The Foreign Aid Regime

Gift-Giving, States and Global Dis/Order

A. Furia

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137505903
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études du développement mondial

The author develops an original interpretation of foreign aid by analysing it as a particular domain of international government. She demonstrates how foreign aid practices are contemporary forms of gift-giving that have made recipient countries and populations governable due to a continuously renovated and expanded debt of development.

1

Foreign Aid Is Gift

Abstract: The concept of gift is a precious hermeneutical tool that serves to analyse the notion of foreign aid and its practices. Using as a starting point the analysis of the history of this concept, the chapter draws attention to its demotion in the modernised economic and political domain, and to its many possible interpretations and intrinsic epistemological challenges. By looking at the ways in which the notion of gift may be of use in international relations, Furia argues that foreign aid constitutes an international gift that produces a particular regime of practices that is not comparable with the existing models of gift-giving practices. ‘Foreign Aid Is a Gift’ concludes with an illustration of the specific methodology adopted for the investigation of this contemporary regime of practices.

Keywords: analytics of government; concept/practice of gift; gift in modern state and market; Maussian gift

Furia, Annalisa. The Foreign Aid Regime: Gift-Giving, States and Global Dis/Order. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137505903.0004.

Since the publication of the seminal essay The Gift by Marcel Mauss (1923–4, L’Année Sociologique), the investigation of the many ramifications, constitutive ambiguities and multiple potentialities of the concept, as well as the practice of gift, has engaged scholars across disciplines. Since then, anthropologists, sociologists and philosophers from diverse theoretical approaches and continents have engaged with Mauss’s argumentations. Classicists, historians of varied periods and specialisations, literary scholars, Marxist theorists, theologians and economists have turned to the field re-opened by Mauss’s work and incorporated its insights into their own fields (Liebersohn 2011: 4). The recent resurgence of interest in the world of the gift has further expanded its already blurred boundaries over feminist studies, aesthetics, literary, film and art criticism, ethics, and has relentlessly nurtured current reflections on disparate themes within, across and at the intersection of a number of disciplines – from discourses around ‘feminine’ economies and post-capitalist market economy to regulations on corporate and government ethics on gift-giving, and from feminist analyses of motherhood to ethical investigation of blood and organ donation (see for instance Guenther 2006, Moore 2011, Zamagni and Bruni 2013).

Not satisfied with remaining within the domestic borders, interest in the Maussian gift has also spilled over into the international domain. While its sole name whispers of something different, of the possibility of a radical and elusive alternative to that which Dardot and Laval term the neo-liberal ‘normative system’ and its founding ‘global rationality’ (2013), the investigation of the troubled history and of the current life of the concept of gift shows however that there is not a ‘universality of gift’, neither in its conceptualisation, nor in its practice (Carlà and Gori 2014: 22). Ethnographically and historically situated in time and in place, its practice has always variously crossed different domains and has unfolded according to diverse rules. The discourses around it have been variously constructed and fraught with fluctuating functions and meanings. Its varied conceptualisations have emerged from the diverse theoretical domains the gift intersects and have divergently focused on the subjective intentions of its actors, on the objective nature of thing that is given, and on the process that is activated by the act of giving, or on a variable conjugation of all (or of some) of these components.

Although it needs to be handled with great caution, I argue that the concept of gift provides the right entry point to the conceptual understanding of foreign aid and to the scrutiny of foreign aid practices. With the aim of historically contextualising the emergence of the concept of gift and of substantiating its relevance for the case at stake, the first three sections of this chapter provide a critical investigation of the gift’s particular history, hermeneutical potential and many pitfalls based on the wide literature on the matter. The fourth section investigates the ways in which the concept of gift has been applied to the analysis of international relations and practices and it delineates the analytical framework adopted within the scope of the study.

Modernising the order

Omnis determinatio est negatio.

(Spinoza)

Practices of gift-giving, along with reflection on the nature and various meanings attributed to the gift, as well as narratives and moral instruction ‘in the art of giving and receiving’, have always been associated with Western civilisation (Liebersohn 2011: 3). Indeed, it is widely acknowledged that Judeo-Christian ethical and religious norms and rituals, Roman poetry, law and ethical thinking, and Greek philosophy and tragedy are the primary (and some times competing) sources of most of the nuances and meanings that still substantiate the contemporary concept of gift (Osteen 2002, Davis 2014). Over the centuries, traditional gift-giving practices have been reiterated and re-invented. Ancestral meanings attached to them have been preserved and reshaped depending on the specific needs, concrete conditions and conventions/principles regulating each geographical context and each domain of life.¹ To borrow Athané’s efficacious expression, not only has the concept of gift contributed to making our history, but it has also been continuously made and re-made by our history (2008: 325). In this long history, an important turning point is represented by the affirmation of the idea that gift-giving practices produce and are part of a distinct and somehow unified realm. This is an assumption that still informs the contemporary conceptions of gifts and is one of the most important products of the late modern history of the concept of gift (Davis 2014). In brief, while the concept of gift flowed ‘freely’ in the ancient world, medieval and early modern societies – variously informing disparate aspects of their political, religious, social and economic life – it gained its contemporary conceptual positioning (which does not mean clarity or certainty) by being conceptually (certainly not practically) limited and constrained, and by increasingly losing its pre-modern freedom of movement. Freedom of movement that found expression in disparate forms and places: from ancient euergetism and leitourgeia, to medieval and modern liberality obligations of lords, noblemen and sovereigns; from the upward flux of tribute from subjects to their masters, to that from noblemen to sovereigns; from Christian moralisation and interiorisation of gift-giving practices, to the role of the church as receiver of charitable donations and instrument for extending charity; from the meaning and function of alms and donations to the poor, to the gift’s inherence in various forms of ‘acquisition, alienation and exchange’ (Carlà and Gori 2014: 16, Athané 2008, Davis 2014).

Whereas the practice of gift-giving has continued to inform life within societies, the concept of gift paradoxically gained its peculiar positioning as a result of the long and complex process that led to the devaluation of both its role and its contribution to the construction, operation and stability of the modern Western political and economic order.² Even though such a process of ‘modernisation’ extended over many years, and involved many aspects and institutions, two classical examples of its main characteristics can be found in the role Thomas Hobbes and Adam Smith assigned to the concept of gift in their theoretical constructions.

Hobbes addresses the definition and the function of the gift in several passages of De Cive (1642), as well as in his more famous and mature work, the Leviathan (1651). In addition to the many passages in which the practice of gift is traditionally framed as a form of worship, as connected to the virtue of liberality, and as a means to honour a person and to procure friends and servants (for example, see Leviathan, XXXI, XII, XV and X), Hobbes develops his rational construction of the modern order by contrasting the contract upon which such an order is to be built to the concept of gift, as illustrated by the following passages of chapter XIV of Leviathan:

The mutual transferring of right, is that which men call CONTRACT. [ ... ]

When the transferring of Right is not mutuall, but one of the Parties transferreth in hope to gain thereby friendship or service from another, or from his friends; or in hope to gain the reputation of Charity, or Magnanimity; or to deliver his mind from the pain of compassion; or in hope of reward in heaven; This is not Contract, but GIFT, FREE GIFT, GRACE: which words signifie one and the same thing. [ ... ]

But there is between these two sorts of merit this difference, that in contract I merit by virtue of my own power and the contractor’s need; but in this case of free gift, I am enabled to merit only by the benignity of the giver: in contract, I merit at the contractor’s hand that he should depart with his right; in this case of gift, I merit not that the giver should part with his right; but that when he has parted with it, it should be mine rather than another’s. And this I think to be the meaning of that distinction of the Schools between meritum congrui and meritum condigni. (Hobbes 1839[1651]: 120–1,123–4)

To be more precise, that upon which Hobbes erects the rational and artificial political order that will grant safety and peace to men is not a contract but a pact or covenant. Although the concept of contract implies the mutual transfer of rights, with the concept of pact or covenant Hobbes highlights the need to create the conditions to ensure not only such a transfer, but also its projection into the future and therefore its continuity over time (see Leviathan, XIV). It is thus from such a pactum unionis, from ‘the men united by consent’, that the Leviathan, which is external to such a pact and is created through it, receives all men’s natural rights (except the right of self-defence) and acquires the ‘greatest of human powers’ (Hobbes 1839[1651]: 74, chapter X). Namely, the power that is necessary to avoid the war of all against all, to deliver ‘the safety of the people’ and to provide the establishment and preservation of the artificial domestic order (Hobbes 1839[1651]: 322, chapter XXX). With regard to such a political project, the concept of gift is considered a unilateral ‘transferring of right’ that does not produce any obligation, does not give rise to any due action and does not ensure any temporal continuity. As such, it cannot play any relevant role, even though it carries some residual functions. With the aim of rationalising political theory and practice, and radically breaking with the preceding political and legal tradition, Hobbes rejects any idea of political productivity of the gift. Due to the uncertainty, instability and risk it entails, the gift cannot usefully serve the cause of pacification and of incorporation of self-interested individuals who distrust each other into a single political entity. The gift cannot provide grounds for the establishment of mutual obligation. It can be part of the modern political domain only insofar as it relates to one of the moral virtues necessary for peaceful coexistence, as Hobbes highlights in the description of the fourth law of nature, gratitude:

As justice dependeth on antecedent covenant; so does GRATITUDE depend on antecedent grace; that is to say, antecedent free gift: and is the fourth law of nature, which may be conceived in this form, that a man which receiveth benefit from another of mere grace, endeavour that he which giveth it, have no reasonable cause to repent him of his good will. For no man giveth, but with intention of good to himself; because gift is voluntary; and of all voluntary acts, the object is to every man his own good; of which if men see they shall be frustrated, there will be no beginning of benevolence, or trust; nor consequently of mutual help; nor of reconciliation of one man to another; and therefore they are to remain still in the condition of war, which is contrary to the first and fundamental law of nature, which commandeth men to seek peace. (Hobbes 1839[1651]: 138, chapter XV)

In Smith’s reflection, the continuous and difficult attempt to account for both the social and self-interested inclination of individuals occupies a central place and has been the object of a deep investigation and tense debates amongst scholars. Commonly known as the ‘Adam Smith problem’, such a ‘problem’ has traditionally been defined in terms of a radical contradiction – a theoretical inconsistency between a moral theory based on the ‘sympathetic part of human nature’ and a market theory based on ‘its selfish part’ (Buckle quoted in Raphael and Macfie 1982:21). Evidence of this inconsistency would be, on the one hand, the moral value Smith assigns to benevolence in his account of ethics and human behaviour in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759); and, on the other hand, the dismissive treatment benevolence receives in his well-known economic text, The Wealth of Nations (1776). In this regard, the widely quoted and famous passage of The Wealth of Nations, hereafter proposed, is generally reported as the major piece of evidence of such a supposed radical change:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages. (Smith 2007[1776]: 9–10)

What is relevant for the purposes of this study is that, whereas many studies have highlighted the different focus, consistency and substantial complementarity between the two writings (Raphael and Macfie 1982, Offer 1997, Birch 1998, Min 2002), it seems correct to say that in Smith’s economic theory it is the exchange of commodities based upon individual self-interest that is the best guarantee of social bond. In this context, the need for benevolence is deemed to be irrelevant to the working and expansion of prudent and just capitalist behaviour in a competitive free-market commercial society (Rist 2008: 18, Birch 1998: 35–6). Smith recognises the function of some acts of liberality and hospitality from a historical perspective in his economic masterpiece. He acknowledges and analyses the rationality of benevolent acts in pre-modern, pre-commercial and pre-manufacturing societies whereas in his analysis of benevolent acts in the modern commercial society he eit...