JULY/AUGUST 1996 · VOLUME 17 · NUMBERS 7 & 8

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B O O K    N O T E S

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It is the fact of the African nations' ballooning foreign debt -- as in other regions of the world -- that has given the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) such enormous influence over the countries' economic policy. Because donor countries and commercial lenders are generally unwilling to make loans to heavily indebted countries unless they first obtain loans from the Fund or the Bank, the indebted nations are at these international financial institutions' mercy.

The price the Bank and IMF extract for loans is adherence to structural adjustment programs, a policy package emphasizing deregulated economies, an export orientation, privatization and a minimal role for the state in the economy.

In Africa more clearly than anywhere else in the world, structural adjustment has been an abject failure. Yet although the Bank has made some concessions in theory to the need for small poverty alleviation in conjunction with structural adjustment programs, by and large the response of the Bank and IMF to the failure of structural adjustment has been a call for still more structural adjustment.

It is this unwillingness to revise economic theory in the face of overwhelming evidence of failure that confirms the legitimacy of labeling as "fundamentalist" the neoliberal ideology which underlies structural adjustment.

In The Market Tells Them So, John Mihevc dissects the structural adjustment program as applied to Africa, reviewing in detail the World Bank's changing rhetoric concerning structural adjustment, the Bank's response to criticism and the widespread misery inflicted on African people as a result of structural adjustment.

The book breaks little new ground in its analysis of structural adjustment, but it does provide a very good overview of the application of structural adjustment policies to the poorest continent -- one accessible to those new to the topic while still useful in comprehensiveness to those well-acquainted with the structural adjustment framework.

Mihevc's efforts to compare the World Bank's economic fundamentalism to religious fundamentalism, while interesting, are less successful. The most obvious shortcoming of this attempt is his failure to abstract the elements of religious fundamentalism from faiths other than Christianity.

The limitations of Mihevc's analysis in this area notwithstanding, the analogy to religious fundamentalism serves a useful purpose. It emphasizes the basic ideological, rather than empirical, foundation of World Bank doctrine. It also, as Mihevc notes, opens the possibility for moral, rather than merely technocratic, criticism of structural adjustment -- an important argument for this book, which is intended in part to encourage church-based criticism of structural adjustment policies.

Perhaps the strongest integrating force in Africa has been apartheid South Africa. Economically, it dominated regional trade and exerted a magnetic effect on men in neighboring countries who migrated southward to work in South African mines. Remittances from citizens working in South Africa became one of the largest sources of income for many southern African countries. Politically, opposition to the outrage of apartheid united post-colonial African countries.

With South African now finally freed from the shackles of apartheid, a critical question for the rest of the continent is: How will free South Africa relate to Africa? In a sign of the country's continental economic dominance, it is an accepted fact that this is largely a question for South Africa, not the rest of the African countries, to answer.

Contributor Robert Davies identifies three schools of thought about how South Africa might answer the query. The first is the "Africa is only of marginal importance paradigm." A second view calls for a return to pre-1970s relations. In its benign version, this view holds that South Africa can be the engine of growth for the continent and a gateway for investment. A more realpolitik version sees Africa as an important market and source of raw materials for South Africa. The third approach calls for a reconstruction of South African-African relations on solidaristic grounds.

Virtually all of the governing ANC's pronouncements fall into this third category, but it remains to be seen whether reality will match rhetoric.

One of the themes running through this volume is that the South African internal balance of power -- between various factions among white industrialists, democratic forces and other groups -- will likely determine the ultimate course of the African continent's most powerful nation with the rest of its countries.

As a collection of essays, South Africa: Within or Apart succeeds most at offering multiple perspectives and raising a range of issues; the absence of a single narrative prevents the book from providing a fully developed answers to the questions raised.

SLAPPs of course is not the name SLAPP filers attach to their suits; the label was coined by George Pring and Penelope Canan, the authors of the important SLAPPS: Getting Sued for Speaking Out. Whether brought in the guise of slander, libel, tortious interference with contract or other legal claim, SLAPPs are suits filed to punish citizens who speak out on public controversies.

Used most frequently in local disputes, Pring and Canan report examples of corporations filing SLAPPs against: a couple who reported a developer's failure to pay taxes on their housing development; a teacher who testified at town council hearings in opposition to an oil disposal site; a scientist who criticized the Austrian drug company Immuno AG for its animal testing policies in a letter to the editor of an academic journal; a local environmental group who filed a federal suit against a landfill company; and dozens of other cases.

Corporations rarely win SLAPPs in the courtroom, but they are often victorious in the real world. Even when the corporate filer loses, SLAPPs can inflict a severe punishment on the SLAPP targets for daring to challenge power, sapping their energy and resources in drawn-out court battles and issuing an implicit warning to other citizens: speak out at your own risk.

The message of SLAPPs "is unmistakable," write Pring and Canan: "There is a price to be paid for voicing one's views to the government. The price can be a multimillion-dollar personal lawsuit, which, even if successfully defended, can mean enormous expense, lost time, insecurity, risk, fear and all the other stresses of extended litigation."

Defining SLAPPs may be the most important contribution of the authors, the leading authorities on SLAPPs. Their insight was to place all SLAPPs in a single objective category, irrespective of whether a particular suit was filed as a slander action or a conspiracy, and without regard to the intent of the target in speaking out on a public matter.

The core of Pring and Canan's definition of a SLAPP is a suit directed against an individual for pursuit of U.S. First Amendment Petition Clause ("Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom ... to petition the Government for redress of grievance.") protected activities. To qualify as a SLAPP, a suit must primarily "involve communications made to influence a governmental action or outcome, which secondarily resulted in (a) a civil complaint or counterclaim (b) filed against nongovernmental individuals or organizations on (c) a substantive issue of some public interest or social significance."

This definitional move is critical. It suggests the objectionable element of SLAPPs -- the interference with citizens' right to speak out on matters of public interest and to seek to change government policy -- and structures the dispute as a First Amendment issue. That in turn allows judges to quickly dismiss the SLAPPs, without the fact-intensive scrutiny required of slander or business interference cases (Did he really call her a liar and a cheat, and if so, did he do so with malice, and if so, is she really a liar and a cheat?) -- a fact-intensive scrutiny that at the very least merits extended pre-trial discovery, and typically a full-blown trial.

Pring and Canan's definition suggests their proposed solutions to SLAPPs. First, judges should recognize SLAPPs for what they are, and quickly dismiss them. Second, SLAPP targets must define the suits as First Amendment issues, and they should look to file SLAPPback suits, alleging abuse of process. Some SLAPPbacks have led to verdicts running into the millions of dollars -- surely the best deterrent to SLAPP filing. Finally, the authors support anti-SLAPP legislation which statutorily establishes rapid review of SLAPP claims and shifts the burden of proof to the filer.