In
1989 the Berlin Wall fell and the so-called “transition period”
for Central and Eastern Europe began. The goal pursued was a radical
change of society at economic, political and social level. In
relation to this, Bulgaria endorsed a variety of development
programs, which were manipulated by the two supranational
institutions – the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
The country was quickly encompassed by a wide network of
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) whose number amounts nowadays
to 38,000. The UN agencies, supranational authorities and NGOs
organized and coordinated Bulgaria’s transition through the same
methods, ideas and language, which were being used for the Third
World Countries by that time.
by
Daniela Penkova
PART
1 - From the “development” to the “democratization” of
Eastern Europe
The concept of “development” was born on the 20th of
January 1949. It was the day when Harry Truman held before the
American Congress his inaugural presidential speech, in which he
defined a wide number of countries as “underdeveloped” and
entrusted the “developed” countries with the task to “work on
the development”:
“Greater production is the key to prosperity and
peace. … We must carry out our plans for reducing the barriers to
world trade and increasing its volume. Economic recovery and peace
itself depend on increased world trade. … More than half the people
of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. … Their
economic life is primitive and stagnant. … The United States is
pre-eminent among nations in the development of industrial and
scientific techniques. … In cooperation with other nations, we
should foster capital investment in areas needing development.”
Concealing the American interests behind the mask of
benevolence, Truman did not hesitate to announce a program for
technical assistance, which “with the cooperation of the
American business, private capital, agriculture, and labour in this
country, … can greatly increase the industrial activity in other
nations and can raise substantially their standards of living.”
The world has vastly changed since then but there was no change in
the condition of the developing countries, labelled to this day as
“The Third World”.
After the Second World War the supranational twin
institutions – the IMF and the World Bank – were born. During the
same period were also founded most of the UN’s agencies – FAO
(Food and Agriculture Organisation) in 1945, UNESCO (United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and UNICEF (The
United Nations Children’s Fund) in 1946, followed by the United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in 1951. The United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP), which is today’s greatest world
network in the sphere of development, was founded in 1966.
The development supporting projects are characterized by
a wide range of activities carried out by NGOs. Their propagation is
a new phenomenon gaining force in the context of a real boom of the
“industry of development”. This evolution began with the change
of the policies of the World Bank after 1973 under the leadership of
Robert McNamara who raised the credit volume thirty fold and made the
bank a real intellectual operator supporting purposive social and
cultural projects. During the 1980s the neoliberal economists
reorganized the World Bank to become a global agent of the
“Washington Consensus” striving to impose policies of
deregulation and privatization in the indebted countries. The NGOs
number made a headlong increase. They were expected to create their
own niche of funds for social investments whose purpose was to soften
the immediate consequences of the Structural Adjustment Programs
(PAS). They were encouraged to become channels for support of the
poor people and those facing social exclusion in the context of the
new economic policy. Some NGOs were financed by American governmental
agencies such as USAID (American Agency for International
Development) with the sole purpose of disseminating the neoliberal
ideas, thus becoming think tanks. They engaged in analysing the
social policies in areas spreading out from social programs to
political strategy, from the economy to science and technology, from
commercial and industrial policies to military consultation. Since
1989 think tanks have found a new field for development in Eastern
Europe where pragmatic experts and romantic intellectuals were
attracted by the idea of autonomous citizen society overseeing the
actions of governments, aiding the advance of the liberal democracy
and protecting against “the return of communism”. Thus the
problematic of development coincided to a great extent with that of
the democratization and was no more confined to the Third World only
but extended also to the Eastern countries and even the whole Western
world where lots of think tanks had developed since the end of the
1990s, which were already participating in planning reforms demanding
sacrifices such as the ones in pension and health insurance. The
social state was sacrificed first.
There is a great similarity between the two terms –
transition (used to denote the economic and political changes in
Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall) and development,
since both assume export and adaptation of the political and economic
models of the Western democracies.
Source
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