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Revisiting Aid in the Arab Middle East
BENOIT CHALLAND
New School for Social Research, Sociology Dept, New York NY
New Models of Aid after 2011?
Since the fall of four Arab dictators in 2011, the issue of foreign aid has emerged occasionally as a focal point, but these discussions have tended just to scratch the surface of the issues at stake. Even a mediocrely informed student of the Middle East knows that the USA grants $1.3bn of military aid to Egypt annually. The partial suspension of this aid after the ousting of Egyptian President Morsi in July 2013 was evoked as a sign that some donors have changed their policies and adapted them to the environment generated by the Arab uprisings. Yet the USA resumed funding at the end of the same year. Other conflicting declarations came from other external actors, the EU and Gulf countries in particular, promising to shoulder the demands for social change in 2011 but backtracking at a later stage and giving less funding than initially promised. Despite widespread rhetoric among lead donors pledging to support the transformational potential of the Arab uprisings, what has been the story here? In particular, what can we learn from a detailed and comparative analysis of the flows of foreign aid across and around the Mediterranean since the beginning of the Arab uprisings?
After a moment of euphoria, of hope for profound democratic revolutions, and promises by US and EU officials to turn their backs on past support for autocratic regimes through development assistance in 2011, the theme of aid lost relevance less than a year later. This shift might be connected to the more pessimistic mood that surrounds current analyses of the uprisings. Thus, in January 2014, the Obama Administration informed aid groups of its ‘plans to decrease the budget for pro-democracy assistance in Arab Spring countries’ (Dettmer, 2014). With the Syrian revolt having turned into an enormous humanitarian crisis, half of its population being in an emergency situation, and the crises generated by the advancement of Islamic State in Iraq and in Syria, talks about innovative ways to distribute aid or to generate an ‘Arab Marshall Plan’ have been shelved and replaced by the rather standard panoply of World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans, of European instruments in action and robust military aid from the USA.
Some novelties took place nonetheless. The EU increased the funds available, including through programmes such as SPRING (Support for Partnership, Reform and Inclusive Growth), and increased the remit of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) to work in the Southern Mediterranean. Turkey’s role as a donor has expanded well beyond the rather limited reach in Central Asia, while flows of money from the Gulf region, at times contradicting one another, have increased the scale of already impressive flows of both private capital and regional subsidies for Arab countries. Nonetheless, the transformational expectations generated by the initial wave of uprisings, and the powerful expressions among Western and other governments of support for the demands of protesters, did not translate into meaningful changes in how these governments used one of the key instruments at their disposal – foreign assistance. Instead, as the following articles show, the leitmotif of foreign assistance post-Arab uprisings is the deep disconnect between official expressions of support for political, social and economic transformation in the Arab world, on the one hand, and a remarkable continuity in the management of foreign assistance programmes, on the other.
For the authors of the articles that follow, this disconnect represents a puzzle that demands attention and specification. How can we account for the disconnect between rhetoric and policy? How broad is the gap? Is it simply a (further) expression of the cynicism and instrumentalism often attributed to Western ‘support’ for democratic change in the Middle East? Such an argument, however, while containing elements of truth, is not satisfactory. Even if, for some, the Arab uprisings have been ‘defeated’, it cannot be denied that new configurations for donors, new relations with fresh actors, new winners and losers, and new challenges to Western and non-Western interests have indeed emerged in the wake of the Arab revolts. Explaining continuity in the face of assertions from governments of their determination to embrace the changes underway since January 2011 thus requires more than simply dismissing change or aid as irrelevant. The challenge of this collection, therefore, is to provide a comparative framework that accounts for the disconnect identified above, and offers a mapping of the dynamics that produced the outcome of interest to our authors: the ebb and flow of foreign assistance programming in the relatively short window since the start of the Arab uprisings. As Carapico noted, scholars of political aid tend not to be familiar with ‘praxis-level implementation’ (2013: 6). This collection presents the evidence about implementation and frames the analytical exploration of the reasons for the disconnect between rhetoric and policy.
It surely is beyond the scope of this special issue to rewrite the history of the Arab uprisings, a phrase we prefer to ‘the Arab spring’ since it avoids the evolution bias entailed in the metaphoric season, and captures the plurality of events. The uprisings have been described as a historically significant form of popular revolts from below, usually called revolutions for dignity and social justice. In a sociological vein, Farhad Khosrokhavar has described, maybe better than anyone else, the price that these ‘demo-movements’ are paying: because they were ‘leaderless revolutions’, these episodes and protest movements carried the seeds of an extreme form of fragility and vulnerability (Khosrokhavar, 2012: 91ff.).
Closer to our theme of aid, a set of revolutions mostly organized by spontaneous movements and calling for social justice represented a daunting challenge for international donors. There are studies on how aid created new windows of opportunity, or not, for revolutionary forces (Tocci, 2011; Peters, 2012; Carapico, 2013), but these mainly offer early assessments of the revolutions. Few authors argued early in 2011 that aid could appear as a barrier to profound social and political change.1
This collection contends that despite much talk about changing foreign development assistance, donors have actually largely chosen the path of continuity. We are therefore far from the grandiose assessment of a new era that Dabashi presented in his The Arab Spring: The end of Postcolonialism (2012). According to him, the famous slogan ‘Ash-Sha’b Yourid Isqat an-Nizaam’ (The people want the fall of the regime) was not only a call for the destruction of corrupt regimes. It was also an expression of the people’s desire to end the regime of knowledge, namely the view that the North automatically had to be in charge of the political fate of citizens (or denizens) of the global South. If this was actually the case, then aid should have also been transformed, offering a new opportunity for Arab activists and associations to turn the tables on aid practices and offer radically original instruments to generate intra-Arab forms of aid, and institutionalization of new networks of horizontal solidarities. It would have meant more intra-regional aid for these demo-movements, shifting the relations between donors and recipients away from one of dependency on the North. The reality is far from this idealized model.
If aid did not match all these expectations, then it is easy to consider it a cynical exercise of deceit, manipulation or foreign intervention. Some even consider aid an outright form of neo-colonialism or imperialism (Hanieh, 2013). While sheer power can use, and has used, aid for such crude realist objectives in specific places and times, it would be a gross mistake to characterize it only through that lens. Foreign assistance constitutes a complex, fragmented and highly politicized domain. Donors and recipients negotiate contested and often contentious relationships around national security, economic development, governance and other sensitive matters. There also exist scores of smaller donors (solidarity groups, NGOs) whose actions are aligned with their declared objectives, such as fighting poverty and providing education or health services that compensate for the poor performance of state institutions or the damage created by large international financial institutions (IFIs) such as structural adjustment programmes (SAPs). But overall foreign aid is a useful indicator of the types of relationships that exist between local actors in Arab countries and regional and international powers.
This introduction therefore seeks to open the black box of aid and argue that before reaching clear-cut conclusions about foreign assistance, one needs to have a clear definition of aid; dispel some of the myths and misconceptions around aid; provide an accurate description of aid mechanisms (what we call here a ‘sociology of aid’); and identify alternative explanations as to why the declared objectives of revolutionizing aid itself after 2011 failed. Such are the objectives of the following pages, meant to set the stage for a series of eight case studies presented in the following articles.
What Constitutes ‘Aid’?
Definitions
Aid discussed in this issue is the shorthand version of official development assistance (ODA), that is, financial or material support given by the governments of advanced capitalist countries, multilateral agencies or official bodies with a view to promote the welfare or the economy of low-income countries. Aid, which can be given to local governments or non-state actors, also includes humanitarian assistance and debt relief. ODA, as opposed to loans or private investments, must include a non-refundable part given as a grant. This means that aid is not just a one-way flow of resources: often recipients must pay back some of the support received, which can, as we will see in the Egyptian case below, create troubles for institutions at the end of the chain of giving. These are the standard definitions given by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), whose Development Assistance Committee (DAC) is in charge of monitoring, and reporting on, the flow of aid on a yearly basis.2
ODA used to be granted only by countries with the means to help countries facing man-made or natural catastrophes. This explains why the OECD, a club of advanced capitalist countries, has played such an important role in collecting information on aid. In the last two decades, new countries have joined the OECD, but only a handful of newcomers have joined the small club of donors countries (OECD-DAC): this is the case, for example, for South Korea, Ireland, Greece and other Central European countries.3 Other donor countries, such as Turkey or Arab countries with powerful economies (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates) are not part of the DAC. They will only report partial data that can be found in World Bank database on aid, but not on the OECD-DAC website, making it difficult to compare figures.4
Another divergence from the standardized OECD definitions pertains to the inclusion or not of military aid. The DAC’s definition of ODA is very clear: ‘Grants, loans and credits for military purposes are excluded.’ This is a crucial difference from aid given by the US government, which is usually counted in a way that aggregates military and economic assistance.5 Non-OECD members have been reluctant to disclose the exact amounts of military aid. A further difficulty is the blurred line between security and military. Thus, for example, the Palestinian Authority, which is not (yet) a sovereign entity, cannot receive military aid. Yet vast amount of US and European money is provided for the ‘security’ sector, leading to complex meanders taken by flows of aid. By and large, even if aid is accounted as ‘civilian’, a lot of it is syphoned into security.
A final set of clarifications on the terminology concerns bilateral as opposed to multilateral aid, and the notion of so-called ‘tied aid’. Bilateral flows are provided directly by a donor country to an aid recipient country, while in the case of multilateral aid, ODA is disbursed by multilateral agencies, typically the World Bank, the UN or regional agencies. The global trend worldwide is towards an increase of multilateral aid, even though it still represents only one-third of the overall amount.6 Tied aid, finally, refers to official grants that limit procurement of goods, food or services to companies in the originating donor country. Although OECD-DAC has time and again pushed its members to ‘untie’ aid (that is, place no conditions on the origins of goods or services granted to a receiving country), the bulk of aid is still largely tied (42 per cent according to OECD estimates of 2006).7 Levels of tied aid vary greatly between donors, with the USA’s being more tied than that of any other donors.8 The USA is the last country still sending its own food to countries in situations of humanitarian emergency, despite the proven hazard and economic distortion such flow of foreign rice or wheat has on local markets. These are consequences of the post-World War II period when American aid, a presidential project that the Congress only grudgingly accepted in 1949, was packaged in a compromising way to promote US interests, in particular the circulation of its food surplus. Still nowadays, the defence of national interests appears on the website of USAID, the branch of the US Government that plays a major role in the distribution of aid.9
The Complexity of Aid
Despite a perception of aid as altruism from richer countries, aid is a very much an instrument of foreign policy. It is about favouring the donor’s national interests (through tied aid or food distribution). Aid is also enmeshed in larger economic exchanges (debt, private investments, etc.) for influence. At times, aid can also be about taking resources.
This widespread characterization of aid as giving is obviously central in justifying fundraising campaigns. It also constitutes the core of humanitarian aid, which often...
