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

On the brighter side, there were cases in which supporting NGOs did not make a mockery of donor intentions. Again, these cases generally involved early error and a conscious process of learning on both sides. Such projects achieved their goals because the donors, as well as the recipients, eventually understood the patterns of informal relationships in the recipient countries and how best to work within them. The Regional Environmental Center is an example of this process of learning.

The aid model of loans to recipient businesses (chapter 5) exhibited many features of the model of supporting NGOs (chapter 3). In the NGO case, donors gave money for public outreach to be used for the greater good; in the case of business loans, donors lent money so that businesspeople could make money. In the latter case, there was less replication of communist-style theatrics because there was no need to hide self-interest: That people made money was expected. But, like support for NGOs, business loans could reinforce long-standing bureaucratic “arrangements” because of the lack of institutions of governance and financial infrastructures.

The case of the West’s giving one “clan” or power group in Russia a blank check and free rein (chapter 4)—the logical extreme of giving to several elite groups as discussed in chapter 3—deserves special attention. This approach served to reinforce many communist-type practices: it strengthened the interdependence between the Russian economic and political systems, and reinforced the practice of inventing fictions to please authorities (in this case, the donors), in part by encouraging the viewing of a Western-selected power group as selfless “reformers.” The Russian case was a disaster from beginning to end in part because Western policies helped to politicize and deform relationships. It was unlike the other models of assistance, in which donors and recipients came to some mutually workable adjustment, allowing some projects to be effective. Political scientist Peter Reddaway likens the U.S. support of the Chubais group to America’s involvement in Iran, which led to the taking of American hostages in 1979.4 Such a political or foreign aid strategy cannot be reformed or amended. Using “development assistance” as political assistance to one political group or leader was a feature of the Cold War—an attempt to buy loyalties—which continued in the post–Cold War period in the form of new elite-elite relations. However, as shown in Iran and Russia, the potential for political backlash is significant, serious, and has potentially grave consequences, especially in a country with nuclear weapons.

The central role of the state under communism, and its continuing aftereffects, highlights a dilemma for the donors—a dilemma that was never debated in policy and aid circles but which ultimately shaped many aid relations and results. Privatization aid to many Central and Eastern European enterprises appeared almost uniformly to yield few favorable results: operating on an ad hoc basis outside local authorities was largely ineffective and, in some cases, even counterproductive because relevant indigenous organizations and authorities were overlooked. On the other hand, as the Russian case shows, aid projects that were “successful” in donors’ eyes often were fruitful because they worked through well-connected local people who “could get things done” through relationships. These “successful” aid projects relied upon a small clique to circumvent, override, or otherwise reorganize political and economic institutions and authorities, ostensibly in the service of the donors’ goals, but especially those of the clique. Such relationships appeared to replicate the closed systems of informal relationships upon which the functioning of communist bureaucracies depended.

Some aid providers who found themselves in an environment dominated by informal relationships felt they had to work through those relationships to be effective. To do so, however, lent resources and legitimacy to communist-style organization, thereby both undermining the donors’ celebrated attempts to build “independent institutions” and fomenting resentment against the elite cliques that benefited. Either way, donors’ strategies—whether they ignored local social organization or worked through it—in crucial ways recalled and encouraged communist legacies. When donors implemented standardized aid programs, they risked being bureaucratic and ineffective; when they were more flexible, they risked reduced accountability. The paradox for donors was that, either way, aid efforts resulted in less-than-optimal aid outcomes.

As the Russian case shows, it is essential that aid policies encourage the building of legal infrastructures and participatory mechanisms, and that they take into account local perceptions, realities, and responses. At the very least, donors must discontinue support of noninclusive “private” organizations and reform by decree. Rather, donors should broaden their base of recipients and support structures to include all relevant parties. Indeed, much of the evidence here presented, from Russia as well as from Central Europe, shows that aid projects that implicate sensitive political processes are very difficult to administer effectively without engendering negative consequences for recipients and/or donors.

COLLISION, COLLUSION, AND CONSEQUENCES

This story has been about efforts to nurture relations between nations (or blocs of nations) using aid as a “bridge”5 built by certain representatives of each side. As we have seen, a crucial factor shaping aid outcomes is just which actors or groups on each side served as bridge builders and the relationships and “chemical reactions” among them.

Perhaps just as important are the actors and influences that resolved just who would represent both donors and recipients. Their role in casting this story would not have achieved such prominence were it not for the fact that the cast (as outlined in the introduction and chapter 1) consisted of distant, if mutually fascinated, nations and peoples. Cultural ignorance—coupled with the idea that cultural knowledge is either irrelevant or easy to achieve—configured the first phases of the aid story. For example, without a good deal of cultural innocence on the U.S. side about the recipient sides, the econolobbyists could not so easily have created the image in the Western press of playing decisive policy roles. Econolobbyists could create such images only in the absence of processes that would help interpret information for one side with the benefit of cultural knowledge of the other side.

Two overall scenarios can be observed in the story of aid to Central and Eastern Europe. The first scenario is best seen in the case studies focusing mostly on Central Europe presented in chapters 2, 3, and 5 in which recipients were influenced by the donors in some important respects. In time, and usually after both collision and collusion with donor standards, procedures, and representatives, recipients responded in various ways. In some cases they incorporated standards and procedures emphasized by some donor programs and representatives (such as those regarding conflict of interest and accountability) into their own frameworks, albeit often in their own renditions. For example, the Polish NGO community instituted innovative measures to foster “transparency,” as described in chapter 3. In other cases, notably the “Marriott Brigade” syndrome detailed in chapter 2, contact with donor organizations confirmed and solidified recipients’ differences with the donors—sometimes unconsciously, other times rather consciously. In this first scenario, contact between donor and recipient sides was a process of back and forth, of frequent and often routine contact among many members of the “sides.” It was relatively inclusive of many regions and peoples in the recipient nations, as shown in chapter 5.