The Politics of Foreign Aid: U.S. Assistance for Reform in Ukraine and Poland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Foreign aid is first and foremost a technique of statecraft.It is, in other words, a means by which one nation tries to get other nations to act in desired ways" (Baldwin ). is statement was made almost four decades ago.Yet when one looks at the U.S. support for the post-Soviet countries in transition, one realizes that Western assistance has been and continues to be driven by inherently political considerations.Indeed, following the Soviet demise, traditional Cold War rationales for assistance strategies disappeared, prompting reconsiderations of donors' priorities.e prospects of the former socialist states' transition to liberal democracy and a market economy opened up new opportunities for donor governments and agencies.Many of them redirected resources from the ird World and became actively involved in the formulation, financing and implementation of multiple aid programs in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.By the mid-s they had disbursed nearly billion in aid funds to the region.e transition has increasingly become a strategy implemented by Western donors, illuminating the fundamental and ongoing tension between the economic and political self-interests of donors and the developmental needs of recipients.More importantly, beginning in the early days of the transition, the U.S., and the West more generally, did not view the entire post-socialist world as monolithic.Western donors tended to discriminate in favor of the countries of Eastern and Central Europe and treat them more as potential partners, while the Soviet nations, except for the Baltic states and Russia, were denied recognition of the right to statehood.In this paper I will analyze U.S. support, or lack thereof, for transition reforms in two neighboring countries.I will demonstrate that in contrast to Poland, stumbling U.S.-Ukraine relations made the challenge of maintaining independence a far greater task than was expected.is explains much of the frustration with transition reforms and much of the blame discourse over Western unwillingness to embrace Ukraine.However, I will also argue that the donor's self-interested policy toward Ukraine is not a single reason for developmental under-achievement in this country.Many of today's prob-
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".