Page 197 - Cultures and Organizations

He, She, and (S)he 173

to the wealth of the donor countries. What does correlate with a high aid
quote is a feminine national value system. 67
The Internet Journal Foreign Policy has computed for twenty-one rich
countries a Commitment to Development Index (CDI) by measuring not

only flows of aid money but also positive and negative impacts of other poli-

cies: trade flows, migration, investment, peacekeeping, and environmental

policies. Again the CDI was significantly (negatively) correlated only with

MAS. The correlation was weaker than for money flows, as policies on
behalf of welfare in the home country sometimes conflict with policies on

help abroad. 68
Countries that spend little money on helping the poor in the world
probably spend more on armaments. However, reliable data on defense

spending are difficult to come by, as both the suppliers and the purchasers
of arms have a vested interest in secrecy. The only conclusion we could
draw from the available figures was that among donor countries, the less

wealthy spent a larger share of their budgets on supplying arms than the
69
wealthier ones. Guns had priority over butter.
Masculine countries tend to (try to) resolve international confl icts by
fighting; feminine countries by compromise and negotiation (as in the case

of work organizations). A striking example is the difference between the
handling of the Åland crisis and of the Falkland crisis.
The Åland islands are a small archipelago halfway be tween Swe-
den and Finland; as part of Finland they belonged to the tsarist Rus-
sian Empire. When Finland declared itself independent from Russia in
1917, the thirty thousand inhabitants of the islands in majority wanted to
join Sweden, which had ruled them before 1809. The Finns then arrested
the leaders of the pro-Swedish movement. After emotional negotiations
in which the newly created League of Nations participated, all parties in

1921 agreed with a solution in which the islands remained Finnish but with
a large amount of regional autonomy.
The Falkland Islands are also a small archipelago disputed by two
nations: Great Britain, which has occupied the islands since 1833, and
nearby Argentina, which has claimed rights on them since 1767 and tried
to get the United Nations to support its claim. The Falklands are about
eight times as large as the Ålands but with less than one-fifteenth of the

Ålands’ population: about 1,800 poor sheep farmers. The Argentinean
military occupied the islands in April 1982, whereupon the British sent an