their renewal; in which more armaments are made and sold than ever before; and where a destructive capacity has been accumulated to blow up our planet several times over.”
A 2002 report from the Brandt 21 Forum noted, “The Brandt Commission made a set of bold recommendations to change all that. In a sweeping series of measures addressed to the global public, governments, and international agencies, the Brandt Reports called for a full-scale restructuring of the global economy, along with a new approach to the problems of development, including an emergency program to end poverty in developing nations.”
The grand vision, celebrated and embraced by some but certainly not all countries, remains unrealized.
The grip of poverty and hunger has not been released. The chasm of inequality is still exceptionally wide. Economic and environmental injustice continue to create crises.
Yet, the understandings that Brandt and his colleagues helped to develop remain influential.
And a new generation of leaders seeks to open a serious discussion about global poverty—and the possible responses to it.
Congressman Keith Ellison, D-Minnesota, has for many years urged the United States to embrace the concept of a “Global Marshall Plan”—based on the principles of post–World War II international development programs. Earlier this month, Ellison asked Congress to resolve that
1. The elimination of poverty and hunger should remain key foreign and domestic policy goals for the United States;
2. A Global Marshall Plan holds the potential to transform development assistance in a manner that would significantly reduce poverty; and
3. The President should implement a Global Marshall Plan to increase United States assistance towards the elimination of poverty.
That’s a proposal that is equal in its ambition and optimism—especially in a time of divided government that has tended towards austerity economics.
But it is right to aim high. And to recall the ambition and optimism of the Brandt Reports, and of the former German chancellor who declared,
A new century nears, and with it the prospects of a new civilization.
Could we not begin to lay the basis for that new community with reasonable relations among all people and nations, and to build a world in which sharing, justice, freedom and peace might prevail?
