Janine Wedel - Collision and Collusion - The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe

If the first phase of aid relations—Triumphalism—was predestined by the prior isolation of East and West occasioned by the Cold War, what about Disillusionment? Was it also inevitable? Emerging from the isolation of the Cold War, both West and East were perhaps destined to have great expectations that could not be fulfilled. Some degree of disappointment seems inevitable given the end of the Cold War and the coming into contact of two profoundly isolated worlds. Triumphalism and Disillusionment were so intense at least partly because of the isolation of the Cold War and the great expectations that its demise created. Both phases were, to a large degree, predictable aftereffects of the Cold War and communism.

Still, many findings here have shown that the donors did their part to exacerbate the tensions of Disillusionment. Had donors designed aid more thoughtfully and grasped the importance of taking into account the legacies of communism—its mindsets and political-institutional frameworks—they might have structured aid differently and thus avoided some of their mistakes. Had they not sent such an ill-suited cast of characters to the aid table, some of these legacies might have been overcome. Instead, the West’s misguided aid efforts opened the door to misunderstandings and ill will on a massive scale. The central role of the state—a powerful legacy of communism—played a large part in shaping aid relations and results. The West as symbol, whether as saint or demon, was also an enduring concept that aid reinforced. If donors had treated the East less as if the blackboard of communism could be wiped clean, donor efforts might have achieved more of their stated goals.

The devil was often in the details and in administrative and political processes. The broad strokes of policy and funding typically failed to incorporate the particulars of implementation: who participated, how they were tasked, what their relationships were to each other as well as to the public and to the law. The pressure from government agencies responsible to legislatures in the donor countries to show quick results and visible benchmarks of reform often stood in the way of working toward lasting positive institutional change. The future holds the possibility of equally large failures if these issues are not addressed.

RELATIONSHIPS AND PARADOXES

The aid story in Central and Eastern Europe has entered a new stage: by 1998, nearly all U.S. aid programs to Central Europe were being “graduated,” as U.S. aid officials characterized it, and aid programs to Russia and Ukraine were coming under closer scrutiny. By 1998, PHARE had reoriented its Central European program toward helping prepare the countries of the region for prospective membership in the European Union. And, as the new century approached, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Estonia were much immersed in pre-accession negotiations with the EU and appeared likely to enter it within the coming decade.2 In 2000, the United States, the EU, and other donors continued to provide assistance to nations further east but with less energy than that which characterized donor efforts in earlier years.

The aid story cannot be relived, but it may provide insights for future aid efforts. As the Cold War ended, many of its categories disappeared. The representation of the nonaligned nations as “Third World” and that of the communist East Bloc as “Second World” no longer have much analytic relevance to the political and economic world system. Anthropologists have demonstrated “how the ‘Third World’ has been produced by the discourses and practices of development since their inception in the early post–World War II period,” as Arturo Escobar put it.3 Limited development assistance to at least some of these countries is likely to continue, and several critical conclusions arise from the aid experience to the Second World.

The means by which donors found and connected with their foreign partners were critical to the success or failure of aid efforts, yet were critically flawed. Donors’ choices could—and did—shape aid outcomes. Because the Western aid community failed to appreciate the importance of the partners chosen in both West and East, and also did not take into account relationships in the East, it actually helped to replicate some communist-style patterns—in both informal and formal relationships. The more that relationships between West and East, as well as within the East, were ill chosen and ill considered, the more likely that old patterns were replicated by Western assistance. In general, the more problematic the relationships, the more the patterns were reinforced.

In the case of technical assistance sent to Central and Eastern Europe (chapter 2), for example, it was the lack of real working relationships between Eastern and Western representatives in many cases, that tended to replicate relationships reminiscent of communism. Easterners put on communist-style shows for Western visitors (especially during the Triumphalist phase). And, despite some overt complaining during Disillusionment, reminiscent of symbolic protest under communism, the code of conduct largely remained “You pretend to help us, and we pretend to be helped.” Effective technical assistance was limited to cases in which relationships between donors and recipients made sense. These cases typically involved long-term, targeted assistance, in which recipients who were to use the advisers identified the specific type of expertise they needed and donors provided resources and oversight. With few exceptions, it appears, donors and recipients did not work this out in the Triumphalist and Disillusionment phases. Adjustment took place in some contexts after a considerable period of learning.

Such learning did not take place in relationships involving the econolobbyists, who were typically present only during Triumphalism. A version of Triumphalism appeared to be a near-universal feature of the beginnings of “reform” and the involvement of econolobbyists and international financial institutions. The econolobbyists’ advice was notable for its generic quality: prescriptions offered in Bolivia were repeated in Poland and later in Russia, with little modification for country-specific conditions. The mode of operation of the econolobbyists—and the damage they did—is by now clear: they went to a country, made unrealistic promises to mostly unsuspecting citizens about such things as improvements in living standards, and pledged international aid—which usually failed to materialize in the amounts and forms expected, and which they might or might not have had access to, and which might or might not have helped. Then they typically disappeared, moving on to another country, another playground for “reform.” The defining feature of the involvement of econolobbyists was that they were mostly about public relations. And they rarely were to be found in a country once the phase of Disillusionment was in full swing.

Potential recipients of econolobbyists’ involvement would be well served to study the records of the prospective advisers in the countries where they have been active and to be circumspect about whose purposes the econolobbyists ultimately serve. It is potentially misleading to take the econolobbyists’ accounts of their records in the various countries at face value: assessments are best made by gathering firsthand information from people with whom the econolobbyists have dealt in the recipient countries. Economists concerned with the record and professional standards of their profession might also discuss standards of conduct and monitor such activities.

In the case of Western support of NGOs that set out to do public service and outreach and help to build civil society (chapter 3), Western aid often enhanced the social, political, and economic standing of informal groups that had formalized themselves as NGOs. This reinforced the informal networks that had formed under communism, giving informal, semiclosed groups still other resources (money, information, and access to Western contacts and opportunities) to be guarded and used only for the group. Communist-style public displays were staged for the consumption of the funders, as in letters signed by an Eastern NGO (but written by its Western counterpart) extolling the virtues of projects already supported and asking for more money, much like the propagandists of old.