Problems of Post-Communism May/Jun 1995, Vol. 42 Issue 3, pp. 45-50 U.S. AID TO CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE: RESULTS AND RECOMMENDATIONS Janine R Wedel Most assessments of foreign aid to Central and Eastern Europe have been from the donors' perspective. How do things look from the other side? The 1989 collapse of the communist Eastern bloc inspired a major shift in the priorities of the Western development and aid community. Western agencies re-oriented resources and diverted personnel en masse from the Third World to Central and Eastern Europe. Although the donors had long-standing foreign aid institutions in place to handle aid to the third world, donors nevertheless added new entities and reorganized the mechanisms of aid management to administer aid to the new recipients. The European Union (EU) created a wholly separate PHARE (Poland-Hungary Aid for Restructuring the Economy) program to manage assistance to the region. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) created a new entity to manage aid to the new recipients, the Bureau for Europe and the New Independent States. The U.S. effort engaged some thirty-five federal agencies, most of which had no prior foreign aid or overseas experience. To coordinate the effort, the U.S. government created the Assistance Coordination Group, a body chaired by the State Department. The West offered aid, and the East accepted it. Western politicians came to show support. So how, in a few short years, did this promising cooperation become filled with so much disillusionment? Many recipients wanted to know "where have all these billions gone?" Eastern citizens developed negative impressions of Western advisers, saying, "foreigners don't understand our conditions" or "these bureaucrats can't tell my country from Shangri-La." The disillusionment was often mutual. Donor representatives would grumble in private, "they [the recipients] just can't handle it," "they have no sense of democracy," or "it's a gift--why are they complaining?" How could them be such a discrepancy between how aid projects look in the field and the "success stories" conveyed in donor reports? To find out, I conducted extensive interviews in Washington, Brussels, Central and Eastern Europe, and Russia; I discovered that aid is a story not just of economics but of political, social, and cultural impact. These concerns may seem tangential, and they are certainly less quantifiable than the study of expenditures and their targets. Yet the technical assistance that makes up much of the Western aid packages is as much about relationships among people as it is about goods and money. How local people interpret aid affects whether aid can become the object of criticism by nationalist demagogues as examples of foreign influence. A Czech politician launched his career by waging a campaign against an aid program. The slogan, "A Foreign Elite Steals from us while the Polish People are at the Bottom," decorates the main entrance to a Polish factory. Another reason the political and social aspects of aid to Central and Eastern Europe should be given special consideration is that many of the donors' approaches to aid imply substantial political and social transformation. In fact, changing the very nature of recipient institutions is a goal of aid to Central and Eastern Europe (whether explicitly stated or not). (This is a marked departure from aid policies to the third world: aid to India, for example, tends to be couched in terms of efficiency and economic growth.) Moreover, many in the West argued that they had only a brief "window of opportunity" to effect change and that they had to move quickly to fill the political-economic vacuum created by the collapse of the Soviet bloc. The donors' heightened sense of urgency, however, may have led to overpromising and to frustration on the part of the recipients.