Beyond Colonialism, Development and Globalization

Social Movements and Critical Perspectives

Dominique Caouette and Dip Kapoor

Introduction

More than sixty years ago, US President Harry Truman announced that his nation would undertake the project of improving what he described as underdeveloped countries (Escobar 1995; Parpart and Velmeyer 2004). The idea of a 'developing world' (Ferguson 1994; Rist 2001), later named Third World (Beaudet et al. 2008; Dansereau 2008), captured the imagination and energy of several generations of individuals and institutions dedicated to the project. The international development industry was not just the domain (chasse-gardée) of the West; the Communist bloc also promoted development aid programmes. Although capitalist and socialist-driven aid programmes differed widely in terms of the role of the state and commitments to equality, the notion of political participation and the ultimate goals of development were infused with ideas embedded in the philosophical liberalism of the Enlightenment and of modernity, science and industrial modernization.

Although the origins of the ideology of unlimited scientific progress and its intrinsically positivist character go back as far as Greek Antiquity, it is with the onset of the Enlightenment period in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the doctrine of social development took root. As development became institutionalized, it started to embody various corpuses of knowledge, each with its own underlying disciplinary effects, including productivity, homogeneity and division of labour. Such ideas were not detached from the daily realities of the time, as newly consolidated Western European nation states were experiencing social tensions and new problems with increasing industrialization and urbanization. Liberal philosophers and intellectuals, who advised policymakers and the emerging bourgeois regimes, worked to avoid or stabilize social disorder. This period was thus marked by the maintenance of and concern for order and progress. This prompted the construction of public institutions and agencies capable of regulating social practices, ranging from hygiene to transportation to market transactions, in order to move towards modernity in the eighteenth century. Development gradually became the end rather than the means of government intervention, because it embodied the ideas of progress and modernity. Anything that fell outside this path was considered as disorderly, archaic and backwards and eventually became linked to underdevelopment.

Associated with the tension between development and under-development, the era of social Darwinism in the nineteenth century strengthened and legitimized the myth of Western superiority (Cowen and Shenton 1995; Hopkins 2002). Acting as a justification for the ongoing process of colonization, a universalizing language of 'trusteeship' of developed and modern nations towards their colonies started to emerge. With development becoming an intrinsic part of the civilizing mission of the West, colonization acquired an appearance of legitimacy for its important and much more 'real' motivations, namely the extraction of resources and wealth from the colonies. The strength of development as the embodiment of modernity and progress intensified during the second half of the nineteenth century and the race for colonies. Colonial administrations, despite their intra-imperial competition, promoted the European model as the natural way (voie royale) to be followed towards progress and modernity. Scientific positivism, the epistemological basis for action, bred the first experts of scientific development.

Not surprisingly, as early as the turn of the twentieth century, dissenting voices and attempts to construct a counter-hegemonic discourse were heard among anti-colonial and anti-nationalist movements (Anderson 2007). Soon after the wave of independence that followed the end of WWII, several intellects from the 'Global South' and elsewhere, were able to point out continuities between colonial and development projects and development theory or thinking (Connell 2007; Fanon 1963/2005; Nandy 1967/1999). Both types of international assistance programmes aimed at modernization and were rooted in notions of progress, scientific rationalism and what some scholars have referenced as development racism (Dossa 2007; Fanon 1952/2008; Kothari 2006; Wilson 2013).

Underdevelopment was described as a pathological condition at worst and as a transitive moment towards development at best. International assistance programmes were then conceived to move the underdeveloped nations towards development. Both the East and the West were convinced that their own historical trajectories could chart a model to be followed. Providing international assistance was hardly philanthropic, but instead rooted in geopolitical and economic interests of the 'ex-colonial' powers. Nonetheless, assistance was cloaked in a discourse of philanthropy and/or internationalist solidarity. The international development project of the 1950s, which extended well into the 1980s, required the deployment of new elites, oftentimes administrators, technocrats, social scientists, engineers and other applied scientists, as well as ambitious and opportunist politicians and well-meaning idealists, scholars, and large contingents of volunteers – the new missionaries of this era (Barry-Shaw and Jay 2012; Beaudet 2009;...