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The best aid relinquishes control to recipients, who take the lead in spending it. Photograph: Phil Moore/AFP/Getty Images
The best aid relinquishes control to recipients, who take the lead in spending it. Photograph: Phil Moore/AFP/Getty Images

Soft power to the people: Britain should use aid to promote universal values

This article is more than 10 years old
Instead of safeguarding domestic interests, the select committee investigating the future of aid should view it as a global good

Another day, another parliamentary committee investigating the future of aid, this time the House of Lords select committee on soft power and the UK's influence. Soft power is the concept by Joseph Nye to describe ways in which countries nudge and cajole rather than pay or use force to further their interests.

Or, as the committee's chairman put it, it is a way to "promote Britain's reputation, protect its interests and ensure security in a world where the military methods of the last century or two don't always work".

At the committee, I came at the question from an "internationalist" perspective. The significance of shifts in the geography of power is hard to exaggerate. We know about the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), and even the Civets (Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa), but countries such as Peru and the Philippines will be among the 30 largest world economies in 35 years or so, according to HSBC's projections.

Developing countries and emerging economies are beginning to dominate global economic growth, and their political power is increasing as a consequence. They are also the home of rapidly increasing reserves of global savings (46% of the total according to the World Bank) and therefore, of course, the source of growing foreign investments, including aid and concessional loans.

Even the smaller, low-income countries in Africa and elsewhere have become newly assertive in their dealings with other countries. Why? Because they are living in what colleagues at the Overseas Development Institute have termed an age of choice, in which many more external financing options are available to them, both private and public, to complement a vast expansion in domestic resource revenue in many countries.

And they are looking to new examples of how to develop – as the exaggerated market fundamentalism of the Washington Consensus is tossed into the dustbin of history, poorer countries no longer want to be the US, or France. They want to be Brazil, or Vietnam.

For Britain that means continuing the gradual decline in power that has been in trend since the end of the empire. Power is zero sum: if some countries become more powerful, other countries become relatively less powerful. Where we used to get our way, increasingly, even poor countries are saying "No thanks" when they do not like the modalities of aid or trade relationships, or the conditions we attach to them.

One response of OECD countries to this ebbing of power has been to seek to defend advantage. Famously, the Project for a New American Century brought together neoconservatives plotting to preserve US hegemony. But as an internationalist, I am inclined against this approach. On the contrary, it is right and desirable that other countries become wealthier and more powerful – that is what development means.

I want a world in which we all share roughly the same standard of living, and I care as much about the interests of other people as British interests, especially given how immensely well-off we are compared with the rest of the world. It would be illogical and absurd for someone working on poverty eradication, human rights and sustainable development to advise on how to increase the power of one of the world's richest countries.

The UK has played a role in promoting great causes with its aid, from democracy and civil rights, especially gender and sexuality issues, to free healthcare and education, and peace in conflict countries.

But it has also used the power of aid in shameful ways – forcing countries to privatise key industries and basic services, to eliminate subsidies to crucial industries, to open their markets to cheap imports, flying in the face of historical evidence, but suiting the interests of our corporates.

The temptation in the aid business has been to use it as if it were hard power – paying for strategic advantage and economic preferment. There are many examples of this, from the US cutting aid to Yemen (one of the world's poorest countries) when it failed to support the first Gulf war, to China giving aid only to countries that do not recognise Taiwan.

But the nature of soft power is that it is more nebulous. The UK is almost unique in its worthy insistence that aid is not used for political or economic gain, and it is right to do so – the best aid relinquishes control to recipients who take the lead in spending it. It does not always work, but it is more likely to, and the respect earned is the soft power the committee was interested in talking about.

So aid should not be used to promote our own interests (although some of the newer donors emerging from poverty should have more leeway in this regard). It should be used to promote international public goods and universally agreed values, which implies a move from bilateral objectives towards a more rules-based international public finance regime.

The question is not how the UK can safeguard its power and interests, but how it can help shepherd the transition to a world in which power, soft and hard, is spread much more evenly, for the good of all.

More on this story

More on this story

  • David Miliband's aid goals ignore evolution of humanitarian industry

  • UK's 25% aid budget rise contributes to record help for developing countries

  • UK to boost aid for business in poor countries to £1.8bn

  • The big aid debate: rich countries consider foreign aid overhaul

  • UK invests £20m in Tanzania amid push to replace aid with trade

  • No plans yet for UK development bank, says Justine Greening

  • Should UK aid money be propping up private schools in developing countries?

  • Ban Ki-moon: development aid decline a cause for concern

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