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Emporium Current Essays

Emporium Current Essays

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F iternational development assistance is heading for a crisis. For nearly 50 years, the
developed world has take aid for granted. It no longer docs. In real terms, it has started to
give less.

The expected "peace dividend" has not materialised and scepticism is rising, especially
for the poorest nations, most of which are in Africa.

Aid and solidarity are considered old fashioned concepts. Progress and development, it is
argued, must come from cooperation based on mutual interest and a business - like
approach.

"Aid scepticism is at its highest in the United, States. A conservative majority in

Congress promotes radical "winner' recipes and aid has be slashed. Slowly but surely,
American is getting out of the development business," Jos Jonckers, Principal
Administrator in the European Commission's Directorate for Asia said recently.

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Lacking domestic support, the Clinton administration seeks to "rescue" the country's aid
programme by seeking more cooperation with other donors - particularly the European
Union (EU), whose "solidarity horizons do not yet stop at its own borders even though
these horizons are shrinking."

For the EU, happy and prosperous neighbours suddenly seem more important that distant
friends in need, Mr. Jonckers

says.

Has the end of the Cold War marked the beginning of a Cold War, where international
solidarity is being dismantled together with the nuclear warheads'? Or could we be
experiencing the beginning of a fundamental reshaping of global solidarity and aid
between nations?

"Global aid has always involved a compromise with "affluent society", Mr. Jonckers
added. "People and nations are not normally disposed to give something away unless they
receive something in return. We must, therefore, start from the premise
that those providing aid do so as a result of a complex and evolving compromise between
altruism and self-interest.

In the colonial times, aid flows first emerged as a compromise between the expansionist
North and Christian society with it own colonising clergy. Decolonisation increased
insecurity in most former colonial powers. To safeguard their capital they had "invested"
in third overseas territories, they shaped aid to "buy" goodwill from the new rulers. This
"recomprcmiscd" aid from a colonial into a non-colonial from resulting in the secular,
institutionalised arrangement called bilateral aid."

Besides, during the Cold War, Western aid was used as a device to stop the developing
world from joining the Communist bloc, the aid system was more international and more
politicised. The next stage came with an end of the Cold War.

With it came the Western vision for stability peace and progress: a world of sovereign
nations, organised on the basis of democratic and capitalist market principles and
committed to respect for each other's territory and for basic human rights. Today,
capitalism has become the norm in most nation ~ states. Long time sceptics and
convinced opponents such as Vietnam has embraced it. Democracy has not yet achieved
the same coverage, but it is sailing forward under favourable conditions.

The effect has been a speedy erosion of the terms of the compromise on which aid thrived
for so long. Inn a rapidly globalising, multi-polar world, the old approaches seem
redundant. And the recompromising process is influenced by both self-interest an
altruism in the rich North, say Mr. Jonckers, but African and Asian development
economists and political scientists disagree with him on the later court.

"The sole guiding force behind Western thinking has always been its inherent selfishness,
before, during and after the Cold.War, according to Chief Mashood Abiola of Nigeria, a
major campaigner for the manding reparations from the West for the "Depiction of
resources of the colonised countries."

Meanwhile, three recompromising trends can be identified. The first involves restoring
altruism, if at all it ever existed. In some ways, altruism has given a boost to humanitarian
aid, speedy in the case of say, Bosnia, but ponderous in the case of Rwanda, Burundi,
Somalia, the so-called non-strategic regions. Thus, whenever Africa gets humanitarian
aid, it's largely at the cost of development assistance. 3'M)

Emporium Current Essays

Secondly, it has led to a decentralisation of aid -- with more assistance being channelled
through non-government organisations (NGOs) which at least on the surface, have an
uncompromiscd altrujstic profile. Thirdly, it has led to a "deconstruction" of development
aid along idealistic altruistic lines. "Women in developments," "child health",
environment and ... poverty alleviation" are examples of deconstructed labels around
which aid is being structured and justified.
The second recompromising strategy may be summed up in the expression, "Be
Businesslike," which approaches development co-operation more sceptically. Aid, it is
argued makes sense if it leads to real progress and development; the prevailing view is
that this is not happening. There is an obsession with trying to measure progress with the
help of business tools such as "output", "impact", "efficiency", "rates of return" and so
on. It has also resulted in the "discovery" of aid failures through the burgeoning aid
evaluation process.

The "businesslike strategy has gained further ground because of the failure of many
countries to achieve any real progress in recent decades. The conclusion is that altruistic
aid will seldom or never work, presumptuously assuming that there ever was any aid
without self interest. This is said to be the major cause of "aidfatigue." . .

Regionalism, the third major strategy, is linked to,» globalisation. Rooted in human -
survival psychology, this prompts nations in close proximity to from "strategic" coajjt-
kms. In the current era, development aid is one of the instruments used by affluent
regions to strengthen their position in a globalising environment. Itentails promoting open
regionalism elsewhere in the world and capitalising on it t i create linkages and
interactions which enhance their own inflik ne'e or hegemony.

These, then, have been the rationales behind aid. It is now possible to develop North-
South relations with a view to developing an egalitarian order? The answer is both "Yes"
and "No". Those developing countries which in the view of the West have "earned" their
right to a better future through markctisation and dcmocratisation in accordance with how
the North perceives it will doubtless be preferred over those who have failed "to be
enabled."

Marginalised because they cannot participate and perform in the system, the excluded are
the losers, a burden and a threat to the winners. The result is a growing disparity in the
society of nations. More than one-fourth of mankind finds itself unable to

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perform effectively and is marginalised. Unemployment, underemployment and poverty

arc growing And the costs of disparity will be monumental if the process is not checked
now, now tomorrow.

In the South, the pace of development must be left to the enabling forces of maturing
democracies and free markets, however, weal and imperfect they may still appear, weal
and imperfect, they may still appear. Indeed, every effort should- be made to help these
forces, become stranger. To achieve this cooperation will heed to move away from an
emphasis on engineering outputs to one which involves'"massaging" the system and
process. There must be also a radical change ill mentality.
If the aim is to have an affluent and a less affluent society working together to ensure that
the latter adopts "free market democracy" -- and can adapt it in a way which benefits both
- it is vital that the former be connected to the business of the development co-operation.
The rich must help transform their poor partners in the creative manner of,a minority
stockholder. They must be ready to share Jheir wealth and technological prowess in the
process of development.

Unless the North is imbues with new vision, such forms of stakc-holdership will not
materialise. Instead of spending most of their time and resources determining the scope
and content of development co-operation, the rich must step out of their cockpit. Their
new role should /be brokers and facilitators of co-operation rather than as discourse
demagogues.

Thus, for example, donors should try to broker co-operation which is "small but smart" to
pursue co-operation which is enabling, not disabling. An output related decision
techniques must be creatively reshaped to support the enabling approach.

Tragically, however, proposing such recompromsing may seem tantamount to selling

dreams, for it is unlikely that the development countries will actually practice altruism
instead of preaching it, as they are doing now. And many of the developing nations,
especially those ruled by dictator are likely to remain unqualified for the simple reason,
among others, that their leaders will not step down from their ivory towers to feel the
tense pain of poverty, and disparities within the societies and among societies will keep
growing, giving rise to genocides, civil wars and cross border skirmishes that will make
mankindlcss and less human in the long run.