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

    9. Arturo Escobar (“Anthropology and the Development Encounter: The Making and Marketing of Development Anthropology,” American Ethnologist, vol. 18, no. 4, November 1991; Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995) and James Ferguson ( The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho, Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1990) provide important illustrations of this point.

CHAPTER ONE

    1. William Pfaff, “Redefining World Power,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 70, no. 1, 1990/1991, p. 47; cited in the address of John Brademas, former U.S. congressman and president of New York University, at the conference “Economies in Transition: Management Training and Market Economies Education in Central and Eastern Europe” cosponsored by the White House and the Treasury Department, The Cash Room, United States Department of the Treasury, Washington, D.C., February 26, 1991.

    2. The idea of joining Europe is by no means new in the region. As anthropologist Susan Gal has pointed out, “Debates about the meanings of Europe were important elements in the 18th- and 19th-century construction of national identities throughout the peripheral regions of capitalist Europe.” Although there are important political, cultural, and historical differences shaping debates among elites within different nations, common features of the debates include, according to Gal: “the elites’ painful recognition of their regions’ economic and political backwardness under peripheral capitalism” and “the consequent attempt to adopt western (European) models of material and technological advancement, ‘civilization,’ bourgeois life, and liberal democracy.” (Susan Gal, “Bartok’s Funeral: Representations of Europe in Hungarian Political Rhetoric,” American Ethnologist, vol. 18, no. 3, August 1991, p. 443.)

    3. Michal Illner, “Post-Communist Transformation Revisited,” Czech Sociological Review, vol. 4, no. 2, 1996, p. 161.

    4. As political sociologist Claus Offe points out, ideas of a “third road”—a more democratic and efficient socialism—or of a course that might replace the Soviet-style economic regime (such as those floated during the Prague Spring of 1968) were “conspicuously absent in the post-1989 events.” ( Varieties of Transition: The East European and East German Experience, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997, p. 107.)

    5. Cited in John Lukacs, “The Legacy of the Marshall Plan,” Washington Post, May 25, 1997, p. C3.

    6. American President Harry Truman signed the European Recovery Program, later known as the Marshall Plan (after Secretary of State George C. Marshall), on April 3, 1948.

    7. According to the U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, “The initial response of several East European nations to the Marshall Plan was positive. Both the Polish and Czechoslovak Governments expressed their intentions to send delegations to the organizational meeting to open in Paris on July 12, 1947.” (U.S. Department of State, Public Affairs, Office of the Historian, “The Marshall Plan: Origins and Implementation,” June 1982, p. 24.)

    8. Quoted in John Robinson and Michael Kranish, “In Speech to Congress, Walesa Presses Case for Aid,” Boston Globe, November 16, 1989, p. 12.

    9. PHARE’s name, which means “lighthouse” in French, reflects the EU’s initial focus on Poland and Hungary. After its first year of operation the PHARE program broadened its target to include other countries in Central and Eastern Europe, but the old acronym was retained.

  10. The countries of the G-24 are Canada, the United States, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.

  11. For further details on this issue, see Stephen Haggard and Andrew Moravcsik, “The Political Economy of Financial Assistance to Eastern Europe, 1989-1991,” After the Cold War: International Institutions and State Strategies in Europe, 1989-1991, Robert O. Keohane, Joseph S. Nye, and Stanley Hoffman, eds., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993, pp. 247, 258-261.

  12. Public Law 101-179, Support for East European Democracy (SEED) Act of 1989, November 28, 1989.

  13. Public Law 101-179, Support for East European Democracy (SEED) Act of 1989, November 28, 1989. For authorization and allocation amounts, see U.S. General Accounting Office, Eastern Europe: Donor Assistance and Reform Efforts, November 1990, pp. 14-15.

  14. By the end of 1992, the United States had committed $4.6 billion, followed by Germany ($3.6 billion) the EC Commission ($3.2 billion), and Canada ($1.6 billion). These figures, which are based on the April 1993 G-24 Scoreboard, cover the period from January 1990 through December 1992 (U.S. Department of State, SEED Act Implementation Report: Fiscal Year 1993, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of State, January 1994, pp. 278 and 279).

  15. European Commission, “G-24 Assistance Commitments: Assistance by Sector,” Brussels, Belgium: European Commission, January 1990-December 1992.

  16. With regard to U.S. assistance, the U.S. Department of State reported $6.98 billion in cumulative obligations to Russia and $2.21 billion in obligations to Ukraine as of September 30, 1999 (U.S. Department of State, U.S. Government Assistance to and Cooperative Activities with the New Independent States of the Former Soviet Union, FY 1999 Annual Report, prepared by the Office of the Coordinator of U.S. Assistance to the NIS, Washington, D.C.: Department of State, January 2000, tables).

  17. The sum appropriated under the Marshall Plan, $13.3 billion over four years in 16 countries (U.S. Department of State, Public Affairs, Office of the Historian, “The Marshall Plan: Origins and Implementation,” June 1982, p. 30), is equal to approximately 87.5 billion in 1997 dollars (Elizabeth Neuffer, “Marshall Plan Legacy Thrives Abroad” Boston Globe, June 3, 1997, pp. A-8).

  18. Pascal Bruckner, The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt, New York, NY: Free Press, 1983, p. 80.

  19. With a few exceptions, what “underdeveloped” or “Third World” countries have in common is receipt of official foreign aid, not hunger, poverty, stagnation, exploitation, or race. Economists P. T. Bauer and B. S. Yamey and Pascal Bruckner (Ibid.) make this case. Bauer and Yamey explain that: “Official foreign aid has been the unifying characteristic of this huge, variegated, and utterly diverse collectivity ever since its components began to be lumped together from the late 1940s onward as, successively, the ‘underdeveloped world,’ the ‘less developed world,’ the ‘nonaligned world,’ the ‘developing world,’ the ‘Third World,’ and now, the ‘South.’ These expressions never made any sense except as references to a collectivity of past, present, or prospective aid recipients.” (P. T. Bauer and B. S. Yamey, “East-West/North-South: Peace and Prosperity?” Commentary, September 1980, p. 58.)

  20. While Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic relied to a large degree on industry, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania were more dependent on agriculture. While Poland and Hungary had substantial private sectors prior to 1989, Romania, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia had very limited private sectors; Albania had none. Ethnic and political turmoil also contributed to perceptions of developed versus less developed nations. For example, Romania was regarded somewhat as a “black sheep,” as David Kideckel has observed, due to “its violent revolution, the questionable commitment of its leaders to democracy and the market, and its persistent ethnic difficulties.” (Janine R. Wedel and David A. Kideckel, “Foreign Aid as Ideology and Culture: The Case of Transitional Eastern Europe,” proposal submitted to [and funded by] the National Science Foundation, 1993, p. 4).