| |
Contributions from
the Column
Focus
No security without proactive
development policy
Poor performance on poverty eradication
The Arab world
demands coherence
Europe closes its doors
Too many voices
11/2004
|
|
Too many voices
With good reason, Europeans accuse the US administration of unilateralism. However, Europe’s development polity is far too fragmented to serve as an equal partner for American strategists. For the EU to be heard and understood in Washington, much remains to be done.
[ By Carol Lancaster ]
In three ways, the 21st century is already creating new opportunities and challenges for international development cooperation. First, Europe – that is, the European Union – is enlarging. With the addition of ten new member states its weight in international politics has greatly increased. The EU far surpasses the United States in demographic size. Its gross domestic product is second behind the US. In terms of aid, the EU and its individual member states account for more than half of public development funding world-wide. That means Europe is not just a major power in development cooperation but potentially the major power in a world where in the traditional standards of international status and power (that is, military potential), there is only one superpower – the United States.
New US commitment
Second, the moment appears ripe for a new effort on development cooperation with the engagement in development issues by the US government. President George W. Bush has committed the US to increase its aid more than at any time since President John F. Kennedy. He has created a new aid agency – the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) – to manage much of the new funding. The new aid initiative will allocate assistance on the basis of the desirable norms such as good governance, free markets and a government’s commitment to invest in its own people.
The administration has increased funding to fight HIV/AIDS. And it is moving in the direction of adding a new purpose to its development efforts: how to deal with fragile and failing states as one means of preventing conflict world-wide. These initiatives present Europe and the rest of the world with both challenges and opportunities. The challenges include the degree to which they follow these leads in their own aid programmes or shape their programmes to fit them; the tasks of international coordination raised by the aid initiatives on the part of the US; and – surely from an European point of view – how to improve consultations between US policy-makers and Europeans as the US considers further new initiatives in development cooperation.
The new US initiatives must have been exasperating as much as they were welcomed in Europe: why didn’t the administration discuss its thinking with the international development community as it shaped its new programmes? Why didn’t it take into consideration existing international practices like the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers and other forms of donor collaboration as it shaped its aid policies? Why does the US act like a unilateralist even in its foreign aid initiatives? What other initiatives might be in the works in Washington?
Private initiatives
The third challenge stems form the changing world of development itself. During most of the 20th century, the major actors were donor governments, a few international organisations and recipient governments, civil society organisations in the donor countries as sources and channels of aid and a few non-governmental organisations in developing countries as recipients. This was primarily a public to public organisational network of aid-giving and aid-receiving. This world of “one to one” is vanishing rapidly, replaced by a world of “many to many”.
The many include an increasing number of venture philanthropists – not just those like Bill Gates, George Soros or Ted Turner but many wealthy individuals wanting to help to make the world a better place. In developing countries, this involves a growing number of social entrepreneurs undertaking a wide variety of activities, often involving local community groups, to better the human condition. It also includes private corporations now beginning to take corporate social responsibility seriously and supporting development cooperation activities not only for public relations benefits. Marketing departments are searching for new ideas to sell their products to poor people in poor countries. At the same time, an increasingly socially conscious public in rich countries is starting to buy goods from firms known to treat their employees well and care for the environment.
The world of development cooperation in the 21st century promises to be a dynamic one. The public-private nexus will be the real frontier of development cooperation and an exciting and promising one it is. But it challenges traditional aid agencies to “think out of the box” – to be ready to encourage and collaborate with organisations they may have dealt with little in the past. Will Europe – especially its aid agencies – be able to participate and lead development cooperation in this world, encouraging European firms and individuals to become venture philanthropists and supporters of development abroad? Will it be able to collaborate with US organisations, like the Gates Foundation or USAID, now attempting to adjust their modi operandi to do the same?
How, from a US perspective, should Europe adapt its development cooperation to these new challenges and opportunities? It is self-evident that a more effective dialogue and collaboration in development efforts between the US and Europe would be beneficial not only to both of them but to those in the developing world they are seeking to help. At present, dialogue and cooperation is sporadic and often superficial. Periodic meetings of the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are helpful but far from adequate.
The US – a continent in itself with its intense self-absorption, its ambiguous attitudes towards continual engagement with the rest of the world, its assertive sense of national exceptionalism and its unilateralist tendencies – is admittedly not an easy interlocutor to engage in development discussions. Its public has been passively (if at times dubiously) supportive of development cooperation; its political right (until recently) has been highly critical of foreign aid per se; its foreign policy elite has had little time for development work abroad except as it furthered more pressing goals of US foreign policy. It is instructive that its think tank – the Council on Foreign Relations – has no specialist on development cooperation on its staff and has not had anyone with that focus in many years.
However, President Bush has demonstrated his interest. Part of his constituency – the Christian right – has become engaged in a number of key issues in development policy such as humanitarian relief, fighting HIV/AIDS and will likely serve as an important constituency for US development cooperation in the future which ever party controls the White House. This presents an opening for expanded collaboration in development issues between the US and Europe. It is not clear, however, whether this new US government engagement with development cooperation will continue. The deepening problems in Iraq and the yawning deficit in the federal budget could easily extinguish the new focus on development.
Difficulties in Europe
But there are two problems to collaborate with the officials of EU member states: there are just too many of them, with varying approaches to development and they are often small compared to the US in the amount of aid they provide. The largest source of national aid in Europe is France. But France often seems almost as self-absorbed and unilateralist in its development cooperation as the US. And in France, to whom does one speak? To the Agence Française de Développement? It is very small and still struggling for a pivotal place in French aid. The Ministries of External Affairs or Finance, where the real power is said to be? They each have their own agendas and development cooperation may not be among the top priorities. In the United Kingdom, the answer is easy – one speaks with the Department for International Development (DfID). But the UK is still a mid-level aid donor, with lots of good ideas but not lots of money. In Germany, one can speak with the Ministry of Development. But that leaves out one group of key actors in development cooperation – the implementers in German Technical Cooperation (GTZ) and KfW development bank.
Speaking with one voice
If real dialogue is to take place between the US and Europe, it needs to be at a high level in both places – preferably the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and the Ministers/heads of development agencies. This is difficult in the US but seemingly impossible in Europe. There are just too many voices. So the first thing Europeans need to do is consider how to speak with the US in a single or limited number of credible voices. Europe may wish to seek a way to engage with the US on development at a high level that involves national governments, but acting together. It is possible that such an engagement could have a much greater impact on the US policy than lots of interactions between the US and European governments at low levels with little coherence.
This point of engagement as close to one-on-one between the US and Europe is echoed in the world of NGOs, development think tanks and even corporate entities. European and US NGOs already converse periodically. Given the potential for these groups to influence their governments in a concerted manner (as was the case on debt), a regularised dialogue makes sense.
The problem gets harder with regard to think tanks. There are several policy research institutes in Europe – the Overseas Development Institute in London and the German Development Institute in Bonn, for example. But there is no interlocutor in France and other important countries. Denmark just closed its development research centre. And there is no institution that focuses on EU development cooperation as a whole that could interact with the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C. That means cooperation already exists to some degree in the field. But at the level of policy-makers where the exchange of ideas can put issues on national political agendas, boost their priority and promote action to address them, there is still much work to be done.
Prof. Dr. Carol Lancaster
teaches international relations at Georgetown University,
Washington D.C. lancastc@georgetown.edu
|
