Abstract
In the political and academic debates on development aid in the post-Cold War years, there is often reference to a “new aid architecture.” This study explores what is new about this “new architecture of aid” and traces change and continuity by comparing the form and essence of aid architecture in the Cold War and the post-Cold War years. It discusses to what extent development aid can be interrogated within the inter-systemic competition during the Cold War period. After having located aid into a systemic framework, it seeks to understand the emergence of the “new aid architecture” in the post-Cold War years. To this end, it first analyses the relevance of aid to the hegemonic project that pursues the proletarianization of the world's poor. It then focuses on aid's role in transforming social and industrial relations to promote capitalist competitiveness at the global level. In this respect, it pays particular attention to “global value chains.” This study argues that “new aid architecture” is nothing more than an attempt to set a new framework for the role and contribution of aid in expanding and deepening the hegemony of capital over labor on a global scale in the absence of the Soviet factor.
Highlights
Development aid1 has become an indispensable part of the discussions on today’s most serious global problems
The mainstream understanding of the Cold War reduces the explanatory significance of the socio-economic properties of the superpowers by separating the bipolar political–military relationship from wider political, economic, and ideological processes associated with the rival social systems of capitalism and communism
This study has sought to build on the systemic accounts of the Cold War that integrate the geopolitical rivalry with the socio-economic dimensions by highlighting the role of aid in the global inter-systemic struggle
Summary
Development aid has become an indispensable part of the discussions on today’s most serious global problems. The most common criticism that development aid receives has been that it is a strategic foreign policy tool in disguise, used by donor countries to reach certain political and military goals rather than supporting the development efforts of aid recipients. Attempts to show that development aid, from its beginning in the early postwar period, has played a role in exploitation of the aid recipient countries by donor countries, and in ensuring the hegemony of capital over labor at the global level. After discussing the role and relevance of aid in global inter-systemic rivalry during the Cold War, this study further explores and points out the continuity and change of “new aid architecture” in the post-Cold War years. By examining the changing nature of aid in the post-Cold War years, this study investigates to what extent such a fundamental transformation in donor-recipient relations and aid delivery mechanisms has taken place
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