Neo-colonialism in disguise. Development Aid of IMF and World Bank

Abstract or Introduction

The development aid can be traced back to strategic and historical donor considerations. Aside from vastly expanding the arena of ideological rivalry during the cold war, the 1940s saw the beginning of the independence movement among former colonies. Independence encouraged new donors to build aid programmes as a continuation of their colonial obligations in the 1950s. In the 1960s, the principal donors agreed to set up the International Development Association (IDA) under the control of the World Bank, which was quickly established as financially the most significant source of concessional assistance. As the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is an institution of the UN system, which shares the same goal of raising living standards in their member countries and focusing on long-term economic development and poverty reduction.
Development aid is, besides the colonial debt, often legitimized by the humanitarian obligation to help the people in need and thereby allows aid institutions to work almost unquestioningly and unproblematically in so called developing countries. The designation of ‘development’ as ‘good’ with the differentiation of the ‘bad colonialism’ seems to bear no resemblance to the perceived inequalities and exploitations of empire. But the ‘new imperialism’ can already be recognized in the designation ‘development’. The concept of ‘development’ conveys a hierarchy of the world through the juxtaposition of ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ and a power asymmetry through the unequal share of resources for development.