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

The second scenario, that of economic aid to Russia (chapter 4), involved a very few pivotal people on both donor and recipient sides who formed one group that, working as a unit, played a decisive role in making and executing policy. These donor and recipient representatives created the Harvard-Chubais partnership and an identity as a group. Members of the group typically acted in concert, regardless of whether they formally represented the donor or recipient side. The main loyalty, at least for purposes of getting, using, and portraying aid was to the group and not to either side.

Members of the Harvard-Chubais partnership created a framework in which key members of the partnership had “transidentity” capabilities. These members could draw on the identity of either (donor or recipient) side, regardless of which side they came from. Each side could represent the other and interchange these identities depending on what was called for in a given situation.6 The same individuals played interchangeable roles, once as representatives of the donors, once as representatives of the recipients. For example, donor representative Jonathan Hay often spoke on behalf of Maxim Boycko, Dmitry Vasiliev, and other recipient representatives from the Chubais Clan. Hay, formally a representative of the United States, interchangeably acted as a Russian (for example, as a “Russian” official empowered to sign off on pivotal high level privatization decisions) and as an American (for example, with formal management authority over other U.S. contractors). In Hay’s case, this transidentity was actually institutionalized by the policies, procedures, and dictates of both sides. Likewise, Maxim Boycko, formally a representative of Russia, who to key American officials literally personified the Russian “reformer,”7 acted as an American in some operations.

In this second scenario, the actors that represented both donor and recipient sides emerged mostly as a result not of choices made by their own sides, but by those made by the other side. Just who would represent the recipient side was largely decided by the self-appointed representatives of the donors whose offering of Western money, connections, and clout was readily accepted and monopolized by the Chubais Clan early in the East-West encounter. The Clan’s comparative advantage in Russia, as laid out in chapter 4, was its standing in Western political and aid circles. The Clan used its claims on this access to successfully promote itself as the legitimate representative of the recipient side.

Similarly, on the Western side, the Harvard group cited its prior access to “reformers” in both Russia and Ukraine as its primary comparative advantage in applying and lobbying for aid contracts; this access was a key plank of Harvard’s public relations efforts. These decisions were then institutionally reified by both sides, although not without substantial manipulation of procedures on both sides.

This structure of relationships among people institutionalized flexibility and afforded maximum leeway for its “transactors”8 to play on their transidentities. It facilitated the ability of a transactor, formally representing the donor side, to arrange entrée of a fellow transactor, formally representing the recipient side, to the donor side. It enabled transactors to represent institutions on both sides, regardless of which side they came from. The most effective transactors were the ones most skilled at playing on their identities and exploiting this flexible structure.

It is conceivable that such latitude could raise questions about the legitimacy of an actor’s claims to represent the side from whence he came. However, in many cases, the opposite happened: in the United States, Harvard reinforced Chubais as a signifier for Russia while Chubais’s association with Harvard lent him credibility and clout in Russia, at least in some circles at some times. Likewise, in Russia, Chubais reinforced Harvard as a signifier for the United States. In this way, transactors from different sides reinforced each other’s identities as a member of the other. 9 Moreover, the process by which transactors reinforced the other to each other’s sides served to fortify the influence and identity of the transactors as a group. Therefore, transidentity could simultaneously strengthen the distinctive identity of an actor, the identity of that same actor as the “other,” and the identity of the group as such.

These two scenarios, then, can have very different consequences for the donors and recipients and the larger societies they represent. In the first scenario, the recipients are influenced by the donors and the process but typically continue to represent the side of their origin. In the second (Russian) scenario, one group interchangeably represents both sides and thus is empowered by transidentity capabilities. This scenario raises a question: What are the implications of a state of affairs in which the choice of who represents one side is shaped to a significant degree by self-selected representatives of the other? The play of identities that this social structure affords enables maximum flexibility and deniability, as well as the opportunity to reduce accountability by bodies, procedures, and structures on both sides.

In this increasingly globalized economy with snappy technology, we have the persistent illusion that transferring information is the same as communicating. But fundamental disconnects between cultures and civilizations persist. Thus, opportunities for transidentity and transactor groups to play significant roles may be growing. This phenomenon—and its implications—warrant further exploration.

ADJUSTMENT

Over a number of years of foreign assistance, something of a “learning curve” on the part of both donors and recipients evolved within each recipient country, though often after damage was done, and with the recipients, rather than the donors, doing most of the learning. The redundant and inexperienced consultants that donors sent in the first years of an aid effort to a particular country were sometimes replaced later on by more carefully chosen and useful advisers.

But despite the learning experienced among aid officials and contractors, progress was rarely transferred from one country to another. As assistance moved east, the same lessons had to be relearned (or not) in each new recipient country. Local officials in Ukraine (circa 1994-95) voiced complaints almost identical to those that Central European officials had expressed years earlier (circa 1990-91): that donors send burdensome fly-in–fly-out advisers who stay in expensive hotels and know little about the host country. Only after local criticism or lack of receptiveness to further aid in a recipient country did donors tend to alter their approaches. And in many ways, after initial contact, true change became more difficult because the legacies of communism tended to be more entrenched the farther east the donors went.

This is not to say that the outcome of the aid effort has been entirely negative, or that donor efforts invariably resulted in permanent alienation. Despite the mistakes that were made, and the resentments they engendered, much of the antagonism present a few years earlier has dissipated, at least in Central Europe. In these countries, even if both sides initially came away from the aid table disappointed, person-to-person contact has helped to reduce the isolation stemming from the Cold War. Despite its mixed legacy, aid to Central Europe has been part of a broader process of establishing “normal” relationships between West and East, and aid programs have contributed to the interchange of people and ideas. To a significant degree, these relationships mostly were between elites and on Western terms, but some relationships that were more inclusive and balanced also flourished.