Recognition and Redistribution

Beyond International Development

Heloise Weber, Mark T. Berger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317996170
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This is an innovative and insightful approach to the global politics of development. The authors challenge conventional perspectives of, and approaches to, development and offer alternative accounts of the politics of development from the perspective of non-state centred and non-state centric approaches. The authors offer critical reinterpretations of historical experiences of development processes and together with insightful analysis of contemporary development strategies this is a genuinely new perspective on the global politics of development. Moreover, in moving beyond more 'economistic' approaches to development this book seeks to uncover the complexity of development in ways that account for social relations of power and identity. The authors successfully demonstrate the transdisciplinary nature of the politics of development in their respective engagement with political theory, anthropological and sociological perspectives in ways that provide an overall integrated approach to the politics of recognition and redistribution in development. In contrast to globalisation calling into question the idea and practices of international development, this study situates the question of the politics of the 'international' within a broader historical context of global social relations of power and dispossession, and their impact on states, regions and cultures. In framing the project as whole through the concepts of recognition and redistribution, this is a genuine effort to 'rethink development'. It is timely in an era of global politics and globalisation wherein both issues of identity and struggles over development challenge us to re-rethink disciplinary boundaries.

Keeping the World Safe for Primary Colors: Area Studies, Development Studies, International Studies, and the Vicissitudes of Nation-Building

MARK T. BERGER

Introduction: Keeping the World Safe for Primary Colors

Nation-building is back. Since the end of the Cold War and particularly since 9/11, it has returned to the center of academic and policy debates in the context of various attempts to revitalize or establish regional or international security organizations and development frameworks. This essay links the formulation of contemporary nation-building strategies to a critical examination of the history of earlier nation-building efforts. It does this by setting the idea and practice of nation-building against the backdrop of the international history of the twentieth century. In particular, there is a need to talk about security and development in relation to: decolonization, the Cold War, the universalization of the modern nation-state system, the vicissitudes of the global political economy, the transformation of international relations since 9/11, and the contemporary crisis of the nation-state system. More particularly, this paper focuses on the history of the idea and practice of nation-building in an effort to explicate the roles of development studies (DS) and area studies (AS) in the constitution and transformation of the field of international studies (IS). The aim here is to clarify in broad terms how all these fields of study have been, and continue to be, embedded in international security and economic/develop-ment policy processes and questions of international relations and global governance.¹

The central argument here is that at this world-historical juncture the nation-state system and the pursuit of modernity via the nation-state generally, or nation-building more specifically is the key obstacle to the achievement of a genuinely emancipatory modernity in a global era of emergent oligopolistic capitalism. This approach challenges the way in which the nation-state and the nation-state system remain central to, and continue to be routinized and naturalized by, the dominant discourses within IS (Berger and Weber, 2005, pp. 95–102; Berger and Weber, 2006, pp. 201–208). With the end of the Cold War, furthermore, the boundaries between DS and AS, and their relationship to international relations (IR) and other disciplines, have become increasingly blurred (Palat, 2000). In fact, it can be argued that the future of these fields of study, whether as critique of or complement to the IS.

This paper begins by looking at the history of DS (particularly development economics). It then turns to AS (especially modernization theory). The rise of these fields is outlined with an emphasis on the international politico-economic and security context that framed their institutionalization, professionalization, and transformation after 1945. I conclude that the future of DS and AS lies in their implicit or explicit convergence on IS. Furthermore, as a set of critical practices and structures, IS generally, and the theory and practice of nation-building more specifically, needs to be reconceptualized in ways that carry it well beyond its contemporary international framework.

Development Studies, Nation-Building, and Economic Development

Development Studies and Development Economics

The emergence of DS programs after the Second World War was grounded in wider processes of decolonization, the universalization of the nation-state system, and the onset of the Cold War. More specifically the rise of DS was closely connected to the emergence of development economics in this period. From its inception the discipline of economics was preoccupied with understanding economic growth in North America and Western Europe. However, against the backdrop of the Cold War, the emergent discipline of development economics (and what eventually became known as development studies more broadly) explicitly sought to understand the causes of poverty and underdevelopment in what became known as the Third World.

A key role in the establishment of development economics is often assigned to economists working in Britain during the Second World War, in particular Paul N. Rosenstein-Rodan. During the Second World War Rosenstein-Rodan encouraged research on economic development at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Nuffield College, where he was secretary of the committee on post-war reconstruction. In the 1950s he emerged as a key figure at the Center for International Studies (CENIS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Following its establishment in 1951 CENIS emerged as an important nexus for development economics and modernization theory. MIT itself had already emerged as the biggest defense contractor of any university in the United States by the end of the Second World War, a position it occupied, followed closely by Stanford University, throughout the Cold War and into the post-Cold War era (Leslie, 1993, pp. 11–12).

For Rosenstein-Rodan and his colleagues, government-planned industrialization was the key to national economic development. The importance of industrialization was exemplified in the writings of W. Arthur Lewis. Apart from writing a number of influential works on development economics in the 1950s, Lewis also made a major contribution to the 1951 United Nations report Measures for the Economic Development of Underdeveloped Countries. Lewis embodied the growing concern of many North American and Western European policy-makers, and development economists, that the Soviet model of nation-building was gaining support in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America (for example, see Lewis, 1955, p. 431). Lewis’s work also represented a major point of departure for W. W. Rostow’s efforts to articulate a developmental alternative to Marxism. In the 1950s Rostow was closely associated with CENIS, then in the 1960s he served in various positions under both John F. Kennnedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Rostow’s book, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, symbolized the high modernist and anti-Communist approach to nation-building emanating from Washington in the early 1960s. First published in 1960, the book called on ‘we of the democratic north’ to ‘face and deal with the challenge implicit in the stages-of-growth … at the full stretch of our moral commitment, our energy, and our resources’ (Rostow, 1960, pp. 162–167).

During the 1960s, however, development economics increasingly lost its luster (Krugman, 1999, pp. 6–7; Seers, 1979). A central factor in this decline, as manifested in the highly politicized conclusions of Rostow’s work, was that the political and social complexities that development economists faced were not given sufficient consideration at the outset. For example, the work of Gunnar Myrdal exemplified the view that underdeveloped nations could not escape from poverty unless they embarked on major state-guided national development efforts, supported by substantial foreign aid (Myrdal, 1957). However, writing many years later, Myrdal conceded that what had been needed in underdeveloped nations ‘in order to raise the miserable living levels of the poor masses’ was ‘radical institutional reforms’ and the governments of the new nations had not been able to bring these about (Myrdal, 1968, pp. 47, 66–67).

More broadly, one of the most significant weaknesses of development economics, and of a wide range of theories of modernization in the high period of national development, was the taking of the nation-state as the unquestioned object of their technocratic and paternalistic efforts. The emergence of modernization theory in the 1950s and early 1960s is generally seen, in part, as a response to the failure of development economists to address the wider political questions associated with nation-building. The radicalization of DS by the 1960s, and its broadening to incorporate an increasing array of social science disciplines, also reflected a reaction to the failure of DS and its consolidation around development economics as the key to the delivery of modernity.

Development Studies and Neo-Classical Economics

The influence of development economics as a dominant set of ideas about economic development and nation-building, and the overall character of DS, shifted in the 1970s and 1980s with the growing ascendancy of neo-classical economics against the backdrop of the rise of neo-liberalism and the US-led globalization project. This reorientation was readily apparent at the World Bank. By the 1980s, US influence over the Bank and beyond was increasingly grounded in the Bank’s dependence on world financial markets, the position of the US as a global financial center, and the closely aligned interests of key financial actors with those of US foreign policy.

The high period of neo-classical fundamentalism at the World Bank peaked by the second half of the 1980s as ideologues gave way to technocrats in Washington during the second Reagan administration. This shift was marked by the change of presidents at the Bank from Clausen to Barber Conable (1986–1991). With Conable at the helm, the organization’s public image was seen to be more consensual than under Clausen, while poverty alleviation and the mitigation of the social costs of structural adjustment were given greater prominence.

The World Bank’s understanding of development into the 1990s, despite the relative retreat from neo-classical fundamentalism, continued to be, or increasingly became, influenced by the rise of rational choice theory. The dramatic ascendance of rational choice theory (or the new institutionalism and the new political economy) in this period resulted in a highly mechanistic approach to the dynamics of political and economic change. Like the approach to economic behavior taken by neo-classical economics, rational choice theory built its explanations for political behavior on assumptions about the rational calculations that informed the policies and actions of the individuals and groups concerned. By the 1990s, the terminology of rational choice theory, if not the more rigorous versions of its conceptual framework, was being widely deployed, facilitating the revision and the strengthening of the neo-liberal ascendancy (Leys, 1996, pp. 36–37, 80–82).

By the end of the 1990s, however, the World Bank had ostensibly made a shift from ‘structural adjustment’ to a focus on a ‘comprehensive development framework’ that again fore-grounded poverty alleviation (Pender, 2001, pp. 397–411). This shift has been reinforced, although not necessarily manifested to a great degree in practice, by a renewed emphasis in the wake of September 11, 2001, on the importance of foreign aid and poverty alleviation to engender economic and political stability and undercut the appeal of fundamentalist Islam.

However, as contemporary neo-liberal nation-building in Iraq, which will be discussed below, demonstrates, this does not represent a retreat from any of the core elements of the US-led globalization project within which the World Bank plays a central role (Cammack, 2002, pp. 125–132). In fact, since 9/11 the primary emphasis of key international actors, such as the US government and its various agencies, has been to reinforce the neo-liberalism at the center of the globalization project. One result of this trend has been to marginalize further the social development agenda of branches of the World Bank and the United Nations. As more than one commentator has noted, since 9/11 the administration of George W. Bush has increasingly defined security in a way that views brute force as the only solution to ‘any and all opposition, regardless of its origins or goals’ (Murillo, 2004, p. 15, also see pp. 27–28). This has been reinforced by the steadily increasing expenditure on defense by the US government. The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, appeared to make a concession in the early months of 2006 that the US needed to focus on ‘hearts and minds’ as well as ‘shock and awe’. However, neither his public utterances nor the Quadrennial Defense Review (which came out in February 2006) reflected movement on the part of the White House, or the Pentagon, towards a broader conception of security. Despite Rumsfeld’s subsequent resignation at the end of 2006, there is still no apparent recognition that what the Bush administration and the Pentagon are now calling the ‘Long War’ is also a new war. In practice there has been little or no serious reconceptualization of counterinsurgency and nation-building or rethinking of the war on terror itself (Berger and Borer, 2007).

Area Studies, Nation-Building, and Modernization

Area Studies and Modernization Theory

Modernization theory and nation-building were central to the rise of AS after 1945. During the Second World War and the early Cold War a large number of academics took up full-time or part-time posts with various government agencies. This was linked to a wave of institutional growth and expansion in AS and IS that began during the Second World War. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), was one of the best known postings for political scientists and historians. In fact, McGeorge Bundy, one-time president of the Ford Foundation, which provided considerable support for AS in the 1950s and 1960s, characterized the Office of Strategic Services as the ‘first great center of area studies in the United States’ (Bundy, 1964, pp. 2–3). For example, a number of younger academics were attracted to Asian Studies after having served with the OSS or the armed forces in the Pacific during WWII. This group embarked on their higher degrees after 1945, at a time when large amounts of money from government and private foundations became available as part of the wider geo-politics of the Cold War. The disciplinary range of AS grew dramatically as a new generation of academics entered new or revised fields of study that emerged with the expansion and diversification of the social sciences after 1945.²

In the 1950s, Southeast Asia emerged as a major arena of the Cold War. Policy-makers in Washington were increasingly concerned about the stability of the emerging new nations in the region in the context of the consolidation of the People’s Republic of China and the rise of ‘guerrilla communism’ in a number of former colonies. The rising interest in Southeast Asia, in the context of the growing concern with developing areas generally, is apparent in the work of Lucian W. Pye, a founding member of the Committee on Comparative Politics, who emerged as a particularly influential advocate of modernization theory. Pye succeeded Almond as head of the Committee in 1963, and remained in that post until its dissolution in 1972. Pye’s work combined an explicitly psychological approach to politics and nation-building. His first book, published in 1956, was Guerrilla Communism in Malaya: Its Social and Political Meaning. It built on Almond’s 1954 study, which had concluded that the communist parties of Western Europe drew their recruits from members of the population who were ‘alienated’, ‘deviational’, or ‘psychologically maladjusted’. These new recruits were attracted to the structure provided by the communist parties primarily as a means to resolve personal identity crises (Almond, 1954, pp. 234, 370, 380). Pye argued that the fundamental basis of the appeal of communism in Malaya and other underdeveloped nation-states was the insecurity and psychological stress experienced by people who had lost their ‘traditional way of life’ as part of their effort to achieve a ‘modern’ existence (Pye, 1956, pp. 3, 7, 201–202).

In 1962 Pye published a major study (supported by CENIS at MIT) that focused on the ‘problems of building a modern nation-state’. This book, Politics, Personality and Nation-Building: Burma’s Search for Identity, used Burma as a case study, but drew examples from a wide range of emergent nation-states in Asia and Africa. Making clear the concern with order that was central to modernization theory from the outset, he lamented the apparent lack of ‘doctrines on nation building’. The formulation of such a doctrine, he argued, had been inhibited primarily by an ‘unreasoned expectation’ that democracy was ‘inevitable’ and by the ‘belief that political development is a natural and even automatic phenomenon which cannot be rationally planned or directed’. Pye emphasized that there was a ‘need to create more effective, more adaptive, more complex, and more rationalized organizations’ to facilitate nation-building. However, the ‘heart’ of the nation-building ‘problem’, for Pye, still centered on the ‘interrela...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction: Beyond International Development
• Part 1: History, Power, Knowledge, and International Development
• Part 2: The Global Dimensions and Social and Political Contradictions of International Development
• Part 3: Bringing Recognition and Redistribution In and Moving Beyond International Development
• Index