A window of opportunity to push the aid agenda at the OEEC?

Since the mid-1950s, the US had shunned several initiatives to create a multilateral home for Western aid, yet by mid-1959, under the enhanced pressure of an increasing BoP deficit and the Soviet economic offensive, officials at the State Department were thinking again. They wanted multilateral machinery to coordinate Western aid and to mobilise the almost non-existent bilateral aid of the Western emerging donors, above all Germany – as the unpublished OEEC report documented. Probably the time had come to support Spaak or Sergent and lodge the Western aid agenda either in NATO or the OEEC. NATO seemed at the time even less fit for the job – as the US was now fully engaged in differentiating its development from its military aid. But regarding the OEEC a window of opportunity might have opened up.

After a decade of existence, by early 1959 the OEEC had few things left to do and was in full-blown crisis, caught in the midst of a feud between Britain and France (Camps, 1964; Glauque, 2002; Winand, 1996). In 1956, the UK, privileging its special relationship with the US and the Commonwealth, had shunned the Treaty of Rome establishing the European Economic Community (EEC). To undermine the EEC project, the UK pushed at the OEEC (where they had a dominant position) for a European free trade area (FTA). In theory, the smaller EEC (with six members) would fit into the broader FTA (16 members) and coexist peacefully with it. In practice, however, the FTA was likely to undercut the EEC, opening the way for an alternative sort of European Union based at the OEEC with the UK in the lead. Ultimately, the British strategy failed. In contrast with Germany and the Benelux countries which were better disposed towards the British initiative, the last unstable governments of the French Fourth Republic went along reluctantly with negotiation of an FTA. De Gaulle’s return to power in early 1958 radicalised the French stance (Bozo, 2012; de Gaulle, 1970). He now wanted an EEC clearly led by France to be the engine of Europe and for that it was better to keep the UK at bay. At the December 1958 meeting of the OEEC, the French acrimoniously withdrew from FTA negotiations (Griffiths, 1997). With the FTA dead, in June 1959 the UK, joined by six allies (Austria, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland), launched an initiative to create a rival European Free Trade Association (EFTA), giving rise to what became known as the “imbroglio” between the

“Six (of the EEC) and the Seven (of the EFTA)”. Soon Western Europe was divided in two trading blocs, and the OEEC in disarray (Cahan, 1959).

The US had a double stake in this European family dispute. Tensions between the Six and the Seven could undermine Western European political cohesion and the Atlantic military alliance. If the dispute were resolved, however, a trade deal between the two blocs could hurt US exports to Europe at a moment when the US was desperate to bring down its BoP deficit.

Ultimately, the US sided with France rather than the UK, its traditional ally.

It had supported the European project all along as key to overcoming the calamitous French-German rivalry, and the rapprochement of these countries had materialised at the EEC rather than the OEEC, which now seemed hollowed out. The crisis of the OEEC was indeed opening a window of opportunity to reshape the organisation in a way that would allow the US to help solve the Six and Seven imbroglio in an “acceptable” way, and maybe also, to address the need for a multilateral home for Western aid. These will be the topics of our next chapter.

4.4 Conclusions

The previous chapter began with the League of Nations, which, building on the view of colonialism as a “civilisational venture”, established a colonial aid paradigm in which so-called metropolitan countries acquired responsibility for developing the colonies the League had entrusted them with. In this chapter we carried forward the story of how under the double impact of decolonisation and the Cold War, this colonial narrative was transformed into the modern North-South aid paradigm in which all rich states (redefined as developed nations) assumed responsibility for providing aid to all poorer ones (redefined as underdeveloped nations). The story of this transition is one of how and why, during the early post-WWII era, these two different types of countries began to fully assume their new “counterintuitive” identities, as recipients and donors.

On the one hand, poor and weak but proud, old and new independent sovereign countries, assumed themselves to be recipients of development assistance with the “right” to receive aid from their former metropolitan masters or from powers that had traditionally bullied and oppressed them. Their leaders were generally painfully conscious that this position endangered their hard-won sovereignty. Yet under the spell of the emerging development paradigm and committed to developing their countries, they

saw no choice but to manage this contradiction as best as they could.

Nobody embodied this dilemma better than Nehru, who being conscious

“that gift(s) of this kind do create a sort of obligation”, insisted on India’s right to development aid without any strings attached (Pandey, 1976, p. 320).

Chapter 3 illustrated various milestones in the process by which the South constructed its identity: the Latin American demand for an Interamerican Development Bank in the 1930s; the striving for a Global Development Bank at Bretton Woods and the demand for technical cooperation early on at the UN. This chapter took the narrative further, describing the efforts of Nehru and his allies to create a “non-alignment” movement aimed at putting the emerging Third World in a better position to achieve two conflicting objectives: receiving aid from both the West and the Communist East while maintaining their sovereignty unhindered. In a significant way, all these efforts culminated in the transformation of the UN from an institution that had originally rationalised colonialism and its aid paradigm, into a bastion of decolonisation and of the Southern perspective within the new North-South aid paradigm (Mazower, 2009, 2012).

On the other hand, wealthy states, which did not have a tradition of providing systematic civilian aid to other independent countries, assumed the role of developed countries and donors of development aid. Chapter 3 explored the different perspectives of the three types of great powers as they transitioned toward the North-South paradigm. The first, the imperial countries, adapted relatively easily to a donor identity, which they saw as a continuation of their colonial responsibilities. The second, the Soviet Union, also made the transition relatively quickly, deploying its internationalist and altruistic socialist narrative to assume a distinctive donor identity. The third, the US, followed a more convoluted path, as the new role went against the individualist narrative of self-help upon which the country was founded.

As we have seen, the Cold War was the catalyst that transformed it from a generous provider of temporary humanitarian assistance into a supplier of massive military and civilian aid to contain Communism.

This chapter took the story of the emergence of the North as a constituency of donors a step further. First, it showed how the geopolitical stakes of the emerging development aid agenda rose sharply as the Soviet Union, now fully recovered from WWII and freed from Stalin’s tyranny and dogmas, began to court the emerging Third World, offering it political support and generous economic assistance. Second, the chapter focused on the reaction of the US hegemon to this so-called Soviet economic offensive. This response had two dimensions: a domestic one, by which the US sought to

delink its development aid from its immediate geopolitical objectives, and a multilateral one, by which it sought to organise and broaden the scope of all Western aid.

With the latter project, the US aimed not only to give more coherence to the bilateral aid already given by its Western allies but also, and perhaps more importantly, to boost this aid by broadening the list of Western bilateral donors and the scope of Western aid. There was in fact a fourth group of wealthy Western countries that the UN recognised as developed and that contributed to the World Bank and to the UN technical cooperation programmes. But these countries had no clear geopolitical interest in the emerging Third World and had not yet fully assumed a donor identity. By the late 1950s, the US aimed at creating an institutional home for Western aid –– a search that disqualified the UN which included Communists – as an instrument for mobilising the key players of this fourth group: Germany, Italy and Japan. This chapter ends by exploring the vicissitudes of this search and sets the scene for the next chapter, which deals with the origins of the DAG, the forerunner of the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD (DAC), the club where the (Western) developed countries acquired a common identity as donors (the North).

Our story in this and the previous chapter is about how the historical interplay of different types of state actors, their actions and ideas, underpinned the rise of the modern development aid agenda. These actors were not only structurally unequal but the aid relation itself also introduced more unequal power into the mix, as the donors had the upper hand. Thus, although the Southern countries were far from being passive players with aid pushed down their throats – as post-colonial literature often implies – their capacity to shape the agenda was limited. The interplay within the emerging North, among different types of donors, and mostly between the superpowers, the US and the USSR, had a greater impact on the development of the agenda.

Like many other international agendas of the period, development aid was a child of the Cold War. This is clear at various points in our story, including in the following chapter, in which the US, seeking to organise and invigorate the aid efforts of the emerging donors of the West in order to contain the impact of the emerging donors of the Communist East, propelled the creation of the DAG-DAC, where most of the postwar aid regime developed.

Sixty years later, this North-South postwar aid regime is on its last breath.

Several factors account for its malaise, but one in particular stands out: its incapacity to co-opt a new wave of emerging donors, this time coming from the South and led by China (Bracho, 2015).

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Im Dokument Origins, Evolution and Future of Global Development Cooperation (Seite 176-186)