International Organizations and Development, 1945-1990

M. Frey, S. Kunkel, C. R. Unger, M. Frey, S. Kunkel, C. R. Unger

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137437549
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Political History & Theory

This volume explores how international organizations became involved in the making of global development policy, and looks at the driving forces and dynamics behind that process, critically assessing the consequences their policies have had around the world.

1

Introduction: International Organizations, Global Development, and the Making of the Contemporary World

Marc Frey, Sönke Kunkel, and Corinna R. Unger

In September 2000, world leaders gathered for a historic meeting at the United Nations Headquarters in New York in order to lay out their vision of the twenty-first century’s world. In a declaration that became known as the “United Nations Millennium Declaration,” they outlined the following goals: By 2015, the global community was to halve “the proportion of the world’s people whose income is less than one dollar a day and the proportion of people who suffer from hunger”; it was to make sure that “children everywhere ... will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling,” and it would reduce “maternal mortality by three quarters.” Also, it would halt the spread of HIV/AIDS and malaria, promote gender equality, and improve the living conditions of slum dwellers.¹ Following up on this declaration two years later, the United Nations launched the “UN Millennium” campaign and charged an expert commission, headed by Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, with developing a concrete action plan that would spell out how these goals could be achieved. Published in 2005, the plan announced a new “era in international development” and, with its hundreds of proposals, left no doubt that a “decade of bold ambition” had begun.²

The short history of the “UN Millennium” campaign illustrates that international organizations increasingly see the fight against poverty and “underdevelopment” as one of their core missions. Indeed, as United Nations General Secretary Ban Ki-moon emphasized at a meeting of the Development Cooperation Forum in July 2012, “development cooperation lies at the heart of the United Nations.” He went on to say: “We have a shared calling: to lift people from poverty and support long-term sustainable development.”³ Similar views dominate at the World Bank, where a basic strategy paper of the bank states: “[W]e have made the world’s most pressing development issue – to reduce global poverty – our mission.”⁴

Today, international organizations are heavily involved in shaping global development policy. Through conferences, summits, and campaigns they raise global awareness for specific problems and build moral and political pressure to promote development programs and provide financial and technical aid. Moreover, as the “UN Millennium” campaign shows, they set development targets and formulate agendas, define norms, and coordinate or try to influence other global policies. On the ground, they provide know-how and technical assistance, train officials, and invest in development projects, all of which involves substantial financial commitment. The World Bank alone, to name just one example, disbursed loans to the amount of $15.25 billion in fiscal year 2013 and funded projects in fields as diverse as transportation, public administration, energy, health and social services, water and sanitation, education, agriculture, and finance.⁵

However, international organizations have come under attack lately, attacks vividly embodied by the anti-globalization protests that frequently mar large gatherings of the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank.⁶ Critics charge that their structural adjustment programs have led to impoverishment around the world; they reject their loan conditions as undue meddling in internal affairs, and consider their privatization agenda as the latest cycle in the long history of Western global domination and exploitation. Others point to the disregard that development consultants of international organizations have of local needs and conditions, complain about their cultural ignorance, and criticize their obsession with comprehensive planning.⁷ On the other side of the spectrum, meanwhile, there are two clusters of critics: the optimistic ones who think that international organizations should do far more in fostering global development, and the pessimistic ones who have become disillusioned by their inability to deliver on this mission.

This book seeks to put the current debate about development into historical perspective by examining the role international organizations and international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) have played in the making of global development policies since 1945. Its aim is to explore and explain how their policies evolved over time, to shed light on the driving forces and dynamics that were behind them, and to question the consequences those policies have had around the world. In doing so, this book addresses problems that are at the core of today’s debate: How and why did they make development their mission in the first place? What did they promise and what were they expected to achieve? How did they conceptualize development and through what means did they promote it? What changes did they bring about in the field of global development? And, thus, what difference did they make? It is our hope that, by addressing those questions, this book will equip readers interested in the current state of global development policy with a more nuanced understanding of where international organizations have come from historically, how they have contributed to development, and which problems their actions have produced.

At the same time, this book responds to the growing interest historians take in the history of international organizations and INGOs. In line with the extensive historical research conducted in recent years, it seeks to contribute sound historical perspectives to a growing field.⁸ Until international and transnational historians “discovered” international organizations, most authors in the field were former practitioners, political scientists, economists, and anthropologists – a fact well reflected by the ironic situation that even a grand-scale history such as the United Nations Intellectual History Project includes no trained historians.⁹ As a result, while most books offer important insights, they still also typically suffer from a lack of archival research, historical contextualization, and in-depth analysis.¹⁰ It is the intent of this book, then, to offer a historical account which is broad enough to provide a sense of the general trajectories that marked the history of international organizations after 1945, and which, at the same time, is focused enough to allow for a thorough understanding of some of the core issues that have been involved along the way.

Moreover, this book also represents an effort to sketch a vision of a transnational history which moves beyond the usual Cold War story of superpower conflict and opens up to new actors, new research designs, and new questions.¹¹ Also, paying attention to the forerunners of post-1945 discourses on and practises of humanitarianism and development in the context of colonialism and empire is essential if we are to understand what happened after World War I.¹² And, only if we venture beyond the Cold War narrative will we be able to grasp and explain the radically changed realities of the contemporary world, where globalization has led to a proliferation of perceived and shared global problems and to the erosion of national sovereignty. International organizations and INGOs, as we will see below, have played an important part in this story, and the time seems ripe, therefore, to take a more systematic look at their recent history.

One possible framework for such a transnational history is the concept of “global governance”, which has gained some traction among political scientists. Global governance describes “the nexus of systems of rule-making, political coordination and problem-solving which transcend states and societies.”¹³ It is marked by two major processes: a “reconfiguration of authority”¹⁴ and a “shift in the principal modalities of global rule-making and implementation.”¹⁵ Both are closely interconnected: with the appearance of transnational challenges, nation states increasingly have to share their authority with trans-border players such as international organizations and INGOs which, in turn, gain governance capacity. As a result, global policies are increasingly shaped in a complex interplay between international organizations, transnational networks, nation states, knowledge producers, and national publics. This not only involves new formats of political interaction, such as global summits and conferences, but also new modes of political communication and policy coordination on the ground. Around the globe, governance is increasingly organized in overlapping “spheres of authority”¹⁶ that rely on various “compliance generating capacities.”¹⁷

While most political scientists see globalization as the chief force behind the emergence of global governance, we would like to take the argument one step further. As we argue, it was to some degree the evolution of global development policy (a globalization of its own) which created the system of global governance as we know it today. Indeed, as this volume is going to show, throughout the twentieth century development was a key arena for international organizations, one where they could raise their profiles as actors in their own right, build legitimacy and thereby extend their authority. In this sense, improving living conditions in the “global South” not only served ideational purposes, but was also a way of demonstrating how international organizations and INGOs could make a difference in a world that was increasingly seen as being dominated by global inequalities.

“Developing missions” and global governance, 1920s to 1990s

In order to understand the intimate relationship between global governance and development policy we have to go back to the times of the League of Nations.¹⁸ Article 22 of the League’s covenant emphasized a “sacred trust of civilization” to guide the “well-being and development” of the former German- and Ottoman-occupied territories whose populations were allegedly “not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modem world.” Under the framework of the League’s so-called “mandate system,” those territories were divided into the more-developed “A” mandates, the less-developed “B” mandates, and the non-developed “C” mandates, and the Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC) based in Geneva was charged with supervising their progress.¹⁹ In addition, a few dozen special advisory committees and other bodies were concerned with promoting social and economic welfare around the world, among them the League’s Health Organization, which became an important provider of international technical assistance over the course of the 1920s and 1930s.²⁰ Its experts travelled around the world and assisted governments in Bolivia, China, Siam, and Liberia to reorganize their national health systems, and they staged international conferences on problems such as rural hygiene or cross-border pollution.²¹

By the mid-1930s, moreover, the League paved the way for a new global development discourse. While until then most technical-help programs had been conducted as ad hoc measures to remedy specific exigencies, various reports and inquiries on global food and nutrition questions done under the Health Organization’s leadership now began to formulate a holistic understanding of “development,” and a systematic, all-encompassing policy approach. As the “Mixed Committee,” staffed by experts from various international organizations, observed in its final report published in 1937, global food and nutrition problems needed to be seen in relation to other social and economic aspects.²² Solving the food and nutrition crisi...