Foundations of the American Century by Inderjeet Parmar

Author:Inderjeet Parmar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS036060, History/United States/20th Century, POL011000, Political Science/International Relations/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2012-04-03T04:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION

The evidence above shows clear continuity of the foundations’ domestic and foreign strategies—a smoothly continuous approach to African studies at home and to Africa itself—undergirded by elitist, racial, and imperial assumptions. A globally hegemonic mindset is revealed in the foundations’ funding strategies, with a state-private network central to its realization. Retaining Nigeria in the Western camp and contributing to European recovery and strength took priority over poverty alleviation or improving mass living standards. Equally, it is clear that the Nigerian political class fully supported this approach principally because they were its main beneficiaries. That political class—a class-based ethnopolitical settlement in a federated political system with clearly demarcated (but always contested) lines of regional and central revenue raising and collection—was consciously fostered by the colonialists in the 1950s (and, in the case of tribal chiefs who predominated in the Northern Region, much earlier, and then by U.S. interests both official and private).132 Given the strategic and ideological interest in Africa, the foundations’ knowledge requirements were skewed toward information for influence and control rather than the lofty goals of “development.” Or rather, the components of “development” that favored some degree of social progress—greater levels of equality, welfare, and the like, which would affect most immediately mass living standards and life chances—were easily postponed or jettisoned, while core goals of “development,” such as the maintenance of a pro–free market “modernizing” elite, regardless of its levels of corruption and violence, were advanced. In the writing of Nigeria’s national development plan, Stolper—with full support of the Nigerian political class—dismissed social considerations as “economic nonsense.”

The outcomes of foundation funding—and other Western funding—were that Nigeria remained in the Western camp because its pro-American political and knowledge networks, despite failure adequately to develop the country, proved resilient. Despite their failure to achieve the ends for which it was claimed they were established, foundation networks continued to form the basis of Nigerian planning and educational development: networks as ends but also as means to unstated ends.

Similarly, at home, Africanist networks remained very strong and useful, as they created legitimate knowledge of the kind of Africa that U.S. strategic interests wanted and needed to produce, while ignoring other realities in Africa and other knowledge creators on Africa in the United States. U.S. strategic interests wanted an Africa that was dependent, backward, helpless, and devoid of initiative and ideas. Only with foreign—mainly American—intervention would Nigeria and Nigerians achieve their full potential and achieve “takeoff,” in Rostowian terms.

A Gramscian perspective on the role and influence of the major foundations is, therefore, upheld: they were engaged in developing and implementing a hegemonic project involving the state, corporations, and intellectual elites fostered by the major foundations. There is little evidence of the foundations as part of an independent “third sector” beyond big business and the American state and outside politics and ideology. Knowledge is not neutral—it is thoroughly immersed in the struggle to define the world in particular ways that serve specific interests and not others. That is why the foundations were so particular about the kinds of people and institutions they chose to support or to consign to the margins.

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