empty gestures and foreign aid

Trespassing the shores of your world,
Piles of dead bodies at the walls of Fortress Europe
Cast a shadow on your paradise
Oblivion and apathy will keep you warm
-Heaven Shall Burn

Kriskaravanen by Linda Polman sounds like a book that I really need to read.

I mean I live in a country that likes to think of itself as the conscience of the world. We proudly tout the fact that we give one percent of our BNP as aid to countries less fortunate than us. You see, this magical sum of one (1!) percent has somehow become the norm of when things are deemed to be enough. Who have decided this? I have no idea; quite possibly we did ourselves, decades back. We had to do better than the UN goal after all, which is 0.7 percent. But still, one whole percent of an, admittedly small, country’s BNP is still a whole lot of money, almost 4 billion dollars to be exact. Isn’t that something to be proud of? We are after all only 9 million people in total, and the biggest giver in the world if we count money given per person. This isn’t an empty gesture, is it?

Well, yes and no. It all depends on how you look at things. For example, our current right wing government has embraced this goal wholeheartedly, at first glance succeeding better than the social democrats ever did. But as always when things change in politics I find myself asking why, why would this be important to them? It’s not something that normally draws their voters in, with a few exceptions this is a classic leftist issue. Well, because more and more people are thinking that if we help them there, it stops them from coming here and we’re certainly not racist, but we don’t want to have our country overrun by strangers from any weird and possibly icky cultures. We are only nine million people after all, and having our essential swedishness undermined would be bad. So, by giving aid to the governments that more or less actively terrorizes their citizens we feel entitled to deny those very citizens the opportunity to come here. Things are getting better there after all, look, our money built an entire hospital, surely now you can go home and don’t have to stay here for medical reasons.

Yes, I do not deny that our foreign aid helps people, but that’s not the main reason for it any more than giving that beggar a few coins is to actually help him buy his next meal. No, mostly it is for our own sake. So that we can turn away and not think about it anymore, content that our tax dollars have taken care of helping the world while we go off and do other things. It is a condolence card on the grandest of scales, a bouquet of roses to say that we’re sorry we slept around, and that expensive Christmas gift to justify all the time we spent at work instead of with the kids.

Because honestly, truly, if we REALLY wanted to help, as individuals or as a country, we could do so much more. But that would actually require that we meant it, and thought about exactly what we did with that money.

But what really drives home the point that this is an empty gesture, is when we look behind the numbers. You see that sum of almost 4 billion dollars and might think that hey, that actually IS a lot of money, but you would be mistaken. A lot of it isn’t even actually money. Like so much in the financial world it is imaginary money, make-believe sums that looks impressive but flies away like straw if you just huff and puff hard enough. So let us huff a little and see what we can find.

First, a lot of these poorer countries have one thing in common, at one time or another in their history they have been ruled by oppressive dictators that borrowed vast amounts of money abroad to pay for their regime, or maybe they listened too much to the world bank and dismantled their country wholesale, leaving them impossibly deep in debt. Sweden have lent a lot of money to countries like this in the past, and well, let’s be fair, nobody have really expected to get them back. Hell, asking for it back would be a rather shitty thing to do, like patting someone on the back for ousting that horrible dictator and then asking that they return all the money that he borrowed. It’s not unlike China billing the family of the victim for the bullet that was used to execute them. So if we have no plans to ask for the money back, what is the problem here? Well, the first thing that our current right wing government did was to include what we call ‘skuldavskrivningar’ in our foreign aid. So, that means that if we tell a country, ‘okay, you don’t have to repay that million that your former dictator borrowed’, that counts as actually giving that sum in aid. No money actually changes hands, and we can still feel very good about being generous. And, when the loans have some form of security, we can always write up the value of that security as being a lot higher than it actually is, and then it will count as more money on paper.

Second, our troops abroad for UN peacekeeping measures, in Afghanistan and other places? Foreign aid. I mean they are there to aid people and rebuild their country, so we can totally write off a bit of that cost under the foreign aid banner as well. More money that actually never reaches the people, and used to come from other coffers but we are slashing our military budget and it looks oh so good on paper. The same goes for embassy costs, they could also possibly seen as aiding the country they’re in, so let’s add that to the sum as well, opening a Swedish embassy in Afghanistan really helps the people there a lot. And if we pack in more bits of the administrative business under the actual banner of foreign aid, that means the sum looks larger without actually adding more money. Why else would the money spent on administration have doubled since the new rules took effect? They certainly haven’t hired more people.

Third, there are all those pesky refugees that keep coming to Sweden to escape the horrors of war, poverty and occupation. We are helping them, and they technically are not Swedes, so we are aiding foreigners. And that is foreign aid, right? The OECD says it is okay, and suddenly we are including that as well. More money that looks like money given but technically is not. It was just moved from a different budget, and as a bonus the government can say that they have lowered the cost of dealing with refugees in whatever part of the budget that used to come from.

And that is why our foreign aid has turned into an empty gesture to make Swedes feel good about ourselves. We don’t give more than before; we are just told that we do. It is all there on paper, but nobody never ever bothers to read those. At least nobody that the media listens to.