EN - FR - YÃ¼kselen Afrika ve TÃ¼rkiye / Rising Africa and Turkey 3

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244 Yükselen Afrika ve Türkiye / Rising Africa and Turkeyhardly encountered any real development which had taken place as a result ofa ”considerable proportion of aid inputs” (Arnold 1979: 19). In this case, mostgovernments became in favour of aid. But as a consequence of the developmentsin the 1980s, there were already signs that that aid provisions wereunder threat. One of the indications by then was the fact that the UnitedKingdom and some other donor countries had reduced their commitment todevelopment assistance. In reality, aid provision for most other donor countries(especially those in the Organization for Economic Cooperation andDevelopment—OECD) for the developing countries expanded by more than 3per cent a year in real terms between 1981-1991 (Watkins 1994: 517).One of the international political changes that was to take place in the endof the 1980s was the collapse of bureaucratic state socialism in Eastern andCentral Europe. Besides resulting in the end of the Cold War, it also signalledthe triumph of the neo-liberal economic ideologies which championed thevirtues of free market economies and resulted into the consolidation of theNew Right which stood in opposition to welfarism and provision of aid in general.It was in this context that aid budgets in the industrialized countriesbegan to decline among the major donor countries. Aid, as a traditional toolfor ‘development’ was being steadily withdrawn by the developed countries infavor of direct foreign investments (FDIs). While official development aidtotaled almost USD 60 billion in 1990 and FDI was just over USD 20 billion,FDIs overtook aid for the first time in developing countries in 1992. By 1997,FDIs in the developing countries had exceeded USD 160 billion, while aid inthat year stood at USD 40 billion (Hertz 2001: 34).Despite its diminishing share and frustrations over what development aidhad been able to achieve, the publication of the Brundtland Report on WorldDevelopment and Environment in 1987 and the conclusion of the RioConference on Development and Environment, has offered a challenge to thedonor community to continue giving more aid. This was despite the fact thataid was being criticised. Critics of development aid on the Right were on thewhole condemning aid as a distortion of market forces and a waste ofresources which simply encouraged corruption. The Left critics of aid alsoshared this view, but regarded it within the framework which viewed aid as anelement of neo-colonialism which aimed at integrating the developing countriesinto the capitalist world economy (Mosley 1987 for details).The debates pointed out above were been conducted by both social scientistsand lobbysts, mostly those from the Atlantic World. They mainlygrounded themselves in the economic arguments, mostly focusing at institu-
Foreign Aid and Africa’s Development 245tional levels (nationally and internationally). Social sciences—economics,sociology, political science and history have produced a considerable numberof ”theories of social change/development” since the late 1940s. These theorieshave ranged from those of ”change”, ”modernization”, ”dependence”, tothose of ”development” and and ”globalization”. Basically, these theories andpractices have focused on economic growth and since early 1980s, the generalimpression prevailing among development scholars is that such theorieshave reached an impasse and they have generally failed to deal with the realitiesof the African countries (Spybey 1992; Zeleza 1997).The goal of this paper, a very modest contribution to the historicaldebates on aid in Africa, is to provide some clarification of certain deceptiveaspects of the link between aid and development in contemporary Africa,given the uncritical acceptance of the positive role of aid, as clearly demonstratedby the formulators of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development(NEPAD).What is this thing called Aid for Development?Contemporarily, foreign aid is popularly defined in terms of military oreconomic assistance that one country gives to help another. It includes donationsof money, goods, services, and technical expertise. It can be bilateral,whereby, it is given by one country to another, or multilateral—given by agroup of countries. The term foreign aid is also sometimes used to describeassistance given to a country by a private organization in another country. It isacknowledged that countries give foreign aid for humanitarian reasons and toadvance their own foreign policy objectives. Countries provide money, food,and other services to help meet basic human needs such as feeding the poor,and assisting with economic development. Countries also give military andeconomic aid to provide better security for another country against externalthreats and to promote a closer working relationship with that country.Even though, practices related to transfer money on concessional termsto colonies under the label of ‘grant in aid’ or ‘budgetary subsidy’ by imperialpowers began in the end of the 19 th century, ‘overseas aid’ is a concept,which gained prominence after the Second World War. Before the SecondWorld War, the colonial powers did those transfers, mostly on “temporarybasis and without the slightest connotation of moral obligation or aid for‘development’, a word which itself was not part of the vocabulary of thetime.” (Mosley 1987: 20)Often, such transfers were made because of the colonies’ expenditure“arising from the suppression of revolts by indigenous people”. They were
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2. Oturum21. Yüzy›lda AfrikaOtur
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Afrika’ya Genel Bir Bak›flH›f
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Afrika’ya Genel Bir Bak›fl 113
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11 Eylül, Dünya Siyaseti ve Afrik
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Afrika Birli¤i ve Libya’n›n Af
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Yeni Türk-Afrika Ekonomik ‹liflk
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The New Turkish - African Economic
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Afrika’n›n Kalk›nmas›nda D
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EN - FR - YÃ¼kselen Afrika ve TÃ¼rkiye / Rising Africa and Turkey 3

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