Volume XI, No. 35 (2010)
Nils Gilman:
"[T]he argument that all (or even most) postwar development programs were modeled after the TVA, to my mind, is simply unsustainable. It is one thing to argue that the roots of postwar “high modernist” developmentalism can be traced to various specific pre-war “developmental” practices, including the TVA; it is altogether another to suggest that these practices, as well as the ideas underpinning them, did not undergo radical changes during the postwar period.
...
[The] typical colonial vision of development as “an archipelago of schemes” was in the postwar, post-colonial period replaced by an integrated and monolithic vision of “development” as a singular process destined to unify and integrate a world of liberal welfare-capitalist nation-states. In contrast to the fragmentary view of development in the prewar period, the postwar period’s vision of development was integrationist and committed to the notion that “all good things go together” – implicitly, if not explicitly. ...
In his effort to broaden his cast of characters, moreover, Ekbladh’s The Great American Mission ends up undervaluing the role of the postwar modernization theorists, which was to systematize – in other words, to theorize – how the particular practices of the interwar period could be brought together into an intellectually coherent whole. Moreover, the desire to create (and receptivity toward) such a grand unified theory of liberal development is incomprehensible outside the Cold War frame. The challenge to global liberalism posed by an integrated and ideologically committed Communist developmental alternative demanded an equally integrated and committed vision of liberal developmentalism. The postwar discourse of modernization, in contrast to prewar developmental discourse, was explicitly designed by its authors [...] to serve this integrating function. Modernization theory, in other words, framed development in terms of a metahistorical theory that could serve as a tool in the Cold War struggle. This social theory of modernization reached a crescendo around 1959, and thereafter began almost immediately to decay, as some modernization theorists went into government and began to promote the military as a vehicle for modernization – something that seems awfully hard to square with the idea that there existed some unbroken commitment to “the TVA creed.”
The claim of an abiding liberal consensus on modernization might just work if it is limited to talking about the narrow group of policy intellectuals that gathered around MIT, Harvard, Yale, and the University of Chicago in the 1950s, and can perhaps even be extended to the Kennedy and Johnson White Houses in the 1960s. But the broadening of The Great American Mission’s scope to include NGOs, business people, international institutions, and military officials should, in my opinion, have led to precisely the opposite conclusion, namely that there was NO broad consensus on what to do about development. When policy intellectuals and policymakers claimed there existed such a consensus, what these statements really entailed were efforts to sideline objections to their vision. In other words, these pronouncements of consensus were not factual descriptions of reality, but rather normative claims – bids for paradigm consolidation in the case of the social scientists, and bids for hegemony on the part of the politicians. In the end, what made it impossible to uphold the fiction that there existed any such consensus on development were the calamities in the field during the 1960s – from the misbegotten Alliance for Progress in Latin America, to famines in Africa and South Asia, to the political, military and moral disaster in Vietnam."
Brad Simpson:
"[B]y conflating virtually all twentieth century developmental projects, ideas and organizations with modernization Ekbladh obscures the intellectual and policy significance of modernization as a peculiarly Cold War project. And by reifying a ‘liberal consensus’ on development that never really existed he overemphasizes the dominance and continuity of a particular scheme – the TVA-style plan – vis-à-vis other noncommunist visions and programs of modernization, their myriad manifestations abroad and concurrent critiques.
...
Part of the problem here is that the decline of modernization theory cum policy was uneven, and critiques laid out in best-selling books and popular analyses moved at different speeds compared to the academy, much less the bureaucracies and practices of states and multilateral institutions. Even as proliferating international institutions and NGOs reframed the goals of development around poverty reduction and sustainability, modernization discourses persisted in the Nixon and Ford Administrations. The World Bank, for its part, hardly abandoned large-scale, state-led development projects carried out in the name of modernization, despite much argument to the contrary. The early 1970s represented the high tide of its commitment to state-guided population control and green revolution programs, and through the 1980s the Bank funded the largest transmigration program in history in Indonesia, led by the military modernizing regime of Suharto. Indonesia was no outlier – but the site of the Bank’s first and largest country mission, one of the largest recipients of Bank loans and a crucial source of legitimacy for the Bank’s increasingly central role in international development.
...
Though most academics writing about development and the development community more generally had long rejected modernization discourses, some of its core ideas refused to die, ready to be dusted off and hauled back into service after September 11, 2001. As if by intellectual gag reflex, policymakers and popular commentators revived core assumptions of modernization theory as an intellectual framework for apprehending places like Iraq and especially Afghanistan, with militant Islamic revivalism standing in for the basket of cultural atavisms that animated the literature in the 1950s and 1960s.
The “first time as tragedy, second time as farce” quality of U.S. ‘nation-building’ efforts in both countries would be comical if not for their often ghastly human impact. But the TVA seems to have faded as a pivot point of discussion about development in either place. Perhaps the crumbling of America’s infrastructure and the epic failure of Hurricane Katrina has tempered U.S. hubris about exporting its developmental technology elsewhere. In any case the name of the game in Washington now is counterinsurgency (COIN), embraced on both left and right – as in the early 1960s - as the indispensible partner of development, with both carried out as a public-private partnership dominated by the Pentagon and its gushing spigot of militarized aid
dollars."
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