David Lowe, The Colombo Plan. Development Internationalism in Cold War Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2025).
The Colombo Plan was much larger than an Australian story. This new scholarly study depicts it embedded in a complex of regionalisms, an aid grouping which while lacking in formal organisation functioned largely on consensus and bilateral goodwill while avoiding the worst tensions of the Cold War.
Potential Australian readers might believe that a further book on the Colombo Plan by a local scholar would be, however worthy, an excess, given Daniel Oakman’s 2004 monograph, the volume of documents edited by Lowe and Oakman (2004), as well as a number of sound article length studies. However, not the least of the many merits of this excellent volume is that it puts Australia in its place, which is not centre stage. Based upon close archival work in a half a dozen countries and informed by a deep knowledge of the national and international dimensions of early Asian regionalism, this book is a model discussion of an episode often claimed as an Australian innovation but, in fact, which is proven to be embedded in a complex international history. Based in part upon a British desire to have newly independent Commonwealth countries draw down upon their embarrassing large (and even potentially destabilising) Sterling balances, the Plan began partly as a way of tidying empire, and thus with colonialist assumptions. However, Australian figures, Minister of External Affairs Percy Spender among them, undoubtedly saw further in to the future and their initiatory role was undoubtedly crucial. Later, Spender’s successor Casey was a tireless advocate of the Plan, and made much of its publicity value (including sponsoring a major film, The Builders, put together by Osmar White and James Fitzpatrick). Nonetheless, as Lowe observes: ‘The Australians were the most active in generating publicity around their Colombo Plan efforts, sometimes drawing resentment from other donors for their capacity to turn measurably small gestures into a grand story.’ (164)
In a number of memorable phrases, Lowe captures the many paradoxes of a plan that lacked an overall plan, of an organisation that lacked a secretariat, of an entity that framed a corporate identity (its logo, though never formally approved, even appeared on 1961 Australian postage stamps) albeit possessed of no real permanence (though it did boast of a Bureau of Technical Cooperation) beyond the multi-national network of aid and development officials who appeared at its regular Consultative Committee meetings. Aims, objectives and modalities were, alike, a matter of ‘consensual imprecision,’ and when this consensus was broken after the Republic of Korea successfully lobbied in 1963 to join the Plan against the wishes of Ceylon and Indonesia, even this transgression of a settled modality was thereafter ignored.
Lowe successfully makes the case for the Plan functioning as an umbrella, ‘a label covering a series of bilateral programmes rather than something grander and more centralized’. (232) One American participant from 1963 is quoted to the effect that while the Plan began with ‘grandiose intentions,’ it had evolved ‘with few if any substantive functions,’ nevertheless and paradoxically, to his puzzlement, it continued ‘to enjoy high esteem among many of its members’. (216) It is the argument of this book that ‘one of the reasons for its appeal’ was the very imprecision of the arrangements it entailed.
A further merit of the book is to serve as a reminder that, at the time the Plan emerged, there were many regionalisms. The tendency to foreground the Bandung Afro-Asian Conference of 1955 in historical accounts obscures the fact that the consensual and essentially open style of Colombo, having in effect served as midwife for the Association of Southeast Asia (ASA—embracing Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, 1961), was thus preparatory of ASEAN. With a strong South Asian component—India alone was the recipient of around half of all Colombo Plan expenditure by Australia, for example—it was also a harbinger of the concept of the ‘Indo-Pacific,’ a now modish term sometimes actually employed at the time.
The Plan emerged as the Cold War got under way, and with the entrance of the Americans there were apprehensions that its consensual and non-ideological style would be compromised. Yet, the group managed to avoid the worst tensions of the Cold War. An American proposal made at the 1955 Consultative Committee meeting in Singapore to establish a regional nuclear research and training centre never gained traction, despite follow up studies. Their chosen location was to be Manila, but some members found the Philippines too closely aligned with Washington’s regional objectives as manifest in the formation of SEATO. In this respect, Lowe is a corrective to the common (though not undisputed) view that comprising the main narrative of the time, the Cold War tended to overwhelm and sideline other international narratives. Nonetheless, the flagship British funded steel plant at Durgapur, West Bengal, was built partly in competition with a similar plant sponsored by the Soviet Union. The Plan also managed to steer clear of communal violence, an issue in India and Pakistan and a major impediment to the success of the Gal Oya irrigation project in Ceylon, which was often otherwise presented as an example of Colombo achievement.
While the Plan survived a name change in 1977, its membership expanded well beyond its Commonwealth core and with other development agencies of much greater prominence (and possessed of greater capital) its relevance receded. Britain and Canada withdrew in 1991, and the Plan faded into insignificance without entirely disappearing. As Lowe points out, the chief reason for its eclipse was the economic resurgence of the East Asian nations, which at once shifted the balance against the former ‘donor’ countries while foregrounding a mode of development which owed much more to enterprise than to state direction.
Lowe devotes some intriguing and sophisticated discussion to the Plan as both a generator of images and, later, a site of memory. He shows the ingenuity of the Plan’s propagandists in its Information Unit and beyond. With every growing sophistication of the UN’s ECAFE (Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East) as a source of information on regional economic and social indicators, including aid, the drafters of the Plan’s propaganda became more and more creative in presenting data that maximised the apparent generosity of the donors (including, especially regarding technical training, on the part of its Asian members) and the positive impact of its efforts.
To an extent the Plan enrolled unlikely state actors. New Zealand’s successful induction to regionalism proceeded by way of engineering Bombay’s milk supply scheme, and the magnificent hospitality provided when the Consultative Committee met in Wellington in 1956 was long remembered. Canadians were also prominent, a surprise given their traditional focus on the Atlantic. It should be recalled that when the 40MW heavy water Canada-India reactor built in India went critical in 1960—the Canadians had earlier sponsored the construction of a research reactor—India moved from research activities to membership of the nuclear club (with immense consequences for South Asia to follow), courtesy of the Colombo Plan. And terminological accidents played a part. If Australia’s Minister of External Affairs had been Percy Saver, the plan might have been otherwise named, but to assume the name Spender was too much of a stretch for some of the participating nations and they embraced Colombo as the alternative.
While the group were generally adept at avoiding the Cold War, it did sometimes obtrude. What was then known as the French Associated State of Vietnam joined the Plan in 1951 (Saigon, by then the capital of the Republic of Vietnam, later hosting a meeting of the Consultative Committee in 1957). Felicitously, perhaps, the cover of the book uses a photograph from the Wellington meeting of the Consultative Committee, convened in 1956. The backdrop of the gathering is a large wall map of Asia on which the Plan member countries are identified by distinctive shading. All of Vietnam appears as Plan territory, even though by that time the Democratic Republic of Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh was indisputably a separate state.
