Chapter Two

Historical Antecedents to Foreign Aid

It seems as though Africa is a place you go to wait. Many Africans I met said the same thing, but uncomplainingly, for most lived their lives with a fatalistic patience. Outsiders see Africa as a continent delayed-economies in suspension, societies up in the air, politics and human rights put on hold, communities throttled or stopped.1

Custodian of the values of civilization and history, [the colonialist] accomplished a mission; he has the immense merit of bringing light to the colonized’s ignominious darkness. The fact that this role brings him privileges and respect is only justice; colonization is legitimate in every sense and with all its consequences.2

“Why,” she said, “it’s natural to the folks here to be indolent.... They just haven’t got any hustle in them….”3

Today it is hard to believe that, as late as 1947, the Union Jack still flew over more than a quarter of the human race….4

Historical Theories of Foreign Policy

Foreign Exchange as a Form of Diplomacy

The antecedents of foreign aid (prior to 1948) are important. The history of international assistance provides an understanding of definitions, purpose, assumptions and methods of government to government, government to private sector, and private to private assistance as they have evolved in the last half of the twentieth century. As we will see, the use of public resources for humanitarian relief began in the nineteenth century. Development funds for European colonies began between the two World Wars and the U.S., partially in response to the

1 Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), pp. 226.

2 Albert Memmi, Colonizer and Colonized (New York: The Orion Press, 1965) p. 75.

3 Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express (New York: Berkley Books, 2000 edition), p. 24.

4 Christopher Booker, The Neophiliacs: A Study of the Revolution in English Life in the Fifties and Sixties (London: Fontana Books, 1970), p. 83.

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Nazi influence in the Western Hemisphere, began to assist its Latin American dependencies in the 1930s.5

Subsidies (either as grants or loans at sub-market rates) historically have been a very reliable means of inducing desirable international behavior. As a foreign policy, subsidies go back at least to Athens (and its rivalry with Sparta) and its system of allies during the classical Greek period. Thucydides in 402 BC argued that political relations with other governments had to be based on self-sufficiency even if it included economic exchanges. Exchange as a pattern of interaction evolved into the imperial system of the Roman Empire, a model that was to influence both land based imperialism and overseas colonialism after 1500.

Technical assistance likewise has a long history as an extension of the ideal of social responsibility within the community of nations. In AD 300, in an early example of overseas technical assistance, a number of Koreans were sent to China from Japan to engage people to teach the art of weaving and preparing silk for production. Alexander the Great provided Egypt with technical assistance during the founding of the great port city of Alexandria.6

The earliest recorded instance of humanitarian assistance, according to Carol Lancaster, occurred in 226 B.C. when Rhodes was devastated by a huge earthquake. In response, a number of nations around the Mediterranean Sea sent food aid and other assistance to earthquake victims in the devastated area.7 There were a number of examples of inter-territorial assistance within the Roman Empire in times of war, famine or natural disaster.

During the Renaissance (1400-1600), there was a steady exchange of technical and cultural information throughout Europe.8 The Medicis created an alliance based on the use of financial support as an instrument of diplomacy.9 It was Niccolo Machiavelli who is considered the creator of realpolitik and who advocated the use of both the carrot and the stick in international affairs.

The princely states of Italy were characterized by a stability that would latter define the European state system in the nineteenth century.10 Exchange was the key to the European system and the re-created nation state system that evolved out of the Enlightenment period (1650-1789). As Steven Hook points out:

6 See A Reference Volume on Technical Assistance Programs with Particular Emphasis on the Work and Responsibilities of Voluntary Agencies, Study Sponsored by the American Council of Voluntary Agencies for Foreign Service (Washington D.C.: May, 1953), p. 2.

7 Lancaster, Foreign Aid, p. 239.

8 Ibid.

9 George Liska, The New Statecraft: Foreign Aid in American Foreign Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 37.

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Foreign assistance was not unknown to diplomats of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Developed countries had long supplied allies with military equipment on concessional terms, and states often transferred funds overseas for disaster relief or other purposes. For example, French aid to the United States was critical to U.S. success, in the Revolutionary War against Great Britain.11

Historical realists who influenced the thinking of those who advocated realpolitik (the politics of power relationships) included Thomas Hobbes, Otto von Bismarck and Theodore Roosevelt.

According to George Liska, foreign aid, as a form of subsidy has for a long time been one of the burdens in addition to being one of the privileges of leadership and power in world affairs. The subsidy relationship (as is often the case with foreign aid today) “was that of a quid pro quo; a subsidy relationship without reciprocity was unthinkable.”12 There is in this sense a strong connection between the impact of Western imperialism and foreign aid.

Loans under preferential conditions came to life as an instrument of foreign policy in the last half of the nineteenth century. Practically, nineteenth century loans meant a country would be admitted to a group with foreign securities deemed reliable enough to be listed and traded on major foreign markets. Access was often controlled by the major powers or their banks.

During the pre-modern period, specie money (precious metals such as gold and silver) served as the basis of the international monetary system. Down to the beginning of the nineteenth century subsidies still meant cash in gold, not long term credits.13 Foreign loans were later used to build railroads and other capital construction projects in Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Near East (now often labeled the Middle East). British patterns of lending were picked up by the United States which changed from a debtor to a creditor nation after World War I.

BoxThe Prince of Power

In 1513, Niccolo Machiavelli wrote a book on statecraft and the wielding of power called The Prince. In the book Machiavelli asked whether it is better to be loved than feared. He replied to his reader that the Prince could prefer one or the other, but that it was safer to be feared than it was to be loved when one of the two is absent.

There are several tools in the ruler’s tool box according to Machiavelli. The leader who bases his power entirely on words will, without other influence, come to ruin. Rather than making himself loved, the Prince needs to hold himself together with other Princes through a chain of obligations. However, should that chain of obligations be broken, the obligation can be sustained by the fear of punishment.

To advocates of power theories of international relations, Machiavelli’s almost 500 year old book, which is just over 100 pages long, has as much relevant

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information about foreign policy and foreign aid in it as one can find in find on the shelves of your local bookstore. While not everything Machiavelli said can be directly applied to the situations we are dealing with today, a surprising amount of it can be applied to foreign aid policy. His observations do much to put the foreign aid policy process into historical perspective.14

War, often defined in imperial terms both in Europe and overseas, characterized perceptions of unequal exchange. Loans and subsidies were an extension of the spoils of war functioning as a form of state bribery which would serve as an alternative to armed conflict. According to Liska, “Modern foreign aid derives from subsidies and loans to allies in fluid political and military conditions.”15 These were the subsidies of absolutist statecraft in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Foreign loans in the liberal diplomacy of the pre-World War I era came next but did not replace the use of subsidies. At the end of World War I, both reparations and subsidies became part of the peace process.

At the end of the Second World War, foreign aid would become one of the several tools that were available to promote foreign policy. “What we call foreign aid,” according to Hans Morgenthau, “stands largely in direct succession to what in previous periods of history, went by the name of subsidies.”16 Having seen the reparations destroy the peace twenty years after the Treaty of Versailles, focus after the Second World War was on reconstruction in Europe, a process which refined but did not create the principles of foreign aid. We will explore this issue later when discussing the origins of international assistance in the wake of the First World War.

Imperial Expansion in the Nineteenth Century

The historical processes and values of foreign aid go back to religious and cultural expansion. In November of 1095, Pope Urban II called for a crusade of Christian nations to wrest Asia Minor and the Levant from the Muslim Arabs. The almost two hundred year war called the Crusades ended in 1291 with the expulsion of the Crusaders from the Near East. This was the first phase of a religious and imperial struggle that, to some, continued down to and through the twentieth century. Some suggest that the conflict continues into the twenty-first.17

Religious conversion was a part (but only a part) of the motivations of the Crusaders and their descendents, the missionaries. Moreover, it is important to remember that during the Crusades, in the twelfth century, the Europeans plundered Islamic holy sites and massacred Muslims in the name of God and pocketed the wealth they found.18

Religious conversion was at the heart of the missionary influence in Asia, Africa and Latin America from the beginning. But by 1700, Christians also saw themselves as agents of virtue and in the nineteenth century tried to save Africans from slavery, to give access to health

17 See Anthony Nutting, The Arabs: A Narative History from Mohammed to the Present (New York: Mentor Books, 1965), pp. 171-180.

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and education and to encourage them to move away from subsistence agriculture towards commerce and production.

“Humanistic service and the philosophy behind it,” as Ian Smillie notes, “is neither new, nor does it emerge from a particular place and time.”19 Historically, there were several components to the religious origins of international assistance (and eventually foreign aid). These included, for example, tithing, the requirements for charity and religious involvement in the organization of schools and hospitals. The tithing issue resurfaced in the argument that developed countries should allocate one percent of their budget to international development.

Tithing goes back at least 3000 years in Jewish law and in the Middle Ages European churches became the dispenser of charity, provided hospitals and schools and general welfare. Islam prescribed charity as one of the five pillars of wisdom. Some argue that the contemporary call for pledging .7 percent of a countries budget to foreign aid is little more than a form of state tithing.

The mission became part of the overseas expansion of Europe that began in the fifteenth century. Many European non-governmental organizations can trace their origins to missionary organizations and the anti-slavery movements. One of the oldest overseas assistance organizations was Les Soeurs de la Congregation de Notre Dame, founded in 1653.20 The overseas missions of the great European powers helped to define imperialism throughout its four hundred year history.

Values and processes of international assistance, as opposed to subsidies and exchange, probably go back over 300 years.21 Historically, for over two hundred years there has been a continuing role for voluntary organizations in the field of technical and humanitarian assistance. In both Europe and the United States voluntary agencies date back to at least the 1830s and began to operate internationally in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Voluntary organizations, anti-slavery societies and religious groups certainly defined the need and scope for international voluntary and social action groups from the end of the eighteenth century. In continental Europe, many non-governmental organizations had become directly involved in international welfare efforts by the mid-nineteenth century, focusing on humanitarian relief, social reform and charity.

Humanitarianism and relief efforts were particularly important in time of war. Florence Nightingale, Mary Seacole and Clara Barton led groups of volunteers to nurse the wounded in the Crimea and the American Civil War.22 Henry Dunant founded the International Red Cross in Switzerland in 1863 in the wake of the Crimean War. As Walter Sharp points out, “The International Red Cross, dating from 1863, has through its disaster relief operations indirectly contributed to the spread of technical [and] administrative methods” of international assistance throughout the world.23

The Impact of Colonialism on International Assistance

The Missionary Factor

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More than any other empire, it was the British Raj that defined colonial rule and international development and eventually proved to be a model for the United States.24 In the British Empire, international assistance is a story that began in the early nineteenth century, “with a handful of humanitarians driven by urges often half hidden from themselves.”25

In both Africa and Asia, the abolitionist and missionary movements were major factors in the Imperial system. From the early nineteenth century, the missionary “of the old breed [was] an educator, not an evangelist, someone who had come to Africa to serve, to call it home, and to die in the bush.” 26 Moreover, missionary activity in the colonial world was a nineteenth century phenomenon that had implications for the twentieth century. The educator, the medical missionary and the humanitarian worker came to define the softer side of foreign aid.

In much of Europe (and North America) the origins of international humanitarian involvement in Africa, the Americas and the Indian Ocean lay in the anti-slavery movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Reformers in England founded the Anti-

5 Carol Lancaster, Foreign Aid: Diplomacy, Development, Domestic Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 25.

10 Steven W. Hook, National Interest and Foreign Aid (Boulder Col.: Lynne Rienner, 1995), p. 5-6.

11 Ibid., p. 22.

12 See Liska, The New Statecraft, p. 341.

13 See Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 119-120 and Albert Fishlow, “The Debt Crisis in Historical Perspective,” in The Politics of International Debt, Miles Kahler, ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 37-70.

14 Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince and the Discourse (New York: Random House, 1950 edition).

15 Liska, The New Statecraft, p. 24.

16 See Hans J. Morgenthau, “Forward,” in Liska, The New Statecraft, p. viii.

18 Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), pp. 104. See also Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation : The Conquest of the Middle East (New York: Knopf, 2005).

19 Ian Smillie, The Alms Bazaar: Altruism Under Fire: Non-Profit Organizations and International Development (London: IT Publications, 1995), p. 22-23.

20 Sisters of the Congregation of Notre Dame.

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Slavery Society in 1787. This intervention occurred as part of a set of missionary impulses that would stimulate colonial expansion. European Empires were justified as part of a “moral mission, with antislavery as its flagship.”27 To the abolitionist movement, the ending of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trade justified European intervention in Africa and other parts of the world.28

Throughout much of nineteenth century British colonial policy was intended to placate the ever-increasing demands of liberal missionaries, cloaking their Victorian social change policy in religion.29 Imperial historians prior to World War II often ascribed philanthropic motives to British colonialists in the nineteenth century. Colonial administrators, in the nineteenth century Exeter Hall30 tradition, were said to protect the African population from European settler greed and avarice.

The Exeter Hall liberals of the Aborigines Protection Society, the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and for the Civilization of Africa both challenged the customary

21 Peter Hjertholm and Howard White, “Foreign Aid in Historical Perspective, Background and Trends,” Foreign Aid and Development: Directions for the Future, Peter Hjertholm, ed. (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 80.

22 A.N. Wilson, The Victorians (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003).

23 Walter R. Sharp, International Technical Assistance (Chicago: Public Administration Service, 1952), p. 8.

24 Niall Ferguson makes this argument. See his Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2003).

25 Deborah Scroggins, Emma’s War: An Aid Worker, A Warlord, Radical Islam, and the Politics of Oil- A True Story of Love and Death in the Sudan (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002), pp. 18.

26 Theroux, Dark Star Safari, p. 288.

27 Scroggins, Emma’s War, p. 45.

28 Michela Wrong, In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Congo (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), p. 39.

29 The Victorian mission saw nineteenth century Victorian England as an ideal model for a civilized society for Asia and Africa. See A.N. Wilson’s wonderful book, The Victorians.

30 Exeter Hall was the celebrated gathering place in the Strand for the missionary and humanitarian societies that represented liberal thought in Britain. See for example, C.W. de Kiewiet, The Imperial Factor in South Africa: A Study in Politics and Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937).

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traditions of slavery from the Cape to the Caribbean and lay the foundations for segregation and later apartheid in settler Africa and that would define British Imperial custom by the beginning of the twentieth century. It is also certainly true that nineteenth century missionary schooling provided the "oppressed" with the skills "to put forward a refined political argument in English."31

According to Weatherby and his colleagues, at the end of the nineteenth century, “[w]estern countries in the last generation of the Victorian period rationalized that colonialism was a beneficial process that would help to bring a ‘backward’…world into the light of the modern age.”32 There were built-in contradictions to colonialism however. The reality for critics was that “humanitarian romanticism [was] looked upon [by colonizers] in the colonies as a serious illness, the worst of all dangers.”33 Both the French and the British were sending missionaries to North America by the end of the eighteenth century.

The nineteenth century missionary societies were the aid organizations of the Victorian period, “the old ladies of Clapham.”34 However, as the newsmagazine the Economist has put it, looking backwards, “The brave souls who spread the Lord’s word in the 19 th century often found the natives uncomprehending and hostile.”35 These nineteenth century misunderstandings would have their counterparts in twentieth century foreign aid.

By the mid-nineteenth century, David Livingstone, as Niall Ferguson only partly tongue in cheek points out, “had become a one-man NGO: the nineteenth century’s first medicin sans frontieres.”36 By 1900, there were more than 12,000 British missionaries in the field throughout and beyond the British Empire. These missionaries represented more than 360 missionary societies and other organizations. One hundred years later they were still there. At the start of the twenty-first century, Ferguson points out:

The modern equivalents of the missionary societies campaigned earnestly against “usages” in far-flung countries that they regard as barbaric: child labour and female circumcision. The Victorian non-governmental organizations were not so different.37

The Europeans who traveled to Africa and other parts of the world in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century often “were imbued with a sense of moral and technological superiority.”38 Some missionaries thought little of conversion but focused on health and education. The goal was to save Africans throughout Africa though many missionaries had few converts. Instead, the missionaries simply taught by example and were accepted as different by

34 Clapham was the area in London where the various anti-slavery movements were located.35

? “The Missionaries’ Position,” The Economist, Apr.24, 1993, p.36.

36 Ferguson, Empire, p. 131.

37 Ibid.

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Christians, Moslems and Animists alike. In Africa, as one critic noted, the seed of the European missionary had “not sprouted, and now it was decayed and moribund.”39

It must also be remembered that the impact of the missionary often severely disturbed traditional social values in what had been socially and economically self-sufficient communities. As Ralph Linton put it back in 1950, the wreckage of these communities was due to fundamental incompatibility between stable, closely integrated folk cultures and an ever changing machine civilization represented by the trader and the missionary.40

The Legacy of Colonialism

As late as 1947, Britain governed 25 percent of the world’s population. Along with the Empire, many British settlers, missionaries and colonial officials have long aspired to export British culture overseas. Governance in the British Empire “was only really possible with the collaboration of key sections of the governed.”41 As Ferguson has noted, the key to the creation of an Indian elite was British education.42 Niall Ferguson has described Victorian imperial beliefs in India as follows:

The Liberals believed all men should have equal rights, regardless of skin culture; the Anglo-Indians…preferred a kind of apartheid, so that a tiny white minority could lord it or the mass of ‘blacks.’ But to a Tory aristocrat…Indian society could never be as simple as those two opposing visions implied.43

Instead, Ferguson has argued, a hierarchical pyramid divided people in Britain and the Empire into classes, with the upper classes in both countries having more in common with each other than with their fellow countrymen. This has been labeled, by another apologist for imperialism, as “ornamentalism.”44

International relations in the late nineteenth century, however, particularly as directed towards Africa and Asia, were based on the “predatory logic of social Darwinism.”45 Racial and cultural imperialism were never far from the surface in nineteenth century views of the non-western world. Historically, both European and U.S. policy makers have found it difficult to overcome a black-and-white approach view of Asia and Africa.46

This colonial view of non-western society remained with many Westerners as they interacted with the developing world throughout much of the twentieth century. Frances FitzGerald, writing about Southeast Asia has put it this way:

44 David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

45 Hook, National Interest and Foreign Aid, p.8-9.

46 Wu Xinbo, “To Be and Enlighted Superpower,” in What Does the World Want from America? International Perspectives on U.S. Foreign Policy Alexander T. J. Lennon, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), p. 4.

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Unable to understand the natives, the French colonialists of the nineteenth century, along with their American counterparts in the rest of Asia [as well as the rest of the non-Western world] invented all of the racist clichés that have passed down into the mythology of the American soldier: that Orientals [and Africans and Arabs] are lazy, dirty, untrustworthy, and ignorant of the value of human life.47

Down to the middle of the twentieth century most policy makers in Britain, as well as continental Europe and the U.S., carried “the prevailing attitude toward subject peoples.… Regardless of their history, they were not considered ‘ready’ for self-rule until prepared for it under Western Tutelage.”48 This was confirmed by the League of Nations in that most former colonial dependencies of Germany were classified as second class mandates. Attitudes in Asia and Africa were defined by such words as “nigger,” “wogs,” “kaffers,” “slopeys” and “gooks.”49

And yet at the heart of the imperial system was a claim that colonial officials, settlers, traders and missionaries all had a civilizing mission in the dependent territories. More than anything else, no doubt because of these attitudes, one of the patterns of administration inherited by developed countries from the colonial period was an unofficial policy of “salutary” neglect.50

The victorious powers at the end of World War I at least temporarily found they had taken on the administration of much of Europe, more permanently the Middle East, parts of Africa and the Pacific. At the same time, many of the post-war leaders feared leaving a poisoned legacy in the wake of this control. The allies during and after the First World War promoted changes throughout Central Europe where a “modern ethnic nationalism superimposed itself on an older different world” of land based imperialism.51 Ethnic and religious nationalism were additional legacies of the imperial world of the nineteenth century inside and outside of Western Europe.

During the inter-war period, (1919-1939), Western ethnocentrists judged non-westerners not in terms of their religion but in terms of their working abilities.52 The distinction was between date and time and sun and seasons. Many Europeans accused Asians and Africans of not being able to keep up with the pace of modern life as defined by the clock and the calendar. The European represented promptness, efficiency and rationalism.

Whites in sub-Saharan Africa have often projected an image of the “dark continent,” suggesting gloom and alienation. Africa in the view of some imperials and missionaries symbolized to many expatriates the dark passions of the human soul of sinners. African savagery represented (and to some still represents) the victory of that passion.53 In turn, indigenous peoples absorbed this hostility and returned it. The words “faranji” or “Aferingi,” meaning the foreigner, describe the alien nature of the European presence in North Africa and the Middle East.

The image of colonialism was etched in the memory of the generation that grew up prior to and during World War II. As Paul Theroux has put it, “Since aloneness is the human condition, a stark example of the perfect stranger was the white man in black Africa, alone at his post, odd man out.” 54 This is the way that Albert Memmi has put it:

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We sometimes enjoy picturing the colonizer as a tall man, bronzed by the sun wearing Wellington books, proudly leaning on a shovel-as he rivets his gaze far away on the horizon of his land. When not engaged in battles against nature, we think of him laboring selflessly for mankind, attending the sick, and spreading culture to the non-literate. In other words, his pose is one of a noble adventurer, a righteous pioneer.55

William Easterly evokes the images of the colonial figure, and his “White Man’s Burden,” in his analysis of foreign aid in the twentieth century.56

Albert Memmi in his writing about North Africa focused on the role conflict between the colonizer and the colonized. He argued that the subjugation of colonial peoples was not merely economic but also social and political and the “negative element [became] essential to his [the colonized’s] revival and struggle.”57 There was, Memmi concluded, an inherent contradiction in the colonial system. Observers as different as Mannoni and Fanon pointed to the mutual dependence between the dominant and the submissive built into the colonial system.58 “The conquerors,” according to Serverine Rugumamu, “saturated the entire [colonial] society with their values and ethos.”59 It was this image of indigenous peoples that would prove so disruptive to North-South relationships in the last half of the twentieth century.

It was the impotence of middle class intellectuals in colonial territories which was particularly damaging to colonial society. Normally the backbone of a society, they could not make themselves heard under colonialism.60 According to Jean-Paul Sartre, colonialism denied “the title of humanity to the natives, and defining them as simply [absent] of qualities, and defining them as animals, not humans.”61 As a result, the colonialists, going back to the imposition of slavery in the eighteenth century, also dehumanized themselves. Memmi concluded, “Colonial actuality is a specific historical fact; the situation and state of the colonized, as they presently are, of course, are nonetheless special.”62

The colonial model of foreign intervention initially was based on the concept of the external Protectorate. For their own well-being, the indigenous peoples had to be excluded from the management of their own affairs. Dependence, and a sense of inadequacy, resulted from colonialism but was not its cause. In the end, colonial intervention destroyed and distorted indigenous institutions and left colonized societies out of the mainstream in terms of ideas, technology and economic progress. As Memmi goes on:

What is clear is that colonization weakens the colonized and that those weaknesses contribute to one another. Non-industrialization and the absence of technical development in the country lead to a slow economic collapse of the colonized.63

The colonial official was kind of super man, who represented a “superhumanity.”64 The mother country, the image goes on, “combines only positive values, good climate, harmonious landscape, social discipline and exquisite liberty, beauty, morality and logic.”65 The reality is

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somewhat different. In the end, “[c]olonization distorts relationships, destroys or petrifies institutions, and corrupts men, both colonizers and colonized.”66

Cultural comfort, being culturally safe in terms of language, custom and dress (thus having indigenous peoples adopt western behavior) was important both to missionaries and other western officials including foreign aid workers. Such an image of cultural comfort fits well the foreign aid worker, the technical assistance specialist and even in some cases the Peace Corps Volunteer. The first line of defense of the colonized is to change his dress, lighten his or her skin or in some way change their physical appearance in order to become more like the colonial model.

From the beginning Europeans tended to interact with those that they felt they could trust, who were thought to be honest and trustworthy, and above all those who could speak English (or the other colonial languages).67 What began as a search for cultural comfort ended by spreading European languages (particularly English) and the Christian religion over most of the world. Resentment within administrative and settler communities was also a part of the legacy of colonialism. Those who believed in it saw the collapse of the Empire first as catastrophe and then with apathy.68

In the immediate post-colonial period all of the European powers (and the U.S.) looked to continue to wield influence in their former colonies and Protectorates. North-South relationships became institutionalized in the post-war period and at the end of the colonial period these institutions determined the role of the colonized and their relationship with the colonizer. Colonial society tended to be a managing society and worked hard to give that appearance.

Much of the admitted stereotypes of Westerners fit into the theory of modernization which has dominated foreign aid over the past sixty years going back to the colonial period. At the level of the individual territorial unit, the colony had a limited recruiting ground from which it drew its colonial administrators. Those colonial officials, who were chosen to maintain the system contributed more vigor to its defense and often transformed themselves into foreign aid administrators when colonialism finally ended reinforcing a set of institutionalized North-South relationships that had begun in the colonial period.

Imperial Influences on Development

The origins of Empire lie not in missionary impulses alone. The intersection of economic motives, political imperatives, and international relations all combined to create the British and other European Empires (and Japan and the U.S.) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is not the place to review that history. Suffice it to say that in the British and other Empires the seeds were laid in terms of theories of modernization and developmentalism that would raise international assistance to the level of state policy by the late 1930s.

Overseas assistance to colonies was a by-product of twentieth century colonialism. It can be argued that the reality of superiority and inferiority defined during the colonial period transferred over to donor agencies and technical assistance experts. Foreign aid policy and processes, including voluntary non-governmental organizations, was in large part a product of

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the systems of empire that governed much of the non-Western world prior to 1960.69 “The Victorians had…elevated aspirations,” according to Niall Ferguson, “and they dreamt not just of ruling the world, but of redeeming it…. Like the non-governmental aid organizations of today, Victorian missionaries believed they knew what was best for Africa.”70

From the middle of the nineteenth century, it had been a common practice among the major colonial powers of Britain, France, Belgium, Holland and Germany (and even the United States), to transfer some money on concessionary terms to their colonies, Protectorates and dependencies. By the 1920s, the British and the French were beginning to use public funds for the expansion of infrastructure, the development of health services and the funding of education in their colonies.71 Treasury departments in the home countries of course often resisted such concessions. Terms used to describe this process prior to World War II were “infant colony subsidies,” “grants-in-aid” and “budget supplements.”

Institutionally, there was nothing apart from a few river commissions that could properly be called international administration until the second half of the nineteenth century. During the fifty hears before World War I, however, some fifty public international organizations carried out international administration in many fields.72 Prior to the First World War international organizations required the service of only a few hundred people and cost only a few hundred thousand dollars. The costs and the number of personnel involved in international activity both multiplied several-fold during the period between the two World Wars. Much of this international administration was indirect however, being funneled through colonial systems and, after 1918 the League of Nations mandates set up by treaties after the War.73

International assistance in part evolved both out of de facto and de jure colonialism. Foreign aid and technical assistance schemes both had their antecedents in British, French and other colonial rule. The British had developed its Colonial Development and Welfare Fund in 1929 and France had similar programs in its Asian and African Empires. Even smaller, and less developed colonial systems (Belgium, Holland and Portugal), gave lip service to developmentalism in their colonial areas.

The purported goal of colonialism from the beginning was based on the concept of modernization (and Westernization) since, according to one early advocate of development, in traditional society all of the desire for modernization was lacking. As Barbara Ward put it in describing what she called the positive elements of imperialism, “colonial rule abolished local wars and…modern medical science and modern sanitation began to save babies and lengthen life.”74

Colonialism defined authority in most of what we call the developing world until well after the middle of the twentieth century and much of the practice of foreign aid and technical assistance grew out of that heritage. Understanding that legacy is important in any attempt to define the mixed legacy and the moral ambiguities that frame international assistance after 1960. These values remain an important factor in influencing foreign aid in the twenty-first century.

Conclusion

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Government and administration “in most of the counties of Asia and Africa and more distantly, Latin America, [were] conditioned by their colonial pasts.”75 There was seldom significant delegation of authority or significant local self-government.76 Part of the colonial legacy in developing countries’ public sectors, has been a rigid attachment to the externalities of Weberian rationality.77 It is the contention of this book that many of the characteristics of the colonial period, some for better, much for worse, carried over to both bilateral and multilateral foreign aid programs in the last half of the twentieth century.

This book does not purport to be a history of colonialism and imperialism. Much would occur in the evolution of foreign aid policy that was not a product of colonial history. Yet, to reiterate: three components of international assistance- economic exchange, commercial

31 See also Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa (New York: Random House-Times Books, 1998), p. 46-47. Also Personal Communication. Letter from Prof. D.A. Kotze, then Professor, Department of Development Administration, University of South Africa to the author, 28 June 1985

32 Joseph N. Weatherby, The Other World: Issues and Politics of the Developing World (New York: Longman, 2000), p. 23.33

? Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), p. 21.

38 David E. Apter, Ghana in Transition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. xv.

39 Theroux, Dark Star Safari, pp. 320.40 Ralph Linton, “An Anthropologist Views Point Four,” American Perspective, vol. 4, no. 2 (Spring, 1950), p. 119. Article, pp. 113-121.

41 Ferguson, Empire,p. 190.

42 Ferguson, Empire, p. 189.

43 Ferguson, Empire, p. 204.

47 Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (New York: Vintage, 1972), p. 371.

48 Barbara W. Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to VietNam (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), p. 235.

49 Ibid., p. 241.

50 See Caleb Carr, “William Pitt the Elder and the Avoidance of the American Revolution,” in What if? America: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, Robert Cowley, ed. (London: Pan Books, 2003), p. 25.

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development and religious based humanitarian impulses- converged in the last half of the nineteenth century as the European powers (along with Japan and the United States) created worldwide empires. To what extent this convergence continues to define world governance is a focal point of this book.

At question for some is to what extent, there are similarities between Great Britain in the early twentieth century and the U.S. at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In the latter case, the U.S. was overloaded with misused foreign aid and was made a pawn of their “attempts to secure that indefinable and ultimately unattainable thing [called] ‘national security….’”78 We will revisit this issue at various points throughout this book.

51 Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919 : Six Months That Changed the World, (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 240.

52 Everett C. Hughes and Helen M. Hughes, “Sociologists View Point Four” in American Perspective, vol. iv, no. 2 (Spring, 1950), p. 132. See entire article, pp. 129-138.

53 Wrong, In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz, p. 10.

54 Theroux, Dark Star Safari.

55 Memmi, Colonizer and Colonized, p. 3.

56 William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New York: The Penguin Group, 2006).

57 Memmi, Colonizer and Colonized, p. 138.

58 O. Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (New York: Praeger, 1964) and Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963),

59 Severine M. Rugumamu, Lethal Aid: The Illusion of Socialism and Self-Reliance in Tanzania (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1997), p. 27.

60 Memmi, Colonizer and Colonized, p. xv.

61 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Introduction,” in Memmi, Colonizer and Colonized, p.xxvi.

62 Memmi, Colonizer and Colonized, p. 25.

63 Ibid.,, p. 115.

64 Ibid., p. 61.

65 Ibid., p. 60.

66 Ibid.,, p. 151.

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Endnotes

67 Harlan Cleveland, Gerard J. Mangone, John Clarke Adams, The Overseas Americans (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960), p. 34.

68 Booker, The Neophiliacs, p. 101.

69 Ferguson, Empire, p. xxvii.

70 Ibid.,, p. 116.

71 Lancaster, Foreign Aid, p. 27.

72 Quincy Wright, “Forward,” in William C. Rogers, International Administration: A Bibliography (Chicago: Public Administration Service, 1945), p. iii.

73 Wright, “Forward” in Rogers, ed., International Administration, pp. iii-iv.

74 Barbara Ward, The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations (New York: W.W. Norton, 1962), p. 42.

75 Edward W. Weidner, Technical Assistance in Public Administration Overseas: The Case for Development Administration (Chicago: Public Administration Service, 1964), p. 7.

76 Ibid., p. 180.

77 Ibid., p. 206. Weidner provides an uncritical view of development administration.

78 Carr, “William Pitt the Elder,” p. 42.

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