Re-Framing Foreign Aid History and Politics

From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the COVID-19 Outbreak

Igor Pellicciari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000601169
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book presents an integrated analysis, at once conceptual, historical, and political, of the growing impact of State Funded Aid on international relations, particularly after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the bipolar system.

In order to observe Aid as an emerging instrument of foreign policy, the book develops an original approach which puts Donors and Recipients on the same level and examines the political dynamics of their relationship. The focus shifts from looking at the needs covered by Aid interventions to the political motivations of Donors and Recipients. Aid is reconceptualized to include any transaction on favourable terms between these two parties, regardless of the object of that Aid. This framework of analysis is applied to several historical cases, from the post-conflict transition in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the post-Soviet one in Russia in the 1990s to the medical Aid to Italy and Russian vaccine diplomacy to the Republic of San Marino during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the end, the book identifies ten major trends that have shaped the dynamics of the relationship between Donors and Recipients over the past few decades, and on a more general level, traces the impact that State Funded Aid has had on the international system.

By arguing that, on the whole, Donors have had greater political interests than Recipients, the book takes a fresh and original look at Aid as instrument of Power Politics. It will be of great interest to students, scholars, and practitioners of Foreign Aid and foreign policy, and to all those interested in analysing how they have been affected by the global pandemic.

Part IThe Conceptual Dimension of Aid

DOI: 10.4324/9781003123330-2

Aid is first and foremost a political relationship.

1Framing a New Concept of Aid in Foreign Policy

DOI: 10.4324/9781003123330-3

Aid is never just Aid. It comes with confrontations of Interests rather than Values.

Heading Towards Aid Wars?

According to a maxim by Carl von Clausewitz which has now become a classic, war is to be considered a continuation of politics by other means (Aron, 1983, pp. 12–14). Due to the times in which he was writing and the role he held (he was a fighting Prussian general during the Napoleonic wars), it is evident that he was referring to the foreign policy of nation states (Paret, 1985, p. 8). This is ultimately the main focus of this work, especially when States try to influence each other through Aid rather than War or Trade.

Is it then legitimate today to go beyond von Clausewitz and say in turn that State Funded Aid – both given and received – can generate a “war” between the actors involved? By war, we obviously do not mean an armed confrontation but rather a strong competition among the subjects in the field, and in particular among Donors – in general, it is much less observed and studied than Recipients in the relevant technical and political literature (Castaneda, Garen, and Thornton, 2008, pp. 215–246). Furthermore, we consider State Funded Aid any kind of direct or indirect assistance between two States and not just humanitarian or development assistance, such as military, health Aid or – why not – the vaccine supply observed during the recent COVID-19 crisis (Morgenthau, 1962, pp. 301–309).

In the global pandemic, as is often the case in times of crisis, Aid has been one of the most common recurrent terms in both the private and the public sphere, in the domestic as well as the international, the national (Where is the European Aid?) as well as the regional (Where is the Aid from the Central Government?). And yet, Aid has also been used with reference to types of assistance that are not classically registered as Aid interventions, even if they have dominated international relations in 2020–2021.

This has underlined the difficulty in framing what exactly Aid as a term refers to; even more so if it is foreign Aid involving Sovereign States, often leading to frequent misunderstandings and the establishment of common attitudes that are difficult to overcome. These attitudes have re-proposed ambiguities inherited from the past, that both academic and political debates have contributed to revive rather than resolve (Halloran Lumsdaine, 1993; Furia, 2015).

To address the issue of assistance policies that have historically failed to guarantee that they operate on the assumption of non-interference by the Donor States within the Recipient States, we may proceed in three stages. The first is to confront some theoretical questions that help emphasize the political dimension of Aid, which too often holds a secondary position with respect to the moral dimension (Crawford, 2001). Then, we move on to observe some concrete historical cases which, not surprisingly, all occurred after the collapse of the Berlin Wall or make reference to post-Soviet transitions; that is, to the post-war Balkans and the very recent events of Aid linked to COVID-19 (Hermes and Lensink, 2010, pp. 1–16). Finally, the last step is to deduce some of the most frequent types of dynamics that are established in the relations between Donor States and as mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph (Berthélemy, 2006; Easterly, 2006). All this serves to seek confirmation of the main thesis of this work. In order to fully understand the History of International Relations, particularly in the period from the end of World War II until today, it is essential to also specifically read the policies of International Aid between States, whether outgoing (if Donors) or incoming (if Recipients) (Burnside and Dollar, 2000).

The Importance of Variables in the History of International Relations

In the general accelerated development of social sciences over the last century, international relations have registered their own particular growth in importance. This is a normal consequence of what has so far been the historical period most characterized by a crossroads of technological progress (especially in the field of communication and transport), of industrialization, of demographic development, of the multiplication of active international actors (multilateral and bilateral, State and non-State) and finally of the imposition of the process of globalization (Sutton, 2012).

At the same time, understanding the political dynamics among the main actors that animate the international context has become one of the central objectives of researchers who have constantly tried to introduce new interpretative keys to simplify and make sense of the complexity of the observed events (Panebianco, 1986; Bevir and Rhodes, 2016). The main hermeneutical tool they were endowed with, as was the case with rest of the social sciences of the 20th century, was the theoretical one. This has become less self-referential over time and more prone to read reality ex-post, to guide the concrete ex ante empirical research.

The positivist idea that social sciences can explain events through immutable and replicable laws has long been left behind; there is now an awareness, at best, that they can be understood (Murray Smith et al., 1996) and theories may be the main hermeneutical tool of this process of understanding. They can coexist even when different from each other and, unlike laws, they are not immutable and therefore neither true nor false in themselves. But, as is the case with eyeglasses, they are interchangeable and constantly evolving with time, they are useful depending on how much they are able to focus on the observed reality and the particular situations in which they are used.

An increasing number of detailed theoretical tools have become central in observing the behaviour of nation states outside their borders and their main interactions with each other. Inevitably, they have placed the analysis of foreign policy, understood as the definition of priorities and mutual public interests in the context of the relations that the governments of the various States of the International Community have among themselves, at the forefront. Just as the foreign policy of the 20th century has been enriched with many new elements (including rhetorical elements) as a consequence of this growing complexity of the international system, the theories for interpreting relations between States have similarly always included new aspects to be analysed. New “frames” have been added to the old “eyeglasses” that were useful for reading the politics of the 19th century which do not cancel out the previous ones but complement and integrate them when they have the advantage of being more suitable to highlighting a greater number of elements. A similar parable of refinement of the theoretical tools of classification and empirical research has been experienced by the rapid evolution of the History of International Relations (Rugge and Di Nolfo, 2006; Knutsen, 2020). Born in the contemporary age as a specialized discipline – and therefore a niche – aimed at observing the diplomatic history of Sovereign States stricto sensu in a diachronic perspective, it has progressively been enriched with new study perspectives.

From the constant (and sometimes academically virtual) polemics that came with the emerging Global Studies, the History of International Relations has benefited from the strengthened conviction (indeed, already mature for some time) that the complexity of relations between States cannot be traced back to the study of their only formal reciprocal interaction activity, however thorough and necessary it be (ibid.). The discipline has therefore been enriched by expanding first to informal relations between States and then, following and broadening the path opened by orientations such as those of the Annales school, adding an ever-greater number of variables for the understanding of inter-State relations (Burke, 1990).

In parallel, with the shifting of the focus on chronologically more recent events – after World War II – the distinctions between social and historical scientists have generally narrowed, even those dealing with International Relations. While carrying out less archival research, the first have frequently adopted a historical method to complete the construction of their theoretical models. The latter, however, have increasingly turned to the use of conceptual tools such as ideal types, typologies, etc., to escape the stereotypical cliché of the exclusive daily micro-narration of the past. This convergence of conceptual tools has also led to a rapprochement, despite the fundamental differences between the immediate working methods, of the same long-term intentions and research tools. An increasingly multidisciplinary approach has emerged from this trend, leading historical analysis to open up to the cross-observation of a growing number of new aspects and variables which are constantly being updated.

Adding the Aid Variable

Among these new emerging variables in the study of foreign policy, a great potential lies in the policies of mutual Aid and assistance among Sovereign States, both through direct bilateral and multilateral relations. The progressive growth of State Funded Aid in the international system is a historical fact which, albeit in separate phases and with different characteristics which will be discussed below, has not experienced a decline between the end of World War II and today (Van Bilzen, 2015, pp. 1–3).

In turn, this importance has been accentuated and further complicated by the contextual end of bipolarism after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the increase in the international arena of potential actors (Donor States), with their own autonomous ambitions of being present in new crises, post-war, and post-Soviet transition scenarios. It is in fact particularly in recent decades, in a historical phase that we would define as still open, that this importance has reached its highest levels, driven by a rapid evolution of the main constituent factors of Aid: from the types of assistance, to the actors involved, to the contexts of the intervention.

It was a constant crescendo with no real trend reversals; heedless of the periodic collapse of resources due to global political, economic and system crises – but indeed often strengthened. Despite everything, the funds to finance Aid initiatives are always found. The actors involved have become institutionalized, their policies have evolved, and the types of intervention have been refined. Consequently, today the main relational dynamics between Donors and Recipients follow patterns that can be organized in descriptive and recurring models, which paradoxically are less studied than specific assistance initiatives as self-standing events.

In recent decades, the desire to be at the forefront of providing Aid in areas of geopolitical interest or significance has become a primary political motivation for international institutional Donors seeking to enhance their status (Carbonnier, 2010; Furia, 2015). In spite of the prevailing narratives, this desire has anticipated the Donor’s own decision on what kind of Aid to concretely convey to the Recipient. Entering the scenario of interest has become a purely instrumental choice; not that in the 19th century and in the constitutional State of liberal derivation, International Aid was not known and there were no examples of State Funded overseas assistance interventions, precursors of what we see today. These are nevertheless isolated episodes on the whole, or linked to the rich rhetoric that surrounded colonialism in Old Europe, or to sporadic interventions on the occasion of emergencies such as earthquakes, natural disasters and so on. It would be too ambitious to consider them – from today’s perspective – as an expression of consolidated public policies or of a long-term strategic awareness.

It is with the end of World War II that Aid among Sovereign States – although still referring only to some specific types of assistance – goes from being marginal in its core essence to becoming central in affecting the international order with a systematic nature that makes it an instrument of relationship, making it on a par with – if not greater than – other classic traditional forms of exchange or confrontation. In his realist thought, Hans Morgenthau was among the first to call it one of the “real innovations which the modern age has introduced into practice of foreign policy” (Morgenthau, 1978, pp. 4–15).

Although the birth of the Soviet proletarian internationalism of the ideological matrix had shown concrete examples of State Funded foreign assistance strategies, it is mainly the US initiative in the immediate post-war period that rises Aid to a new and full-fledged category of governmental action in foreign policy. This accreditation goes through both the approval of the European Recovery Program (commonly known as the Marshall Plan) of 1947 and the powerful message of political legitimacy contained in Truman’s iconic Point Four Program in 1949 (Singh, 1994).

The context in which these two actions mature is clear. The first is functional to the creation of the future Euro-Atlantic space and to a post-war environment that – despite supporting the defeated – would not repeat the mistakes made after World War I when the pressure of German war debts had laid the foundations for a new extreme nationalist revanchism. The second, on the other hand, is connected to the need of the classical Western world to keep and strengthen relations with the colonial world, which emerged from the world conflict with reinforced expectations of obtaining independence and sovereignty in the short term, detaching itself from the old homelands.

If the political objectives of the two Programs are therefore understandable, it is nevertheless worthwhile to ask ourselves why that of Aid is introduced as a new category of government – favoured over other old diplomatic formulas (such as protectorate or loans), used in the 19th century to channel assistance between States (Morgenthau, 1962, pp. 301–309). The main reason is to be found in the profound changes that occurred in the political systems of the 20th century and in the expansion of political participation and in the massification of politics, which was the main metamorphosis experienced a...