INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION, MULTILATERAL ASSISTANCE, AND GLOBAL DEPENDENCE: INSIGHTS AND EVIDENCE

Current Third World demands for a just and progressive global order call for the greater use of international institutions and a multilateral approach to areas of activity and policy involving the environment, food, trade and monetary relations, the oceans, and aid. Generally speaking, there is an expectation among the developing nations of the world that alternatives and shifts in modes and forms of global organization and interaction will lead to a realignment in power and control relations which will eventually alleviate their own impoverished status. As noted above, the transfer of international capital and technical assistance falling under the broad rubric of concessional development finance, or simply economic aid , has been characterized by this move toward multilateralization. This shift has occurred despite the continued existence of a vast gulf between, first, the rhetoric of aid-giving and the reality of its developmental impact and, second, little appreciable growth in the worldwide level of assistance funds. From the perspective of the Third World, this appears to be a satisfactory development. But why would First World nations, as primary suppliers of most of the globe\u27s concessional finance, permit this transformation to occur when it represents clearly a diminishment of their control over such funds and a change in the donor-recipient interaction structure? Of most importance among the various unsystematically-developed perspectives or orientations which purport to offer some understanding of the increased importance and behavior of multilateral assistance institutions is the foreign policy view. From this perspective, these agencies are depicted as instrumental devices which serve to augment and enhance the foreign policy interests of the world\u27s primary donor nations. Multilateral programs are perceived by these actors as a useful and manipulable adjunct to bilateral lending operations. The basis for this perception is the excessive dependence which multilateral agencies have on donor nations for resources. Unfortunately, the foreign policy view has not been elaborated much beyond this basic imagery and accompanying assumption regarding resource dependency. In addition, this orientation emphasizes the significance of motivational considerations and neglects structural influences. This investigation attempts to supplement the foreign policy perspective by analyzing and evaluating the shared language and net of variables which characterizes theories of dependence and dependency, modern Marxists and global hegemonic views, and explanations based on notions of metapower and relational control. Together, these approaches are labelled the systemic conditioning tradition. Their primary claim is that particular systemic arrangements structure or condition the global power relations between actors of all kinds. Since multilateral assistance agencies are an integral part of many of these approaches, insights and evidence gleaned from this scholarly tradition are seen as potentially useful for establishing ordering concepts within the foreign policy orientation. A statistical exposition which evaluates a select portion of the net of variables connected with the systemic conditioning tradition reveals the following: There is a close relationship between multilateral assistance and investment factors and debt levels associated with Third World countries. In contrast, aspects of trade dependence do not seem to be important for explaining the allocation of multilateral assistance. The strength and direction of the first finding is mediated by the specific agency under consideration. Based on these macrolevel results, and in accord with the structural explanation of the role of multilateral assistance institutions afforded by the systemic conditioning tradition, recommendations for use of the foreign policy orientation in future microlevel research efforts are proffered