A little over five years ago the world leaders who had assembled at the United Nations for a Millennium Summit agreed on a Millennium Declaration that is truly an expression of what one could describe as a global social democratic consensus.

The declaration covers a lot of ground.  It begins with a statement of shared values – freedom, equality, solidarity, tolerance, respect for nature and shared responsibility.  In surprisingly clear and punchy prose, it formulates a set of goals covering peace and security, development and poverty eradication, environmental protection, human rights and governance, protecting refugees and other vulnerable groups, meeting the special needs of Africa and strengthening the United Nations. 

The Millennium Development Goals are a part of this commitment.  They have been articulated in terms of eight broad goals the most important of which is the first one of halving absolute poverty by 2015.  The other goals relate to universalising primary education, reducing infant and maternal mortality, combating AIDs, malaria and other diseases, promoting gender equality and environmental sustainability. To make all of this possible there is a crucial eighth goal that seeks changes in trade aid and debt policies to improve the ability of poor countries to reach these goals.

The goals contained in the declaration came from a series of big conferences that the UN organised in the nineties. This started with the Children’s Summit and the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio and culminated in the 2002 Monterrey and Johannesburg Summits on global finance and sustainable development respectively.

The nineties was a period when the world economy shifted decisively from planned to free markets and, less explicitly, to a broad consensus on capitalist development.  This was based on the perceived success of market-oriented development policies at the national level and the rapid expansion of international trade and market based private capital movements.

But free enterprise capitalism at the global level lacked something that it had at the national level –a political consensus on the need to protect those who could be left behind by market based growth. The US had its New Deal programmes. The welfare state or the social market economy was the European manifestation of this.  The Japanese and East Asian version rested more on a strong commitment for the public provision of education health and other related services.

The UN conferences were essentially an attempt to offer a similar social consensus at the global level.  They dealt with things like the environment and social protection that could fall by the wayside in the wave of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation that swept through the world economy.  A crucial part of the consensus was the recognition of the need for international cooperation to address these matters and. as part of this, the obligation to make it easier for poor countries to give priority to social and environmental spending.   

The UN Conferences were a massive exercise in opinion formation.  But there was an attention deficit disorder at the global level, particularly in the richer countries who were required to assist poor countries to attain the noble goals agreed in the summits.

This is where the Millennium Development Goals have helped most.  They are individually not new.  They were negotiated and agreed in earlier conferences.  What was new was the aggregation of diverse goals in one framework and the clear connection between these development goals and the other goals on peace and security, human rights and so on.  In essence the Millennium Declaration lays down an agreed minimum programme for social democracy on a global scale, though some prominent participants in the summit would not like this terminology! 

We in India should understand well the politics of this exercise.  In some ways we saw this in the early seventies with the Garibi Hatao (Eradicate Poverty) slogan, the Minimum Needs Programme and the Twenty-Point Programme.  They started as part a leftward shift in policy. But soon they became a token of the political commitment to a fairer distribution of gains from the faster growth that economic liberalisation made possible.  This focus on targeted anti-poverty and social infrastructure programmes has continued though the names on the bottles in which this welfare wine is poured changes with the needs of political marketing.

But the MDGs and their counterpart goals at the national level should not be treated simply as sops to the poor.  They must become part of a broader growth strategy.  We now know the importance of human resource development for growth- many of the goals are focussed on that.  We should also recognise that any serious dent in absolute poverty will bring many new consumers into the economy and thus fuel growth.

Looking beyond short term politics is particularly important for the MDGs that deal with environmental sustainability.  The goals here were supplemented by what came from the Johannesburg summit.  In essence these sustainability goals connect with the social agenda in two ways.  First,  they deal with certain dimensions of deprivation, like lack of access to safe water and sanitation, which connect directly with the social agenda.  Second, they assert that sustained reductions in poverty, particularly in rural areas cannot come without a better use of soil, water and biotic resources. 

We cannot make the world safer for liberal market democracies unless we also make it better for the poor and the dispossessed. And we cannot make it better without addressing the pressing environmental problems that threaten our well being now and in the future.  That, in essence, is the social democratic message of the Millennium Declaration and the MDGs.