When people ask why impoverished countries haven’t improved their condition recently, opinions sometimes break down along the following lines: some people point out that the terms of trade are stacked in favor of rich countries, which impedes their efforts to trade their way to increased prosperity, and others point out that many of those countries are very badly governed, which produces the same result. (Myself, I think that both claims are obviously true.) One of the reasons people insist on one or the other point is, I think, that the first implies that rich countries are at least partially responsible for the continued immiseration of poor countries, while the second seems to imply that it’s those countries’ own fault. (Not the fault of their entire population, obviously, since often those bad governments seize control in coups, but at any rate not something we can do anything about.)
I want to call this last assumption into question, and argue that the fact that poor countries often have disastrous governments is in part the result of an international legal framework that we have put in place, and that we are in a much better position than poor countries to change. But, to be clear at the outset: I am not trying to argue that this is wholly our fault, or anything. Obviously, it’s not. The nature of international legal arrangements is, I think, much more the doing of rich countries than of poor ones, but I have no idea how large these arrangements’ contribution to bad governance in poor countries is. I am just trying to argue that since it’s unlikely that these arrangements don’t contribute at all to bad governance in the developing world, changes in international legal principles could lessen the number of thugs who take over poor countries; and thus that when a poor country is taken over by a thug, that’s not something we have no responsibility whatsoever for, as if it were a random natural catastrophe.