From aid to mutual aid – How development aid could change

The concept of ‘development’ has been criticised for a number of years, both in the Global South and the Global North. It was inevitable therefore that the related concept of ‘development aid’ would also be challenged. Until recently, so-called ‘humanitarian’ operations appeared to have been spared this criticism. The humanism on which they are based remains an unquestionable value that can only be renounced if we challenge the universal nature of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Nevertheless, there is debate about humanitarian methods, particularly as the practical conditions in which they are implemented have changed a great deal. It is less and less common for third party countries or organisations who have not taken part in the conflict or who are not in any way responsible for the ‘crisis’ to claim the right to intervene in humanitarian contexts. Today, the majority of humanitarian organisations work hand in hand with forces involved in military interventions or occupations. It is impossible in such circumstances to claim neutrality of any kind; so-called ‘humanitarian’ or ‘emergency’ operations have become integrated into military projects. They are used to justify (or extend) these, with the aim of ‘pacifying’ entire regions who find themselves controlled by foreign powers.  Rather than a ‘right to intervene’, organisations and states claim to have been ‘asked to intervene’ by the parties to the conflict or the victims of natural disasters (like in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake), in order to justify the deployment of significant resources, or the provisional ‘tutelage’ of entire countries.

Towards the ‘tropicalisation’ of the Global North

This situation is not new, but recent events have led to unexpected consequences. It may be that the relations between the Global North and the Global South are being reversed, so that soon the South will be asked to come to the aid of the North, bogged down in its contradictions and rapidly becoming increasingly ‘tropicalised’. I use this term to describe a process whereby the Global North is transformed into a colony of transnational Capital, its resources are taken away (transformed into simple factors of production) and it is forced to dismantle its state apparatus one piece at a time after its industry has been ruined. In this respect, the North is now similar to the South (even though it is still richer in terms of GDP per inhabitant). The only difference is that this situation is new for the North and it is not in any way prepared for it.

Forty years of neoliberalism have begun to get the better of welfare states; the North is no longer spared the ‘structural reforms’ that the International Monetary Fund formerly imposed on countries in the South under the name of ‘adjustments’. Both in the North and the South, it is public services, state-owned companies, and different types of protection (customs tariffs and nontariff barriers) as well as resources (labour, arable land, mining resources, and tropical forests) that are being attacked in an unprecedented way in the name of the supposed superiority of the market over all other forms of social regulation. This fable serves the interests of investors who desperately need to invest the overabundant cash that has become available due to under-investment and the reduction in spending by households around the world. Everywhere, ‘demand’ is collapsing due to liberal policies that squeeze salaries and maintain deflationary trends that discourage investment.

As a result, the North has lost some of its splendour in relation to the South, which has been stuck in a state of ‘under-development’ for years. Even corruption has become a universal phenomenon. There are more and more ‘scandals’ in the North despite the ‘good governance’ that used to be its speciality in relation to the ‘badly governed’ South which was condemned to eternal mismanagement. But, in fact, it is liberal ‘good governance’ that has led to corruption. This is the form of governance that company shareholders demand so that they can control their directors and their staff, with the main objective of resolving the eternal ‘principal-agent’ problem: an asset holder – or ‘principal’ – can never know whether the agent responsible for increasing its value is paid in terms of its marginal productivity, in other words, the asset’s marginal ‘yield’ which he is responsible for increasing. To encourage ‘managers’ to go further, their pay has been linked to the net profitability of capital and notably stock market prices. Repurchasing operations, insider dealing, doctored accounts that aim to deceive shareholders, etc. are the consequence of the development of this ‘managerial’ capitalism which has made financial value (in other words, stock market prices) the main indicator of good management of a company. Financial value is an abstraction, a ‘generalised equivalent’ which, at a glance, gives shareholders an idea of the health of the company without having to deal with the details. Investment funds are happy with such a set up, but they remain unaware of the real mechanisms that allow the company to create ‘value’, or of the state of mind of the workers and their supervisors.

Both in the North and the South, good ‘managerial’ governance has destroyed good government and transformed companies into aggregates whose survival depends on their capacity to establish an effective monopoly, thus overcoming the problem of their inefficiency, on the condition that they maintain vast political clienteles. As such, corruption is a by-product of ‘good governance’ rather than its enemy.

The North looks uncannily like the mocked South of the past whose supposed atavisms were attributed to cultural peculiarities. Corruption is no doubt encouraged, or even justified, by a political culture that associates the exercise of power with cronyism and the sharing of honorary positions and honours within cliques according to rules that are known to all and are perfectly respected. In addition to these old forms of ‘corruption’, which are part of traditional political culture, new forms have recently appeared, in the South, which flourish alongside structural adjustment programmes due to their coherence with managerial capitalism and the neoliberal economy. The state, which in its turn has become an ‘economic’ tool, run purely on the basis of efficiency and value for money, has begun to adopt costly control mechanisms where new forms of corruption, unknown in pre-colonial times, have been able to flourish unhindered by multilateral organisations and international donors.

In 2020, the COVID-19 crisis has placed the countries of the North in a completely unprecedented situation. State institutions and citizens have found themselves faced with abandoned public services and, more generally, the powerlessness of the state. The state has shown itself to be incapable of producing masks and gel, or of organising emergency hospitals in industrial sites or the numerous abandoned buildings that it is able to requisition by law (notably during a state of emergency, as has been the case in France since the law of 23 March 2020). There is absolutely no difference in this regard between France, the United States, Peru and Brazil. Some have imposed lockdowns, others have not, but these are only regulatory measures. It is as if states only had the power to prohibit. No one appears able to take action. Nor to consult with those on the ground (healthcare providers, teachers, social workers, etc.). The old ways of the colonial states (coercion by force) are being unearthed.

The South as a model of mutual aid?

Mutual aid and humanitarian action therefore take place in the gaps and fallow areas of public action, well off the radar screen. Indeed, it is civil society organisations, whether associations or informal groups (at the neighbourhood or village level) who have cared for vulnerable people that no service was able to care for: isolated, destitute and homeless people, stateless refugees left to their own devices, struck off the lists of the French Office of Immigration and Integration (OFII) or without status. These acts of humanity are not controlled in any way and are not the result of an official call to action as they are not carried out by structured organisations. They are purely spontaneous acts in response to circumstances and carried out by individuals, who often come from the South themselves, where they learned forms of family-based or regional solidarity that they now put into practice. The Malians come to the aid of Malians, and this solidarity then gradually extends to all people from the Sahel. In villages, old forms of solidarity between neighbours have reappeared. Acts of solidarity, where there is contact with another person and action is taken to reduce their suffering – in a word, acts of compassion – create a state of mind that opens up to anyone who is suffering. We have seen villages in Alpine regions, that do not have the reputation of being very hospitable, helping migrants or ‘asylum seekers’.

We have a lot to learn from the South where this more or less spontaneous solidarity is present on a daily basis, unrelated to state institutions that are either non-existent or ineffective. Of course, it does not meet all the needs that exist, far from it. What is more, it does not exclude major inequalities that are the result of circumstances and interpersonal relationships. This solidarity can not replace republican law, but it reminds us that humanitarian action is impossible without a humanist ethos, without a spontaneous orientation towards others, without a form of ‘popular’ culture which defines a people and genuine humanity.

The South may even be ahead of us today: see, for example, how the people of Peru (following in the footsteps the people of Chile) spontaneously reacted to the attempted institutional coup d’état and hijacking of the Constitution by mafiosi elites, events which emerged in the wake of a drug economy that is fully embedded in the liberal economic order. The driving force behind this popular mobilisation, in the streets of Lima as well as in those of Ayacucho, is popular culture. Armed with guitars and ponchos and dressed in festive attire, the demonstrators parade to the beat of traditional dances, which they learned as children and which create a sense of belonging, not to the community but to the “people”. It is common that, during these processions, the inhabitants of the Andes adopt rhythms from the coast (the criollos) or from the Amazon. In their festive clothing, they do a series of dances to honour the comparsa (the troop of dancers) in front of them or behind them. These dances have long been an important feature in Peru, and they are even carried out in the Andean regions to represent the unity of the ‘body politic’, transcending the diversity of customs and types of social organisation in each valley.

We should learn from the South. The examples I’ve given are from Peru and Chile, but we could also look to Morocco, Burkina Faso, or countries in Sub-Saharan Africa or Asia where the COVID mortality rate has been the lowest; including in slums and areas with very high population density, and despite atrocious health conditions. The resilience of the people living in these poor areas may surprise us, but it is due to forms of self-management which are particularly robust because of the way the population is distributed by ‘neighbourhood’, where internal migrants (pushed into the slums by the poverty in rural areas) all have the same origins.

Our view of these worlds will change completely as soon as we learn to decipher their meaning and motivations. All social groups produce order, rules, and meaning. The regions who appear to be the poorest or the most deprived are no exception to this universal law. At a time when we ourselves are threatened by absurdity and social anomie, we need to listen to these societies that have so far been able to resist neo-liberalism’s attempt to destroy social order.