Foundations of the American Century

by Inderjeet Parmar

  “There is rarely a direct link between terrorism and poverty and exclusion. But it is evident that terrorists draw much of their support and justification from those who are, or perceive themselves as, unjustly impoverished.” So wrote the president of the Rockefeller Foundation in 2002.136 In addition to those programs, RF also launched a number of area studies–type initiatives to illuminate the nature of modern Islam as a precursor, or in addition, to further interventions in the war on terror and anti-Americanism.

  In May 2004, RF allocated $700,000 to a series of conferences on “Muslim Worlds and Global Futures,” the title suggesting an interest in examining the Muslim “mind” and its effects on the globalization process.137 Further initiatives funded by RF on aspects of the “Islamic question” include a series of meetings, new studies, and research fellowship programs. RF also awarded $50,000 to the American Sufi Muslim Association toward the cost of the “Cordoba Dialogues, an interfaith effort to heal the relationship between Islam and America.”138 The Asian Resource Foundation in Thailand was granted $252,000 for its research fellowships program for “young Muslim scholars in the region,” entitled Islam in Transition in Southeast Asia: A View from Within.139 Other initiatives explored how Middle Eastern Islam looks from African and Asian perspectives or the nature of “Radical Islamic Organizations in Central Asia,” or they are pointedly combative—the Sisters in Islam group, Malaysia, was funded for its meeting in 2003, “Muslim Women Challenge Fundamentalism: Building Bridges Between Southeast Asia and West Asia [i.e., the Middle East].”140

  Inherent in these initiatives is the idea that the principal cause of terrorism and anti-Americanism is insufficient knowledge and understanding between communities or a failure to communicate. The initiatives suggest that the foundations, echoing the Bush (and Obama) administrations, believe that the problem lies in people’s hearts and minds rather than in any desire to retain national cultures or autonomy from American domination. As Conway told delegates to the International Symposium of the World Conference on Religion and Peace, we must act now to “bridge the potential fissures that terrorism can create. Civilized societies should not fall victim to a manipulation of human understanding.” Here, terrorism itself is given an independent causal role in spreading misunderstanding between peoples, rather than being seen in any way as symptomatic of significant globalization processes.141

  The Carnegie Corporation has focused on the “problem” of Islam and globalization for some time, even prior to 9/11. For example, in June 2000, CC awarded $237,000 to the University of California–Santa Cruz for “research on Globalization and Islam.”142 This grant should be seen in the context of CC’s funding of other studies of the effects of globalization on national self-determination and “ethnopolitics”: to UCLA ($312,000 in early 2001), Yale ($445,000 in early 2001), UC–San Diego ($260,000 in 2002), and the University of Pennsylvania ($248,000 in 2000).143 In effect, this helps strengthen an existing network of American Islamicists, a contemporary version of Cold War students of communism.

  Post-9/11, however, a more sharply defined investment strategy has been forged at Carnegie. Its International Peace and Security Program is more pointedly aimed at “global engagement,” as “the United States and other states face new global threats and opportunities.” In particular, CC focuses on the problems posed by “states at risk for instability” that may be attacked by new “nation-building” measures, a policy now espoused, according to CC, by the Bush administration in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to Carnegie, there are, “on the horizon,” “other candidates for external intervention by both the United States and other members of the international community,” presenting CC with an opportunity to support efforts at “generating policy-relevant scholarship on the challenges posed by states at risk; and promoting new multilateral approaches to confronting these challenges.”144

  CC funded a plethora of scholars and institutes to study Islamic ideas, political Islam, and terrorism. For example, the University of Maryland was awarded $25,000 to finance a workshop on “non-state actors, terrorism and the proliferation of the weapons of mass destruction”; Robert A. Pape was granted $100,000 to research “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism”; and the National Academy of Sciences given $220,000 to study “U.S.-Russian challenges in countering urban terrorism.”145 Domestically, there is a growing interest in Arab and Muslim communities in America: in 2003, CC granted Louise Cainkar $100,000 for “A Sociological Study of the Islamicization of Chicago’s Arab Community: Implications for Democratic Integration.”146

  Additionally, like Ford, CC also considers the principal cause of anti-Americanism to be in misunderstanding and backs several initiatives to extend understanding. For example, in March 2002, Boston University was awarded $100,000 for its radio stations to develop “programming on Islam and foreign policy,” and in 2003, the American University in Beirut received $94,900 “toward a program to promote understanding between the United States and the Islamic world.” Likewise, the Brookings Institution received $11,000 in 2004 toward “creating new dialogues between the US and the Muslim world.”147 The ultimate aim of these efforts is indicated in the title of a grant ($100,000) for the scholar Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, in 2003, to research “The Path to Moderation: Lessons from the Evolution of Islamism in the Middle East.”148

  Between 2007 and 2009, Carnegie granted $9.6 million to a range of universities and think tanks as part of its “Islamic Initiative.” To build up cadres of Middle East experts engaged with public discourse and policy makers, in 2009 CC gave George Washington University’s Institute of Middle East Studies $475,000. The SSRC was granted $3 million in 2009 to “mobilize academic expertise on Muslim regions and communities, with a special set of grants for policy-relevant work on Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.” The Aspen Institute’s program for U.S. congressional representatives to learn of the “contemporary dynamics in Muslim states and networks” received support from CC to the tune of $720,000 in 2008. Squarely located in the heart of the war on terror was the $500,000 CC grant to the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism, to “evaluate causes and countermeasures to terrorism, including the fastest growing form of terrorism (suicide attacks), as well as the dynamics of radicalization and strategies such as the ‘decapitation’ of terrorist groups.” The Chicago grant was conditional upon outreach work with “government, academic, media and public forums.” Finally, Harvard was awarded $200,000 by Carnegie to develop an online database on “contemporary Islam’s emerging schools and identities,” including debates on themes ranging from “personal conduct to rights and law, secularism, and the role of women… to reflect the most accurate picture of contemporary Islam.”149

  CONCLUSION

  The Big 3 foundations constitute powerful forces for supporting American power. They promote capitalist globalization (or “smart globalization,”150 as the Rockefeller Foundation now terms it), encourage amelioration strategies to assist (some of) those unable to compete in the global marketplace, and sponsor elite-led organizations that claim to give a voice to those unheard in the halls of power. Or, rather, they sustain forums through which globalization might be “reformed” or humanized. The programs are significant because they assume that there is no alternative to globalization, even though it generates, by its “normal” functioning, huge social and economic inequalities within and between nations and has led to impoverishment on a massive scale.

  Interpreted as promoting market democracies, democratic peace theory, as the post–Cold War concept of U.S. power, scientifically legitimized America’s continued global preponderance. Indeed, DPT—the successor to the doctrine of containment—offered American elites the opportunity to “shape the political character of the entire world for generations to come,” according to Larry Diamond. In words that sound prescient a decade after 9/11, Diamond effectively expressed the political functionality of DPT for extending American power. Even more significantly, Tony Lake institutionalized DPT in Clinton’s democratic
enlargement and engagement programs. In emasculated form, DPT served as the legitimating rhetoric for the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

  The major foundations were critical to the networks that relaunched DPT and articulated it with the Clinton administrations. Their publications in respected policy-oriented journals further refined the thesis and added to its scientific legitimacy. By the mid-1990s, DPT had attained political commonsense status among policy makers. Despite complaints by proponents of the democratic peace that their theory had been hijacked by the Bush administration, it is likely to remain a key element in the U.S. foreign policy arsenal. This was signaled in the very depths of the crises engulfing the Bush administration, in 2006, with the publication of the bipartisan report endorsing DPT, by the Princeton Project on National Security. It is now, arguably, central to the Obama “doctrine.”

  In the post–Cold War and post-9/11 world of American power, the Big 3 continue to play significant roles in maintaining and developing the concepts and infrastructure of foreign policy knowledge networks that are central to the exercise of America’s global role. They are at the heart of dense networks of think tanks, research institutes, universities, and media organizations and close to the leaders of both main political parties and to relevant state agencies. They are to knowledge networks what central banks are to the financial system: absolutely critical in maintaining flows of particular people and particular ideas. As “soft” and “smart” power151 become ever more relevant to the exercise of American power, nonstate actors such as the Big 3 are likely to become even more significant to maintaining and extending America’s global reach.

  9

  CONCLUSION

  This study has tracked the major American foundations from the early part of the last century to the first decade of this one. During that time, the United States has grown from a society that was, on the whole, inward looking and parochial, relatively content within its own borders—or rather, content with expanding its frontiers to their continental limits—to one that considers the management of the very global order itself as not just a national interest but its God-given duty. The United States has transformed from a global minnow to the world’s lone superpower. Many factors have contributed to this transformation—economic, political, and military—but one that is generally neglected is the role of philanthropic foundations.

  Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford in various ways marginalized “isolationism” as a major force in U.S. politics, were central to building the knowledge base of the U.S. state and key elements of society about the rest of the world, built or reformed aspects of the U.S. state’s foreign affairs capacities during World War II, harnessed their power to the American state during the Cold War, and helped to develop the key political and security concepts that guided American power through the period since the collapse of the Soviet bloc. In the post-9/11 period, the major foundations continue to develop and innovate, forming the model for newer philanthropies as well as collaborating with them. This book has documented in some detail the vast array of foundation funding programs that acted upon the capacities of the American state as well as those of academia and elite publics to better comprehend the world that U.S. elites now view in proprietary terms.

  The central argument, over and above restating the importance of elite dominance of U.S. foreign affairs, is that the foundations’ manifest purpose—to address fundamental problems like poverty and development through better knowledge of their causes—played second fiddle when compared to their (officially secondary) purpose of creating national and global networks of intellectuals committed to a Progressive-era state-building project for globalist ends. American foundations and the networks they nurtured and constructed carried out statelike functions for a global order consciously built by the corporate leaders who created and led the Big 3 foundations.

  Running through all of the foundation programs reviewed here, the idea of the “network” is a constant. The knowledge network is the foundations’ principal instrument and achievement. It is virtually an end in itself, a technology of power that acts as a “force multiplier.” Indeed, Ford’s Peter Cleaves and Jeffrey Puryear noted the point in those very words in regard to programs in Chile (chapter 7). Networks achieve much when they are well funded and attractive to the brightest and best. They bring together scholars and practitioners in productive union. They bestow prestige on insiders and draw the boundaries of what constitutes valuable knowledge. They act as gatekeepers of ideas and approaches, certifying some and delegitimizing others. They determine what is current orthodoxy. In so doing, they end up being rather “conservative” even in their methods of innovating, preserving certain powerful continuities and interests while making changes that may not radically alter patterns of power and influence within academia, politics, or the state. In effect, networks are the tangible evidence of how elite hegemony actually “works,” how “power works” in ostensibly (and, to an extent, actually) “open” democratic societies.

  Networks thereby generate outcomes that are not publicly stated. That is, the promotion of elite hegemony within the United States is nowhere stated in foundation publications or Web sites. Yet, the results of liberal internationalist foundation-funded networks are clear: the effective hegemony of a globalist worldview across elite and attentive opinion in the United States within the leadership of the main political parties and the upper echelons of the state.1

  The influence of networks was felt during the Cold War, as shown in chapters 4–7 in reviewing the activities of the Kissinger and Salzburg seminars for European elites and the building of networked academic associations in Asian, African, and Latin American studies, sometimes with devastating consequences. The examples of Nigeria, Indonesia, and Chile are especially significant in this regard. In Nigeria, Ford-funded economic planning ultimately produced little economic “development” but exacerbated ethnic political tensions that contributed to the civil war in the mid-1960s. In Indonesia, economists supported by Ford funds contributed to undermining the “anti-American” Sukarno regime and, indirectly at least, to the bloody massacres that occurred in the wake of Suharto’s military takeover in 1965–1966. Indonesian economists—the so-called Beautiful Berkeley Boys—went on to frame broadly neoliberal economic policies that transformed the country. In Chile, the Chicago Boys ended up plotting with the military ahead of Pinochet’s coup of 1973 and presiding over the conversion of Chile into a laboratory for neoliberal experimentation. Indeed, in each case, the foundations’ experts tended to see the societies in which they worked as real-world laboratories for their technocratic schemes for modernization, normally without any knowledge of the societies and peoples themselves. In fact, in the case of the Michigan/MIT economist Wolfgang Stolper, a lack of knowledge was worn as a badge of objectivity, if not pride. There is in each case a distinct colonial mentality in the dealings of American (and other) experts with “their” Third World counterparts.

  Such colonial mentalities are unsurprising. They have their counterpart in U.S. elites’ attitudes to the general run of American citizens. Elitism is a core attitude among those who created the foundations and their trustees and is evident in the subtext of the everyday work of their officers. Of course, by the 1970s, foundations were discussing “empowering” the masses and building partnerships with “local” people. And today, “giving a voice” to those left behind by globalization is a core concern. Nevertheless, the determination of who constitutes “the masses,” “local people,” or unheard voices seems in the end, as with the World Social Forum, to remain within the power of foundations and other rich funders themselves, and they tend to select people who work for “respected” organizations normally led by elites who think and speak in a cosmopolitan and technocratic language comprehensible to program officers.

  Foundation elites tend, as a default position, toward other elites. Consider the Ford Foundation’s programs in the wake of large-scale protest by African American Africanists in the late 1960s (chapt
er 6). Ford’s programs, according to its own reports, ended up empowering some African Americans, but almost exclusively those drawn from programs at elite, mainly white universities, further deepening and widening the gap between those universities and historically black colleges. Even further, Ford’s programs tended to remain oriented to white students—in terms of the relative scale of funding. Even among black students, the program ended up creating a black fellowship network, a smaller version of the extant white network.

  Unerringly, what is continuous and longest lasting in terms of foundation programs’ influence is the network: its careful construction and nurturing, maturing, and development is given the most painstaking attention. Ultimately, the network is the end, not just a means to an end. Its production, maintenance, and “normal” operations and activities constitute power technology. It is within networks that concepts are either initially developed or co-opted and elaborated, refined and packaged, and made ready for use by practitioners. This was most clearly shown in chapter 8, in discussing the knowledge politics of democratic peace theory, a theory that had been around for some time but that only broke through into mainstream academia and politics on the basis of a combination of powerful foundation networks as well as catalytic events—the end of the Cold War and the devastating terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001. And it is such catalytic events, combined with the networked production and refinement of ideas for use that produces powerful policy shifts and the repositioning of the American state to its domestic society and to the world. This was also clearly the case in regard to Japanese aggression at Pearl Harbor in December 1941: dense liberal internationalist networks composed of foundations, think tanks, and other organizations nurtured over a period of two decades or more had produced the concepts, attitudes, theories, and policy-oriented and “public” language that predominated after Pearl Harbor. But catalytic events alone do not guarantee any particular outcome. The role of powerful networks is to interpret the world after the event and to sell their version of cause and consequence to American publics, to draw the lessons for future policy, and to advance concrete plans for implementation.