a contest of beneficence 111
kinds, are gained in a “war of property,” just as they are in a real war, or through
chance, inheritance, alliance, and marriage. Yet, everything is conceived of as
if it were a “struggle of wealth.”... In a certain number of cases, it is not even
the question of giving and returning gifts, but of destroying, so as not to give
the slightest hint of desiring your gift to be reciprocated.... Objects are broken
and thrown into the water, in order to put down and “flatten” one’s rival. In this
way one not only promotes oneself, but also one’s family, up the social scale.
(Mauss 1990 , 37 )
The potlatch example offers another explanation for the rise of contests
of beneficence. Potlatch feasts became more about “fighting with prop-
erty” when tribal societies were facing growing outside intrusion that lim-
ited their ability to use force. We can therefore expect groups in which the
use of force is not common, or not feasible, to adopt alternative patterns of
competition as substitutes. If this is correct, we should expect beneficence
competitions to be more prevalent among members of stable regional
subsystems in which the use of force is very unlikely. It is therefore not a
coincidence that foreign aid appeared as an integral part of international
relations in the years following the end of World War II, when the cost
of systemic, rank- defining wars was proven agonizingly high (Lumsdaine
1993 , 33 ; Mueller 1998 ). Nuclear weapons further reduced the probability
of a survivable war and necessitated the development of alternative modes
of competition (Gaddis 1987 ). The sharp increase in humanitarian aid in
the decades following the end of the Cold War signals a similar process of
substitution (Barnett 2005 ).
Van der Veen ( 2000 , 165 ) argues that the most prosocial countries are
those who, because of geographic, historic, and economic constraints,
have a very limited ability to gain prestige through other means. Simi-
larly, Gordon ( 1996 , 51 ) analyzes Canadian prosociality as stemming from
“aggressive modesty,” as Canadians realized that their geographic location
and resources “made major power pretensions unrealistic” and therefore
forced Canada to “salvage chauvinistic satisfaction from espousal of an in
between position which is not quite major and certainly not minor.” Wylie
( 2009 ) also argues that Canadian foreign policy is often driven by prestige-
seeking considerations. In particular, she looks at Canadian leadership in
the development of the International Criminal Court as a form of prestige-
seeking behavior. This argument is consistent with Hoadly’s ( 1980 ) find-
ings that within the Organization for Economic Co- operation and Devel-
opment (OECD), smaller countries tend to be more generous. Similarly,
