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Warsaw Business Journal
August 21, 2000

Marketing execs soak up Mazuria. (Excerpt)

Peggy Simpson

"Janine R. Wedel, a U.S. anthropologist, whizzed through Warsaw recently, using it as a stopover between her forays to Russia and back to Washington. In 1998, she made waves with a high-profile book criticizing Western aid to Russia and Eastern Europe. She was particularly damning about the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

USAID folks might beg to differ. But her congressional testimony on the early 1990s "Marriott Brigade" and the barrage of U.S. consultants offering help that Poles didn't necessarily want reflected criticism that forced fundamental changes in the agency.

Since the mid-1990s, for instance, the consultants are required to train the trainers. Not just to consult, but to stay long enough to transfer their skills.

...

What isn't known is whether USAID or other foreign advisers were responsible for this change or if it was a result of the Poles' own energy, initiative and intensity of desire to compete with the best of the West.

Wedel has just finished updating her "Collision and Collusion" paperback book. But she isn't trying to tackle that frontier question. And that would seem to be a pretty crucial issue for policy chiefs, as Poland's transition is adopted as a model for many other countries, especially among former Soviet republics and countries in Latin America."

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