Global Development and Colonial Power: German Development Policy at Home and Abroad (Kilombo: International Relations and Colonial Questions) - Hardcover

Bendix, Daniel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1786603497 ISBN 13: 9781786603494

Verlag: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Although Germany was one of the principal colonising nations in Africa and today is the world's second largest aid donor, there is no literature on the postcolonial condition of contemporary German development policy.

This book explores German development endeavours by state institutions as well as NGOs, and provides evidence of development policy's unacknowledged entanglement in colonial modes of thought and practice. It zooms in on concrete policies and practices in selected fields of intervention: development education and billboard advertising in Germany, and - taking Tanzania as a case in point - obstetric care and population control in the Global South. The analysis finds that disregarding colonial continuities means to perpetuate the inequalities and injustices that development policy claims to fight. This book argues that colonial power in global development needs to be understood as functioning through the transnational character of development policy at home and abroad.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Daniel Bendix is Professor of Global Development at the School of Social Sciences at Friedensau Adventist University, Germany. Franziska Müller is Assistant Professor for Globalization and Climate Governance at the University of Hamburg's Department of Social Sciences.

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Global Development and Colonial Power

German Development Policy at Home and Abroad

By Daniel Bendix

Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.

Copyright © 2018 Daniel Bendix
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78660-349-4

Contents

List of Figures, vii, 
Acronyms, ix, 
Acknowledgements, xi, 
1 Introduction, 1, 
2 German Colonialism, Development Policy and Colonial Power, 15, 
3 Development Education and the (De-)Stabilisation of Colonial Power, 39, 
4 Billboard Advertising and the Potential for Subverting Colonial Power, 65, 
5 Transforming Childbirth-Related Care in East Africa and Challenges to Colonial Power, 91, 
6 Controlling Population in East Africa, 121, 
Conclusion: Colonial Power Transnationally, the German Case and Postcolonial Future, 143, 
Appendix: List of Cited Interviews, 153, 
Bibliography, 155, 
Index, 189, 
About the Author, 195, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

'German-Tanzanian Cooperation in Health can be followed back to the 19th century' (Tanzanian German Programme to Support Health 2008). When I began my research on colonial power in German development policy in 2008, I was surprised to find this allusion to the colonial period on the website of the Tanzanian German Programme to Support Health (TGPSH), the most significant German development programme on health in Africa. I was surprised because there is a general agreement in Germany – and in formerly colonising nations more generally – that development policy constitutes a break with the colonial past. As it turned out, the reference to the period of German colonial rule was the product of a short research project initiated by a former senior manager of the German health programme in Tanzania. In my interview with him, he recounted his fascination with the German activities in health care during the colonial period. At the same time, he pointed out that Germany's colonial past was a delicate topic for the German government:

Well, it was new to me how systematically the German colonial medical personnel or the German Colonial Office had already acted in the establishment of a health system back then. That was really exciting. ... The German government, well, I know that BMZ [the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development] was, of course, never interested and very reluctant when it came to dealing with German colonial times, research-wise or other. That was politically taboo ... but one would have to, I think, ask again from time to time, whether the times are not changing; that it has just become more of a historical thing, and not political. (Interview 10, 21 October 2010)

German development staff may have made similar political considerations – to declare colonialism a thing of the past – and, when relaunching its website, TGPSH avoided all references to the colonial history that connects Germany and Tanzania. It appears that non-recognition of the colonial past and denial of colonial legacies is characteristic of global development in general (e.g., Biccum 2002; Kapoor 2008; Kothari 2011). This book addresses this denial and reconstructs traces of colonial power in contemporary development. It does so by investigating the presence of colonial modes of thought and practice in the specific case of Germany's transnational development policy.

Unlike the previously mentioned research by the German health programme manager, who would have liked to consign the topic of German colonialism to the past, this research pursues an understanding of history as put forward by Michel Foucault (1977, 1979) and described by the German postcolonial scholar Kien Nghi Ha as follows:

As long as the overlapping of sediments of time and society is not acknowledged and academic reappraisal remains purely historical, the influences of colonial effects on the racist imprints of present German society cannot be focused on. To not comprehend history as an open and dynamic field means to disallow the question of the topicality of colonial presences. (2005, 106)

A critical approach understands history as a realm that is still active and refrains from treating colonialism as historical in the sense of being over and done with. It acknowledges that the past affects our present.

THE RELEVANCE OF THIS BOOK

Challenging the notion of a clear and thorough break between colonial-era interventions and post-World War II (WWII) development, postcolonial approaches have urged us 'to unnaturalize stories of development' (Power 2006, 28). While the impact of British colonialism on contemporary global development policy has been subject to revision and critique, this book turns the spotlight on the neglected case of Germany. It applies the postcolonial development studies' assumption that colonialism affects contemporary development to various fields of German policy and undertakes an empirical investigation of specific German interventions. Investigating German development in a transnational sense as interrelated interventions 'at home' and 'abroad', this book shows how colonial power – conceived as discourses which emerged during colonisation, interconnected with practices, institutions and political-economic conditions – functions in global development to stabilise relations of inequality to the advantage of the global North.

The book builds on and complements important work in postcolonial development studies (Eriksson Baaz 2005; Heron 2007; Kapoor 2008; Wainwright 2008; McEwan 2009; Wilson 2012). It takes up their theoretical insights to specific contexts (policy fields as well as country context) in order to empirically test the hypothesis that development policy and colonialism are interrelated. The book explores colonial power in German development policy both empirically and as a transnational phenomenon. It understands the colonialism-development nexus as productive in the interrelationship between policies directed at informing and educating the German public, on the one hand, and development activities aimed at the global South, on the other. Scholars of postcolonial development studies have mainly focused on one side of the coin only: some have investigated the coloniality of development in interventions in the South (Wainwright 2008), while others have focused on the production of colonial development mentalities in the North (Kontzi 2015). Moving beyond the common strategy of understanding racism, colonialism and development through the lens of the British (post-)colonial context, and bringing forward the under-researched case of Germany, this book suggests more generally that the colonial power of international development can best be understood in the complex transnational interrelationship between interventions at home and abroad. Postcolonial development studies have to date not undertaken a comprehensive analysis of a single donor country's development endeavours in such a transnational manner. By linking interventions abroad with activities in the name of global development inside Germany, this book highlights the concerted – and at times contradictory efforts of national policies towards international development.

The overall argument here is that contemporary transnational German development endeavours are fundamentally shaped by the colonial past. By disavowing that legacy, development policy risks creating or perpetuating the very inequalities and injustices it claims to battle against. More specifically, the book highlights the fact that international development activities inside...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1786603497
• ISBN 13: 9781786603494
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 208
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland