Barbara Ward’s vision

In 1957, the economist and journalist Barbara Ward gave the first of the Aggrey-Fraser-Guggisberg Memorial Lectures at the University College of Ghana. Shortly after Kwame Nkrumah led the British colony of the Gold Coast towards self-government, he invited Ward to address the independent country’s first cohort of students.Ward was well acquainted with the local political landscape because she had spent the previous four years living in the Gold Coast, witnessing its political transformation. As the world’s eyes were set on Ghana, the first sub-Saharan colony to achieve independence from European rule, Ward was determined to provide her audience with the knowledge needed to govern their newly founded country. Her lectures, titledFive Ideas that Change the World, developed a world-historical narrative of the supposed human progress from nationalism to colonialism, industrialism, communism, and finally to internationalism, the highest point of political order. Ghana’s peaceful democratic transition showed that African colonies were ready to govern themselves, weakening European arguments about the need for prolonged imperial guidance. The country soon became a model for new African statehood based on postcolonial sovereignty, inspiring other colonies on the continent to join the decolonisation process, which culminated in the ‘Year of Africa’ in 1960. The charismatic Nkrumah, who ruled Ghana from 1957 to 1966, became an international player in Cold War diplomacy by promoting pan-Africanist visions of post-imperial unity. He wanted to show the world that Africans were no longer imperial subjects but important and influential members of the global political community. While Nkrumah was a vociferous opponent of colonialism, Ward uncritically appreciated the civilisational and technical legacies of empire. Yet in her lectures, she supported Nkrumah’s international political aspirations by suggesting that economic development, international cooperation, and even world peace were interrelated problems that warranted a planetary solution. Barbara Ward was a remarkable thinker, a visionary who imagined a ‘planetary’ political, economic and environmental justice based on both material and spiritual principles. She was an unusual figure in the Cold War political sphere, a charismatic public intellectual who advised world leaders and the United Nations at a time when women’s voices were often marginalised. She was among the first thinkers to argue that human prosperity, environmental sustainability and global justice were inseparable political questions. Her distinctive vision of planetary politics, grounded in ecological interdependence, moral responsibility and global cooperation, still offers insights into some of the most pressing challenges of the21st century. Ward’s diagnosis of Ghana’s predicament emerged from an intellectual trajectory that predated decolonisation itself. She was born in 1914 to a British Quaker-Catholic family that put a strong emphasis on education, encouraging her to attend a Frenchlycéein Paris and later Somerville College, Oxford, where she was among the first women to graduate in politics, philosophy and economics in 1935. She continued to lecture at Oxford and Cambridge, as well as in Catholic circles, until 1939, when she launched her journalistic career as a contributor toThe Economiston foreign affairs. ‘For 30 years, it has scarcely been possible to discuss development anywhere in the world without bringing in Barbara Ward’ During the war, Ward joined the Sword of the Spirit, then a British Catholic organisation that encouraged believers to support the democratic battle against totalitarianism. This experience, as well as her friendship with Arnold J Toynbee, Christopher Dawson and Jacques Maritain, persuaded her of the importance of religion – and especially Christianity – as the moral foundation of political and economic internationalism. Ward drew inspiration less from the doctrinal authority of the Catholic Church (which she frequently criticised as rigid and conservative) than from her own universalist interpretation of Christianity, which she regarded as a source of moral principles applicable to all humanity. Well beyond a personal creed, Ward’s Catholicism reflects a fundamental aspect of her political thought. After the Second World War, Ward was interested in the global challenges of economic growth and reconstruction. She travelled extensively in the United States, India, Europe and Africa, where in 1946 she prepared astudyof demography and migration in British Togoland. In 1950, she married the Australian civil servant Robert Jackson, and three years later the couple relocated to the Gold Coast, where Jackson was appointed chairman of the preparatory commission of the Volta Dam, one of the continent’s major economic-development projects. Ward’s bestselling books and prestigious public lectures made her a well-known figure, and she developed a public profile as a political commentator and advisor to world leaders, including Nkrumah, Adlai Stevenson, John F Kennedy, Robert McNamara and Lyndon B Johnson. By the late 1950s, she divided her time between Harvard, where she held a visiting professorship, and Ghana, where she continued to promote the Volta Dam project, sharing Nkrumah’s hope that it might foster Ghana’s economic independence. Later, she was appointed to a prestigious professorship in development economics at Columbia University in New York, and in the 1970s she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire and a life peer. Upon her death in 1981,TheWashingtonPostacknowledged her influence by stating that: ‘For30 years,it has scarcely been possible to discuss development anywhere in the world without bringing in Barbara Ward.’ A 1961 letter from Barbara Ward to John F Kennedy regarding Kwame Nkrumah. Courtesy theJFK Library Poverty was such a significant issue for Ward to tackle because it created global political unrest and undermined local societies’ potential to prosper. How could it be overcome? She was persuaded that only a revolution could help humanity undermine global inequality. The postwar era was, for her, a particularly promising time for radical change: ‘I suppose we are all aware of the fact that we live in the most catastrophically revolutionary age that men have ever faced.’ In the early 1960s, she identified ‘ten or twenty’ revolutions still underway. She singled out two important calls for equality: postcolonial self-determination, which led to ‘the new peoples’ claim to national equality with the older states’, and the revolution of economic development, which aimed to reduce global inequality. Following her friend Walt Rostow’s theory of modernisation, she explained that some countries (typically the European imperial powers) were ‘sensationally richer’ but others had ‘not yet’ realised a revolutionary transformation despite their ‘desire to do so’. The challenge of her era was to figure out how to make this revolution come true. One successful ‘revolution’ was the Marshall Plan for the development of Europe after the Second World War, which Ward praised as an example of international economic planning. She suggested that Europe and the US should apply a similar model and provide financial aid to promote local economic development in India. Historically, Europe and the US prospered from the continuous plunder of colonial capital and resources. Imperialism caused ‘not only a considerable degree of political immaturity and instability’ but ‘also a type of economic structure or layout which is unlikely to produce further growth of itself’. For Ward, these structural inequalities in the world economy prevented postcolonial countries from overcoming poverty ontheir own. Her proposals for the development of postcolonial societies expressed a paternalistic, hierarchical worldview Ward outlined various measures to end economic inequality on a planetary scale: training local expert