detraditionalization
that they are pre-determined by a particular kind
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development theory
ECLA’s economists emphasized the continued
of entity to the exclusion of other entities. A more
adequate view is that social happenings do have
causal determinants which bring them about, but
that these determinants tend to be both internally
complex and plural, and that they combine to
produce social events but without having been
bound to do so. ROB STONES
detraditionalization
– see tradition.
development theory
Coming to prominence in the context of United
States hegemony and attendant Cold War super-
power rivalry, development or modernization the-
ory assumed the existence of national societies
developing in parallel with each other in a natural
and universal evolutionary process. There were
strains, to be sure. The Russian Revolution, as
Theodor Shanin argued in Russia 1905–07. Revolu-
tion as a moment of Truth (1986), can be seen as the
outcome of some of the contradictions of “devel-
oping societies,” and rapid industrialization (see
industrial society) thereafter – though brutal –
was held up as a model for Third World states
seeking to overcome economic backwardness.
Both the United States and the Soviet Union
aimed to convince other states to ally with them
in the Cold War in exchange for military and
economic aid, each arguing for the superiority of
their model of economic development.
Structural-functionalist theorists, notably
Talcott Parsons, held up those industrialized capi-
talist societies that had achieved high levels of
wealth and democratic political forms, notably
western Europe, its settler offshoots – the United
States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand – and
states such as Japan, as models of successful devel-
opment. Poverty and underdevelopment were
conceived of as reflecting the prevalence of
traditional cultural values thwarting moves
towards greater economic development and
differentiation.
In the context of the wave of decolonization
after World War II, and new international bodies
like the United Nations (UN), new voices chal-
lenged this consensus. One early important cri-
tique was that developed by the UN Economic
Commission on Latin America (ECLA), based in
Santiago, Chile, and formed in 1948 despite the
strong objections of the United States, and led by
the Argentine Raúl Prebisch (1901–86). While
Latin America had been independent since the
Hispanic American revolutions of the 1800s, the
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structural dependence of the region on advanced
countries such as the United States. The ECLA
analyzed how the formation of peripheral export
economies served the needs of the powerful states
at the center of the global capitalist economy
throughout the colonial period and thereafter.
The ECLA’s studies had a major impact on the
emergence of a distinct Latin American perspec-
tive on development and underdevelopment, thus
playing an important role in the emergence of
dependency theory. The career of Celso Furtado
(1920–2004), widely regarded as the most influen-
tial Brazilian economist of the twentieth century
and a leader of the structural economists of the
region, exemplifies this connection. Prebisch saw
Furtado’s ability early on and chose him as the
first head of the newly created economic develop-
ment division. In a 1956 book, Furtado became
one of the earliest social scientists to use the
term dependency, and went on to serve as Brazil’s
Minister of Planning in the populist government
of João Goulart (1918–76), until the United States
overthrew the democratically elected government
in 1964.
The structural economists of ECLA advocated
the importation and development of infant indus-
tries through import substitution industrializa-
tion (ISI) and Keynesian (see John Maynard
Keynes) techniques of economic demand stimu-
lus. Yet, aside from the relatively unique experi-
ence of East Asia, for all the gains made in
economic growth and development, ISI failed to
overcome economic dependency on foreign actors
and thus gave way to the emergence of a radica-
lized dependency theory. In the context of the
Cuban Revolution and the United States response
to this in the region, including through support
for the emergence of military regimes, many of
the dependency theorists advocated anti-imperial-
ist revolutions, often as part of a broader socialist
or Marxist-inspired strategy for Third World
development.
Marxist economist Paul Baran (1910–64) was an
early precursor of the dependentistas, who included
left-wing social scientists such as Samir Amin,
Frederick Clairmonte, Alain de Janvry, Anibal Qui-
jano, Cheryl Payer, Dudley Seers, Walter Rodney,
and Theotonio dos Santos. Among the most pro-
minent were Fernando Henrique Cardoso (later
President of Brazil) and Andre´ Gunder Frank,
both of them associated to varying degrees with
ECLA. Frank coined the term “the development of
underdevelopment,” arguing the two dimensions
were dialectically related. In contrast to the
133
 development theory
modernization school, dependency theorists
argued that the poverty of the periphery and
wealth of the core were a structural outcome of
unequal power relations between different states
and peoples, not cultural differences or tradition.
Such so-called feudal remnants – the domination
of landed classes and so forth – were seen instead
as products of capitalist development in the Third
World dictated by the center. While inspired by
the arguments of Karl Marx, dependency theorists
differed in that they argued capitalism brought
not modernization but instead subordination
and polarization through surplus extraction.
The institutional structure of domination here
included what Peter Evans, in Dependent Develop-
ment (1979), called the “triple alliance” of multi-
national, state, and local capital. Associated
critical actors, which Robin Broad, David Pion-
Berlin, Michael McClintock, and others have ana-
lyzed, included the core states, US-dominated
Bretton Woods institutions – the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) –
and associated core military intervention and
support for repressive regimes.
Despite all the frustrations of postwar develop-
ment, it is now seen by many as the golden age of
postwar capitalism. Governance of market forces
and related social programs led to high growth
rates and a growing advantage in the 1960s and
1970s for Third World states in the area of trade
and development. The 1980s, in contrast, saw such
dramatic reversals in social gains that it was
called “the lost decade of the South.” The genera-
lized economic crisis hit both the Second and
Third Worlds, eventually leading to the collapse
of the Soviet Empire in eastern Europe and the
breakup of the Soviet Union, and the return of
much of the region to its original Third World
role. These epochal shifts of the 1980s were part
of the “counterrevolution in development policy”
associated with the hegemony of neoliberalism,
globalization, and finance capital, propelled by
the United States’ move towards high interest
rates and massive borrowing on the global capital
markets. Yet among radical critics, such as those
of world-systems analysis, what was signaled here
was actually not the victory but instead the crisis
of developmentalism, the shared belief among
self-declared capitalist or communist states that
the gains and benefits of the world economy were
open to all those who put in the requisite effort.
Here, the rise of liberation theology, Islamic fun-
damentalism, and other social movements were
seen as part of the resistance to developmentalism
and its failures.
134
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development theory
The US economic boom of the 1990s, coming in
the wake of the communist collapse, added to the
revival of modernization ideologies and the neo-
liberal Washington Consensus, seen as the end-
point of history by scholars such as Francis
Fukuyama in his The End of History and the Last
Man (1989). For a time, the Asian economic crisis
of 1997 and concomitant dramatic plummeting of
incomes in the region led to renewed discussion
about the superiority of the United States model
of capitalism. Yet soon afterwards mainstream
intellectuals such as Jagdish Bhagwati, along
with radical critics such as Walden Bello, and
Peter Gowan in his The Global Gamble (1999),
pointed towards the unleashing of speculative
capital – from hedge funds to derivatives – called
for by neo-liberal policymakers, as causing the
crisis. In the wake of the collapse of the US spec-
ulative boom, the bursting of the bubble, the ensu-
ing corporate scandals and economic meltdown of
Argentina – the former darling of the IMF – more
sober assessments, questioning both the moderni-
zation and neo-liberal approaches, thus gained
ground.
Authors such as Alice Amsden, Bruce Cumings,
Chalmers Johnson, Robert Wade, and former chief
World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz, highlighted
the structural conditions allowing for East Asia’s
economic advance and the role of neoliberalism in
the crisis. Particular attention was paid to the
developmental state, as Meredith Woo-Cumings
explores in her edited volume (The Developmental
State, 1999), and Alexander Gershenkron’s advan-
tages of backwardness or late development, along
with a host of unique conditions – land reform,
US military aid for export-oriented industrializa-
tion in a productivist mold, limitations on foreign
direct investment, and capital controls – that
allowed for East Asia’s ascent, now joined by
China. In essence, contrary to ideologies of neoli-
beralism, in East Asia’s export-oriented industria-
lization the state played a pronounced role in
guiding market forces. More recently, Ha-Joon
Chang in Kicking Away the Ladder (2002) has shown
that virtually all the developed countries used
infant industry promotion and protectionism
before opening their markets to free competition,
as Frederich List predicted, by telling the rest of
the world – through organizations ranging from
the IMF to the World Trade Organization – that
they were not allowed to use such mechanisms.
Indeed, advanced countries still interfere with
market forces in numerous ways, from agricul-
tural subsidies to military spending serving to
prop up high-technology industry.