Foreign folly
J. Enoch Powell
Prom Aid to Recolonisation: the lessons of a failure Tibor Mende (Harrup £3.00)
The whole episode of 'aid, to developing countries' since the Second World War will rank high in the annals of human folly, and • Will furnish abundant material for the studies of political alienists. Times are changing, however. While it is not yet respectable, still less conventional, to dissect the theory of aid Into its component elements of humbug and fallacy, Professor P. T. Bauer and others who Persist in asserting that "aid does more harm than good to the recipients" are no longer Pitied or ignored. Gunnar Myrdal himself, long a high priest of aid, announced his recantation in three octavo volumes in 1968; and Tibor Mende, once a high United Nations Official — he is a British educated Hungarian'
published in French last year a book under the significant title, From Aid to Recolonisation: the lessons of a fiascho (echec). It is now translated into English. Even for those who need no convincing of What, as a justified tribute, might be called the Bauer doctrine,' this analytical survey of the last twenty-five years is full of instruction. One had forgotten how close the founding fathers of aid came to the essential truth When they pointed in the 1940s to "the Psychological and social prerequisites of Progress." The economic experience of 'the West' could not be reproduced in 'the East' and 'the South' by deliberately transplanting Western capital and organisation unless 'the East' and 'the South' could also become like the West' psychologically and socially. Economic growth was not the result of techniques transferable at will, like anti-malarial measures or improved strains of domestic crops. It was the outcome of mental and moral revolution, requiring its own special Preconditions.
This is not to say that non-Western nations cannot experience an industrial revolution on their own terms and in their own rhythm. There are examples enough; but as Mende acutely observes, "the few non-Western countries which have attained self-sustaining and autonomous development have done so at the price of a more or less prolonged isolation from the world economic system dominated by the West." Meiji Japan, post-Revolution Russia and, more recently, Mao's China point the unwelcome moral.
These truths were so daunting that' the World's polliticians — and above all the Americans, with their native impervious optimism — reacted to them in the normal way: they ignored them as being too challenging and too/ pessimistic. Hence the increasingly materialistic and statistical manner in which the policies of aid developed. The moral and psychological conditions were dropped, in order to concentrate exclusively' upon the tecnnical; and even the latter were misconceived.
The process was assisted by those two powerful political persuaders, working together — wishful thinking and self-interest. The United Nations declared in 1945 that "conditions of stability and well-being, necessary for peaceful and friendly relations among nations," are promoted by higher standards of living, full employment and economic progress generally. It was a declaration not only with no basis in experience but contrary to experience. Economic progress and the rest is more likely to be associated with instability than with stability: and if there is any correlation between economic progress and bellicosity, it is an inverse one. Not long after the establishment of the United Nations and its agencies, the outbreak of the 'cold war' and American preoccupation with 'containing Communism world-wide' lent popularity to another wish-fulfilment fantasy — the hoary and oft-exploded fallacy that friends and allies are procured and secured by donations. In twenty-five years aid-giving has gone far to create and entrench that mutual suspicion and hostility between 'the North' and 'the South,' which its advocates claimed it would be the only means of avoiding.
Even these are not the most melancholy reflections to which a review of the history of aid gives rise. The simplest and most apparently charitable form of aid is the transfer of agricultural surpluses to feed the starving. The reality is different. The expenditure on so-called aid is often money which would anyhow have been expended under some other pretext on purchasing agricultural votes by the subsidising of surplus production; and the effect at the recipient end can be the reverse of beneficial. "Is it possible," enquires Professor Mende, "to estimate the economic loss occasioned by the postponement of overdue agrarian reforms made possible by food aid which, when given, may have averted a politically dangerous local famine?" He might have asked the same, still more searchingly, about the long-term demographic consequences.
The section entitled 'mercenaries of the status quo' discusses the perverse political effects which aid produces in recipient countries, through the creation of a gulf, of a kind unknown to developed economies, between the mass of the population and the new post-colonial rulers in their role of aiddemanders, aid-receivers, and (to imitate Cobbett) "aid-eaters." "They cannot mobilise their people. Yet to do so is an indispensable prerequisite of the mobilisation of internal resources. Unable to do this, they are deprived of the major instrument of development, and so become proportionately more dependent on the other, far less important components: exports and aid."
The author's conclusion is what to some will appear a counsel of despair, to others impracticably straightforward commonsense. The developing countries should be left "unobstructed," a synonym for "unaided," which at the end of both his personal experience and his academic study Tibor Mende considers likely "to be the only process able to provide the hope and the self-respect which alone may divert dangerously mounting racial passions into constructive channels." He has a phrase for it: "constructive disengagement." "Constructive" or not, "disengagement" or — in plain terms — abandonment of the policies of aid as they are still officially acclaimed even after the fiascoes of twenty-five years was the only logical conclusion at which a critical history could arrive. It is a pity the author did not leave his conclusion where it stood, but felt constrained to add an optimistic flourish about the young "in both rich and poor worlds," who "in their unshaven, barefoot and rugged extravagance perhaps unconsciously may be finding their way towards the voluntary levelling which could lead to the solution of what seemed insoluble" — all which, Unfortunately, is neither here nor there.
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