3 - Bono made Jesse Helms cry: Jubilee 2000 and the campaign for developing country debt relief

Summary

I opened the book with the story of the Jubilee 2000 campaign. To dramatize the issue of developing country debts, advocates surrounded two consecutive meetings of the world's advanced industrialized countries with human chains in the late 1990s. I retold the perhaps apocryphal story of the pop music star Bono's meeting with Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, the powerful, yet curmudgeonly chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Although Helms had famously derided foreign assistance as throwing money down ratholes, he was reportedly brought to tears by Bono's invocation of Christian faith as a reason for supporting debt relief. This chapter, through a case study of Jubilee 2000 and selected country responses to the debt relief campaign, seeks to explain how states may be moved to support “moral action.”

The Jubilee 2000 campaign – the campaign that sought to write off external debt of the world's poorest countries – provides an interesting case study. The case is a puzzle because some states acted in a manner that was contrary to their narrow material interests, apparently at the behest of a transnational advocacy group. This case is also interesting because debt negotiations are normally discussed in a rarefied world of central bankers and finance officials, multilateral bureaucrats, and private financiers, nearly all of whom are committed to minimizing moral hazard and are thus skeptical of writing off external debts.