By Sue Onslow & Dr Olivia Lwabukuna
President Donald Trump has been in office for a mere seven weeks, and the international community has been reeling from the disruptive effect of his blizzard of executive orders.
Executive Order 14169, suspending all USAID programmes with the exception of emergency food assistance, has slammed down the shutters on American financial support to the Global South, many of whom are Commonwealth members. The 90-day pause while all overseas programmes are assessed, means the effective severance of aid, not simply suspension, since local contractors and recipient organisations are obliged to meet staff costs on a 30-day cycle.
These local organisations have been confronted with the stark choice: to terminate their project work, and sack employees; or to borrow to meet the possible shortfall – which could last for some considerable time. It has been estimated that approximately 480 million people have been affected by the Trump team’s ideological agenda to row back dramatically on developmental assistance. This massive disruption in overseas aid has also been exacerbated by development retrenchment by the right-wing government in the Netherlands, Sweden and in Switzerland. The damage of the Trumpian rhetoric goes further – precisely because of the licence it gives to governments and particular constituencies to argue against international developmental aid.
It is certainly true that in recent years there has been a discernible shift in popular perceptions of the benefits of aid: is it an effective soft power tool, or waste of scarce domestic resources which would be better directed to disadvantaged communities abroad, or at home; does it do more harm than good, and does it enable authoritarianism?
The far-reaching repercussions of these seismic events are percolating slowly through to the big international NGOS, and the international community. The Trump administration’s actions constitute nothing less than a concerted ideological purge by Trump’s allies and political coterie on American liberal internationalism around development that dates back to the 1960s, based on Walter Rostow’s ideas of 5 Stages of Economic Growth.
This fundamental philosophy of emergency humanitarian assistance and long term aid to developing countries, as both a moral imperative and in the security interests of the United States, endured through the bruising era of Structural Adjustments/Stabilization Assistance imposed on heavily indebted poor countries in the 1980s, and the neo-liberal Washington Consensus of the 1990s. Aid was given on conditionalities – that it worked for US foreign policy on building markets that would allow economic liberalisation which benefited foreign companies, including American ones; and secondly, US-type democracy in foreign countries – thus building more soft and actual power for the US. This outlook also influenced multilateral diplomacy around Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) debt forgiveness in the late 1990s and 2000s.
Back to today’s world. No one closely involved in the international development sector would argue that the system was perfect. For decades, criticism has ranged across perpetuating patterns of dependency; that aid should be finite, or it would prove self-defeating; that it enables authoritarianism and repressive regimes by removing the need for transparency, accountability and frees up money for military and domestic security regimes (rather than on social goods); that aid is an inherent paradox – development only takes off if local elites back it; that it distorts local political economies by imposing significant costs on fragile states’ budgetary reporting, and that it erodes state capacity and professionalism since NGOs offer more attractive salaries than public sector employment.
But the Trump wrecking ball approach has turned perennial structural problems into a full-blown systemic crisis affecting humanitarian assistance, the rule of law and human rights. As we have all seen, there has been a quantum shift in international relations, and licensed a ‘First World First’ approach. The Trump administration’s evisceration of developmental assistance will lead to the immiseration and suffering of hundreds of millions of people across the globe, further exacerbate global inequalities, and throw the past achievements of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into abrupt reverse.
The subsequent decision by the Labour government under prime minister Keir Starmer to cut the UK’s international development budget, in favour of a dramatic hike in defence spending, is another significant blow. (The downward spiral had already started under the Conservatives with the blunt fusion of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office with the Department for International Development, and reduction of the UK’s development budget from 0.7% to 0.5% of GDP.) Meanwhile, the deepening crisis in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo underlines that authoritarianism, with its playbook of calculations of hard power and brute force, is being emulated by others, such as the Kigali government, in the confident expectation that the international community will not react.
- Opinion – Trump: There will be consequences
Modi-Trump starts well with White House talks in February - How Canada and the U.S. can still tackle climate change in a second Trump era
- Should the Commonwealth worry about Trump 2.0?
In this grim situation, what can be done? What can the Commonwealth do? In the view of the authors, now is the time for larger Commonwealth states to step up to fill the yawning gap. As a non-treaty, non-geopolitical organisation which does not include either China or the United States, the Commonwealth has both greater latitude and policy space to do this, and a past track record of coordinated action to alleviate inequities between developed and developing states. There is a chance now to demonstrate and assert a different narrative, in sharp contrast to the far right’s iconoclastic solution to the structural flaws in the international development sector.
What will it take? Political leadership, expertise and sustained political will. This is not an argument for the major powers within the Commonwealth to stump up the shortfall in cash. Given the sums involved – and the leading place the USA has long occupied in overseas international humanitarian assistance (not including emergency humanitarian support) – this would be beyond the capability of the Commonwealth’s larger economies, quite apart from the evident lack of domestic support for such an agenda. Instead, the Commonwealth has the chance to reconfigure aid to be more impactful, by focussing again on boosting training and development directed to young people – classic ‘human skill capacity’. This requires the revival of the agenda of the Pearson Report of the 1960s:
A new basis for international cooperation … with responsibilities of both recipient and donor country … A far-reaching programme of action, a new global strategy that can transform the current aid framework into one that fits the changing needs of the developing world.[5]
The new secretary general, Shirley Botchwey, is reportedly developing a strategic plan and detailed agenda, focussed on what the Commonwealth does best. Rather than focus on the micro (such as election observation, support for legal systems and parliamentary management, climate and environmental advocacy), we urge the secretary general – in collaboration with Commonwealth leaders of the G-20 (currently chaired by South Africa ) – to focus on the Commonwealth’s convening power, and its members’ range of economic and professional expertise (even if not necessarily hard economic power), its unparalleled capacity for people-to-people diplomacy, its access and networks. The Commonwealth could lead a new developmental model that centres organic human rights and the rule of law, and articulates to its stakeholders and beneficiaries why this approach is preferrable.
Does the Commonwealth have the capacity to act, even to agree, let alone convene beyond its membership in Trump’s rough world? This is a sore question. (Lets face it: the Commonwealth as an organisation and its individual members have been extraordinarily quiet in the face of Trump’s pressure on Canada.) But the Commonwealth can find its voice and has done this before. In the late 1960s secretary general Arnold Smith and the Canadian prime minister Lester Pearson initiated a radical, relatively inexpensive but highly effective developmental programme, in the Commonwealth Fund for Technical Cooperation (CFTC) programme.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, secretary general Sir Sonny Ramphal seized the policy space offered by the Commonwealth as a bridge between West/South in the ideologically charged battle between Western international financial institutions and the G77 group of countries, developing a coherent approach to limit the hollowing out of state capacity and retrenchment of public goods, caused by the IMF/World Bank’s Structural Adjustment/Stabilization Programmes, through a series of high-level, and highly influential, commission reports. Again, in the 1990s, Commonwealth finance ministers were key players in the HIPC negotiations, and under secretary general Don McKinnon, the economic affairs division at the Secretariat crafted an innovative and effective programme for multi-lateral debt relief.
A new international development model is essential, recognising the world as it is now – in which the US and China, the world’s most powerful economies, are driven solely by self-interest. According to John Endres, CEO of the South African Institute for Race Relations, ‘the biggest danger to growth is public mismanagement and lack of technical training, rather than graft (corruption). This new international development model requires people-centred diplomacy and people-centred development, something in which the Commonwealth has a strong track record for delivery; and one that can be structured to ensure human skill capacity stays in country, rather than accelerating a classic ‘brain drain’.
While there are no magic solutions, incoming secretary general Botchwey could start by getting together a South-led group — including prime minister Mia Mottley, president Cyril Ramaphosa, prime minister Narenda Modi and others, including Commonwealth financial expert ‘Elders’ — to outline what can be done to rescue the poorest from the Trump administration’s hammer blows, and put international development on a more sustainable basis. Support for people-centred development through professional training must be an integral part of this. Part of the staged long-term strategy for a New Development Agenda must also be directed to restructuring the exorbitant costs of international borrowing and credit for emerging economies. All this requires rethinking and democratising the global economic system, as opposed to charity.
Now is the time for a new Commonwealth narrative.
Sue Onslow (Editor, The Round Table, & Visiting Professor, Dept of Political Economy, King’s College London) and Dr Olivia Lwabukuna (Senior Lecturer, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London).
The post Out of every crisis, an opportunity. Enter the Commonwealth? appeared first on Caribbean News Global.
