President Truman’s “Point Four”

Less than two months after UNGA approved resolution 200(III), Truman launched a worldwide development aid initiative also centred on technical cooperation: the Point Four programme named after the last of four points on foreign policy that the president made in his 1949 inaugural address (Geselbracht, 2015). Due to its scope and the fact that it came from the sole major donor of the time, Point Four is usually seen as the true starting point of the modern development aid agenda. As it almost coincided with UNGA resolution 200(III), it clearly deserves to share in the honour. First, unlike the Greek package, which sought to help one country to cope with the communist menace, Point Four was a programme directly aimed at “the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas” (Truman, 1949). Though in some ways it continued the Truman Doctrine, Point Four was also distinct from it, and its implementation was entrusted to a new ad-hoc institution: the Technical Cooperation Administration (TCA). Second, like UN resolution 200(III), Point Four aimed primarily at mobilising technical assistance, though it also included a reference to the need to foster capital investment.

Third, Truman wanted Point Four to be a global rather than a purely US initiative. He invited “other countries to pool their technological resources in this undertaking” which must be a “worldwide effort for the achievement of peace, plenty and freedom”. He called on allies to use the UN system for this endeavour as much as possible.

Although Point Four was a watershed in conceptual terms and much larger than the technical assistance programme launched by UNGA resolution 200(III), its scope and impact in practical terms were still modest. When launched in September 1950 the Point Four programme had only $27 million in funds, less than a tenth of the aid given to Greece and a pitiful fraction of the money mobilised by the Marshall Plan (Zeiler, 2015, p. 39). Moreover, it started off on the wrong foot. Not only did it take a long time to put into motion,⁴⁷ but the TCA that ran the programme was placed under the direction of the State Department, which was focussed on fighting communism and had little respect for Point Four (Geselbracht, 2015, p. 166). But it was the Korean War, which broke out in June 1950 while Congress was discussing the TCA budget, that most derailed the Point Four initiative. The Korean conflict dramatically escalated the Cold War and had a strong impact on US aid policies: the Truman Doctrine of providing military aid to allies clearly took precedence over the Point Four programme with its plea for pure development.

The fuss and propaganda around the grand new initiative of the Truman administration (the section about Point Four in the inaugural address was notably longer than the other three points taken together) contrasted sharply with its quite modest impact on the ground. As a result, although developing countries welcomed the conceptual breakthrough of Point Four, they began to become more vocal about what they really wanted. Technical cooperation was fine, but it was not enough on its own. It should come with capital as well to cover balance of payment gaps, strengthen reserves, buy investment goods, and finance the building of infrastructure. Disappointed by the Point Four programme, which paled in comparison with the Marshall Plan and even the Greek-Turkish package, many developing countries began to demand more access to capital resources, either bilaterally or in the multilateral UN framework. They were soon to articulate their demands more clearly through the Third World movement.

47 Truman sent the bill to Congress in May 1949, but funds were not released until September 1950. By then, much of the momentum had been lost.

Another implication was that Point Four involved an inherent trade-off.

By eschewing political and military objectives, the programme gained legitimacy as specifically developmental in nature. Nevertheless, the non-strategic nature of the programme seemed to mark its weakness and explain its failure to mobilise more substantial resources. Indeed, given that US foreign policy was driven by the Cold War, a programme that did not clearly fit into this agenda was bound to have limited support and be poorly funded.⁴⁸ In this situation, the US would commit seriously to a development aid agenda only under two circumstances. First, if Cold War considerations ceased to be the overall guiding light of US foreign policy.

This was unlikely given that the “threat” was perceived to increase rather than subside in the following decades. Second, if a purely development aid agenda could somehow be incorporated into the Cold War narrative. As we have seen, the Truman Doctrine took a clear step towards this outcome. But as long as the US hegemon continued to perceive Communism mainly as a

“military” threat fuelled by the deprivations caused by the war, rather than as a “civilizational” threat to the Western world order that it championed, the technical assistance-focussed agenda that emerged in the late 1940s would not develop into a true aid system. It took major changes in the USSR itself and, as a result, in the perceived nature of the communist threat, for this paradigm shift to take root. That is the topic of the next chapter.

3.6 Conclusions

The international relations community tends to address the question of development aid by focussing on donors’ motivations (Malacalza, 2020;

Pauselli, 2020; Schraeder, Hook, & Taylor, 1998). Discussions often shed light on the distinct profiles and practices of different donors (i.e., why US aid diverges from Swedish or Japanese aid) and about how the aid agenda has evolved and where is it heading. They examine why states choose to donate to specific areas or causes and how they justify these decisions to their citizens.

48 Though its impact on the ground was limited, Point Four gave a strong impulse to the cause of technical assistance in the UN development system. The UN regular programme of technical assistance was soon to be complemented by an Expanded Program of Technical Assistance (EPTA) driven by Point Four and based on voluntary contributions. The US set an example by contributing a significant amount and then cajoled its European allies to do the same. All of them complied in one way or another (Kirdar, 1966, pp. 23-64).

These studies, however, tell us very little about how the “counterintuitive”

practice of development aid appeared in the first place and how it cemented itself in the international agenda as a system. How did states come to invest resources in the citizens of other states when their main job was to care for their own? States did not start “systematic development aid” (i.e., distinct from military or humanitarian aid) because at some point in their history they found it was profitable for them to do so. Indeed, as we shall argue in the following chapters, a number of donors began to provide bilateral systematic aid almost against their will: it was the price they had to pay for being part of the postwar order in the making. To find out how the aid development practice arose and how it consolidated into an agenda in which all countries were bound to participate in one way or another, we need to move from the typical international relations inquiry to a historical one, as I have attempted to do here.

From a broad historical perspective, the rise of the modern development aid agenda can be seen as the transition from an “imperialist” paradigm of international relations in which the rich powerful countries exercise power over small weak countries, to a “post-imperialist” one in which this relation of power goes hand in hand with the responsibility of the former to provide development aid to the latter. It can also be seen as the process by which a colonial aid paradigm, in which metropolitan powers assumed responsibility for helping their colonies, transitioned to a North-South aid paradigm in which rich (developed) states assume responsibility for supplying aid to all poor (underdeveloped) countries, including politically independent ones.

The colonial aid paradigm, rooted in the traditional view of colonialism as a civilizing project, formed part of the New Diplomacy articulated in Versailles at the end of WWI. In its moderate Wilsonian version, the New Diplomacy instructed metropoles to guide their (mandated) colonies towards independence – i.e., to prepare them to overcome their dependence on political tutelage and aid. In its more radical Leninist version, the New Diplomacy demanded immediate self-determination for all colonies. Rising nationalist forces in colonial countries opted increasingly for the latter. Yet the colonial powers, while assuming the colonial aid paradigm as a device to legitimise their rule, resisted self-determination.

During the interwar years, while the colonial powers maintained their stance, two historical processes (unrelated to the post-WWI order of international relations) took shape, which would eventually ease the way for the emergence of a North-South agenda of systematic development aid: (1) the

rise of social states in rich countries (with the fiscal muscle and the mandate to systematically aid their own citizens as a premise to aid “others”) and (2) the rise of a worldwide aspiration to “development”. WWII disrupted the colonial world. The weakened colonial powers managed to impose their will at the first UN conference in San Francisco, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. The combination of empowered nationalist elites in the colonies and empowered anti-colonial states (the US and the USSR) on the world stage delegitimised the original UN vision and eventually opened the way to massive decolonisation, first in Asia and then in Africa.

The transition from the colonial to the North-South aid paradigm still required a major conceptual leap: the developed countries had to take on responsibility for systematically aiding fully independent countries. In the aftermath of WWII, the independent weak states, increasingly recognised as developing countries, began demanding aid in UN fora where they now had a say – preferring to manage the sovereignty risk that it implied rather than forgo such aid. But everything depended on the stance of the new world powers: the USSR and particularly the US, the new hegemon in the making. The Soviet Union, a radically new state in the world order that emerged from WWI, had in principle no problem in assuming such a task:

socialism was meant to be an international project based on solidarity and any state that achieved it was expected to aid the cause in other countries.

In short, the USSR was ready to invest substantially in the development of underdeveloped independent nations or at least those ready to follow a socialist path, such as North Korea and China.

The idealised socialist vision was a brotherhood among socialist states that would contrast with the destructive competition among capitalist powers which sought only their own enrichment and power, and which pursued their interests by bullying weak states rather than aiding them. An exchange between Stalin and Milovan Djilas, who went to Moscow in 1944 on behalf of Tito to request Soviet support for the Yugoslav communists illustrates this view vividly. Djilas asked Stalin for a loan to buy arms that Yugoslavia would repay after the war. Stalin angrily replied:

You insult me. You are shedding your blood and you expect me to charge you for the weapons! I am not a merchant, we are not merchants. You are fighting for the same cause as we. We are duty bound to share with you whatever we have. (Djilas, 1962, pp. 63-64)

The Soviet dictator was underscoring what he saw as the essential difference between the socialist and the capitalist approach to aid. Implicitly he was contrasting his policy with US military aid during the two world wars. It is true that the US misgivings towards state aid ran deep. The US was founded on an individualist tradition of self-help, individual merit and hard work, which was at odds with the idea of a state systematically helping its citizens, not to mention those of other countries. Unlike Europe, socialist thinking had made little headway in the US. Moreover, the US had in the 19th century embraced a stance of isolation in its international relations and had been dragged into the two global European conflicts of the 20th century very much against its will. Given these two traits together, the United States had a hard time assuming the concept of state-to-state aid even in times of war and hence opted for repayable loans rather than pure military aid – a position that undermined the fragile postwar order agreed upon at Versailles and that came back in a tamed way during WWII with the “lend-lease” schemes. In short, up to the end of WWII, the United States was particularly ill-geared to engage in an agenda of systematic aid to other states in peacetime.

The beginning of the Cold War around 1947 made all the difference. Almost overnight in its programme for Greece and Turkey and its Marshall Plan for Europe, the US under Truman showed it was ready both to abandon its isolationist tendencies and to engage in massive state-to-state aid in peacetime in order to contain what it now perceived as an existential threat:

communism. Three years earlier Stalin had given aid to Tito on the grounds that they were fighting for the same cause: the construction of socialism.⁴⁹ In his conversation with Djilas, Stalin was not wrong in suggesting that the US had no equivalent cause to fight for and that even in war they could not leave completely aside their individualistic and mercantile spirit. Ironically, however, it was the threat he represented to capitalism and liberty that gave the US the reason they needed to change their position. As the literature has long recognised, the Cold War tipped the balance and paved the way for the emergence of the modern development aid agenda. In the following chapters we will see how this agenda developed into a proper aid regime with consensual common definitions, norms and good practices (Krasner, 1993).

49 Djilas was asking for arms, but in a conversation between communists the cause went much further than the war against the Nazis. Indeed, as the Polish resistance was soon to find out, the Soviets showed no such sympathy for other non-communist Nazi-fighters.

For his part, Tito was also soon to find out that the political price to pay for Stalin’s

“generosity” turned out to be too high to bear. Four years later, the two leaders had broken relations with each other.

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