COVID-19 and Foreign Aid: Nationalism and Global Development in a New World Order

 

COVID-19 and Foreign Aid: Nationalism and Global Development in a New World Order

Here are the details of my latest book project:

For book details, click here.

For my chapter details, click here.

Book Description

This book provides a timely, critical, and thought-provoking analysis of the implications of the disruption of COVID-19 to the foreign aid and development system, and the extent to which the system is retaining a level of relevance, legitimacy, or coherence.

Drawing on the expertise of key scholars from around the world in the fields of international development, political science, socioeconomics, history, and international relations, the book explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on development aid within an environment of shifting national and regional priorities and interactions. The response is specifically focused on the interrelated themes of political analysis and soft power, the legitimation crisis, poverty, inequality, foreign aid, and the disruption and re-making of the world order. The book argues that complex and multidirectional linkages between politics, economics, society, and the environment are driving changes in the extant development aid system. COVID-19 and Foreign Aid provides a range of critical reflections to shifts in the world order, the rise of nationalism, the strange non-death of neoliberalism, shifts in globalisation, and the evolving impact of COVID as a cross-cutting crisis in the development aid system.

This book will be of interest to researchers and students in the field of health and development studies, decision-makers at government level as well as to those working in or consulting to international aid institutions, regional and bilateral aid agencies, and non-governmental organisations.

Table of Contents

1. Towards a post-COVID world order: A critical analysis

Viktor Jakupec, Max Kelly, and Michael de Percy

2. International multilateralism in a non-hegemonic world

Andrey Kortunov

3. COVID-19 and the decline of the neoliberal paradigm: On the erosion of hegemony in times of crises

Tobias Debiel and Mathieu Rousselin

4. The global dialectics of a pandemic: Between necropolitics and utopian imagination

Nadja Meisterhans

5. The rules-based world order and the notion of legitimacy crisis: Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on foreign aid

Viktor Jakupec

6. Pandemic shock and recession: The adequacy of anti-crisis measures and the role of development assistance

Leonid Grigoryev and Alexandra Morozkina

7. COVAX, vaccine (inter)nationalism and the impact on the Global South experience of COVID-19

Max Kelly and Mary Ana McGlasson

8. Health emergency or economic crisis? Fail forward and de-risking opportunities in IMF COVID loans to Egypt

Lama Tawakkol

9. Institutional exhaustion and foreign aid in the time of COVID-19

Michael de Percy

10. The COVID-19 pandemic and its impact in sub-Saharan Africa: Geostrategic dynamics and challenges for development

Matthias Rompel

11. Economic and social prosperity in time of COVID-19 crisis in the European Union

Angeles Sánchez

12. COVID-19 Impacts in Pacific Island Countries: Making an already bad situation worse

Mark McGillivray

13. COVID-19 vaccines and global health diplomacy: Canada and France compared

Stephen Brown and Morgane Rosier

14. Strong capacity and high trust: Perceptions of crisis management and increased nationalism among Chinese civil servants

Qun Cui, Lisheng Dong, and Tom Christensen

15. China’s inward- and outward-facing identities: Post-COVID challenges for China and the international rules-based order

Yan Bennett

16. Soft power and the politics of foreign aid: The case of Venezuela

Anthea McCarthy-Jones

17. Nationalist politics, anti-vaccination and the limits of the rules-based world order in an era of pandemics: The case of Tanzania

Japhace Poncian

18. COVID-19 crisis and the world (re-)order

Max Kelly, Viktor Jakupec, and Michael de Percy

Editor(s)

Biography

Viktor Jakupec is an Honorary Professor at Deakin University and the University of Potsdam. He is an international development aid consultant and a member of the Leibniz Sozietät der Wissenschaften, Berlin.

Max Kelly is Associate Professor of International and Community Development, and Research Associate at the Centre for Humanitarian Leadership, Deakin University.

Michael de Percy is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Canberra. He was appointed to the Australian Research Council’s College of Experts in 2022.

Reviews

"This edited collection provides an in-depth discussion and analysis of the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on foreign aid within a context of the rules-based world order and the geo-political health crisis. In this volume, various political, social, and economic aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic are examined from diverse geo-political vantage points. This highly ground-breaking and timely volume is worthy to be read by scholars, policymakers, practitioners, and students in the fields of geopolitics, political economy, rules-based world order, and foreign aid."

Prof. Dr. Christa Luft, Rector (i.R.) University of Economics, Berlin, Germany

"Financial crises, pandemics, climate change, the growing risk of a nuclear conflagration, the growing assertiveness of China and Russia, and the new Cold War are accelerating the decline of the West’s confidence on the world stage. This will see traditional foreign aid and the model of global development that characterised the past 70 years disappear. To understand how this is happening, and how the foreign aid-global development nexus will unfold in coming years, this book is indispensable reading."

Prof. Dr. Wim Naudé, University College Cork, Ireland

"Global cooperation is seriously challenged when it is needed more than ever. This book considers the problem from all angles in a well-balanced intersecting manner. The deeply thought-provoking exploration is worth immersing oneself in."

Dr. Tetsushi Sonobe, Dean and CEO, Asian Development Bank Institute

My chapter details:

Institutional exhaustion and foreign aid in the time of COVID-19

ByMichael de Percy

BookCOVID-19 and Foreign Aid

ABSTRACT

The multilateral rules-based world order was already under threat from the rise of populism, China, and instability in US politics before the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted global diplomacy and brought about far-reaching economic crises. In response, nation-states have adapted to emerging nationalism amid the US–China trade war. Such multifaceted disruption forced nation-states to re-evaluate their traditional foreign aid partnerships, resulting in a weakened commitment to existing multilateral institutions. Such institutional exhaustion provided opportunities for China and Russia to challenge the existing rules-based world order through foreign aid. The result has been a parallel, albeit novel, world order for developing nations, resembling a competing form of neo-Cold War diplomacy. The foreign relations strategies of the US under Biden have resulted in a fragile balance of competition and cooperation between the major global powers, supported by the UK and Australian leadership and the strategic interests of other countries. This chapter examines foreign aid amid changing patterns of geopolitics in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and multilateral institutional exhaustion. It focuses on the shift in global geopolitics towards a new multipolarity that threatens to undo the much-lauded success of global capitalism and the rules-based world order upon which such success is presupposed.

 

 

Rewire the Nation or Go Nuclear?

Power Lines at Canada's Darlington Nuclear Plant [Photo: Milan Ilnyckyj CC BY-NC-SA 2.0] 

Here is my latest article in The Spectator's Flat White, Rewire the Nation or go nuclear?

Despite #Labor pundits’ claims to the contrary, a clear choice is emerging between Rewiring the Nation and #nuclear when it comes to reducing carbon emissions. Whoever wins the social licence to operate holds the key to Australia’s future energy security.https://t.co/DT4Dz9Tglr

— The Spectator Australia (@SpectatorOz) November 14, 2022

A Contest of Ideas: Teaching Politics in Australia

House of Representatives in Action [Parliament of Australia, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0]

One of the most challenging aspects of teaching politics in Australia today is the rate of change in societal attitudes that appears to be out-pacing our political institutions. But Westminster-based liberal democracies, supported by the liberal arts tradition, have evolved and proven to be resilient over historical periods of great upheaval. I argue that we should not give up on a liberal education just yet.

Underpinning my views on teaching politics are some classic texts, including Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, John Locke's Two Treatises on Government and A Letter on Toleration, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, and C.B. MacPherson's Life and Times of Liberal Democracy. Each of these texts presents different ideas that have been incorporated into our political system over time.

While prevailing senses of manners, etiquette, and ethics have changed, liberal democracy has been the greatest engine room of ideas in human history. The results include higher standards of living, increased longevity, and greater choice for individuals.

Most importantly, within this system, individual citizens have rights and responsibilities that are central to the system's survival. Balance is achieved not by mandates, but by what former Prime Minister John Howard referred to as "a contest of ideas" that are freely expressed in the public sphere. As John Stuart Mill argued, even bad ideas should be allowed to be aired so that these ideas can be determined to be bad by the body politic. To prevent bad ideas from being aired only enables these ideas to fester and take on a life of their own.

Free speech in a liberal democracy, just like free, fair, and regular elections, provides a safety valve for citizens to let off steam: a form of bloodless revolution if you will. But to understand our rights and responsibilities is not something that suddenly appears from a happy accident. It requires a liberal education. For me, teaching politics in Australia is about teaching students how to think, not what to think. 

Teaching students how to think relies on a long tradition. Much like Sir Isaac Newton standing "on the shoulders of giants", our students will be given a better vantage point to grapple with current and future problems if they embrace this tradition. Even the most radical teacher began at the beginning - while happy accidents can and do benefit our society, it is too speculative an approach to leave our common good to mere chance.

In The Great Conversation, Robert M. Hutchins argued that the great upheaval of the first fifty years of the twentieth century did not invalidate nor make irrelevant the tradition of a liberal arts education. In a liberal democracy, that tradition is still relevant today.

Nonetheless, one of the major challenges to our liberal democracy is not from outside the citadel, but from within. Contemporary politics is awash with calls to silence opposition as if the contest of ideas should be limited to the ideas chosen by one side or the other. In the United States and New Zealand, incumbent political leaders are suggesting that democracy itself is under threat from the contest of ideas that is the very stuff of liberal democracies.

In my own pedagogical approach, teaching students how to think means that I have to overcome my own inherent political biases. I have to step back from the contest of ideas and find a way for citizens to make their own sense of the world we live in. That is no easy task. But as teachers, we ought not to think our students are simple sponges that soak up what we say.

Students bring to their studies their own inherent biases, their experiences, and the ideas they have been exposed to prior to their education. A liberal education challenges those ideas as a matter of course.

I often say to my students that a liberal education is a choice, but a choice between the red and the blue pill as in the movie The Matrix. Take the blue pill and one can live in ignorance, for ignorance is bliss. Or take the red pill, and be exposed to the unsettling and transformative "truth".  For one can never go back once a liberal education begins.

That transformative, life-changing power of a liberal education brings together the best of tradition with the best of the present. By presenting the methods of comparative politics, we bring into sharp relief differences between societies that help us to see beyond our own limited experiences. Bring in the scientific method, and we have an opportunity to remove our biases. Study political history and philosophy, and we can understand ways to live a good life, and so on.

These are just some of the ways that I approach the teaching of politics in Australia. I do not suggest that my approach is the right way, but I hope my words here contribute to the conversation and that some of my more provocative writing contributes to the contest of ideas. 

My slides from the presentation are available below.