The Right Kind of Revolution

Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present

Michael E. Latham

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780801460562
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

After World War II, a powerful conviction took hold among American intellectuals and policymakers: that the United States could profoundly accelerate and ultimately direct the development of the decolonizing world, serving as a modernizing force around the globe. By accelerating economic growth, promoting agricultural expansion, and encouraging the rise of enlightened elites, they hoped to link development with security, preventing revolutions and rapidly creating liberal, capitalist states. In The Right Kind of Revolution, Michael E. Latham explores the role of modernization and development in U.S. foreign policy from the early Cold War through the present.

The modernization project rarely went as its architects anticipated. Nationalist leaders in postcolonial states such as India, Ghana, and Egypt pursued their own independent visions of development. Attempts to promote technological solutions to development problems also created unintended consequences by increasing inequality, damaging the environment, and supporting coercive social policies. In countries such as Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Iran, U.S. officials and policymakers turned to modernization as a means of counterinsurgency and control, ultimately shoring up dictatorial regimes and exacerbating the very revolutionary dangers they wished to resolve. Those failures contributed to a growing challenge to modernization theory in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Since the end of the Cold War the faith in modernization as a panacea has reemerged. The idea of a global New Deal, however, has been replaced by a neoliberal emphasis on the power of markets to shape developing nations in benevolent ways. U.S. policymakers have continued to insist that history has a clear, universal direction, but events in Iraq and Afghanistan give the lie to modernization's false hopes and appealing promises.

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SETTING THE FOUNDATIONS

Imperial Ideals, Global War, and Decolonization

On January 20, 1949, President Harry S. Truman delivered his inaugural address before a massive crowd of more than 100,000 spectators and a televised audience estimated at 10 million. Standing before the Capitol, he promised that the United States would seize the initiative in the struggle against communism, a “false philosophy” that offered only “deceit and mockery, poverty and tyranny,” instead of democratic liberties, social justice, and individual rights. Three of the “four major courses of action” Truman proposed that afternoon—strong support for the United Nations, the continuation of the Marshall Plan, and the creation of NATO—were already well-established components of the U.S. approach to containing the Soviet danger. To the surprise of many commentators, however, the fourth point of Truman’s speech turned in another, more striking direction—that of international development. “More than half the people of the world,” he emphasized, “are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate. They are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty is a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas.” But now, “for the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and skill to relieve the suffering of these people.” The United States, Truman promised, would “embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of the underdeveloped areas.” In stark contrast to “the old imperialism—exploitation for foreign profit,” Truman heralded “development based on the concepts of democratic fair-dealing,” a process that would help “the human family achieve the decent, satisfying life that is the right of all people.”1

In many ways, Truman’s “Point Four” proposal marked a pivotal moment. Amid the uncertainty of the early Cold War, as U.S. policymakers anxiously watched decolonization advance across Asia and move toward Africa, Truman officially committed the United States to a massive global project that would ultimately outlive the Cold War itself. He also defined that commitment in ways that would become central elements of a powerful ideological framework. First, by emphasizing the problem of “underdevelopment” among the members of the “human family,” the president conveyed the idea that the destitute societies of the non-Western world were not trapped in an inevitable condition of “backwardness” by the particularities of race or culture. They were instead struggling to travel along the very same historical trajectory as the world’s more advanced nations. The transmission of investment capital, technical knowledge, and activist values, moreover, could dramatically accelerate their productivity and progress, enabling them to leap the gap toward liberal modernity. Second, by defining poverty as a strategic threat, Truman firmly linked development and security. Just as the Marshall Plan and the reconstruction of Europe had “beaten back despair and defeatism and saved a number of countries from losing their liberty,” development would alleviate the desperation in which radicalism flourished. Third, Truman framed U.S. support for development as an inherently anticolonial venture, and an expression of a new set of cooperative, mutually beneficial relationships among nations. As one State Department policy paper argued, the Point Four program would repel communism and replace imperialism. It would strengthen “political democracy” and show that “world development can take place peacefully and with increasing political freedom, as the energies of the masses of the people are released into channels of constructive effort aimed at greater production, greater exchange, and greater consumption.” Finally, Truman’s proposal suggested that development was ultimately a matter of scientific and technical expertise, a field governed more by the application of universally valid knowledge and technique than by questions of specific historical context or political choice. Though Americans did not yet use the term, Truman’s proposal articulated the core elements of what would soon be referred to as modernization.2

Truman’s ambitious, sweeping vision was not entirely original. The collapse of European empires, the growing strength of anticolonial nationalism, and the greatly amplified global power of the United States did indeed make the early Cold War a crucial period for American thinking about modernization. The concept’s underlying assumptions, however, have a more deeply rooted history. Modernization was grounded in older imperial assumptions about the United States’ ability to transform a foreign world, the legacies of Wilsonian thinking about the meaning of modernity, and shifting understandings of race, culture, and the perils of revolutionary change. As an American ideology, modernization fit squarely within the larger history of liberal, internationalist visions of an open, integrated world in which ideals and values as well as capital and commerce would flow across borders and markets. Its assumptions about the universal validity of U.S. institutions and the malleability of foreign societies were also tempered by long-standing reservations about the nature of foreign peoples and the need for their transformation to be carefully channeled and controlled. Modernization put the United States on the leading edge of the world’s history. It promised a more productive, more just, and more democratic international order. But it did so in ways that reflected a persistent ambivalence about the people and societies that were to be transformed.

Imperialism and the Cause of Civilization

The idea that the United States is uniquely ordained to carry out a vital world-historical role is deeply embedded in expressions of American identity. As Thomas Paine boldly declared in 1776, the revolutionary commitment to natural rights and republicanism made America exceptional. “Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression,” he wrote, and “freedom hath been hunted round the globe.” But America would “receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.” As the new country grew in territorial and economic terms, a powerful nationalism emerged to link the expansion of the United States with historical mission. New York newspaper editor and Democratic Party supporter John O’Sullivan clearly defined that sense of “manifest destiny” in 1839. “Our national birth,” he proclaimed, “was the beginning of a new history, the formation and progress of an untried political system, which separates us from the past and connects us with the future only; and so far as regards the entire development of the natural rights of man, in moral, political, and national life, we may confidently assume that our country is destined to be the great nation of futurity.”3

Expansion across the North American continent, however, rarely involved attempts to ensure the liberation and development of the foreign peoples living there. By the mid-nineteenth century, Americans had come to define expansion less as the triumph of universally relevant republican ideals than as evidence of the inherent superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. In contrast to Paine’s emphasis on the exceptional characteristics of the “new world” experiment, by the 1850s the growing popularity of racial determinism led Americans to identify themselves as the latest, most western branch of a transatlantic family. In historian Reginald Horsman’s words, “Americans had long believed they were a chosen people, but by the mid-nineteenth century they also believed that they were a chosen people with an impeccable ancestry.” As scholars emphasized the American rediscovery and recreation of purportedly ancient English liberties, and ethnologists classified the skull measurements of diverse racial “types,” Native Americans and Mexicans were increasingly defined as mere obstacles to the execution of a biologically rooted mission. Americans considered the supposed lack of technological and material sophistication of such peoples as confirmation of their ultimate inferiority and doubted their innate capacity to adapt to the dominant society. While some reformers attempted to “civilize” Indians through the resettlement and educational efforts of the 1870s, Americans more commonly stressed the inevitable extinction of racial inferiors in competition with vigorous Anglo-Saxons. By the late nineteenth century, social Darwinist ideas were also invoked to justify wars of extermination as the natural manifestation of a universally progressive trend. At home, the solidification of rigid Jim Crow laws of segregation and sharply restrictive immigration policies also reflected the racial dimensions of republicanism.4

The idea of a racially inflected destiny also shaped the United States’ acquisition of an overseas empire in 1898. The fundamental causes of U.S. imperialism at the turn of the century remain a source of intense debate, and historians have put forward competing explanations stressing the search for foreign markets, the pursuit of strategic interests, and growing psychosocial anxiety amid the rapid industrialization and political turmoil of the 1890s. Yet Americans also imagined their conquest of the Philippines and intervention in Cuba as part of a broader process in which they were taking on the obligations of a great power to act as a civilizing force in the world. American missionaries, traders, military officers, and administrators often invoked the British Empire as a model. For pro-imperialists like Indiana’s Republican senator Albert Beveridge, taking the Philippines was an exalted, noble cause, for the “English-speaking and Teutonic peoples,” ordained by God as “the master organizers of the world.” Like their English cousins, Americans possessed the “blood of government.” Ruling the Filipinos without their consent, moreover, was a simple necessity. “Would not the people of the Philippines,” Beveridge asked, “prefer the just, humane, civilizing government of this Republic to the savage, bloody rule of pillage and extortion from which we have rescued them?” For many Americans at the turn of the century, overseas imperialism represented not so much a repudiation of republican values as the embrace of an international responsibility. Up to that point, many pro-imperialists argued, the United States had demonstrated its formidable industrial and commercial prowess but had exerted little influence in defining the wider world’s future course. The time had now arrived for the United States to play a leading role in shaping a global civilization.5

It was at that moment, as part of the call for a civilizing imperialism in the Philippines, that U.S. officials, intellectuals, and opinion leaders took the first tentative steps toward a comprehensive vision of development. The process began haltingly. President McKinley spoke of a duty to “uplift” the Filipino masses, but he remained far more concerned with gaining a point of entry to the imagined potential of the Chinese market and keeping the islands out of European hands. Most U.S. policymakers also shared the perspective of Secretary of War Elihu Root, who claimed that the Filipinos were “little advanced from pure savagery.” As Princeton professor Woodrow Wilson concluded, “it would be wrong to try to give the same government now to the Philippine islands as we enjoy who have been schooled for centuries to the use of our liberties.” The official policy of “benevolent assimilation,” moreover, was carried out through a horrific counterinsurgency campaign. Between 1899 and 1902, the United States sent seventy thousand troops to suppress the Filipino revolutionaries. Tens of thousands of Filipino soldiers were killed, and probably as many as 700 thousand Filipino civilians died, many due to disease and malnutrition. U.S. commanders launched brutal attacks against Filipino guerrillas and destroyed homes, crops, and livestock. They ordered the torture of suspected insurgents, designated vast areas “free fire zones,” and, in one case, ordered that the island of Samar be turned into a “howling wilderness.” But, in an argument that would become all too familiar in the twentieth century, imperialists insisted that such lethal violence was necessary to prepare the ground for comprehensive reform. The invocation of American mission also helped overcome anti-imperial objections stressing the incompatibility of empire and democracy, the problem of assimilating racial inferiors, and the “degenerating” effects the Philippine environment might have on white settlers.6

In the aftermath of the war, the concept of development began to take firmer hold, bolstered by new arguments about the nature of the Filipinos themselves. In the process of creating a colonial state, U.S. imperialists reformulated their understandings of race and shifted away from the previous emphasis on the absolute debilities of nonwhite subjects. In place of the older language of “race war” and extermination, colonial administrators substituted what historian Paul Kramer referred to as a new, “aggres...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Setting the Foundations
• 2. Take-Off
• 3. Nationalist Encounters
• 4. Technocratic Faith
• 5. Counterinsurgency and Repression
• 6. Modernization under Fire
• 7. The Ghosts of Modernization
• Bibliography