Human Rights and Foreign Aid

For Love or Money?

Bethany Barratt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415771252
• eBook ISBN: 9781135984076
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Bürgerrechte in der Politik

By trying to alleviate poverty abroad, foreign development assistance tries to meet, among other things, basic human needs, which some schools of thought classify as basic human rights. However, because development abroad has often been treated as a tool for the pursuit of donor interests, rather than as an end to itself, it often ends up not only neglecting basic human rights, but making them worse.

Bethany Barratt develops this argument by presenting a systematic external examination of the internal documentation of aid rationale in three major donor countries (Britain, Canada and Australia). The book sets the discussion of these documents in the context of the foreign policy process and structure of each donor, and contrasts it with the results of statistical analyses of key factors in aid. It shows that different criteria are applied to the various categories of recipient states, resulting in an inconsistent treatment of recipient rights as an aid criterion.

While the book demonstrates important gulfs between rhetoric and reality, between elected policymakers and aid implementing agencies, and between the donors themselves, it comes to relatively optimistic conclusions about the general direction of foreign assistance and its increasingly pure focus on poverty alleviation.

This substantive and important book will be invaluable to students, researchers and policymakers in the fields of politics, economics and development.

1 Introduction

The ‘rights way’¹ in foreign policy?

This book is fundamentally about justice and hope. It sprang from the conviction that, if more people knew what was really going on in foreign policymaking, and how the policies of democratic states can sometimes actually lead to bad practices elsewhere, they would demand better behavior from their governments. I had read the powerful arguments made by Chomsky and Hermann (1978) about the ‘Washington connection’ and human rights abuse abroad, and they rang true to me, but I wanted evidence. So, clearly, did others. The last three decades have seen increasingly sophisticated empirical work in the policy community and the academic literature addressing the question of how and when rights matter to policy-makers. Increasingly these investigators are asking a harder question: ‘when do they really matter?’ These have built on earlier rich descriptive work on the stances of policy-makers² and used the increasingly nuanced quantitative data on foreign policy outcomes to determine how much states’ foreign policy-makers really support—in measurable ways—what their formal and informal policy statements say they support. Through the growing pastiche of nuanced case studies and statistical analyses, we are beginning to triangulate on real answers to these questions about the ethical meanings of foreign relations—perhaps the most important questions in international politics.

One of the things this pastiche has revealed is how very often the record looks quite different in the aggregate than it does in the particular. This is especially the case because we are most likely to hear about the most dramatic cases of rights abuses and how other states have—or so often have not—responded to them. These differences made me wonder: was it perhaps not that there was not a ‘real’ commitment to human rights in democracies’ foreign policies, but rather that this commitment existed in the presence of other ‘real’ foreign policy goals? Was there perhaps a specific subset of cases that we could identify where issues of rights were more likely to be taken into account? The normative punch line, of course, was that, if this was the case, finding that subset of cases where human rights mattered should tell us what would have to happen to make human rights matter all the time.

I was interested in wealthy, relatively powerful states, because it is these states that can effect positive change in the international system. And I was interested in democracies because they are the ones who we might most expect to have the will to effect such changes.

Given the current historical moment, I want to be very clear about what I mean by effecting positive change. I try very hard in the pages that follow not to make claims about the moral superiority of particular regime types. By positive political change I do not mean unilateral interventions aimed at changing specific political arrangements that have been established through a truly participatory process of consensus. By positive change I mean making the poorest people less poor and more empowered, making people who cannot express themselves free to do so, and making governments that would abuse the people to whom they are responsible unable to do so.

So why expect leaders of states with regimes that can broadly be defined as democratic to be more likely to have the political will to act for positive change? Instances of course abound in which leaders of democratic states act in ways that allow or compel behavior that clearly violates fundamental human rights. One of the most dramatic examples would be the slowness of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and others to react to the Holocaust, but leaders every day choose not to take stronger action against violator regimes like Burma, China and Sudan. As the Irish politician and philosopher Edmunde Burke said, ‘the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing’.

However, leaders in democracies do as a whole protect human rights domestically better than do leaders of nondemocratic states. Because of this protection, and because of the laws compelling it and the philosophical commitments underpinning these laws, most members of the public in democracies support at least a minimal role for human rights in foreign policy. They believe that in extremis it is appropriate to deploy foreign policy tools to intervene in the cause of human rights in another state. Sovereignty no longer serves as a fig leaf for gross human rights violations, especially those such as personal integrity, the violation of which has no widely accepted logical or moral defense in any cultural tradition. This general consensus has led all advanced democracies to ratify at least some of the manifold UN human rights treaties and covenants, and more importantly (de facto, though not de jure) to the passage of domestic laws that ensure at least a minimal basic respect for human rights in foreign policy decisions.

I became interested in looking beyond United States foreign policy because a wealth of evidence was accumulating on these very questions from a number of excellent studies done in the US setting. Yet the US is an outlier in so many ways that it becomes dangerous to generalize from these studies. So I decided to turn to other donor states that were like the US in some ways, but much more like each other, and much more typical of the overall donor community. The result is a nested research design that begins with cross-donor, aggregate statistical analyses of different kinds of aid decisions. The heart of the book is the focused donor-special case chapters, which wed statistical analysis to new archival research in a way that offers a novel approach to the study of foreign aid.

In the course of this research, I have spent hundreds of hours in the official development assistance agencies of the UK, Canadian and Australian governments. Through the generosity of these agencies I have had access to much internal documentation that is here being systematically shared with an academic audience for the first time. And I have become convinced that there really is no ‘typical’ aid agency, nor ‘typical’ approach to aid. There are tendencies, but that is all.

I refer above to ‘leaders in democratic states’. In the following chapters I frequently use the common semantic shortcut of anthropomorphizing states and referring to them as unitary actors. Thus I will make reference, for instance, to the actions of Australia. But it is crucial to my approach to bear in mind that decisions are always taken by people, not states. While states may have interests, only people can decide how to pursue those interests. And only people can go further to redefine the relevant interests to be pursued as encompassing more than just the welfare of a particular state. For if a leader can think in terms of, and fight for, the interests of the whole of the state, she can also potentially think in terms of the interests of a broader human community.

The plan of the book

Chapter 2 entails a more detailed consideration of the potential role for human rights in foreign policy. I briefly review the assumptions of several of the most important perspectives on international relations and foreign policy about the likelihood of states taking rights into account. I consider the dilemma that democracies face when deciding how to balance competing imperatives in the international system: self-interest (measured by economic standards but also by security), stability and justice. These competing imperatives result in mixed motives for states. I anticipate that certain kinds of domestic and external contextual factors will condition the extent to which states’ foreign policies take human rights into account.

I discuss the focus on aid in Chapter 3. Originally I conceived of this project as simply the first in a series that would look at human rights’ role in foreign policy decisions over various types of tools—here foreign aid, next military assistance, then trade and so on. In the course of researching and writing this book, however, I became acutely aware of the magnitude of global poverty, and of the woeful inadequacies of the resources devoted to addressing it. I also became deeply impressed with the moral and political commitments of not only the members of the aid community I met, but also with the convictions that often underlie the very concept of development assistance. While aid often simply serves as a tool, an international consensus has emerged over the last five or six decades that extreme global poverty, when some of us have so much, is simply unacceptable. This consensus has been such that development assistance has gone from a short-term and ad hoc tool to be applied only in special circumstances and relationships (e.g. the Marshall Plan, 1947–51, for rebuilding after World War II; or the Colombo Plan, from 1950, for Asian members of the Commonwealth), to being a foreign policy goal unto itself. I discuss this further in the concluding chapter.

Chapter 4 addresses the qualitative and quantitative approach taken in the substantive case-study chapters. Some readers may wish to focus on the description of the qualitative research strategy and variable operationalization, and skim the latter part of the chapter as it deals in more detail with statistical methods and diagnostics than some readers may want. Chapter 5 then presents some evidence on overall aid trends in the donor community, to provide a context for the specific donor case discussions that follow in Chapters 6, 7 and 8.

The longest of these is Chapter 6, which focuses on the United Kingdom, because in it I describe some of the methodology and variable operationalization common to the donor case chapters that go beyond those covered in Chapter 4. These include definitions and measurements likely to be of interest to all readers, even those not as interested in statistical detail.

Each donor chapter starts with a history of the role of human rights in foreign policy, after which I describe the evolution of the donor’s development assistance programme and some of its unique features. In all chapters I consider the role of international context and key internal players.

I mentioned above that various methods have been applied in extant investigations of related questions. I borrow—how successfully the reader will be left to judge—several sets of analytic tools, because I believe they tell us different things that together provide both wide angles and finer foci on aid decisions. The most important new contribution I present is the discussion and analysis of whole sets of development policy documents that have not been released to the public before. These are laid side by side with multivariate analyses of the actual recipient characteristics that are rewarded in aid-giving. I also discuss major whole-of-government policy documents that should be driving specific bilateral decisions. This allows for a threefold comparison between 1) the concepts conveyed in central government directives; 2) the way these are explicitly reflected in specific bilateral decisions; and 3) the statistical record on which conditions are actually associated with higher aid levels for recipients. This gives us a sense of the way that central policy is applied in particular cases, as well as an idea of the way that changes in policy language are matched by changes in policy outcome.

For each donor I describe the archival research conducted at each of the donor’s official development assistance organ, and summarize some of my findings in the documentary evidence: how different kinds of considerations stack up in internal discussion of aid decisions, and what sorts of factors change the very calculus that is applied to states. I then discuss the results of statistical analyses designed to test the hypotheses presented in Chapter 3. These will be seen to be a rather mixed bag and display a good deal of disparity between the three donors, as well as a woefully small role for human rights when we look for their overall impact in the aggregate aid fortunes of recipient states.

This is one of the big stories of the book: while the discourse of human rights has made important normative changes in the way foreign policy-makers and activists think and talk about development, it has yet to be incorporated in any consistently robust way across the donor community, even through the appealing but sometimes fatally vague rubric of ‘good governance’.

I then go on to suggest for each donor some reasons why rights may play a more subtle role, and propose ways to test more specifically the nature of this role. I perform some of these tests, but many will be the purview, I hope, of future research in this field. I end each chapter with a consideration of some specific recipient cases that furnish anecdotal evidence on the conditions under which aid policy responds to rights violations in the recipient, and the ways it does so.

Because there are several commonalities shared by the three donors on which I focus, Chapter 9 presents some evidence on my hypotheses from extant studies on three other donors:—Norway, Japan and the US—that afford a broader context for considering the role of different domestic and international imperatives in states’ incorporation of human rights into their foreign policy perspectives.

While there is no way to definitively establish this using the evidence presented here, and regardless of some rather pessimistic findings, after completing this research my impression is that for every aid decision that is made on the clear basis of donor self-interest, there is another that is firmly grounded in a desire to help recipients. That aid often does not end up doing this is partly the result of mixed motives, but also the result of myriad difficulties in implementing development strategies in parts of the world that have stubbornly, for any of a number of reasons, remained underdeveloped.

My dependent variable, aid policy, and my key independent variable, human rights, share an important characteristic. Both require policy-makers to ground definitions of interest in not merely a sense of national community but a sense of global society. To what extent can leaders make the shift from the former to the latter? Their ability to do so will be determined by many individual, social, national and systemic characteristics. In the following chapter I present an approach which emphasizes the role of domestic political processes, norms and institutional structures; the nature of the international system; the role of the media; and sometimes, the leadership of important personalities. I choose—as one always must—to leave aside other undoubtedly important parts of the calculus. The news is sometimes not particularly good. But in trying to get at the ‘real motivations’ of policy-makers, I inadvertently discovered that for many of them, and especially for those charged with implementation—the key source of interests truly is the larger global community. This suggests that an important avenue for future research might start with the question of why policy-makers and implementers who start with the narrower definition of interests choose to adopt the broader one.

In reading the descriptions of the results in the following chapters, particularly the statistical results, I hope that readers will not entirely forget the realities behind the numbers: that the statistical regularities described often represent indescribable suffering on the part of hundreds of millions of individuals—not only torture, disappearance or other violations of personal integrity, but severe deprivation, malnutrition, starvation, homelessness and hopelessness. Global poverty, when so many are so rich, is a violation of rights as well.

Is the enforcement of human rights, ostensibly at the heart of the democratic form of government, something for which donors are willing to sacrifice gains in other arenas, or is it only pursued when it is not costly to do so? This is a critical question in a world where policy-makers claim to fight to spread democracy—because when terms like ‘human rights’ become hollow, so does one of the organizing principles that defines democracy.

2 The role of human rights in foreign policy

It is the purpose of this chapter not to briefly review the major theories of international relations in toto but rather to examine, broadly, the major schools of thought to see what role they allow for human rights in foreign policymaking. Some initial comments about the purview of this research are first in order.

I adopt a comparative perspective on the bilateral aid decisions of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member donor states with a focus on the policies of the three big Commonwealth donor states: Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. Similar questions have been ably addressed in the context of the US by a number of scholars (e.g. Apodaca and Stohl 1999; Cingranelli and Pasquarello 1985; Hofrenning 1990; Lumsdaine 1993; Mertus 2004; McCormick and Mitchell 1988; Milner et al. 1999; Poe 1990, 1991, 1992; Poe et al. 1999), and in this work I explore some of their contentions and findings in the context of the broader donor community.

What does ‘human rights’ mean?

We next consider rights as one of the sets of goals that states may choose to pursue in their foreign policy.

Human rights is a concept that is notoriously prone to selective interpretation that varies dramatically in different times and places. The famous ideological and political battles that led to the creation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) out of the extraordinarily comprehensive Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), took place across not only the political gulf of the Cold War but across ancient differences in commitments and understandings of what it is that makes for a life of dignity and worth. I will not here review the pantheon of different conceptions of rights and obligations, spanning the length of dimensions tracing the tension between individual and collective rights; between economic, social, cultural, political and civil rights; and between dramatically differing beliefs about the sources of these rights and the appropriate role of government in their assurance. This task has been done ably elsewhere (e.g. Donnelly 2004; Shue 1996). It is worthwhile to note, though, that even further definitional complication has occurred in recent years with the conflation both rhetorically and in practice of democracy with rights, something that is discussed in detail by Tomasevski (1993) and more recently, by Mertus (2004) and Neumeyer (2004). This particular conflation will be very evident in the case studies which follow in later chapters.

I do not, then, argue here for a particular definition of human rights. However, I do attempt to determine what human rights have meant in the foreign policies of major donor states. As human rights have become more fashionable as a foreign policy goal it has been tempting to interpret the term more and more broadly, cloaking a broad range of goals, including self-interested ones, in the rhetoric of rights, a tactic which has been employed perhaps most frequently by the US (for an excellent recent discussion see Mertus (2004)). While the quantitative component of the research that follows does focus on one of the most basic sets of rights—personal integrity rights¹—in each of the country case studies that follows I trace the evolution of the concept of human rights in the policies of each donor state through official documents and revealed policy preferences.

Policy processes rarely allow for application of strict definitions of human rights. Instead, as Tomasevski puts it, bilateral relations

emerge as the outcome of intergovernmental negotiations; hence they represent a political compromise and not the result of the application of any theory. Theories of human r...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations and acronyms
• 1 Introduction: the ‘rights way’ in foreign policy?
• 2 The role of human rights in foreign policy
• 3 Development assistance: from means to end
• 4 Methodology: means, not end
• 5 The global context: cross-national aid patterns 1980–2004
• 6 Imperial pieces to global preeminence: British development assistance and human rights
• 7 Neither here nor there? Canadian development assistance and human rights
• 8 Inherited from history and geography: Australian development assistance and human rights
• 9 Context and consideration: three other donor states
• 10 Developing a ‘rights way’: conclusions, implications and possibilities
• Notes
• References