This brilliant, engaging book opens with a personal story about the “humiliation of the gift.” The scene is 1980s communist Poland and author Drążkiewicz is a preschooler. Complete strangers enthusiastically approach her family on an excursion in the countryside. These are not just any unknown people; they are from the west, that faraway, fairytale land of riches. They offer candy to our preschooler-protagonist. In a foreign language, her mother kindly tells them this is not necessary, while allowing her daughter to accept the candy. The gift is puzzling to the child, for it is not given to befriend her or reward good behavior. That day, she grasps the essence of west and east as separate, unequal worlds. She has a priceless insight into “why they were giving me goodies: [B]ecause they could” (2).
Where does the impetus to give aid come from? How do countries become aid donors and build their aid institutions? And why do their citizens engage with distant others through foreign assistance? Through the experience of Poland, and employing original empirical contributions gleaned from her impressive fieldwork over a decade among key parties involved in aid efforts in multiple sites and countries, Institutionalised Dreams addresses these questions. In showing how actors and institutions respond to international and domestic incentives, constraints, and worldviews, Drążkiewicz demonstrates how globalization happens. Poland provides a revealing lens for this study because it has been on both sides of the aid relationship: first, under communism, as a “Second World” donor to the “Third World”; then, after the fall of communism, as an aid recipient beginning in the early 1990s; and, most recently, as an aid donor.
Institutionalised Dreams makes key contributions by detailing the interplay between foreign assistance and national identity, always shaped in relation to other nations, and how the foreign aid of donor countries at once reflects and reinforces their national ideologies. Donors may harbor feelings of pride and superiority, while recipients are characterized as underdeveloped and needing assistance. Yet very little attention has been paid to how aid relationships help configure a donor country's external image, national identity, or ideology. Drążkiewicz shows that, while the aid industry's stated aim is to rectify global inequality, its “hidden curriculum” instead frequently fosters inequality by nurturing particular images about both donor and recipient societies. Living in Ireland as an academic, she observes that her daughter's nursery still participates in a “collection for the needy in ‘Eastern Europe’”—fifteen years after Poland's accession to the EU. One of many such initiatives, it “help[s] to cement the Irish identity as the most charitable in Europe,” she writes (7).
This state of affairs is why Poland's effort to shed its yoke as an underdeveloped aid recipient is intertwined with its emergence as a donor country, Drążkiewicz documents, drawing on a wealth of experience working across the aid industry (including Poland's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where foreign aid is managed; a Polish government agency charged with democracy promotion; UNDP; and several NGOs). To build its identity as an aid donor, on par with established western donors like Germany and France, Poland must fashion its own aid regime after those in the established club. To this end, Poland's aid officials seek to show that their cadre is professionalizing and continually expanding the sites of foreign assistance. To this end, too, Poland must forget its Second World experience as a Soviet satellite donor and exchange partner with certain Third World countries. That does not count in the coveted donors’ club. At the same time, however, for domestic consumption, Polish aid actors leverage the country's Second World past. In building support for aid to Africa, for instance, the aid community builds on the legacy of eminent Poles’ Cold War-era Africa encounters. In operations to Poland's east, the aid regime deploys historical and cultural affinities connecting it to former fellow Second World members. Thus, vis-à-vis Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, and other eastern neighbors, Poland emerges as a mature democracy helping to bolster democracy.
Drążkiewicz illustrates key points through gripping stories and main characters who come up throughout the book. Each chapter is replete with the author's and others’ lived experiences, exposing real-world realities, and keen theoretical insights. Unfortunately, inadequate final copyediting and an over-use of acronyms detract from the narrative in places.
Institutionalised Dreams marks a timely response to debates about the changing landscape of central Europe, globalization, the aid industry, and the emergence of new donors. The book is required reading for anyone concerned with foreign aid or development policy, efforts or projects, and with questions of national identity. It is a valuable resource for those seeking to understand globalization, foreign relations, and society more generally. And, of course, for students of the gift.
