Kees Biekart's is a highly professional, theoretically sophisticated and empirically well-founded study. It is written by a person with many years' experience in Central America solidarity and development work. It was submitted for a Ph.D. and received this with honours. My response to it here is something more than - or at least different from - a conventional review. Biekart has stimulated me to further reading and reflection on civil society, non-governmental organisations, solidarity and charity.

The book begins with an Introduction on `charity and solidarity'. Part I deals with `civil society building' and the private aid agencies, both theoretically and analytically. Part II presents democratic transitions in Central America and evaluates the role of these agencies in this process. There is a Conclusion on the `paradox of private foreign aid'. My expertise, on what could considered the international relations of social movements, and my concern, with the role being played internationally by `the solidarity of substitution', imply that an address to the Introduction, the theoretical/analytical framework, one international case study, and the Conclusion. If, by so doing, I miss anything of substance, I hope others will inform me accordingly. What we need in this area is a so-far absent dialogue.

But first I should clarify what I mean by `substitution solidarity' and its relation to charity. The solidarity of substitution belongs to a set that includes: Identity, Substitution, Complementarity, Reciprocity, Affinity and Restitution. Briefly; Identity is expressed by the slogan `Workers of the World Unite!', implying one long-term general interest; Substitution is exemplified by development cooperation, or `standing in' for the poor, exploited and powerless; Complementarity by the solidarity of `differential contribution' to a common interest or aim (which could be between workers, or North-South); Reciprocity by the exchange of similar quantities or qualities over time; Affinity suggests personal identity/friendship between, say, eco-feminists, socialists (of a particular hue), or even stamp-collectors; Restitution by recognition and compensation for past wrongs. Each of these has its own part of the meaning of international solidarity; each is only part of the meaning, and by itself can only be a limited and impoverished understanding of such. The limitations of a substitution solidarity are that it is a top-down, one-way relationship, close to charity. Like charity it does not contain any necessary address to the causes of inequality, nor implication of a transformation of the relation between the two parties: `the poor are always with us'. Indeed, during the short history of development aid, it appears that `the poor are always with us - in ever-rising numbers! Now back to the book.

The Far From My Bed Show

Biekart's Introduction, is intended to identify the tension, contradiction or movement from solidarity to charity in the work of his `European Private Aid Agencies' (henceforth EPAAs). Since he nowhere defines or discusses the notion of `solidarity', it appears to be used rather as those agencies, or their Central American `partners', understood it - as aid intended not so much for well-digging or disaster relief, more for self-empowerment and democratisation. Whilst I understand the usage, and prefer this kind of aid to the other, I evidently consider `solidarity' problematic when applied to a relationship which is top-down, one-way, North/West-to-South/East, `far from my bed' (as the Dutch have it) and basically financial.

Civil society and political economy

The key concept in Part 1 is that of `civil society' (CS). Biekart presents a thorough discussion of this much-discussed term, and of such related ones as `citizenship' and `non-governmental organisations' (NGOs). The latter he considers a loose and ambiguous notion which he prefers to avoid, except when applied to organisations mediating between bodies at the base and those higher up the aid/finance hierarchy. Although Biekart is obviously aware that he is discussing both CS and CA (Central America) in the context of neo-liberalism, his index does not list either `market', `capitalism' or `globalisation'. So his CS is understood, fundamentally, in relationship to the state. Here arises the Pasha/Blaney challenge, which seems to me entirely relevant to understanding what is or was going on both in Central America and in the North-South funding relationship. I will return to this.

In so far as a new, globalised and networked capitalism is shaping up, it does seem to me to be also shifting priorities from force to consent - from violence to seduction (which evidently does not mean it will stop using the former, nationally or internationally, as in ex-Yugoslavia). We seem, in other words, to be increasingly moving from a Leninist to a Gramscian capitalism internationally. An informatised capitalism seems to require, for a globally-integrated world of consumers, a stable and legitimate polity - from the nation to the globe - which is to be ensured by some kind of CS. Whilst the density and activity of such a civil society is variable in the extreme (in the USA it prominently includes the National Rifle Association, and permits guns to be the primary source of death amongst the young), the existence of a lively CS could be understood as essential to the flexibility and innovation of a globalised, networked capitalism. Completion of the `unfinished tasks of modernity' is clearly needed in CA (as in the US). But even the thoroughly modern and socially-civilised Netherlands is confronted by contradictions which capitalism produces and reproduces. In order for citizens and social movements to surpass this limitation they surely need to have a notion of CS that is in tension with the market in general, capitalism more specifically and, in Central America, an externally imposed neo-liberal capitalism in particular.

Foreign-funded farmers (and…feminists?)

In Part 2 we eventually arrive at the CA case studies, and I at the regional peasant network known as ASOCODE (Central American Association of Small and Medium Agricultural Producers), founded around 1991. In the meantime we have skipped some 200 pages of dense description and sophisticated analysis and conceptualisation of the EPAAs, their targets/recipients/partners in CA and even Biekart's notion of an `aid chain' as the necessary object/process for analysis. The ASOCODE falls into the category of international networks, and to two uncommon but crucial sub-sets of such, the `sub-regional' and the `popular'. 

If, as I believe, the development of a new kind of `global solidarity', an internationalism related to globalisation, is to come into existence, its most crucial building blocks will have to be, like ASOCODE, both geographically and socially close to the relevant `people'. This network went further, providing both the stimulus to and basis for a regional coalition of Central American civil society networks in 1994, known as ICIC (The Civil Initiative for Central American Integration). The nature and history of the ASOCODE reminds me quite strongly of those of feminist organising at the Latin American/Caribbean regional level (Alvarez 1998, Waterman 1998:Ch. 6). It may be that the clue to the rise and crisis of both lies precisely in their role as heavy aid recipients at a time of transition from international neo-Keynesianism to a globalised neo-liberalism. 

ASOCODE and ICIC receive some 20 pages in Biekart's account, and I could have done with a great deal more (some can be found in Edelman 1998). Biekart deals with them under the sub-heading `Strengthening Civil Society from a Regional Level'. The creation of this regional campesino network comes quite clearly out of a given history, specific social changes and a particular political opportunity. The history is that of semi-capitalist societies, military regimes, devastating (US-sponsored) civil wars, and of left rural insurrectionary strategies. The social changes include the creation of rural social structures increasingly interlinked with urban ones, ecological depredation, the crisis of the nation state confronted by globalisation, and the formal and self-education of rural cadres. The opportunity was precisely that offered by the demilitarisation/democratisation process, and the creation of a regional identity and institutions, enthusiastically backed, as they were, by at least the European PAAs.

Out of a European Community-funded project on regional food security came the proposal for a network of campesino (peasant, farmer) organisations, led by a young charismatic activist from Costa Rica, Wilson Campos. Springing partly out of national needs and partly out of regional ambitions, the project rang the right bells with funding agencies - which had their eyes on the Earth Summit planned for Rio, 1992. In the first year of its existence the network received US$ 110,000! This project was clearly flavour-of-the-decade with the EPAAs. Campos presented the network as the real voice of the peasants at the grassroots, contrasting it with the rural-oriented but mediating NGOs. This argument evidently also appealed to the funders. By 1992, ASOCODE was receiving US$ 200,000. By 1996 the budget had risen to US$ 1.5 million! (One wonders where exactly this very considerable funding came from). Whilst in some cases there were existing or developing national campesino federations, in others they were being stimulated top-down by the network. ASOCODE produced `alternative' regional documents on agricultural development, consulted and lobbied with new regional inter-governmental structures. Regional governments, and inter-governmental institutions, were impressed. They were also obviously unconcerned about any unrepresentativity of ASOCODE, any mishandling of finance, any lack of internal democracy or failures in reporting to financial agencies! With the help and advice of some of the EPAAs, the leader(s) of ASOCODE made international contacts outside the sub-region - though these seem to have been with Europe and North America (vertically?) rather than the rest of South America, Africa or Asia (horizontally?). At a certain moment, criticism of the network developed amongst the national federations, which felt ASOCODE had lost its popular address and base.

The success of ASOCODE led to the creation of the ICIC. Eight regionally organised networks were involved, including trade unions, the peasant organisations, small entrepreneurs, development NGOs and community organisations. As a regional network of regional networks, the ICIC - of which Campos was again a leader - had no national members. Foreign-funded heads without local bodies were looming over the horizon. Biekart concludes:

From civilising mission to civil-society mission?

The `paradox' Biekart refers to is not, it seems to me, limited to misused funding, personalistic leadership, distance from the base, or bureaucracy (in the sense of institutional self-interest and self-referentiality). It includes, I would like to suggest, the injection (with appropriate cash incentives) of contemporary West European social-democratic values, such as `sustainability' and `gender awareness'. Whilst the first of these seems to have found an echo amongst campesino activists increasingly aware of environmental depredation, the latter related to no pre-existing awareness amongst a traditionally macho leadership. Any more than did later attempts to parachute into ladino (`white') consciousness a sensitivity to indígenas (`Indians'). 

This, and more, is all well understood by Biekart. What he fails to note, far less to stress, is the relationship between these practices and those of earlier generations of White Fathers (or Mothers), who introduced into their colonies such worthy notions as `cleanliness is next to godliness'. In neither the historical nor the contemporary case is it easy to deny the progressive - even life-sustaining - nature of such imports. In both cases it is, however, necessary to recognise the nature of the relationship, and the relative power of the parties at various positions in the `aid chain'. (Would not `pyramid', suggesting a hierarchy, or `waterpipe', suggesting one-way flow, have been more appropriate metaphors?).

The appropriate conceptual framework for this kind of relationship is, surely, that of patron and client. There is here a well-developed theoretical literature, which would seem quite adequate to the case. That the patrons are themselves critics of colonialism, patriarchy, the church - even of charity or capitalism - does nothing to necessarily transform or even flatten the hierarchy. At this end: lifetime office jobs, professional status, a comfortable income, cars (his and hers), neo-liberal managerial doctrines and methods, health insurance (cradle to grave), generous retirement benefits. At that end: a palid (dusky?) and, probably, temporary echo of these things, subject to the vagaries of European state developmental priorities, of European public response to the increasingly slick appeals of the funding agencies. (And in this contrast I am leaving out those at the bottom of the pyramid, at the end of the pipeline). 

Biekart is not unaware of all this. There is, however, a fundamental (i.e. foundational) shortcoming of development funding, which I do not think is highlighted by Biekart. This is that the local process of struggle and learning, by which women and indigenous peoples impose themselves, from below or beyond, on conservative or privileged others, is truncated, with the consequent danger of the disappearance of any `woman friendliness', or `ecological awareness', once the external financial stimulus for such disappears. For me, therefore, there is no private aid paradox, there is a private aid syndrome and/or a private aid contradiction. All that Biekart tells us was, surely, predictable before the event, at the dawn of development aid.

This is not to say that the EPAA represents evil. It is to raise the question of what (or whom, and how) it represents. There are, no doubt, `good' funding agencies or projects. But the fact that there might, according to one human interest, identity or prefence, be `good' wolves (or mice), does not tell us enough about the nature of the species `wolf'. There are, after all, `good' capitalist states. The Netherlands is an excellent example, and one wishes, for the sake of US schoolchildren, as for its Central American backyard - and for the rest of us living under the volcano - that the US had a similar state. In so far as these funding agencies do in some sense mediate between European civil societies and Third World peoples (mark my language), perhaps one should follow the argument of Wilson Campos and either do away with the mediator, or at least turn them into public or civil aid agencies, i.e. something directly dependent on, open and accountable to, a relevant part of the European public (labour, women, ecological, pacifist, human rights, etc). When, around 1890, Australian and British dockworkers practised effective solidarity (sub-species: reciprocal?) during successive dockstrikes, the money came out of worker and public pockets. Maybe we could be inspired by this model, learn from it, and invent a new one appropriate to our age and problems.

I don't think I am saying anything particularly original or radical here. Much of the substance and tone can, I think, be found in a rather more sceptical work - to which Biekart contributed and for which he was co-responsible (Sogge 1996). In judging the impact of the private funding agencies, he here concluded as follows:

Niet of of, maar en en?

So, back to civil society - and my exotic subhead. This is the economical Dutch for `not either/or but both this and that'. I am referring to the political-economic critique of a primarily political concept of civil society. My employment of the initial quote should not (Goddess forbid!) be taken as an identification with any political-economic determinism. Both the item I here cite and the one I mention below mount serious challenges to an over-political understanding of CS. But neither of them even defines, far less problematises the rock on which they stand, that of political economy. We need an understanding which allows for both, and possibly more (social psychology? cultural politics?).

Without pretending that I can here solve the problem I have raised about an understanding of CS, let us see if a consideration of other recent material might point us in the right general direction. Pasha and Blaney (1998) consider that the notion of `global civil society' (GCS) and `transnational associational life' (TAL), are either premature or predefined, that they aid the development of the neo-liberal world order, and that what is required is a reassertion of the importance of a democratised nation state in the Third World. The story they have to tell is 

Görg and Hirsch (1998, henceforth G&H) seem to come out of the same stable as P&B, have similar worries, but are enabled by their attraction to the idea of `international democracy', and approval of certain kinds of NGOs, to spell this out positively - even if with heavy qualifications. Dealing with NGOs and GCS under the rubric `between myth and reality', G&H seem themselves paralysed between an old myth and a new reality. The myth (OK, a theory related to a stage of capitalist development), is that of a contradiction between economic `globalisation' (put in cautious quotes) and the political form of the nation-state. The new reality is that of a globalisation (mine comes without quotes) in which hegemonic power may be shifting from the political institutional form (state/interstate) to the socio-cultural one (consumption, media viewing, tourism). And in which even the political-institutional form/level may be being dispersed to the locality, the region (within, between nation states), the hemisphere, the globe. G&H do rehearse a series of challenges to notions of international democracy, but worry that, given the nature of the international sphere of decision-making, it becomes necessary to ask

Back to Central America, which I will take here socio-culturally, so as to include at least the South-East of Mexico just mentioned. Zapatismo clearly comes out of a comparable conjuncture to that which Biekart reveals in CA. It has also benefited from EPAA funding, at least indirectly (according to the account of de la Grange and Rico 1997). But the CS it is attempting to create also comes out of both national and indigenous experience. Its discourse is not, as Yúdice (1999) says of the local, national and foreign NGOs involved with the two Brazilian projects he examines `largely overdetermined by this network of collaborators and intermediaries'. Here is the take of Holloway and Peláez 1998 on the Zapatista concept of civil society:

It is not true, finally, that transnational corporations are currently unchallenged. Such solidarity is being reinvented, even in the immediate neighbourhood of Central America, often in innovative `cross-border, cross-movement' alliances (Pollack 1998, cf. de la Cueva 1999, RECHIP 1999), which do, occasionally, effectively challenge the transnational corporate sector. Some such have, again, been funded by Dutch funding agencies (the Santiago Summit of 1997 recorded in RECHIP 1999)! I therefore hope that Kees Biekart might, in some forthcoming work, use his evident capacities to investigate such phenomena, which represent the advance guard of the struggle to civilise national, regional and global society. My feeling is, however, that the North-South relations even here need to be considered in relation to a solidarity discourse and practice. Standing on the theoretical and ethical rock of international solidarity, wielding the kind of conceptual tools I have suggested (improved ones would be welcome), we could then consider to what extent funding agencies might or might not be making a contribution toward the civilising of our dangerously globalised world.

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