Lord Bauer – Thatcher’s Hungarian friend who stood up for Africa

Hungarian contribution to world theories tends to get overlooked, even though the views of people like Lord Peter Thomas Bauer had a great impact on the way developing countries are perceived today. Bauer’s main argument throughout his career was that foreign aid hinders both personal and state development. 

Lord Peter Thomas Bauer was born as Péter Tamás Bauer to a Jewish family in 1915 in Budapest, where he studied law and in 1934 eventually moved to Cambridge to pursue a different academic angle, economy. He was also a Fellow of the British Academy.

Lord Bauer was a development economist, with great interest in international development and foreign aid.

At the time when pro-aid was immensely popular, he was one of the few who opposed foreign aid,

reasoning that it is dangerous because it increases the government’s power, giving way to corruption.

Bauer had a strong stance on the detrimental effects on state-controlled foreign aid that had the aim of helping developing countries advance: in his opinion, an aid-based theory is fundamentally inconsistent with reality.

When criticising foreign aid, Bauer drew on personal experiences which he gained as a colonial officer in Malaysia and Nigeria. Having experienced first-hand the harmful effects of support, Bauer drew the conclusion in his essay Dissent on Development that