EN - FR - Yükselen Afrika ve Türkiye / Rising Africa and Turkey 3

260 Yükselen Afrika ve Türkiye / Rising Africa and TurkeyEurope, which ended the Cold War, had marked the triumph of the ideologyof market economies internationally. According to the Ministry for ForeignAffairs of Finland, given the changes in global politics and economics:The end of the Cold War has also meant that development co-operationcan no longer be justified by the same security policy arguments as before,when the great powers and their allies often gave aid to developing countriesin order to keep them ‘in the same camp’ or prevent them from allying themselveswith the other side. Developing countries also have to compete with theCEE countries and the CIS for political attention, markets, and first and foremostdevelopment funds. (Finland, Ministry of Foreign Affairs 1993: 8-9)As it is clear from the above, there was a search for a new rationale forthe existence of aid regime.The new search for the rationale of development aid had its pedigree inthe crisis, which began to face most African countries by early 1970s. Despitethe flow of aid in Africa since 1960s, the socio-economic situation of thesecountries had tended to deteriorate. It was in this context that lending institutionssuch as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank initiatedthe Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) as means to redress thepoor economic performance of these countries starting from the late 1970s.Aid was overtly tied to conditionalities henceforth. The end of the Cold Warhad resulted into the consolidation of the New Right which had always stoodin opposition to welfarism and provision of aid in general.Aid budgets in the donor countries began to decline in the 1980s. Thiswas to be expressed in terms of what has become known as donor fatigue, asan expression over what development aid has been able to achieve. This wasthe period when United Kingdom and some other donor countries startedreducing their commitment to development assistance. The publication of theBrundtland Report on World Development and Environment in 1987 and theconclusion of the Rio de Janeiro Conference on Development andEnvironment in 1992, it seems, propped up the arguments for continued flowof aid. Otherwise, the new right was of the opinion that aid is a distortion ofmarket forces and a waste of resources, which simply encouraged corruption.Opposition to aid was also shared by Left critics, who since 1960s viewed itas an element of neo-colonialism, aimed at integrating the developing countriesinto the capitalist world economy (Arnold 1979; Watkins 1994; Mosley1987).NEPAD and the Renewal of Appeal for AidThe New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) was the latest