The United Nations is trying to get Gulf countries to channel more foreign aid into global multilateral institutions and away from Arab/Islamic-specific bilateral projects.

John Holmes’ the UN’s Emergency Relief Co-Ordinator has been having talks in the Gulf and he seems optimistic, according to the Financial Times today, that the Gulf States are moving in this direction, although the process will take time.

The Gulf Arab Decision

This is very significant because decisions by Gulf countries, singly or together, will dictate whether they are going to remain with traditional models of giving (essentially the zakat writ large where aid almost exclusively assists the Arab and Muslim community).

The alternative model being proposed by the UN is that the Gulf Arabs become part of a more global liberal vision of the West. The probable outcome is some token hedging of bets to get the West off their back to the degree that Gulf Arabs feel that they need or do not need to do this.

There is a political dimension to this, of course. This is not just about charity but what charity means in the world.

For example, some funds have gone to Islamic educational investments that have reinforced conservative traditionalism. If not directly contributing to insurgency, such investment is seen by many in the West as maintaining cultural conditions from which radicalized elements emerge.

This really irritates hard-line Westerners and especially secularists associated with a pro-Israel stance.

This group, in particular, has developed increasing influence within the formal ‘international community’ on the back of a neo-conservative US Administration and is keen to press its current but waning advantage as its sponsor, the US Presidency, changes ownership.

The Moral Dimension and 'Spin'

The ‘moral’ dimension (basically the PR spin) is that the profits of high energy should be redirected to cover the costs of high food prices. 

This suggests to the public that there is some simple implicit exchange between Arab luck or greed and the serious problems of the non-Arab developing world.

In fact, the issue is far more complex than this. Many Arab and Muslim countries are in the front line of the food crisis, notably Egypt, Pakistan, Bangla Desh and Indonesia, while Gulf countries themselves are suffering from serious and potentially destabilizing food inflation.

The issue here is whether the Western liberal ideology of universal provision and of implicit world governance is better than traditional charity given within a culture zone whose customs are based on revelation.

A traditionalist might easily turn around to, say, the Philippines and say, “Of course, we can help you if you join us in sharing the Prophet’s revelation”.

Of course, most significant Gulf Arabs are highly modern in their own thinking but they have to consider cultural expectations in their community and Holmes' persistent lobbying works against hundreds of years of ingrained habit.

Traditionalism Versus Modernism

Muslims are not alone in looking after their own – families, tribes, Jews, Catholics, trades unions and nationalists all adopt similar strategies.

It will be a momentous political and cultural development if the Gulf Arab community switches tack and diverts substantial funds (rather than token bribes) to the universalist, multilateral and essentially secular-liberal model of giving.

Before we assume that the modern way is better than the old way (which it is in dealing with the super-excluded without direct access to a community with resources), we should note the disadvantages of the secular liberal approach.

It is bureaucratic, it creates an expensive middle class of administrators, ‘experts’ and fund-raisers and it becomes subject to political manipulation by the largest universalist power (currently the UN but soon the EU).

More important politically, it abandons the prime directive of national governance, social cohesion, by shifting funds from the lower middling sort or poorest in a rich area to the poorest in far-away places.

This can happen within nations, of course. The growing sink-pits at the heart of Southern English towns contrast with the over-development, against market common sense, of degraded Northern Towns that just happen to be more likely to be New Labour voters.

This redistribution from communities that are integral (including nations) to regions away from the source of funds is ‘progressive’ but it leaves behind three legacies.

First, an emotionalism that debases political debate because only through emotion can a constituency be created to legitimise transfers. We have called this Clooneyism elsewhere.

Second, there are less funds for local and national community infrastructures, creating ‘conservative’ resentments.

And, thirdly, a prejudice against democracy develops amongst international progressives because it is influence over elites rather than a democratic mandate that permits the redistribution to take place at all.

The Ambiguity of the United Nations

But the UN has other problems and we have referred to these before.

The UN and the entire panoply of multilateral aid has, over the last two decades, increasingly become seen – in our opinion quite rightly – as highly ambiguous in its claims to universalism.

The system is redistributive and progressive (broadly a good thing, subject to the long term anti-democratic political effects on the giving nations) but it is also an instrument of the West.

The ‘international community’ (as it likes to style itself) is not all nations but only the wealthier nations who created the UN at a time of collapsing empires.

Its legitimacy is extremely dodgy by any sound philosophical principle and derives, in practice and ultimately, from a de facto right of conquest as do all rights to make law and regulation that are not revolutionary. 

However, instead of moderating its claims through democratic revolution, UN claims are moderated through bureaucratic negotiation in order that the fiction that the UN is universal (based originally on aspirational texts rather than facts on the ground) can move into the realm of fact.

Just as the ‘international community’ operates in defiance of national democratic politics in the cause of world peace and social justice, so those same institutions of world peace and social justice get twisted into meeting the demands of the primary originators and backers in the West.

This is not to minimise the contribution of, say, China or Russia - or developing countries - but the mismatch of interests and the source of primary funding always skew the UN to the softer end of the Western interest. Bureaucrats, NGOs and multinationals bend in the same direction.

This is not just perception, it is reality. Every non-Western potential donor from the Gulf to China knows that it would have to contribute an awful lot to get even a smidgeon of the global influence exercised by the US and EU, let alone Canada and Japan.

The Palestinian Case Study

An example of the real life politics of multilateral donation can be found in the case of Palestine.

For years, Gulf Arab (notably Saudi but also other GCC) funds flowed into relief for the Palestinians, not always to the levels required, but based on some sense of ‘brotherhood’.

These funds still flow into Palestine but they are now routed through UN bodies for political reasons – to deal with Western and Israeli claims that the funds were used for liberation purposes and not just relief.

To old-style traditionalists, liberation was a form of welfare relief but the West has decided otherwise after 9/11 and conservative leaderships in the Arab World shared their assessment that they may have been nurturing a revolutionary viper.

So, the UN became the convenient tool for getting funds away from the liberatory model and into a pure welfare model where, to be blunt, for all the claims of neutrality, it is largely used to buttress, in effect, one faction and one model for Palestine rather than another.

Whether this is the right or wrong policy is not the point – the ‘international community’ thinks it is and ‘insurgents’ will think it is not - but the general thrust is the point.

Universalism in aid and the multilateral system have not yet reached the point where they actually represent the global population in any accountable way but represent only one vision, detached from direct democratic control by several removes, of what is good for the global population as a whole.

The Vision

This vision is one in which charity is directed at specific political crisis points (like Palestine) or points of absolute deprivation or disease (like famine or plague).

It still sees the world in terms of the infection of prosperous and stable areas by weak or damaged areas – hence the obsession with ‘failed states’ – and charity for the most destitute is offered along lines that would be familiar to Victorian reformers like Charles Dickens.

Unfortunately, like Victorian reformers and certainly like Dickens’ wonderful satiric character, Mrs Jellaby, it often leaves problems untouched in the homelands so that a universalism that seems progressive abroad also seems to leave collapsing social cohesion at home.

If the Gulf Arabs do start supplying funds in significant quantities to multilateral institutions, we may take it as a significant political act.

It will strengthen the liberal progressive system dominated by the ‘West’ but also, ultimately, raise questions about these States' traditionalist legitimacy.

The next step will have to be that these States must modernize rapidly and undermine domestic conservatism through rapid economic growth and policies of social inclusion or remain very repressive until they 'crack' from the strain.

Domestic conservative thinking is certainly not going to like the loss of charitable preference for its own culture - while radicals are not going to like any more explicit and 'transparent' denial of liberation as a component of welfare.

A Nagging Doubt

We leave with one nagging oddity in John Holmes' briefing to the Financial Times, published on 30 April. It was noted that local Gulf rulers will give funds privately and quietly.

Holmes then said that this was “not enough to meet the demands and requirements of transparency needed these days”. Apart from the tradition in Muslim giving that you do not shout about what you do, this statement says a great deal about Western priorities.

Surely, we would think, if the funds are coming through to benefit the poor (and keep bureaucrats in jobs) that should be enough. The only question should be, how do get more out of the Gulf Arabs. But, no, the givers have to be ‘transparent’.

Is this because certain parties fear that Arab giving is ‘political’ and need reassurance or is it because the international community does not just want the funds to help the poor?

Is it that conservative Sunni Arab political endorsement of the multilateral system as the best one for global poverty relief, better than faith-based or nationalist solutions, is now necessary in the war against traditionalist insurgencies?

You sense the Gulf Arab rulers being quietly drawn into taking sides in a war about which their instincts are to remain more neutral - opposing the methods of traditionalist extremists but not wanting to abandon traditional values as much as many Westerrners would like.

Holmes adds that, working through the UN means that “it is very clear where the money is going” (yes, through a bureaucracy as well as to the recipients) and that this is a “fundamental” benefit.

This seems to give the game away, doesn’t it? The West does not like flows of capital it cannot see and touch because cash is king in politics as everywhere else in life.

This is really very close to PR blackmail: if you want a good image and you do not want sniping that this or that bit of cash has landed in the hands of a terrorist supplied to order by a Western intelligence service, then you will give us the cash and we will spend it wisely on strengthening the system that we wish you to be part of.

This is not charity, this is high politics.

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