Hans-Georg Schleicher
The development policy of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), or East Germany, was not constituted as an independent entity. It was an integrated part of the country's foreign policy, trade and cultural relations. Its trademark was supporting decolonization processes and engaging in the southern dimension of the East-West conflict. In the 1980s, the GDR's development aid got into an increasingly difficult tightrope act of balancing between foreign policy demands and economic policy constraints.
Solidarity with the developing countries was a fundamental principle of GDR foreign policy and a constitutional imperative. These rested on the Marxist-Leninist perception of national liberation movements as one of the three mainstreams of the worldwide revolutionary movement. With such a political-ideological starting point, and based on equal rights, non-discrimination and mutual advantage, the GDR's development policy was to serve "the consolidation of political independence, the all round development of the national economy and the social progress of the new states". The GDR's understanding of the Third World's development problems was that they could be resolved only by far-reaching social changes and concomitant liberation from colonial and neocolonial dependence. Towards that goal, the GDR provided considerable military aid alongside its civil development assistance inputs. But that can't be a subject of this analysis. For longer than in the West, the GDR clung to development concepts oriented on industrialization. A striving for international recognition and hopes of extending the influence of "world socialism" stimulated the GDR's development policy commitment. Self interest in foreign trade also played a role, and became increasingly dominant. Eurocentrism in foreign policy and its strained economic situation led the GDR in the 1980s to giving its development policy lower status. This process was advanced by disillusionment over the failures of socialist development models in the Third World.
A GDR Council of Ministers decision in 1988 emphasized that development aid "is to be so provided that its effective employment is in harmony with the macroeconomic interests of the GDR, its foreign policy goals and the solidary support of the developing countries". In practice, this demand on the developing countries to shape a new and just form of economic relations was increasingly called into question.
But at the end of the 1980s elements of new thinking also emerged in which independent of ideological dogma global development problems were made agenda points. A long term concept for Africa of the foreign ministry in 1989 (before the fall of the Berlin Wall) described the solution of global problems by cross system cooperation as the most important task.
Organisation structure
In the GDR, development cooperation encompassed economic and scientific technological support, including inputs of trade subsidies and humanitarian aid.
The organization of the cooperation suffered from a lack of developmental criteria, framework conditions, targets and monitoring. These were only partly compensated for by system related, centralistic management and monitoring. Central decisions on development policy were taken either by the Politburo or the Secretariat of the Central Committee (ZK) of the Social Unity Party (SED). Back in 1964, the latter had laid down precise annual plans for the assistance of social organizations and the monitoring of them. From 1977, a commission chaired by the ZK Secretary for Economics, Günter Mittag, known as the "Mittag Commission", had a decisive influence on cooperation with the developing countries. Special representatives of the party leadership and the government armed with far reaching powers coordinated the cooperation with key countries. It was only in 1988 that a determination ("order") of the State Planning Commission (SPK) fixed the coordination of developmental measures at state level.
In the state area, the respective ministries had competence for their corresponding fields of development cooperation. From 1960, the development aid of social organizations was coordinated by the "Solidarity Committee", which although officially independent was subordinated to the ZK of the SED. It was also directed by the foreign ministry, and increasingly carried out developmental tasks (in the 1980s, partly the financing of previously state inputs in the education area). Of the numerous social organizations that above all were active in the field of education and training, the trade unions, which had the greatest donation revenues, and the FDJ youth organization are worth a special mention.
With the exceptions mentioned below, there was no solidarity movement in the sense of grass roots organizations in the GDR who would take their own initiatives. Solidarity work in the social area, including some considerable financial and material inputs, took place within the parties, mass organizations, occupational and specialist associations, factories and institutions. The money for the work came from collections within factories and organizations, but also from public fund raising campaigns. Grass roots groups worked independently, partly under difficult conditions, in the context or environment of the churches, e.g. the INKOTA network. The churches themselves also carried out developmental work. Their focal points were humanitarian and disaster aid. The Protestant "Brot für die Welt" and the Roman Catholic "Misereor" aid organizations are to be mentioned here. During the GDR's last decade, the church organizations were also implementing their first development projects in the Third World, e.g. the Gossner Mission in Zambia.
Solidarity in the GPR also fulfilled a domestic political function. The struggle of the liberation movements, the developing countries' striving for greater political and economic independence were propagated as successes of the worldwide revolutionary movement, as proof of the truth of the state's own doctrine. In particular, the struggle against colonialism and racism and the war in Vietnam triggered a marked response among the East German people. This was also expressed in a readiness to become personally involved by making donations.
But here the state hindrance of self initiative, grass roots oriented development cooperation unfortunately blocked an important GDR developmental potential.
Content design and profile
The GDR identified as development cooperation cost-free assistance and preferential prices, as well as government and special credits. Free assistance included the supply of aid materials and goods, vocational basic and advanced training, university and technical college training, the secondment of experts, health care, government grants and voluntary contributions to United Nations aid agencies.
Financial subsidies as the grant element of Financial Cooperation were made apart from some exceptions in nonconvertible currency, often as supply of goods. Credits were granted mostly in nonconvertible currency (the GDR mark, the transfer rouble), and were often tied to the supply of GDR goods. Credit conditions were decided from case to case at the political level and were oriented on the OECD's ODA conditions for government development cooperation inputs. Long term government credits (813 years, 2.53%) were mostly tied to large scale projects. Besides short and medium term trade credits, capital aid was donated in the context of the solidarity inputs. In the late 1980s, preferential prices were also listed as aid. These were extended to several GDR-friendly countries (Cuba and Nicaragua above all) for selected raw materials, and were much higher than world market prices.
In Technical Cooperation, basic and advanced training began in 1951 with a group of Nigerian students in the GDR. In 1962, there were already almost 1,400 students from developing countries in East Germany. In 1989, 6,800 were receiving university or technical college training, of whom 2,500 came from LDC countries. In addition, there were almost 5,000 scholarship holders in vocational training, of whom more than 1,000 were from LDCs. Long term training dominated in the GDR, and even the training programmes for skilled workers lasted three years. In concept, the training was often oriented on fields in which the GDR was pursuing specific interests in investment projects or in trade. From the end of the 1970s, a great number of workers from above all Vietnam, Mozambique, Cuba and Angola worked under contract in the GDR. Originally construed as training oriented, this foreign worker programme served as a growing solution to the GDR's labour shortage problems and the balancing of economic relations with the partner countries. Thereby the hard currency revenues linked with this employment of foreign workers were quite significant for the sending countries.
Initial and advanced training aid (including scholarships) was mostly provided free. Economic constraints led from 1982 to the GDR also offering the developing countries training inputs and experts on a commercial basis in the context of a so called export of intangibles. The step had only moderate success.
The assignment of experts was also mostly free. There was a special programme for the provision of consultants and experts for African countries as early as 1960. Chronic labour shortages and the security regulations covering the selection of specialists hampered the recruitment of experts for "nonsocialist foreign countries" and made the fulfillment of contractual obligations a permanent problem. Evaluations following the political change in the GDR in the autumn of 1989 acknowledged that GDR scientific technical cooperation projects had the right approaches, and that the experts involved were committed and highly qualified. But there was criticism that the projects were stamped too much by a "GDR presence", they fitted only with difficulty into local structures, the experts were more active in the working process than as advisers, and training of the partner was neglected.
The use of FDJ Friendship Brigades with the focus on vocational training was efficient. A total of 16 vocational training centres was set up, including Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. Despite criticism about their sustainability, these projects were in general given a positive assessment. From their first deployment in Mali and Algeria in 1964, a total of 64 brigades were active in 26 developing countries, involving at times about 300 young East Germans. In 1989, there were still 19 projects in 11 countries. Of those, seven were given positive evaluations following German unification, and these projects were actually continued.
Joint economic committees covering 15 key countries, and mixed commissions dealing with 30 others were to secure the complex economic relations and also development cooperation. Specific forms of cooperation such as preferential prices, barter trade or the employment of foreign workers were due to the economic problems of the GDR and its partners. These included a chronic shortage of hard foreign currency and in part non-competitive products. Out of similar difficulties, the two sides found suitable forms of cooperation. Typical of these were projects implemented on a compensation basis in which investments were repaid out of the production of the project.
Sectoral and regional distribution
The sectoral focal points of GDR development aid were partly key developmental areas. Agriculture, basic and advanced training, vocational training, the public health system, crafts and trades, infrastructure, sport and journalism. Technical, mathematical and natural sciences dominated the basic and advanced training at university and technical college levels with definite developmental relevance.
Although the GDR carried out development cooperation with more than 100 countries, it was determined by political-ideological yardsticks and concentrated on socialist countries and so called "states of socialist development". In 1988, 95 per cent of the cooperation was accounted for by 11 countries and three liberation move ments. These were Cuba, Vietnam, Mongolia, Laos, Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Nicaragua, Afghanistan and the ANC (South Africa), SWAPO (Namibia) and the PLO. In the pecking order of the key countries, Cuba was way out front followed by Nicaragua, Vietnam, Mozambique and Ethiopia.
The GDR's development cooperation was largely bilateral. The multilateral share remained small. The Council for Mutual Economic Aid (Comecon) did not develop any developmental components worth mentioning.
Extent of the cooperation
The dissimilarity of the concepts and structures of the GDR's development policy with western standards, a lack of transparency, the doubtfulness of some statistics, and also the different pricing impede assessment of the country's development aid performance. It was not until 1976 that the SED Politburo gave a green light for the first publishing of selected, summarizing information on development cooperation. In 1982, the Mittag Commission determined that the GDR's aid inputs were to be registered more precisely and completely. The calculation of the input value was to be based on UN criteria for ODA. A corresponding summary for the Politburo in September 1982 posted aid levels in 1981 totaling 1,529.7 million East German marks, equaling 0.78 per cent of national income.
When on April 4, 1989 the Politburo dealt for the last time with the annual overview of the GDR's development cooperation, it showed for 1988 inputs totaling 2,353.9 million marks. That sum was put at 0.68 per cent of GNP.
For reasons already mentioned, it is difficult to compare the GDR inputs with international yardsticks. Taking western parameters into account (which, for instance, do not include preferential prices), the OECD's Development Assistance Committee (DAC) put the annual level of GDR aid at only about $ 200 million. But it also agreed there were fundamental problems in comparing the GDR inputs with those of western industrial nations.
In the Technical Cooperation field, training and education took first place. Thereby the following inputs were made during the period 19701989:
In 1989, the number of foreign workers in the GDR in the context of the "guest worker" programme totaled 86,650. Other specific forms of GDR assistance, besides disaster aid and humanitarian support, encompassed the free medical treatment of victims of wars of liberation and civil conflicts (a total of about 10,000 treatments), and the acceptance of children for in school and subsequent vocational training. The largest of the latter such projects, for 900 children in Mozambique from 1982 to1988, was the subject of controversy.
The GDR's development policy must be assessed in its historical context and measured by the yardsticks of its concept and aspiration. The GDR gave a limited number of politically determined partner countries (including LDCs) and liberation movements partly effective aid, above all with training inputs, goods supplies, preferential prices and the assignment of experts. By utilizing its centralistic structures, such development aid was often concentrated, efficient in terms of time, and thereby employed politically effectively. Measured by criteria of developmental efficiency and sustainability, deficits are plain to see. For example, costly training inputs in the GDR instead of sur place training, insufficient training of local experts during the assignment of GDR specialists, problems due to a shortage of foreign currency, etc. The GDR's development policy contributed to strengthening the "socialist camp" and its allies, but was also meant to help solve its own problems such as securing raw materials supplies without having to spend foreign currency, selling its own products and balancing its foreign trade.
The GDR gained prestige above all in the 1960s and 1970s by its support of the liberation movements, by fast and also effective aid in critical phases, and also by its promotion of particularly politically or economically relevant projects, and in the basic and advanced training field. The concentration of support on key countries contributed to its efficiency and political spill over effect. In the 1980s there was a real danger that the GDR would lose this standing. The policy that was increasingly determined by economic Self interest began to destroy the aura of altruism around the GDR aid. The GDR's demands for a new international economic order could now have hardly been asserted when its own attitude towards Third World countries was examined.
Epilogue
With the political change in East Germany in 1989/1990, many development policy structures broke away. The already mentioned grass roots organizations close to the churches were instrumental in the reorganization of NGO development cooperation. Following restructuring and renewal, the "Solidarity Committee" has also continued its work as the "International Solidarity Service". New organizations have come into being. The development policy Round Table played an important role during the transition phase. The founding of the "North - South Bridges" Foundation has secured the use of former GDR developmental funds for NGOs in Eastern Germany. All of this is now a part of the joint developmental efforts in the enlarged Federal Republic of Germany.