Fifteen Eighty Four

Sometimes plans work best when they don’t really bear the hallmarks of a plan. Less design and more muddling through can achieve unforeseen good. This might be said for a well-known, but less well-understood, postwar international aid program for Asia, the Colombo Plan.

Launched in July 1951, the impressively titled Colombo Plan for Cooperative Economic Development in South and Southeast Asia still exists today, but its heyday was in the 1950s and 1960s when it muddled through the sharp politics of Cold War divisions and changing relations between colonising and colonised states. It was created by members of the Commonwealth following a foreign ministers meeting in Colombo in January 1950, and it grew to include the United States (as a donor) and most of the South and Southeast Asian states. By the early 1960s there were more than 20 members – with others knocking on the door to join.

Although members enjoyed the name, the Colombo Plan was less of a grand, centralized plan than a means by which members would meet annually and decide how they might best move aid, both capital and technical (including scholarships for Asian trainees), in a series of bilateral agreements.

In its early years, the Colombo Plan bore a great mix of expectations. Would it do for Asia what the mighty US-sponsored Marshall Plan was doing for war-ravaged Europe? An Asia in transition was very different to Europe. From the perspective of newly-independent governments in countries such as India and Pakistan, might the Colombo Plan, through economic means, perpetuate colonial power? Might it just be a means by which the West used foreign aid to halt the spread of communism?

The tensions behind these last two questions were often present, but they were also managed remarkably well. Some, such as the Indian government, didn’t really need another plan, when they had their own five year economic plans, but the Colombo Plan contributions could be bolted on. For others, such as the Australians, providing Colombo Plan scholarships to decolonising Asia was a welcome means of offsetting some of the resentment in the region at Australia’s restrictive immigration, or so-called ‘White Australia’ policy.

How then, did this ‘plan’ chart a course that was, at once, sufficiently economically and diplomatically useful but also flexible, benign, unthreatening?

One of the key ingredients was the lack of rules. Whenever an issue arose that might attract differing views, members chose to talk their way towards unanimity. They had plenty of time to do so at the annual meetings of the Consultative Committee, which lasted around four weeks. When, for example, it was suggested that members might vote on whether new countries could join the Colombo Plan, the view was that it was better to work towards at least consensus if not unanimity rather than cast votes.

And when it was suggested that members might try to measure how effective aid was in the building of dams, generating electricity, boosting health and so on, the view was that this would be overreach. It might invite unfavourable comparisons and competition between members. Much better was the case-book or exemplar strategy: showcase those projects that seemed to be running well, especially those that had a strong human interest angle such as sponsored students, or captured the imagination for its scale and ambition, such as a power-generating nuclear reactor for India. These were the years before the OECD set universal standards for measuring foreign aid.

In its long meetings and its rotating format– between a donor country city one year, then a recipient city the next – the Colombo Plan was a moving laboratory of development thinking and a means by which large numbers of politicians and bureaucrats learned about each other. They were treated to a smorgasboard of dining, museum-visiting and post-conference excursions that would rival 21^st century equivalents. Hospitality was a big part of both new and established nation-states demonstrating their credentials on an international stage. By the late 1950s more than 150 were attending the annual meetings.

They cultivated a culture that fostered enterprising bureaucrats working in conference and behind the scenes. When a flag and an emblem was produced by the Plan’s small Information Bureau working in Colombo, members could not recall having endorsed these, but found no reason why they shouldn’t continue to be used!

And they were. The same talented officials produced impressive newsletters, promoted photographic exhibitions and generally crafted the Colombo Plan into its shape-shifting experiment in postwar international relations. It was a Colombo Plan that could use a capital ‘P’ or a small one, depending on what you needed. Seasoned diplomats attending meetings would at first puzzle over how such a loosely-organized, under-promising organization survived. They would emerge the wiser for watching what we might call ‘development internationalism’ in action. The only rule was, there were no rules.