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hello and welcome to cross talk we're all things are considered i'm peter lavelle non-governmental organizations or n.g.o.s what purpose do they serve today and are they politicized can really be called non-governmental if it receives money from governments and what about the donors are they interested parties. do cross talk n.g.o.s i'm joined by david rieff in new york he is a writer and senior fellow at the world policy institute and in pittsburgh we cross to clifford bob he is a political science professor at the caine university and author of the new book the global right wing all right gentlemen crosstalk rules in fact that means you can jump in anytime you want david if i'm going to you want to people say today that n.g.o.s are over politicized how do you come down on that. i think everything is political so for me you know this doesn't come as a kind of shock horror of all ation that n.g.o.s are political i think the more

interesting question would be what kind of politics they represent and whether you can say that and geopolitics have right wing or left wing to the extent those. those categorizations still mean anything cast to them you know human rights is a politics the u.n. charter is a politics so the idea that we're going to be suddenly shocked that the n.g.o.s are not perfectly neutral perfectly objective that seems to me that really does seem to me a little bit of posturing on the part of perhaps also governments that don't like n.g.o.s but also perhaps on the part of one ngo wishing to discredit another and you're ok cliff when you come out on this it's very interesting what we just heard. right i would generally agree with what david has said i think see n.g.o.s as basically the equivalent of lobbying groups domestically and they do clearly have political

agendas even if they may not like to put put it quite in that form even something as supposedly neutral as human rights i agree is a political issue highly political and in fact i'd say that trying to portray yourself as nonpolitical in the case of an ngo often is a political strategy in and of itself likewise i'd say that many governments who might not like the activities of particular and she will again call them political as a way to try to discredit them and to try to avoid being pressured by them in one way or another so i would generally agree with that i do think that there are you can divide n.g.o.s to some extent into various categories depending on what their goals are and kind of for shorthand purposes saying some are left wing some right wing on certain types of issues i think does actually make some sense david some people

call it an industry it's a good way to make money ok but you know there are some people in n.g.o.s that make money like bankers ok i mean is that what n.g.o.s are supposed to be about but they don't but they don't rag money like bankers i mean again look i am not i certainly i wrote a very critical book of the humanitarian relief world some years ago i continue i bet extremely critical for a whole variety of reasons of the human rights movement but i mean excuse me does call it a business it's not a business is the way morgan stanley or the union bank of switzerland as a business i mean you're talking about but you have career is him you know we're it was a there's a lot of us but career women a business that only i think you know if you are like a charity a good thing you know. yeah but this is this is this is making the great the enemy of the good i mean all institutions reader max weber's all institutions evolve into bureaucracies are n.g.o.s more careerist than a hospital then

a university then a radio station i mean i don't think so and the money while it's a lot of money and it's a great deal more money than it was let's say forty years ago is nothing compared to big business i mean you can't compare that ok cliff what you think about that people calling it industry. i think it's out of place as well look at it look at me look at matey look at haiti ok for a shape haiti is a good example well it turned into an industry sure you have n.g.o.s competing with how do you know there are injuries try to provide humanitarian relief you have some competition between them for them to maintain themselves and even grow and i mean it's in that general sense you might see it as kind of an analogy might be to the corporate world but i think david separately right you don't go into n.-g. o. work to get rich and you typically most people would go into it with some very

moral or political goals in mind and so that's that's a distinction but yeah good place to look at how you're going to get organizations competing with one another for. growth for maintaining themselves in any kind of context and that's what's happened in places like haiti with competition over relief there or so you know. and everyone is just i'm sorry go ahead david jump in go ahead i know everyone is very i know i see you mention haiti and i know i've this is about the third interview where someone has talked about haiti as if it is a great defeat for the n.g.o.s some group proof that the n.g.o.s are essentially corrupt or just in it for business advantage or market share advantage or i know haiti pretty well and haiti is a devilishly difficult problem and question and in the end to blame the n.g.o.s you know in fact it's governments including the haitian government itself that

should bear the lion's share the blame again seems to me a kind of posturing the ngos it's true make certain claims for themselves that it's fairly easy to debunk but that doesn't make them the general electric corporation or an arm of the cia or or whatever i mean i think what has to be very careful with with these. sorts of claims there is competition over market share but again let's not if you want to widen the frame and talk about not just n.g.o.s in the sense of development or human rights or environmental or relief n.g.o.s but in terms of say the nonprofit sector in places where private hospitals predominate they compete with each other for market share foundations compete for different kinds of activities so again to single out the n.g.o.s really does seem to me. quite unfair when all is said you know clip shouldn't mean there are ample reasons that

criticize cliff do you think that in jail should get government money to pay back the payment i think. i think that n.g.o.s in certain countries are just naturally going to look for government money and i think the key thing is to really have them disclose where their money is coming from and many countries actually do it by or that i think you know calling yourself a non-governmental organization when you receive one hundred percent of your funding from the government is obviously wrong but i think rajan many i would call it you know as a result of raja and you're not an ngo then well ok i think many people will in that situation talk about gun goes government organized n.g.o.s and business organ is to n.g.o.s are also a term that's out there obviously just like any other group that's trying to

promote itself i think the customer if you will needs to now aware of what the organization is saying but i think most of us are and are aware of the fact that you know the groups even private donors are going to have their own biases their own interests and that's what makes n.g.o.s quote unquote political but i do think we actually see on many issues of very wide span of. interests ideologies and goals among n.g.o.s certain ones tend to get more media attention than others but in fact if you dig in just a little bit you'll find in most global issues a wide variety of opinions being promoted by n.g.o.s and the n.g.o.s come into conflict with one another my book on the global right wing looks at that with regard to gay rights and with regard to gun rights and clashes between groups like the n.r.a. internationally and gun control groups trying to control of the trade in small arms

the same thing as a safe gay rights the same thing with climate change a whole host of other issues you see groups whether they get money from governments or from private donors taking up a variety of different issues and trying to promote them in various institutions david what do you think about about the funding issue from government. well i think that there are two things first of all i would very much echo what cliff just said about the that there are if you will n.g.o.s on both sides of most major issues so the idea that somehow the u.s. government or european union or whatever has bought the n g o x subject seems to be a bit farfetched the second point to make is again cliff i think the issue is is transparency. the international rescue committee to take up a large american relief development and refugee resettlement organization which

receives a great deal of money though by no means all its money from the us government publishes where the money comes from every year you know those books are perfectly open nobody is making any great secret of it both the european union but they don't have a do you do they have the political or do they have a political agenda what are you talking about by political agenda i mean is are refugee rights a political agenda if they are then yes they have a political agenda are you know where is the political agenda but if i can just come back to want to raise that i don't want to leave on the challenge it's not as if a lot of just speaking and development relief and development which is the issue i know best and i you know i have no expertise in gun control and gay rights is as cliff doesn't he should speak about that but you know there isn't enough money from private donors to do a rwanda relief operation or

a or to deal with aids in africa that kind of money not even the gates foundation is rich enough to sponsor that so if you are serious say about public health and development agencies are the ones who are medical relief agency is the one that's going to be best suited to do that kind of work government money is going to come in or you're not going to get anything done and it's. that point you've got principles so refined you just haven't you know great you have all these wonderful principles but people go on dying so i think one has to be very careful about making governments the enemy and all of us ok gentlemen we're going to go to a short break and after that short break we'll continue our discussion on n.g.o.s say with. the least. of.

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welcome back to cross talk where all things considered i'm peter lavelle do you mind who we're discussing non-governmental organizations. ok kliff what we should be the nexus between foreign policy objectives and n.g.o.s meet or not meet. i'm not one hundred percent sure i should state a question but if you're asking for instance whether n.g.o.s somehow serve the foreign

policy interests of particular countries i'd say some might some might not i mean i think. there are n.g.o.s that clearly have a similar set of goals to those of particular countries and some extent they then help serve those interests if but then again there are many n.g.o.s particularly in the human rights world that are often at odds with the policies both domestic and international of prominent western countries so i don't i don't see them as handmaidens for one another and i don't i don't think that we can say that and shias are simply tools of the foreign policy of particular countries there may be particular cases in which that is the case even where they act as front organizations but many of them truly are independent and critical of governments ok david what do you think foreign policy and n.g.o.s is it

a good thing is it a good thing well. i mean it depends on the policy doesn't it i mean this is all too binary for me as if governments have one policy and n.g.o.s either reflect or. or or counteract or resists those policies i mean and then geo like again the international rescue committee in new york or an organization i have enormous respect for. they have been active in all sorts of governments ronald reagan and jimmy carter and george w. bush and barak obama so who what are they reflecting here what are we talking about here there are organizations that have charters meds that. is a medical relief agency that's what it does is there are politics in that are there political. consequences of medical intervention of course there are but

i mean again to think of them largely as. simply quasar governmental organizations doing the bidding of some foreign ministry x. or y. that really doesn't seem to me to reflect what actually goes on and it also doesn't seem to me to reflect the divisions within governments within say the arm of governments that sponsor. underwrite a lot of n.g.o.s to vittie and other parts of government that have really no time for them so this is a much more mixed picture i think then than this kind of description allows for does the donor always get the policy they want i mean if the donor driven as it were. i would see i mean i'm going back to and that's politics and certainly in terms of politics at times. i mean i think donors often especially large donors are going to pick out particular

organizations that they think are going to advance some of their goals i think that's a natural thing the ngo will in some cases try to please the donor exclusively but in others will be more independent particular we're talking about small donors of course it's much less likely that the donor is going to have a real impact on what the policy is of the ngo but but you know it again if you dig in a little bit as a small donor you can kind of figure out what a particular and cio is doing the larger donors sometimes you know you can set up their own n.g.o.s and get them to do exactly what they want but again i think there's a wide diversity of people with money and governments with various interests and even divisions within government so you end up with a real spectrum of n.g.o.s on a variety of different issues often we don't see that i think because certain ones

work more prominently try to get into the media others don't sort of again depends on the particular issues involved ok david how about yourself there i mean the donor gets calls the tune well i think they're also you know the man with the gold makes the rules i mean we all know that it's true to some extent but it's nonstop maybe it should be called n.g.o.s then it should be called n.g.o.s then you know you need coming back to we need elaborate. they are not governmental organizations i mean again as cliff says there are if you want to use sort of old fashioned cold war terminology front organizations that call themselves and she goes but there are also plenty of fraudulent actors in lots of other spheres as well as the media is supposed to be independent to you and i both we all three of us know that that's not true a lot of the time plenty of media that claims its independent is either in the pay of some big corporate interest or government so you know should it be exposed when

an ngo simply is a front group for government policy of course it should but is that what really goes on as the main activities in n.g.o.s i don't think so i i don't think there's any basis for making such a claim and you know you have to come up with a new name again i come back to what n.g.o.s do i'm interested in public health as a matter simply of fact there is no way that serious global public health can be done unless underwritten by governments by the u.n. system which in turn is underwritten by governments so it's just the money of national governments one step removed you're serious about public health you want to use non-governmental private voluntary organizations which is another way of calling n.g.o.s in a way that inside the n.-g. o. world certainly in relief and development is a term almost as commonly used you need government money you know do i think

exposing n.g.o.s is the agents and governments for you know could i you know listen if i want to play my noam chomsky card i could say you know solving the aids crisis in africa for some people means you have more consumers divide g.m. products you know it is that kind of all true left stuff interests me not a whit i'm interested in what can be done about aids in africa and you know the fact that big develop. and geos take money from government does not seem to me something that should be the main focus of our attention let alone of our indignation is there the right attention right now for development because a lot of people say it's the expense of other things the development strategy of today is not positive not strong enough global justice should be applied those kinds of ideas. i think that's a political question ok. yeah and what how you developed countries is also very

political whether aid is a good idea to help countries develop or whether free market mechanisms should be at play again i think that we have a huge debate among non-governmental organisations scholars journalists as well about what the best method of development is and it's there is politics are being applied in many different countries around the world by particular n.g.o.s often in networks with governments perhaps supplying some of the money to propose particular types of. and actually implement particular types of development policies so i think that's something that is happening we have diversity in that area. and governments necessarily are going to be involved as david says my own main focus has been more on the groups acting as advocacy organizations and. there i think again you see these non-government organizations working loosely in networks

with governments with wings of the united nations to try to promote various types of policies that they agree with and you know again you'll see clashing networks that try to undermine one another try to promote their differing visions of how to create well development maybe or whether we should have gay rights at the international level whether we should promote them in particular countries in all of these areas you have these kind of clashes between different ideologies different ideas about how to promote particular visions of the public good you but that's the market place as well right getting people to buy certain kind of drugs sure we don't eat it doesn't have to be can well i mean or it does not look at it we can read it in that way. it it doesn't it's certainly not conspiratorial i would say it is politics at the global level in which there again are very different

views about how to solve particular problems whether things even are problems this is a major question between let's say the gun rights groups and the groups or trying to control guns and their sales worldwide and that's true of many other issues climate change as well is that it is a problem that is a question that is kind of the the basis of the of the debate so i do think that these groups. you know are highly political and we shouldn't make any bones about it that's how the international system is working at this point david and i can jump in there what's the right strategy the right mix you know i. the right mix is to you know to insist on transparency to make it you know to you can start an ngo if you can get the money there's no international covenant preventing you from starting any of the three of us could start our in geo tomorrow morning. in most countries certainly and in most countries in the european union and in

north america and i think many other parts of the world as well certainly in many countries in south america also. you could you know that the issue isn't that the is who are are these agenda is hidden. or not i think for example to take a fairly controversial organization human rights watch an organization that has been accused in many parts of the world of trying to impose western norms of human rights and governance on countries for which it's not appropriate or which they are trying to impose some kind of hedging monic moral and legal discipline but human rights was very clear about its views anyone who looks at human rights watch for two seconds understands what their politics are so i mean i guess i don't really see the problem i mean if it were a clue did as cliff says conspiratorial situation sure ok then of course that should be exposed but where it where are these conspiracies or or these hidden

agendas i actually think n.g.o.s are quite transparent about what they do do they do a bit of moral preening sure so dos spittles so gentlemen thank you very much john i've run out of time thank you very much for being with us many thanks today to my guests in new york and in pittsburgh and thanks to our viewers for watching us here r.t. see you next time and remember. this is. part. of freedom. and.

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