American development aid, decolonization, and the cold war

Abstract

Development assistance served as an important tool of American foreign policy in the postwar decades, when the United States was confronted with a series of new challenges and opportunities arising from the global constellation coproduced by the Cold War and the decolonization of the former European colonies in Africa and Asia. The ways in which American governmental and nongovernmental organizations employed development aid were highly diverse. Military aid and relatively small technical assistance programs dominated the agenda when the first wave of decolonization took place in Asia. When the African colonies began to gain independence in the late 1950s, at the same time that the Soviet Union became a stronger presence in the so-called Third World, US aid budgets and purposes increased notably. While the United States provided the largest total amounts of aid, the development field internationalized rapidly in the postwar years, and within the Western bloc there was at times little agreement about best practices and appropriate contribution levels.