After 9/11, these tendencies sharpened: DPT became even more overtly a source of unity in the U.S. foreign policy establishment, which almost unanimously backed the “Global War on Terror” against “Islamofascism,” as some called it.3 9/11 also revived interest in area studies but in a new form, one shot through with interest in Islamic area studies and the need for greater understanding of the religion, its adherents, their languages, and the causes and methods of religious “extremism.” The 2003 U.S.-led war on Iraq and the continuing war in Afghanistan sharpened the demand for scholarly knowledge of these countries, cultures, and languages.
The war on terror—of which the 2003 Iraq war and subsequent U.S.-led military occupation of the country are part—did not go (quite) according to plan during the George W. Bush administrations (2001–2009): critical voices grew on the issue of coercive regime change and democracy promotion, the war’s ultimate (though mainly post-facto) rationale, along with Iraq’s nonexistent WMD. There was also much public and opposition party clamor on America’s rising global unpopularity, greatly amplified by exposés of human-rights violations in U.S.-run detention camps, including Guantanamo Bay (Cuba), Abu Ghraib prison (Iraq), and Bagram Air Base (Afghanistan). In that context, the foundations backed (mildly) “critical” inquiries better to represent the Establishment: the Princeton Project on National Security, for example. They would continue the war on terror but broaden the range of security threats faced by the United States to include global pandemics and climate change, develop strategies to more effectively combat “anti-Americanism,” and secure the United States/West better than Bush. In many respects, President Barack Obama’s Democratic administration (2009–) and its national security strategy (2010) embody the continuation of the war on terror without Bush.
The big American foundations, as ever, backed the general “resetting” of American foreign policy, as they see the world and America’s role in it from the same perspective: they backed capitalist globalization strategies; indeed, they were drivers of globalization itself. The world continued to require active American leadership—a Soviet-free world was one of turmoil and instability requiring continued intervention both humanitarian and military. It was also an opportunity to remake the world more closely to conform to America’s self-image. In addition, of course, new powers were emerging requiring integration and accommodation into the U.S.-led global order—China, for example, and India. Despite dramatic shifts in the global distribution of power, therefore, the major foundations’ mission hardly altered: they remained committed to a U.S.-led global order with institutions that have embedded within them values and interests congenial to the United States.
This chapter reflects the changed world and programs of the foundations. It explores their roles in promoting and consolidating two overarching and complementary frameworks of American power in the post–Cold War world: an economic order signified by capitalist globalization and a growing recognition of the necessity of various amelioration strategies, including forums to hear the voices of globalization’s critics, and a political/ security order characterized by an upsurge in U.S.-led democratization. The chapter then examines the radical upsurge in “anti-Americanism” in the wake of the U.S.-led war on Iraq and growing anxiety about America’s global role. It also examines the foundations’ roles in renewed attempts to combat anti-Americanism and develop “new” concepts for American power that might make it more acceptable to the world. There will be a special focus on the activities of the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMFUS) and of the Princeton Project on National Security (PPNS), both significantly reliant on funding from the Big 3 foundations. Finally, and very briefly, the chapter considers the role of the major foundations in the development of Islamic subjects that witnessed growth after 9/11, despite the relative decline in area studies funding after 1991. The evidence indicates the degree to which Islamic “area” studies reflect state imperatives. This is not to say that they have no life of their own; it is to argue that the dominant changes therein tend to reflect the broad interests of the U.S. state and elite foundations for the reasons argued throughout this book: there is no duping of individual scholars involved or required. Rather, objective structures of financial power and intellectual legitimacy offering large grants for major programs of policy-relevant research and study are practically irresistible for scholars and their institutions. As a result, the kinds of problems identified and the more or less broad manner of their treatment tend to reflect the dominant elites’ thinking, within the kinds of institutions that the foundations and U.S. state have backed for the past century.
GLOBALIZATION AND GLOBAL CIVIL SOCIETY
The historical experience of the Big 3 foundations of building national and international networks finds its contemporary expression in the hectic bid to create a global order that suits, extends, and defends globalizing capitalism.4 As Thomas Friedman argues, the world today is characterized by “integration and webs” as well as by an unequal distribution of benefits. Effective globalization requires global institutional architecture as well as supportive global civil society, for the same reasons that an industrializing and “nationalizing” America one hundred years ago required a national civil society—a series of densely networked publics composed of strategic minorities—to provide its social base. The Big 3 foundations, among other newer American foundations, are at the very heart of these developments today. They are actively supporting existing international organizations and promoting new organizations more suited to global conditions. The overall strategy remains unchanged, even as programs and personnel change: Americanized or American-led globalization remains the aim. It is also clear, however, that American foundations are not alone in this venture, though they remain the most significant actors.
American philanthropy tops the world league, although foundations are now a feature of practically every continent. Since 1987, the number of foundations in the United States has grown from 28,000 to about fifty thousand. The new foundations hold some of the enormous growth in wealth in the 1990s. Their assets expanded from $115 billion in 1987 to over $300 billion, and their international giving topped $3 billion in 2002. Record increases in international giving were recorded from the mid-1990s, which is attributable to the rise of new fortunes, especially Bill Gates’s Microsoft Corporation, as witnessed by the formation of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.5 The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, however, dealt a temporary blow to the trend, although they focused greater attention among foundations on the global sources of domestic problems.6
Increasingly, European, Japanese, and Australian foundations are engaging in international activities. There are over sixty thousand foundations currently operating in the “old fifteen” EU states. In Italy, of the over three thousand foundations surveyed by the European Foundation Centre (EFC), half were founded after 1999. Over 40 percent of German foundations were set up in the decade up to 2004. Their combined assets total over £100 billion, with the Wellcome Trust topping the league, with assets of £10 billion. Increasingly, European foundations are engaging in cross-border and global activities, with 30 percent already doing so and 68 percent expressing an interest in doing so in the future. Further legal reforms to simplify and incentivize international philanthropy are the subject of reform campaigns backed by the major foundation networks. The EFC’s Europe in the World initiative—to project European philanthropic and political-cultural influence onto a global stage—is driving increased linkages between European foundations and international organizations (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, UN Development Program), corporations, and an array of global networks such as the Transatlantic Community Foundation Network and Network of European Foundations for Innovative Cooperation. The world is dense with foundations, foundation networks, and networks of networks.7
In the era of America’s rise to globalism, the foundations constructed and promoted, at home and abroad, liberal-internationalist versions of A
mericanism. In the era of globalization, they promote a “transnational” Americanism that backs the neoliberal project but seeks to blunt its harsher edges.8 The foundations today are replicating their historical strategies at home and abroad; they seek to protect the existing system of power by engaging in activities to ameliorate the negative consequences of that very system of which they are both a central component and beneficiary.9 As a “Break-out session [on] Globalization” at a meeting of the International Network for Strategic Philanthropy (INSP) concluded, “foundations’ portfolios have benefited from globalization.”10 At the beginning of the twentieth century, the foundations targeted the alleviation of domestic poverty and the slum—brought on by urbanization and capitalist industrialization; today they focus on the worldwide social fallout of neoliberal globalization.11
The IMF and the World Bank are widely considered, along with the U.S. Treasury, to be the motors of neoliberal globalization.12 Founded at Bretton Woods in 1944–1945 with full support from the Rockefeller/Carnegie foundations, they continue to garner sustenance from East Coast philanthropy. As is shown below, the World Bank has received grants from the Ford Foundation, and David Rockefeller has been a consistent IMF stalwart.13
As was historically the case when American foundations often carried out programs that the state would not or could not, it is also the case today—given the dramatic loss of state legitimacy associated with Reaganomics and Thatcherism—that nonstate actors are scurrying to perform key functions. Offsetting the fallout of increasing gaps between rich and poor has become a key foundation task, especially by backing “pivotal institutions that can shape behaviour away from risk factors and dangerous directions [i.e., anti-Americanism and anti-globalization protests],” according to the Carnegie Corporation.14 Part of the solution is seen to lie in “promoting democracy, market reform and the creation of civil institutions,”15 that is, in the neoliberal project itself. Carnegie actively promoted, during the 1990s, “Partnerships for Global Development,” headed by prestigious academics and politicians, that promoted liberalization of markets as a core concern. Contrary to Peet et al., neoliberal globalization’s foundation backers do not see a wide gulf between neoliberalism and its critics: by their social amelioration policies, they hope and claim to promote the market and social justice.16
The Rockefeller Foundation declared in 1985 that the reduction of social inequality lay at the heart of its economic developmental concerns. In 1999, the incoming president of RF, a former vice chancellor of the University of Sussex, Gordon Conway, stressed that the foundation had two priorities: “first, to understand the processes of change spurred by globalization and second, to find ways that the poor and excluded will not be left out.” Inherent in foundations’ attitudes is the taken-for-granted neoliberal character of globalization.17 Therefore, it is unsurprising that the third of what some may call an “unholy trinity,” the Ford Foundation, granted the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, $150,000 to assist “economists and officials of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania [to] develop plans to transform their economies and integrate them into the world economy.”18 To examine the consequences of market reforms, Rockefeller administered a project, at a cost of $150,000, toward “an exploration on trade liberalization and its impacts on poor farmers.”19
American foundations support the key engines of globalization. For example, Ford awarded a grant of $400,000 to the World Bank to fund the latter’s “Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest to develop the capacity of microfinance institutions and improve member donor practices in supporting microfinance.”20 Microfinance is a strategy for lifting into the marketplace those too poor to get loans from mainstream commercial banks. The Ford Foundation claims some credit for the development of microcredit in Bangladesh, the forerunner of the Grameen banking system. Critics argue that Grameen has hardly dented poverty, increased poor-family indebtedness, and played into the hands of corporate investors.21 In 1999, RF granted $800,000 to the World Bank’s Economic Development Institute for economic growth acceleration strategies.22 Further Ford grants were made in 2003 to institutions that try to build interconnections between large Western corporations and small enterprises in the Third World.23 During the 1990s, the head of the Rockefeller family—David Rockefeller—offered unconditional support for the IMF’s global programs, without which the world would return to the economic crises of the 1930s and the threat of global economic and military conflicts.24 A Rockefeller grant of $250,000 aimed to finance “strategic workshops and meetings among Asian government officials, academics and civil society groups on the governance of the World Trade Organization.”25
American foundations are globalizing forces in their own right, too,26 consciously strengthening global knowledge networks between universities, think tanks, government agencies, and philanthropies.27 The International Network for Strategic Philanthropy (INSP), set up by the German Bertelsmann Foundation—with U.S. foundations’ support—encourages the global spread of philanthropy. The (American) Philanthropy Initiative, Inc., aims to ensure the “strategic and systematic investment of private philanthropic resources to address complex, interconnected manifestations of chronic underdevelopment.” RF has backed several initiatives to train a new generation of global givers. Similar programs are run by the Ford, Hewlett, Kellogg, and Charles Stewart Mott foundations. Even philanthropy-strengthening groups have access to a network of support groups such as the Council on Foundations and the European Foundation Center. Global givers are further networked with regional and national philanthropies such as the Asia Pacific Philanthropy Consortium and to international networks and associations such as the World Economic Forum, which, in turn, has its own global social-investors program.28
In that context, the grants information that follows is the tip of a very large iceberg. The Ford Foundation granted $400,000 to the Academy for the Development of Philanthropy in Poland (ADPP)—which grew out of a USAID project—to strengthen foundations locally. A Ford grant of $220,000 supports efforts to link Polish and Belarusian NGOs. Relatedly, Ford awarded $500,000 to the Brazilian Association of NGOs to help organize the World Social Forum (WSF), a body developing “alternatives to current patterns of globalization.”29
The Ford Foundation is an enthusiastic though controversial supporter of the World Social Forum (WSF). Indeed, private corporate and philanthropic funders are the second-largest donors to the WSF, acting as a brake on WSF’s critique of capitalist globalization. FF has invested well over $1,000,000 directly in WSF to help it organize events and globally to disseminate its message.30 At its third annual meeting, WSF attracted one hundred thousand delegates from 156 countries—feminists, trades unionists, and so on. According to Michael Edwards, the director of the Ford Foundation’s Governance and Civil Society unit, WSF changed the “terms of the debate about globalization…. There’s [now] an inescapable public debate about the role of corporations and the distribution of globalization’s benefits… largely due to the WSF crew.”31 WSF, with the FF’s and others’ sponsorship, promotes critiques of some of the “negative side effects of market liberalization: growing economic disparity, the privatization of health care and environmental degradation.” The ultimate aim, according to Ford’s Edwards, is a “global civil society,” the influence of which would bear comparison to the effects of the Bretton Woods system formed during World War II.32 WSF aims to construct “an alternative development model and to construct a new form of globalization.”33 A Carnegie Corporation grant of $25,000 assists “dialogue on globalization between representatives of the World Economic Forum and the World Social Forum.”34 A Ford grant of $500,000 to the London School of Economics aims to help scholars explore “the depth of global governance and its accountability to a polity,” another reformist measure promoted by all three major U.S. foundations.35
The WSF, however, is the subject of much criticism. For example, MumbaiResistance argues that WSF is funded by Western agencies “to mitigate the disastrous projects of
development cooperation and structural adjustment programmes” they have themselves organized.36 They claim WSF’s sponsors have co-opted antiglobalization forces and channeled them away from “direct and militant confrontation… into discussions and debates that are often sterile, and mostly unfocused and aimless.” Some participants at WSF meetings complain that they are expected mostly to “listen” to WSF leaders rather than to participate; the aim was “putting a human face on globalization.” The World Bank refers to the WSF as “a maturing social movement,” and the bank’s officials have been granted observer status at WSF meetings. WSF’s supporters include Brazil’s President Lula, the head of the Workers’ Party and a proponent of IMF policies and U.S. free-trade agreements and opponent of peasants’ land struggles. WSF acts, ultimately, to blunt the harsher edges of capitalist globalization.37 The 2004 organizers of WSF meetings, in Mumbai, India, refused Ford’s donations because of Ford’s role in India’s Green Revolution, which created and exacerbated the problems of poor farmers.38
WSF meetings in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2007 attracted similar criticism from African organizations. According to one source, the meetings were dominated by mainly “white North[ern]” NGOs, while southern voices were underrepresented. The meetings were also sponsored by large corporations with exclusive rights at WSF. Indeed, WSF meetings had the feel of a “trade fair,” while poor attendees were forced to take direct action merely to gain entrance to meetings. The atmosphere was decidedly apolitical, and there was little in the proceedings to suggest that politics is principally about struggles between “the haves and the have-nots.”39
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