A Critique of AIESEC

Introduction

AIESEC is the world’s largest youth-run not-for-profit organization, an institution that was born in Europe in 1948 with the objective of forwarding cultural understanding through professional exchange experiences after the end of the second world war. Since then, AIESEC has pivoted itself to a broader scope of action, now mostly providing volunteer opportunities for young people from all over the world. What I’ll argue in this piece is that, historically, the cultural understanding proposed by AIESEC was narrow in the sense that it was aimed at an understanding between capitalist nations as they strived to create a sense of post-WWII unity and resist the “communist threat”. Furthermore, I claim that the “new” AIESEC that emerged in the 1990s after the end of the cold war, branded itself as an institution of global good by supporting global citizenship and the “fulfillment of humankind’s potential”, while in fact what such claims represent are a globalized evolution of the Western nation-state humanitarian rhetoric that addresses the “symptoms” of world problems such as poverty, hunger, sanitation, and public health, while dissuading us from questioning and debating the root causes of such issues: the centuries of unequal social, political, and economic relations of power and exploitation in between nations and classes.

The fundamental claim here is that, because it was born from a pro-capitalist Western context and with the strict purpose of forwarding the banner of capitalism across borders, as the cold war and the debate of communism versus capitalism came to an end, when the organization tried to reposition itself as an inclusive global platform the worldly culture that AIESEC endorsed was determined by its Western capitalist foundations. Therefore, although a not for profit organization, AIESEC has always guided itself through the capitalist paradigms of economic demand and constant growth. This has led to AIESEC’s current positioning as a volunteer organization for the global elite serving the purpose of differentiating the ones who can afford to become a ‘Global Volunteer’ from those who can’t and of subduing thoughts on inequality and exploitation from the minds of such volunteers by justifying their capitalist lifestyle through the good deeds they perform while volunteering abroad.

Old AIESEC, the Cold War, and Capitalist Prosthetic Memory

At the end of WWII, there was a dream of lasting peace and friendship amongst nations. Organizations such as the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) and the International Union of Students (IUS) embodied this sentiment particularly through young people and students [1]. Such organizations were comprised of youth from both East and West, capitalist and communist nations, and organized big gatherings to promote cultural understanding, for example, the World Youth Festival. In a similar spirit, the United States government launched in 1947 “Operation Understanding” with the intention of transporting American students to and from Europe during the summers, incentivizing their participation in the cultural events and discussions on the post-war global reality [2].

In a short period of time, however, a growing Cold War anxiety had set in together with revivals of a Red Scare and the government’s attitude towards “Operation Understanding” had changed. In January of 1948, President Truman signed the Smith-Mundt act, authorizing and funding a worldwide pro-US and pro-capitalist propaganda agenda. On this, Talya Zemach-Bersin warns us that [3]: “Although the language of the Act retained elements of a vague sentimental internationalism, promising to ‘increase mutual understanding between the peoples of the United States and the people of other countries,’ it was a clear Cold War measure to fight an intensifying war over ‘minds and wills.’” The same language of globalism and cultural understanding that before meant an actual hope of unity, became representative of capitalist propaganda funded by the U.S. government.

This is the context in which AIESEC was born: a 1948 where the hopes of global friendship were slowly starting to fade in the light of a “communist threat” against the “capitalist good”. In this scenario the organization was started by business and economic students from 7 different countries: Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. Similarly to the United States government’s position of anti-communist influence, the students came together to support professional exchange experiences between European students. The idea was that students from these countries would go spend some time abroad, stay with a host family, and work at a company. According to AIESEC’s first mission statement [4], the organization “started after the second world war when a group of young people determined that cross-cultural understanding was essential to prevent similar conflicts” and that its purpose was to “establish and promote friendly relations between the members.” The members of AIESEC were all from capitalist countries and even with the organization’s expansion overseas to the Americas and Asia in the 1950s, communist countries such as Russia and Romania were only allowed to join after 1989. Thus, the “cultural understanding” promoted by AIESEC is analogous to the “mutual understanding” of the Smith-Mundt act: one where cultural differences can be appreciated as long as the political and economic system of the parties involved is the same.

Thus, AIESEC served as a sort of prosthetic memory of capitalist cooperation and friendship, not just amongst its individual members, but amongst the countries that each member, willingly or not, represented. The immediate post-Nazism paradigm created a particular context in which the Soviet Union transitioned itself from an ally into an enemy. The absence of Nazism to define the ‘other’ and thus define the ‘we’ required the imagination of a new narrative of the relationship between nations. AIESEC fulfilled this role by creating a sense of historical friendship through capitalist cooperation amongst nations. This labeled the Soviet Union as the ‘other’ or ‘enemy’ since no Soviet student was able to develop ‘friendly relations’ with the members of other countries.

Such a scenario fulfills, then, Allison Landsberg’s concept of prosthetic memory since it “emerges at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at an experiential site” (in this case the internship abroad). “In this moment of contact, an experience occurs through which the person sutures himself or herself into a larger history”. Just as the ‘exceptional citizen’ represented the United States’ interests abroad through their actions, the students of AIESEC also represented the faux historical friendship amongst their nations through the capitalist collaborative experiences that they underwent. This not only created this sense of ‘us’ versus ‘them’, but also implied that the capitalist working endeavor was a way to achieve such a friendly rapport between nations.

As the Cold War progressed in time and complexity, the conceptual basis of AIESEC also had to. The establishment of NATO and the decades of cooperation between capitalist nations, their private companies, and their citizens had cemented and materialized the imagined post-WWII friendship put forth by AIESEC’s initial mission statement. The progression of the Cold War into the series of proxy wars across the developing world represented an opportunity for AIESEC to frame itself as a more globally-minded organization and to attract membership from ideologically disputed countries. This was exemplified by the creation of national offices of AIESEC in Colombia (1958), Nigeria (1961), Korea (1962), Mexico (1963), Australia (1964), Brazil (1970), and Egypt (1974) [5]. In 1978 AIESEC changed its mission statement to “develop internationally educated management which can affect various economic environments”. This purpose embodies perfectly the progression of the early cold war narrative into a more globally-minded one, but still seeing capitalist development and the development of an internationally experienced managerial class as the path towards progress.

New AIESEC, Global Citizenship, and Humanitarianism

In 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the imminent end of the Cold War AIESEC went a step further with its repositioning as a globally oriented organization. For the first time, it defined its vision in its current form of “peace and the fulfillment of humankind’s potential”. This was the first time that the organization defined as its scope of action the entirety of humankind, symbolizing the progression beyond a communist vs. capitalist framework. However, this ideological change did not and could not represent a de facto change in the culture of the organization. Claiming to become a fully globally-minded organization, by the international community and for the international community, did not immediately make the organization so, especially when it had such a historical association with Western capitalist ideals.

Ulf Hannerz talks about this in his book Transnational Connections [6]. On page 107 he says:

“The transnational cultures are also as wholes usually more marked by some territorial culture than by others. Most of them are in different ways extensions or transformations of the cultures of Western Europe and North America. If even the transnational cultures have to have physical centers somewhere, places in which, or from where, their particular meanings are produced and disseminated with particular intensity, or places to which people travel in order to interact in their terms, this is where such centers tend to be located.”

This is exactly the situation of AIESEC. An organization not only born in Western Europe and with a strong pro-capitalist European culture, but that had its first physical headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, and then Rotterdam, Netherlands, until 2018 when it was relocated to Montreal, Canada. Thus we can say that not only were (and are) the physical centers of AIESEC located in Western Europe and North America, but its 1989 globally-minded vision shift represented nothing but an expansion and projection of the values and cultures of these regions as global values and cultures.

Vanessa Andreotti in her 2014 piece on global citizenship education [7] warns on “the implications of the projection of Northern/western values and interests as global and universal which naturalizes the myth of Western supremacy in the rest of the world.” She goes on by saying that “this naturalization occurs by a disavowal of the history of imperialism and the unequal balance of power between the ‘First’ and ‘Third’ Worlds in the global capitalist system.” Thus, at its pivoting moment at the end of the capitalist-communist paradigm, AIESEC, by claiming to transform itself into a global organization, not only projected and normalized Western European and North American values as universal but in doing so ignored the historical exploitative relationships that the Global North had had with the Global South and forwarded the idea that capitalist neoliberal endeavors, embodied in AIESEC’s professional internships, were the way to achieve “peace and fulfillment of humankind’s potential”. This contributes to the kind of “sanctioned ignorance” that Andreotti mentions in her paper, one where the history of colonialism is either ignored or buried in history, while free-trade capitalism is sanctified as the path to development, making the exploitative nature of neo-colonialist trade relations less evident.

During the 1990s AIESEC underwent little structural change. It saw a natural expansion in terms of membership with the creation of national offices in former communist states such as the Soviet Union (1989), Bulgaria (1990), Romania (1991), Estonia (1992), Lithuania (1993), and Ukraine (1994), as well as in developing nations of the Global South such as Botswana (1993), Pakistan (1993), Bolivia (1994), Sri Lanka (1995), El Salvador (1996), Uganda (1996), and Bangladesh (1999). In the early 2000s, the organization’s decentralized and bureaucratic structure and increasing work-visa problems after 9/11 led to a stagnation period of some sort. As the number of countries without AIESEC decreased, so did the organization’s natural growth by national expansions. Almost as if attesting to its capitalist values, the organization needed to find a way to maintain the constant growth and “maximize their impact”.

Around 2005 AIESEC started experimenting with volunteer opportunities as a part of their exchange programs. Individuals would pay a fee ($500 in the U.S.) to get matched to a volunteering opportunity in their desired country where they would usually get a host family and engage in activities such as language teaching or NGO fund-raising and marketing. This program was an immediate success since there was a constant demand for volunteer labor on the NGO side and the desire for volunteering abroad on the students’ side. AIESEC called this program the Global Community Development Program, then rebranded to Global Citizen Program, and finally nowadays to Global Volunteer Program.

The program fee plus travel costs and other expenses made it quite inaccessible for the general population of the world to undergo one of these experiences, which raises the question of who were the ones entitled to embark on the “Global Citizen” program. On this topic, Talya Zemach-Bersin also tells us that [8] “There is no law of Jus Soli when it comes to global citizenship. Rather, students must be constructed as global citizens through privileged and unequally distributed access to international education.“ In the context of AIESEC, international education can be seen as the volunteer experience itself, since even some American colleges with AIESEC chapters have started to count the volunteering trips as college credit [9]. Thus, we can interpret the act of embarking on one of these volunteer experiences as a way to distinguish and elevate oneself into the higher status of a “Global Citizen”, a status fundamentally financially restricted to the majority of “Local Citizens” in the world. This is analogous to what Hannerz tells us in that “there can be no cosmopolitan without locals”.

What is interesting here is that AIESEC volunteers come not only from the Global North but actually mostly from the Global South. Since the conception of the volunteering program within AIESEC in the mid-2000s, the countries that have sent the most number of volunteers abroad are China (23,356), Brazil (17,177), Egypt (11,029), India (9,874), and Colombia (9,513) [10]. Considering that the program fee in Brazil, for example, is of R$1,500 ($382) and the average monthly salary in the country is R$2112 ($539), that means that the fee costs 70% of a whole month’s salary. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the program fee of $500 requires only 14% of the country’s average monthly salary of $3428 [11]. We can extrapolate this to say that the volunteers from the Global South on average tend to be more relatively wealthy when compared to the local population than the participants from the Global North. AIESEC then can be seen as a platform for the global elite, but particularly the Global South’s elite, to differentiate itself from the rest of the local population through the privileged and unequal access to these experiences.

In the same aforementioned piece, Vanessa Andreotti, when analyzing the work of Gayatri Spivak, refers to these elites as “an elite global professional class (consisting of people in or coming from the First and the Third Worlds) marked by access to the internet and a culture of managerialism and of international non-governmental organizations involved in development and human rights.” Furthermore, she states that “this global elite is prone to project and reproduce these ethnocentric and developmental mythologies onto the Third World ‘subalterns’ they are ready to help to ‘develop’.” AIESEC perfectly fits the description of one of the NGOs linked to this global class. It forwards ideals of capitalism and neo-liberal development disguising itself under beautiful slogans of “peace” for “humanity” and “global citizenship”. In doing so, AIESEC inserts itself in the global humanitarian rhetoric that aims to reduce the ‘symptoms’ of world issues such as poverty, hunger or sanitation, and that claims that the long-term solution to such problems is achieved by the consumption of the Global North’s ideologies and values, which imply also the consumption of the Global North’s products and services.

The Global South countries are trapped in an ideological, economic, and educational trap: humanitarian aid usually comes bundled with the acceptance of the Global North’s superiority, and the adoption of its economic policies, its social values, and its educational practices. And while the first two adoptions grow the market for Northern companies to explore in the South, the latter indoctrinates new generations on how wonderful the two first adoptions are. This systemically prevents critical thinking from emerging in such societies and many times traps the Southern countries in a forever state of development: perhaps objectively less poor than before, but definitely further away from ever attaining any sort of global equity.

This ideological argumentation of pro-humanitarian aid, volunteering, and capitalism is adopted by both the population in need and by the elite. For example, AIESECs latest refresh of the mission statement in 2015 added a subtle but implicating explanation for what “peace and fulfillment of humankind’s potential” might mean. It claims that “peace can also symbolize being in harmony with yourself. AIESEC strives to build a world where people can work towards their own understanding of peace while respecting and understanding the views of others.” This serves a huge purpose in creating an attractive narrative for the elites and in raising interest for AIESEC’s volunteer program. The created narrative is that any sort of guilt derived from facing glimpses of inequality and exploitation in the world can be solved by partaking in an AIESEC exchange. The individual member of the elite can be in ‘harmony’ with themselves if they go and dedicate their time to making the world a better place through volunteering. This is exactly what Inderpal Grewal claims when she says [12]:

“volunteers can escape being these “new colonialists” if they have the right attitude. Power and inequality are acknowledged but ignored since the voluntourist is understood to be sacrificing so much to undertake volunteer work (…) Power is not seen as structural but as an individual avocation. Thus whether or not someone is a colonialist depends on their personal attitude, rather than on the racial/ colonial histories or global structures in which they are enmeshed.”

This is the kind of thought that pleases and indeed creates peace to the mind of any member of the global elite that starts to understand where their privilege comes from and why not everyone in the world can live the same lifestyle that they do. This is the sort of individual peace that AIESEC brings to the world.

Conclusion: Is AIESEC good for the world?

It depends. When you look at reality through the capitalist framework of development and the Western basis of morality, it might. It provides members of the elites valuable international experiences that are useful both professionally as they assert themselves as the future economic leaders of their countries, and personally as they strive to find social circles to fit in and a spouse. It also signals to the members of their society that they are worldly and noble, they have the means to help and they do so because they desire to. It also gives such individuals the peace of mind to go to bed every night believing that they are doing something meaningful and good for the world. And even to the people receiving volunteer help, if we assume the objective immediate analysis of their conditions before and after receiving aid they more likely than not will have had an improvement in their living condition and perceived well-being.

However, if we take a step back and question the fundamental assumptions of this same capitalist framework and analyze the situation both historically and through long-term perspectives, the outcomes of such analyses are not the same. For the individual volunteer, the peace of mind brought by their contribution to the world through AIESEC serves as a silencer of the internal cries of injustice and exploitation in the world. Had those bothersome thoughts and feelings be present, more individuals might be able to more easily undergo deconstruction experiences and understand the systemic privilege attached to their conditions. To the individual that is helped, it might ameliorate their condition momentarily, but just like you can’t cure an infection just by controlling the fever, you can’t solve the apparent world problems without tackling their root causes. Poverty, hunger, lack of healthcare, sanitation, and education are mere consequences of the systematic unjust relations of exploitation between nations in the Global North and South, and between classes inside each nation. And to the societies where AIESEC is inserted, it acts on the elite and the economically vulnerable as described, while also projecting its capitalist and humanitarian values into more and more individuals, spreading even further the extent and strength of the ideological grasps of our minds and making it harder and harder to ever collectively break free.

References

1. Douglas Cater, quoted in Eugene G. Schwartz, American Students Organize: Founding the National Student Association After World War II (American Council on Education / Praeger Series on Higher Education, 2006), p82; IUS Preamble, adopted at the World Student Congress on Tuesday, August 27, 1946. (From Zemach-Bersin, p.298)
2. William Benton, “Operation Understanding: An Address by Assistant Secretary Benton on the Occasion of the Sailing of the Special Ship for Students and Teachers, June 21, 1947,” pp1–5. National Archives, RG 59 General Records of Department of State. Records of Division of Exchange of Persons. Records of Sylvia Miller and Mary French. Box 2, Lot 52–86. Folder: Transportation. (From Zemach-Bersin, p.290)
3. Talya Zemach-Bersin, Imperial Pedagogies: Education for American Globalism, 1898–1950 (2015) pp.366–367
4. AIESEC. “AIESEC Way Toolkit.” LinkedIn SlideShare. March 10, 2016. Accessed December 14, 2018. https://www.slideshare.net/KristjanoMonka/aiesec-way-toolkit-59390010. (all of AIESEC refresh mission statement throughout the years come from this document)
5. AIESEC International Team. “AIESEC Expansions since 1948.” YouTube. February 27, 2012. Accessed December 14, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYjx5wYjY5s.
6. Hannerz, Ulf. Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012 p.107
7. de Andreotti, Vanessa Oliveira Soft versus Critical Global Citizenship Education. In: McCloskey S. (2015) Development Education in Policy and Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, London p.4
8. Talya Zemach-Bersin Entitled to the World: The Rhetoric of U.S. Global Citizenship Education and Study Abroad (2011) p.95
9. Monash University Go on an international internship with AIESEC and get the global advantage September 9, 2014. Accessed December 14, 2018. https://arts.monash.edu/news/go-on-an-international-internship-with-aiesec-and-get-the-global-advantage/
10. Accessed December 14, 2018 from AIESEC’s internal database https://expa.aiesec.org/analytics
11. OECD. Health Status. Accessed December 14, 2018. https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=AV_AN_WAGE.
12. Inderpal Grewal Saving the Security State: Exceptional Citizens in Twenty-First-Century America. Duke University Press, (2017) p. 70

Note: I was a member and local committee president of AIESEC at my university for 3 and a half years. I wrote this in 2018 at the end of my experience inside the organization as a final essay for an anthropology class. I wrote it with the best of intentions, hoping that it might spark conversations about an organization that I’ve devoted so much of my time to and that has provided so much to me in terms of personal and professional growth. I don’t regret being a member of AIESEC, volunteering through the organization, and being an advocate for it for such a long time. However, I do wish I had read something like this as a member in order to have a different perspective that, however critical, could and, I hope still can, serve as a catalyzer for conversations and change to happen.

Liu Ye — Red Warship