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9 - Education in the United States
- Mark Moyar
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- Aid for Elites
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Summary
Nearly all citizens of third world countries attend primary and secondary schools in their country of birth. A substantial minority of them, however, go on to attend institutions of higher learning in the first world for undergraduate or graduate studies. Since colonial times, educational odysseys to Western universities have profoundly influenced non-Western societies. Education at first world universities has often imparted valuable practical knowledge, but its most momentous effects, in centuries past as well as the current century, have been felt in the realm of civilization.
THE EUROPEAN EXPERIENCE
A historical examination of most any Asian or African nation will reveal that some of its elites underwent Westernization during the age of European imperialism. It will also show that during the same period, the nation's elites engaged in protracted debates over the extent to which they should Westernize. The fact of conquest itself contributed to desires to Westernize; with so many nations having been vanquished by European imperialists, it was natural for the conquered, and for bystanders in countries that escaped colonization like Thailand and Japan, to seek understanding into why the West had become so powerful and how others could acquire that same power. Training and education provided by Westerners in the colonies did much to encourage Westernization, for the reasons described in the two preceding chapters. The most potent instrument of Westernization, though, was the education of indigenous elites at Western universities.
During the age of empire, Oxford, the École Normale Supérieure, and the University of Amsterdam admitted students from the colonies and provided them the same education as English, French, and Dutch youth. European governments and universities often provided scholarships to those students. Like most of the colonial activities of European empires, these initiatives arose from a mixture of motives. Some European imperialists were concerned exclusively with extracting resources from colonies, whether for military or economic reasons, and viewed inculcation of Western work habits and admiration for the West into indigenous governing classes as an efficient means of facilitating the extraction. When the people of Senegal or Java submitted to European authority, Senegalese or Javanese administrators were cheaper to sustain than European ones, and were less likely to perish from local diseases.
11 - Measurement
- Mark Moyar
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- Aid for Elites
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Summary
The issue of measurement hangs over all U.S. foreign assistance programs of the present era. Many aid officials and many of their overseers in the executive and legislative branches deem quantitative measurement essential to the assessment of effectiveness, the management of aid programs, and the allocation of aid dollars. Quantitative data can indeed contribute much in all these respects. The concern over measurement of results has, moreover, been helpful in correcting past tendencies to assume that programs were effective simply because they conformed to preconceived notions about aid, such as the notion that giving money to the poor necessarily improves their lives, or the notion that handing out pamphlets on female empowerment is certain to promote gender equality. But measurement, especially that of a quantitative nature, has received so much emphasis, and has been advanced in so dogmatic a manner, that it now undermines the very activities it is supposed to be helping.
THE RISE OF MEASUREMENT
Much of the American public is skeptical about foreign aid because of past instances of corruption, the persistence of third world dysfunction after decades of aid, and the perception that foreign aid accounts for a huge chunk of spending by first world governments. The first two concerns are thoroughly justified, as the preceding chapters attest. The third is not: The average American believes that foreign aid constitutes 10 percent of the federal budget, when in reality it accounts for approximately 1 percent. Even if this misperception were corrected, however, the public would still have ample reason for skepticism. Because of foreign aid's shoddy track record, voters and their elected representatives now feel compelled to demand that aid organizations show measurable results and show them quickly if they wish to survive, much as investors would demand of the management of a company that has been underperforming for years.
U.S. governmental agencies also receive demands for measurements from an ever-expanding group of oversight and regulatory agencies, which includes the Office of Management and Budget, the Government Accountability Office, various inspectors-general, and a multitude of congressional committees. The accountants, economists, procurement officers, and legislative staffers who run these organizations bear the stamp of professors in public administration, business administration, or economics who overemphasized quantification in educating them. These agencies are themselves subjected to pressure for numbers from Congress and the White House.
6 - Training
- Mark Moyar
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- Aid for Elites
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This chapter, and the five that come after it, examine the principal methods by which the United States and the rest of the first world can help the governments of poor countries develop their human capital. They explore and evaluate what has been tried, both in recent years and decades long gone by, and consider new solutions for new problems. Based on those evaluations and consideration of current world conditions, they make recommendations for the way ahead.
We begin with training, in all its forms. Training may include instruction in a classroom, a government office, or a forest. An instructor may train a group of one hundred or ten. In some cases, the instructor works with a single individual, a practice that is variously called training, advising, or mentoring. Generally speaking, training confers specific technical competencies, in contrast to education, which confers information and ideas for the general betterment of the mind.
When it comes to public sector employees, the line between training and education is often blurred. Some facts or concepts contribute to both technical proficiency and general intellectual heft. Some institutions provide a mixture of training and education, particularly institutions dedicated exclusively to employees of the state. Institutions and programs that are more concerned with training than with education are covered in this chapter; the others are addressed in the next chapter.
U.S. TRAINING: AN OVERVIEW
During the first half of the twentieth century, the United States conducted training of foreign personnel in its one major colony – the Philippines – and in Central American and Caribbean countries where it fought the various “banana wars.” Its training efforts were small and rudimentary in comparison with what European colonialists had been providing for centuries. The United States did not become a large purveyor of overseas training until the Cold War, when the imperative of containing Communism drove it to seek allies and influence across the third world.
During the 1950s, American training of foreign governmental personnel mushroomed into a massive enterprise, larger than anything ever attempted by any other nation or empire. It has retained its size in ensuing decades, although its shape has changed markedly. Yet the American people know next to nothing about it. Familiarizing Americans with the foreign training that they fund is therefore a major objective of this chapter.
5 - Human Capital and National Security
- Mark Moyar
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Most Americans are repulsed by governments that fail to provide good governance and security to their populations. But most are also reluctant to ask their own governments to take action or spend money to remedy such problems, especially after nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq failed to live up to expectations. In the current climate of declining budgets and skepticism about the effectiveness of foreign aid, the only way to convince the American people to invest in the third world is to show that it will both enhance American security and save American lives and money. As this and subsequent chapters will show, human capital investments are inexpensive in relation to the threats they mitigate, and they often yield dividends at rates that rapidly recoup the initial outlays.
THE THIRD WORLD AND U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY
At the start of the Cold War, the earth was said to have three worlds. The first world consisted of the United States, the other industrialized democracies of the West, and Japan. The second world encompassed the Soviet Union and the communist nations of Eastern Europe, mortal ideological enemies of the first world. Soviet efforts to convince Western Europe's first world countries to switch sides came to naught, in part because of American infusions of money into Western Europe through the Marshall Plan. America's entreaties to Eastern Europe's second world countries also failed to yield converts, because Soviet tanks showed up whenever the Eastern Europeans tried to break ties with Moscow.
The countries most receptive to first and second world solicitations, and hence the ones that would be most fiercely contested, were the nations lying outside of the first two worlds, termed the third world. Lacking the modern industries of the first and second worlds, the countries of the third world were much weaker economically and militarily. Most of the third world countries in Asia and Africa had been European colonies before World War II and owed their newfound independence to a combination of European debilitation during the war and the rise of indigenous nationalism. Set adrift in a sea of global struggle between the great powers, they found themselves incessantly courted by the emissaries of the United States and the Soviet Union and the smaller nations of the first two worlds.
Frontmatter
- Mark Moyar
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7 - Militarization
- Mark Moyar
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Because civil agencies are not as good as the military at achieving cultural change through training and never can be, the advisability of involving the military in training beyond the purely military sphere deserves consideration. Such involvement could include the training of military forces in law enforcement or other operations normally considered civil in nature. It could include the training of law enforcement organizations that fall under military or civil authority, or the training of governmental organizations of a strictly civil character. While the expansion of the military's writ is sometimes viewed as a formula for oppression, in reality it is more likely to reduce oppression and enhance the well-being of the civilian population.
MILITARIES IN INTERNAL AFFAIRS
Unlike the U.S. armed forces, numerous third world militaries routinely conduct security, governance, and development activities inside their own countries. At times, the U.S. government has encouraged foreign military organizations to engage in these activities and has provided resources to that end. At other times, American policymakers have taken the position that such problems should be handled exclusively by civil authorities, arguing that involving the military in domestic affairs will result in human rights abuses by soldiers and domination of the government by generals. “If you let the military get involved in internal affairs, you'll soon have a military dictatorship,” is an oft-heard refrain.
In truth, exclusive reliance on civil agencies to handle internal problems is a luxury that few poor countries can afford. The police and other law enforcement agencies in the third world are often too weak to deal with dire threats to security like organized crime and violent extremism. Private security firms, which have proliferated in the third world as the result of police ineffectiveness, have seldom been more effective than the police in dealing with major threats to the government or the general population, even if they may make life reasonably safe for the affluent. When the police cannot keep drug traffickers from leaving headless corpses along the roadside or ethnic militias from raping and torturing members of rival ethnic groups, governments must turn to the military for help.
12 - Conclusion: A New Foreign Assistance Strategy
- Mark Moyar
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- Aid for Elites
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Summary
After 9/11, the United States did not need long to adopt a grand strategy better suited to impeding international terrorism, in which the bolstering of third world governments occupied a central role. Ever since, the obvious importance building of partner-nation capacity has ensured that Americans of all political persuasions support a certain amount of assistance to third world partners. But building partner-nation capacity has been much easier said than done, and realization of that truth is eroding the will of the United States to fund it. Today, the United States still lacks a foreign assistance strategy that can produce the desired improvements to the capabilities of third world nations. This chapter outlines a strategy that can achieve the optimal improvements, drawing together the findings of the preceding chapters.
Much of the blame for the ineffectiveness of America's foreign assistance can be traced to misapprehension of the dynamics of human societies. Convinced that the economic and social development of poor nations should be promoted first and foremost, American development thinkers have given too little attention to governance and security, the essential prerequisites for development. Investing in development in the absence of good governance and security is counterproductive, for officials focus on siphoning off aid instead of governing, and enemies of the state steal or destroy the seeds and fruits of development work. But achieving good governance and security requires resources, which are difficult for economically underdeveloped nations to accumulate, so foreign aid can make a real difference when reoriented toward good governance and security.
Recent theorizing on nation building has focused on impersonal institutions and policies as the main drivers of good governance. Just as inordinate preoccupation with sins may divert attention from the people who commit those sins, so has the single-minded concern with institutions and policies obscured the government leaders who guide those institutions and policies. Consequently, foreign assistance programs have often sought to achieve results by other, less productive routes than human capital development.
Multiculturalism has hidden the truth that civilization and its main components, culture and religion, exert enormous influence over the quality of human capital, especially in terms of human motivation. The United States can readily contribute to foreign human capital development by providing skills and experience, but achieving transformational change requires the changing of motives, which is much more difficult because it requires alteration of culture or religion.
2 - How Governments Work
- Mark Moyar
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Although the experts who view good governance as essential to economic prosperity have been gaining ground, they are divided among themselves on another fundamental question: What exactly accounts for good governance? One major reason for the lack of consensus is that only a small minority of these experts has delved into the details of governance in the real world. The remainder prefer to operate at a higher, more abstract level, from which they purport to have the best view of the forest. But this chapter, and several that follow it, shows that we cannot fully comprehend the governance forest until we walk into it and look closely at the trees.
THE INSTITUTION SCHOOL
One leading academic school of thought attributes the quality of governance to the quality of a country's political institutions, including its political organizations, laws, and practices. Within this school, a subgroup views the quality of institutions as primarily a matter of resources and hence concludes that bad governance is the result of geographic disadvantages or acts of foreign oppression that have prevented the economic growth required to provide a sufficient tax base. “Many well-intentioned governments simply lack the fiscal resources to invest in the infrastructure, social services, and even the public administration necessary to improve governance or to lay the foundations for economic development and private sector-led growth,” asserted a 2006 report of the United Nations Millennium Project.
Achieving good governance does require substantial financial resources, to pay for salaries, facilities, and other essentials, and thus is more difficult for poor nations than for rich nations. But it is still very possible for poor nations to attain reasonably good governance; were it otherwise, then most of the world would still be mired in bad governance and poverty. Many of the recent success stories – countries such as Botswana, Singapore, and South Korea – achieved good governance before becoming wealthy. These countries benefited from considerable foreign assistance – which provides strong evidence that foreign assistance in the realm of governance can reap large rewards.
At the same time, large transfers of resources to poor countries for the purpose of governance have often failed to yield improvements. Bad governments have a penchant for absorbing foreign aid without becoming any less bad.
Preface
- Mark Moyar
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On September 11, 2001, four suicide airplane attacks ended a decade of optimism about global progress and showed that events in the third world had a more direct bearing on first world security and prosperity than ever before. Energized by the specter of international terrorism, the United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq to nullify perceived threats to U.S. security and international peace. But the unexpected duration and costs of those wars, along with the passage of a dozen years with few terrorist-related casualties inside the United States, eroded American enthusiasm for large overseas commitments. American politicians began to slash defense spending and downsize America's military presence across the world while urging other nations to take on greater roles in international security.
In justifying American retrenchment, the administration of Barack Obama asserted that the attrition of Al Qaeda, the training of Afghanistan's security forces, and various other developments had made the world a safer place. Some tactical victories had indeed been scored in recent years. Yet the situation in the third world does not, in general, look much better today than it did on September 11, 2001, and is in some respects worse. Political upheaval, war, and the persistence of Islamic extremism have woven a belt of instability from Pakistan in the east through Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, the Palestinian territories, Egypt, and Libya in the west. Pockets of danger lurk not far afield in Yemen, Somalia, Mali, and Nigeria. In these countries, the tremors of international terrorism, war, and humanitarian catastrophe continue to be felt with disturbing frequency and at times shake entire lands. Terrorist organizations also retain strength in Asia, especially in Indonesia, and the rogue regime in North Korea menaces the world with nuclear weapons, conventional military power, illicit financing, and cyberwarfare. In the Western hemisphere, the destabilization of Mexico and most of Central America by large narcotraffickers has caused large flows of illicit immigrants, drugs, and drug-related violence into the United States.
During the past five years, in various official and unofficial capacities, I have visited many of the countries buffeted by the tide of instability. During most of this travel, my primary purpose was to find ways for the United States to help these countries and, in the process, to protect its own interests.
10 - Support
- Mark Moyar
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Funding for training and education represents the best use of foreign aid dollars, since they are the most important activities in human capital development. Aid can, however, be used in other ways that bolster the human capital of recipient nations, as this chapter will show. Some are targeted specifically at human capital, while others affect it indirectly. Their effectiveness varies greatly and is heavily dependent on local conditions.
FUNDS TRANSFERS
Donor nations can transfer funds to third world governments through a wide range of financial vehicles, which are distinguished most significantly by their degree of conditionality. Donors impose the fewest conditions on recipients with what the development community calls “budget support” – the depositing of funds directly into the bank accounts of governments for use as those governments see fit. The recent emphasis of development agencies on “local ownership” has increased the amount of aid provided in this manner. But budget support continues to run up against the problem of bad governance. Governmental leaders, as the keepers of the national treasuries, can all too easily divert state monies to palaces, offshore bank accounts, or patronage networks.
Even where theft of public funds is not rampant, the chances of unshackled foreign assistance funds reaching human capital development programs may be low. Human capital is not a high priority for many third world governments, which after all is a leading reason why they are third world governments. Spending on human capital development takes a long time to produce results and is not easy for politicians to advertise in an election season, unlike, say, building health clinics or handing out welfare checks.
In most countries, therefore, foreign donors who wish to ensure that their donations support human capital development must condition the transfer of funds on the allocation of those funds to specific programs. They must be prepared, in addition, to resort to the “tough love” approach of withdrawing funding commitments if the money is not used for the promised purpose. Past corruption scandals have, in fact, convinced many donors to withdraw funds in response to misuse.
Donors face the difficult task of imposing enough restrictions on the use of funds to prevent misuse while leaving enough latitude for the recipient government to take initiative and make adjustments based on its understanding of local conditions, which is almost always better than that of foreign donors.
Notes
- Mark Moyar
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8 - Education in the Third World
- Mark Moyar
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Over the course of world history, the largest changes to the cultures of peoples have come from either brutal conquest, education, or a combination thereof. As the Hoover Institution's Thomas Sowell showed in his book Conquests and Cultures, conquests that result in cultural change have typically involved the violent overthrow of the existing ruling class, the forceful imposition of the conquerors’ culture on the vanquished, and prolonged military occupation of the conquered land. Such was the methodology of the Normans in England, the Ottomans in the Balkans, and the Spanish in the Americas.
In its recent occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States used violence to remove the ruling class from power but did not hold the new rulers or their peoples at gunpoint while demanding conformance to American cultural norms. The draconian techniques of Hannibal and Cortes have never been especially popular in the United States. The pressures of omnipresent media and international opinion have, in any case, made them inconceivable as options for the U.S. government.
Some of the Americans responsible for planning the military expeditions to Afghanistan and Iraq hoped to transform these countries into liberal democracies in a few years through the installation of democratic institutions and free market capitalism. But this kinder, gentler form of conquest did not yield the cultural changes required for liberal democracy. The Americans did not impose severe punishments on Afghan and Iraqi leaders every time they resisted elements of liberal democracy that clashed with their traditional cultures. When Hamid Karzai ignored American advice to award key jobs based on merit, or when Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki seized control of governmental entities intended to limit executive authority, the Americans did not hang them, or even cut off funding to their governments.
The presence of American forces did compel Karzai and Maliki to heed some American demands, but that advantage dissipated as the American forces departed. American politicians chose not to maintain a large military presence in either country for the long term, as had been done in Germany and Japan after World War II and in South Korea after the Korean War. In those countries, half a century of American occupation had provided security, political guidance, and cultural influence in enough depth to ensure permanence.
4 - Human Capital Development
- Mark Moyar
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- Aid for Elites
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Because a modern government needs a multiplicity of able leaders and technicians to be effective, a nation must develop and maintain a large pool of individuals with the attributes required for those jobs. In the terminology of human resource experts, the public sector needs “human capital” of substantial quantity and quality. Without this human capital, no nation can provide effective governance and security on a consistent basis. Nevertheless, some nations and foreign donors devote much more attention to human capital development than others.
In the 1950s and 1960s, historians, social scientists, and development professionals placed high value on human capital in the advancement of nations, believing that large-scale social and economic development hinged on the quality of the indigenous elites. First world donors consequently spent heavily on human capital development. This “elite-centric” view of development fell out of favor in the 1970s, in part because of the belief that the persistence of poverty in many countries had discredited it, but mainly because of the proliferation of the view that human capital development benefited only the elites and hence foreign assistance should be funneled exclusively to programs directly benefiting the poor. Ever since, hostility to elite-centric development has been strong in development, governmental, and NGO circles. Of late, only a few prominent thinkers, such as Thomas Sowell, Ashraf Ghani, and Clare Lockhart, have stressed the importance of human capital and advocated reinstatement of human capital development at the top of the foreign assistance priority list.
THE HUMAN CAPITAL UMBRELLA
Some human resource experts define human capital as the accumulated capabilities and motives of individuals, which is how it will be defined in this book. Other experts refer to the culturally and socially influenced aspects of human motivation as components of “social capital,” since they are reflective of broad trends within society, whereas they consider human capital to refer exclusively to individual capabilities, particularly those conferred by training, education, and experience. I have opted to include motivation in the definition of human capital for several reasons. First, the cultural factors that determine a person's motivation are not always easy to separate from individual factors such as personality and character, and therefore attempts to differentiate between social capital and human capital can create more confusion than clarity.
Index
- Mark Moyar
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Contents
- Mark Moyar
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Acknowledgments
- Mark Moyar
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1 - Pathways to Development
- Mark Moyar
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Summary
Sitting in his executive office at Mali's Ministry of Defense, Sadio Gassama received word early in the morning of unrest at the Kati barracks. Soldiers were preparing to march the twenty kilometers from the barracks to the center of the capital, he was told, in protest against the government's mishandling of the northern rebellion. The previous month, widows of troops killed in northern Mali had attracted international media attention by setting up barricades and burning tires in the Malian capital of Bamako, but until now the soldiers themselves had stayed on the political sidelines. Gassama and other Malian leaders were acutely conscious that the participation of uniformed military personnel in a political protest would amplify the national discord to a dangerous new level. It would threaten the separation of the military from politics that had prevailed since 1991, when the military had deposed President Moussa Traoré and set up the nation's first democratic government.
The long-simmering Tuareg rebellion in northern Mali had boiled over three months earlier, at the start of 2012. Tuareg separatists and Islamists who had fought in Libya's civil war were at the front of the action, wielding heavy weapons they had brought back from Muammar Ghadaffi's arsenals. Their newfound firepower enabled them to overrun towns and military outposts that had withstood assaults for years. The most prominent rebel victory took place at the town of Aguelhok, where the rebels killed nearly one hundred people, including both soldiers and their families. News of the violence and mayhem spread fear across the civilian population of the northern provinces, causing two hundred thousand to flee their homes.
Malian soldiers blamed President Amadou Toumani Touré for the defeats in the north, seeing in them the same inertia, incompetence, and corruption that had characterized his government's past efforts against drug traffickers and terrorists. Reports of corruption in the supply pipeline were particularly galling to the military. Supply shortages in the north had spelled death for soldiers at isolated outposts, including the one at Aguelhok, where the defenders had fought effectively until running out of ammunition.
Gassama, in his capacity as Mali's Minister of Defense, decided to travel to Kati himself in order to head off the protest march. His chauffeur drove him through Bamako's streets to the barracks compound, a collection of ramshackle cement buildings with tin roofs.
3 - Civilization
- Mark Moyar
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Chapter 1 showed that national prosperity is dependent on the quality of governance and security, and Chapter 2 showed that the quality of governance and security hinges on the quality of leaders. This chapter addresses the most fundamental level of causation, showing that national differences in prosperity, governance, security, and leadership are all the result, to a large degree, of differences in civilization. Few of today's development experts have attempted to argue this case, either because they believe it to be erroneous or because they fear that its articulation will elicit condemnation from their peers. “It is much more comfortable for the experts to cite geographic constraints, insufficient resources, bad policies, and weak institutions,” Lawrence Harrison has noted. “That way they avoid invidious comparisons, political sensitivities, and bruised feelings often engendered by cultural explanations of success and failure.” In the broader intellectual community, however, can be found some highly persuasive arguments in favor of the proposition that civilization is the root cause of disparities in national performance.
CIVILIZATION AND THE INEQUALITY OF NATIONS
A long and distinguished line of thinkers have argued, with rigor and dispassion, that the inequality of nations is the result of differences in civilization and its core components of religion and culture. The Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville and the German Max Weber provided what remain the most famous expositions of this view, in the early nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, respectively. During the middle of the twentieth century, renowned intellectuals such as Edward Banfield, David Donald, Will Durant, Gunnar Myrdal, and Lucian Pye spent decades analyzing the influences of civilization, culture, and religion on national strength, with particular interest in why the West had acquired greater wealth and power than the rest of the world.
Since the 1960s, however, this school of thought has been under attack by multiculturalists, Annalistes, and other academics, who have seen arrogance or even malevolence in any suggestion that Western civilization might be superior to others. To assert that non-Western peoples are less industrious or caring than Westerners, they have alleged, constitutes “culturism,” which in their view is nearly as bad as racism.
Aid for Elites
- Building Partner Nations and Ending Poverty through Human Capital
- Mark Moyar
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- 05 December 2015
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- 01 February 2016
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Current foreign aid programs are failing because they are based upon flawed assumptions about how countries develop. They attempt to achieve development without first achieving good governance and security, which are essential prerequisites for sustainable development. In focusing on the poorer members of society, they neglect the elites upon whose leadership the quality of governance and security depends. By downplaying the relevance of cultural factors to development, they avoid altering cultural characteristics that account for most of the weaknesses of elites in poor nations. Drawing on a wealth of examples from around the world, the author shows that foreign aid can be made much more effective by focusing it on human capital development. Training, education, and other forms of assistance can confer both skills and cultural attributes on current and future leaders, especially those responsible for security and governance.
23 - The era of American hegemony, 1989–2005
- from Part III - Post-total warfare, 1945–2005
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- By Mark Moyar
- Edited by Roger Chickering, Georgetown University, Washington DC, Dennis Showalter, Colorado College, Hans van de Ven, University of Cambridge
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- The Cambridge History of War
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- 05 December 2012
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- 27 September 2012, pp 566-588
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On November 9, 1989, Heinz Kessler was forced, much against his desires, to make one of the most momentous decisions of the Cold War. The former chief ideologist of the East German army, Kessler was now East Germany’s defense minister, which gave him authority over the best military, man-for-man, that the Warsaw Pact had to offer. This chilly autumn day, Kessler himself watched massive throngs of East Berliners heading toward entry points in the Berlin Wall after the announcement, by an East German official, that the country’s borders were open. Having received no advance warning of the announcement, Kessler had not provided guidance to his border troops, with the result that these troops did nothing to restrain the surge of their countrymen toward the wall. Once Kessler understood what was happening, he ordered an artillery regiment to gather ammunition for possible operations to halt the rush of people and prevent the dismantling of the wall.
Kessler phoned one of his generals to ask whether he was ready to send two other regiments to Berlin. But this general and several others warned against bringing army units to the capital, predicting that it could lead to a bloodbath. Kessler was despondent at their aversion to the use of force, but he had enough sense to know that the game was lost. He allowed the sea of humans to flow from East Berlin into West Berlin, sounding the death-knell for Communist East Germany and the ideology to which men like Kessler had devoted their lives. East Germany was absorbed by West Germany, on West German terms. Its army was soon absorbed, in like fashion, by the West German Bundeswehr.