Remember Wolfowitz?
Look at that. Completely dropped off the radar, didn’t he?
This World Press Review article has some interesting questions about the guy’s new job, focusing on asking what the World Bank is supposed to be doing.
Should the World Bank be about poverty alleviation or wealth creation for the poor?
This is a fundamental institutional dilemma. Should the focus of World Bank initiatives be on social programs that help the poor ameliorate the burden of their suffering or should the bank emphasize strategies that permanently graduate the poor out of poverty?
Great question. And it’s more complicated than merely “do you give the man a fish or teach him how to fish.” It’s a question that requires security, rule of law, clear title, and other things foreign to some poor Nigerian guy living in a crappy neighborhood slum without water or electricity. (And that’s a country with oil.)
Should the World Bank become an instrument of the foreign and economic policy of any country?
Here I restate something that shocked my Euro friends a while back.
This question completely misses the point–unless you’re a transnational postmodernist. Countries operate in the interest of countries. Even if that interest is feeling morally improved, or avoiding long term other problems, or investing in future trade partners, countries act in their best interests. The United States does not act solely in the interest of tranzi pomo entities not accountable to anyone, as long as its officers still believe their oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Problem is, people seem to forget this sometimes, even those who work under that oath.
Should the World Bank become an instrument of the foreign and economic policy of any country?
When Wolfowitz becomes the president of the World Bank, he will be scrutinized by non-American shareholders of the bank and an army of the bank’s vociferous critics for any sign that he intends to make the institution an instrument of America’s foreign policy. A major fallout of the close scrutiny of a Wolfowitz presidency is an accelerated process to reform the governance structures of the bank to accommodate what I predict will be an increasingly assertive stance of the governments of developing nations working in concert with Western civil society organizations. The new president of the World Bank must work a fine line between reconciling the real and powerful global economic and political clout of G-7 nations and the equally powerful moral arguments of a development institution dedicated to fighting poverty and improving living standards in developing nations.
This is a much better framing of the question. Wolfowitz is not working as an agent of the United States; he’s the director of a transnational organization. His mandate, and his bosses, are not merely the United States like it would be if he were ambassador to the United Nations. That makes his efforts not exactly what I just ranted about a second ago!
Good luck to the man. I hope he’s successful in doing what Bill Whittle terms shifting the bell curve to the right–making everyone, poorest and not, a little more rich.
9 Responses to “Remember Wolfowitz?”
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April 28th, 2005 at 11:44 pm
Well, I’m far from a “transnational postmodernist,” but I’m also very critical of Realists who believe that the evolution of the political “unit” ends with the Peace of Westphalia and the nation-state. I just don’t buy it. It may be true of our lifetime– and perhaps even through my grandchildren’s lifetime– but sooner or later, the nation-state is going away.
And I think there is proof of some countries that do channel their foreign aid (and thus a substantial piece of their foreign policy) throughthe international institutions, like the World Bank and the IMF. Canada, for example, funnels a very high percentage (about 80%, I think, but I can get you exact figures if you’re interested) of their reconstruction and development in Afghanistan through the World Bank. It was one of the reasons that their Ambassador (Chris Alexander) and Deputy Chief of Mission (Eileen Olexieuk) used to emphasize the importance of World Bank participation at our strategic planning sessions– something we Americans did not really understand at times.
Which is not to say that all countries are going down that path. Many, as you say, are “countries [that] operate in the interest of countries.” The US and Japan, for example, expend millions of dollars through their own Embassies (or the state-controlled aid agencies that reside at the Embassy, such as USAID). But this is no longer the universal rule that it once was.
April 29th, 2005 at 12:41 am
Interesting. Sounds like you’ve been hanging out in Canada! I am not a “realist” in the Kissingerian sense as I am a believer in the success of the American experiment and reader of how nations have acted over time. Realism, if you interpret it as “stability is all”, certainly fails in a world where stability of a tyranny is a bad thing. American exceptionalism is diametrically opposed to most of the ideals of those who currently advocate subsuming the nation-state by unelected nanny state bureaucrats. I’m actually working on an article about an aspect of that subject right now, so I spent a little time digging into some of the trends, many of which read to me as efforts to find a way to obviate or mitigate American influence in some sphere or another. I think you might be interested in the last para of my post, which has some interesting twists to the previous para.
I also think that the split mentioned by Kagan in his 2002 article Power and Weakness (later expanded into the book Of Paradise And Power is real; a belief in national power versus a belief in supranational control is part of that split.
I agree that some countries tend to funnel a proportionately larger share of their nation’s aid through the World Bank’s auspices. One reason, of course, is that those countries share that vision; another, more cynical one, is that they’re abrogating the disposition of that funding to a body unaccountable to them, or rearranging buckets of money to avoid having to pay extra when a new need appears. Up to a point that’s okay, but if money you put into an international fund is your main route to funding then there is a complexity when you try to control that flow.
Aid is pretty strange when you start digging into how it flows. Many NGO folks I talked to were VERY uncomfortable admitting how much of their funding came from the US Government via USAID; you shoulda heard the squealing a couple of years ago when USAID got urged to dish money out only to things in the interest of the US! Private flows versus compelled (from taxes) flows are of interest as well; the tsunami aid flow was pretty revealing in terms of how aid as a whole (not just Government X) flowed and is still flowing.
The negotiations between government agents will be an important part of what the World Bank does, like it is today. What I liked about the World Press article is that it went past all that and got back to core questions about the Bank, like “why are we here and what are we supposed to do?” and “how do we do this on the ground?” and “how do we balance the diverse interests wanting to influence the funding flows?”. After hearing decades of people bitterly complaining about the World Bank and IMF and other plurilateral organizations supposed to be alleviating suffering in the world, I feel that this kind of question is a key to getting significant improvement in what those organizations do.
April 30th, 2005 at 5:20 am
I do actually have Canadian “sympathies,” the logical extentuation of my relationship with my girlfriend (she is Albertan, however, so her opinions are often further to the right than mine!) But most of my knowledge about Canadian foreign policy in Afghanistan came from my service as a lowly minute-taker at the Executive Steering Committees in Kabul– I was the proverbial fly on the wall at the conference for all the Generals and Ambassadors in the country.
There is *absolutely* accountability problems (and lack of control) when you channel your foreign aid through International Organizations. That is one of the main reason that countries like the US, Britain, and Japan control almost all of their funding directly from their own Embassy’s offices– they have control, accountability, and the money goes where they want it. But smaller countries– like Canada– do what they can, and tend to do it through international organizations. They also have less of an ability to accomplish decisive results even if they wanted to, so I think it natural for them to embrace “federations” that allow them to pool their resources.
But then there is also a movement in many countries to embrace “international law” and make the norms of the community of nations binding upon their own affairs. Argentina, for example, has written a clause into their Constitution establishing the supremacy of international over domestic law. I could *never* see America going that route (and I would protest vehemently if we did), but that movement is absolutely afoot. And, in a sense, it has already reached our shores– Supreme Court Justices Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer have started citing international and even foreign state law as justifications for their decisions (a move that has upset Bill Kristol, among others, and rightfully so, I would say).
As an American, we tend to support international law and institutions so long as they support our interest. Other countries have a different opinion about those institutions. It doesn’t make one side better than the other, but the difference is absolutely there.
April 30th, 2005 at 5:21 am
Oh, also, wasn’t _Of Paradise and Power_ such a fascinating book? I didn’t agree with anything in it, but that Kagan sure can write!
April 30th, 2005 at 2:00 pm
Well, you’ve got my curiosity piqued. You’ve implied you completely disagreed with Barnett, and now Kagan. How about den Beste, or Max Boot’s Savage Wars of Peace, or Victor Hanson?
Let’s see those critiques, man!
April 30th, 2005 at 8:16 pm
Actually, I meant to say “I didn’t agree with *everything* in it,” but dyslexia got the better of me, and it came out *anything*. I thought Kagan made some really insightful points– especially about the Mars and Venus factors– but, like most political scientists, he kind of cuts at the edges and rounds the corners to make squares fit into circles. For example, he ignores the sheer number of forward-deployed French battalions in Africa and Latin America in favor of rolling the French up into a “non-expeditionary” European military culture.
I haven’t read den Beste, and Victor Hanson is okay (not great, just okay– reading him always seems like on one long rant and I rarely learn anything new from him). Boot’s _Savage Wars of Peace_ is probably in my Top Five of the best non-fiction books I have ever read. I actually give it out to my lieutenants as a professional development tool.
April 30th, 2005 at 10:34 pm
I did an analysis of French military capability a while back, and I didn’t see anything that allowed for an opposed landing. I think they can do administrative landings to protect former (or, uh, current) colonial interests, but that’s about it. The response to the tsunami is a good indication of real world logistic capability, too.
I’d agree with the French military culture being not expeditionary in nature, just looking at their capabilities, even though they do things like the unilateral invasion of Cote d’Ivoire around the time of the OIF I. The difference to me is whether they can do it opposed at short notice. And I’d easily grant you that Cote d’Ivoire is after Kagan’s book, so he didn’t even have that, just the Camp Lemonier type stuff mostly done with Legionnaires.
The key capability that European nations tend to lack is lift. There’s just not much lift there.
I’d agree with you about the Boot book. I keep having to buy it because I keep giving it to people. I wish I could write like that!
April 30th, 2005 at 10:50 pm
Okay, but strategic lift isn’t what I thought Kagan was getting at– his point was that continental Europe had become insular, its interests confined to improving the economic lot of its member-states, and with nary a reason to support the deployment of their forces to foreign adventures abroad. And he’s mostly right about that. But I think the fact that on any given Sunday, France has about a dozen battalions deployed to various parts of the globe has to count for something “expeditionary” and not “insular” in the French character. I understand that they’re not contested deployments and opposed landings, or that they can’t really operate at anything above the Brigade-level, but I don’t think that’s relevant to Kagan’s point.
I’ve always felt that the French aims have become much like the British aims of the 19th century– actively opposed to the expeditionary capability of the other states of Europe, *not* because they oppose expeditions, but because that situation (a balance of power on the continent) would allow the British (and now the French) to conduct their adventurist foreign policy uncontested by their rivals. That’s why, in my opinion, France supports a European Union that it believes it will dominate, and now (polls show) are getting nervous about approving the EU constitution since it is becoming patently obvious that they will *not* be able to dominate it.
May 1st, 2005 at 12:04 am
[...] 1:58 pm
Bobby and I are discussing Robert Kagan’s opus in the comments to this post. Figured I’d move it up to the front page. At this point we’re discussing Kagan&# [...]