Descartado

Such stuff as folks are made on

We seek an understanding of the concrete ways in which images of an "other" are created and transmitted in the contemporary West, and specifically through the complex of interactions surrounding the concept of "aid" – which have been called neo-colonial relations by some. The "other" involved consists of the non-Western, subordinate other – those human beings and their collective representation who live in what is variously termed "the third world" or "less developed countries," and whose imaginary function alternates between menace and responsibility.

While there are patterns which are similar, in these representations, to representations of poverty in general, and of poorer regions within any particular country, issues of nationality and ethnicity, as well as the distances involved (especially the cognitivie distances), the width of the information gap and the postcolonial heritage- practical and symbolic – including

The extensive literature on the subject written since WW2 by the relevant actors – governments, international organizations, private foundations and development economists, can hardly be considered a direct influence upon public perceptions, and in that hiatus lies the main focus of the study – to ascertain how, and to what degree, such studies and practices influence each other and public opinion, forming a coherent body of symbols; and to glimpse at the wider import of such symbols.

Because the topic could easily grow too wide to be dealt with in a single thesis, a focus on those organizations directly involved with establishing "development" on an international level – the UN, the Bretton Woods organizations, and international foundations – and on actions conducted under their aegis, will be necessary, touching only peripherally on the often conflicting views held by activist NGOs, by unaffiliated social researchers, and by former colonial governments.



Development has emerged as a primary notion in politics across the globe. For "developed" and "developing" countries alike, it is a goal to be pursued, sometimes at any cost. For "developed" countries, development aid is viewed, both by the public and by governments, as crucial to their relationships with other regions, some going as far as the author who wrote in Foreign Affairs that "Foreign aid has returned to the center of U.S. foreign policy." What development means has undergone a major shift in the last few years, from a basically economic definition to a more nuanced one, as reflected in the UNDP's human development reports, and the use of ul Haq,
Sen and Anand's human development index in place of GDP per capita as a measure of a country's advancement along those tracks.

The question of what tracks those are is, oddly enough, discussed less often than countries' relative advancement, which inclines one to believe that the index theory of modernity is actually largely subordinate to the aculturation one; which societies are developed is a settled point, and alternative ways of measuring development will not change that truth. It is easier to understand that apparent paradox (or futility) if we acknowledge indexes and scales of development as instruments of pressure on national governments, to push them into certain directions.

For some, that is the whole purpose of the development aid apparatus; the shaping of developing countries into something akin to Western ones. And yet, while the critique of neocolonialism based on literary criticism makes sense, it remains that, if this is indeed neocolonialism, it is a rather more efficient form of colonialism than its predecessor, as the sum of all aid, official or otherwise, is optimistically (and including immigrants' remmitances) put at 100bn – less than .25% of the world's GDP, or 1% of its trade ( a far cry from the 25% of total budget outlays Americans judged to be going to foreign aid) . In fact, much of the apparatus of international development is not directly tied to donor countries, nor concentrated on countries whose relationship is properly "colonial," nor is it aligned with the maintenance of the current economic order. Like Edward Said's Orientalism, which, while brilliant, ignored the contribution to orientalism of thinkers from countries without empires, or opposed to imperialism, we are left with a conspiracy devoid of its illuminati. In fact, the latest Human Development Report by the UNDP, even as it advocated its goal of turning the world into Toronto, criticized such men as Samuel Huntington and Said's Bête Noire Bernard Lewis, and their notions of cultural superiority. If it is neocolonialism, it is a very anti-colonial sort of neocolonialism.

And yet, it is by no means coincidental that neocolonialist critiques come from literary criticism, as the structure in which knowledge is created bears a striking resemblance to that of colonial times – so much so that, in recent years, outright imperialist rhetorics, complete with a somewhat updated white man's burden, have surfaced. When we look beyond the language to its context – from what is being said to who, where, and why is saying it – the difficulty of calling contemporary international development colonialist becomes clear. Colonialism was an integrated system; today's actors, NGOs, foundations, corporations, and governments, only cooperate topically, and are often outright hostile to each other. Colonialism had the Other's essential Otherness as its ideological core, from Rassenwissenschaften to "east is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet," while the ethos of development has for its ultimate goal that meeting, even if, as some claim, what it really means is the disparition of the "east."

Our goal, is not to solve those contradictions, but to seize them, to analyze and describe just which notions go into the making of the "third world" by researchers and workers, and how they relate to each other and to their utterers' backgrounds. Drawing such a map of the many notional third worlds present in the "development community" is important as a first step in understanding other representation;