Foreign political aid: the German political foundations and their US counterparts

Abstract

The work of the German political foundations is little known, but widely credited with a key role in the successful transitions to democracy in Portugal and Spain in the 1970s and Chile in the late 1980s. This article explores the work of the foundations, its scope and methods, and goes on to examine the work of the US political aid structures that were set up in the 1980s on the German model It assesses the impact of the foundations' work and the utility of foreign political aid as a tool in international relations.