International Development and Global Politics

History, Theory and Practice

David Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136640452
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

This textbook provides a historical survey of economic and political development theory and practice from 1945. Against the background of changes in global politics, it explores how the project of international development has been shaped in a series of wider contexts. Divided into two historical parts: the Sovereign Order, post 1945 to the early-1980s, and the Liberal post-Cold War Era from the 1980s to the present day, it examines:

• the evolution of ideas of international development: how the problem of development was conceived and is understood in relation to development economics and political development. It also addresses the impact of neo-liberal 'counterrevolution' in development theory, the rise of good governance, participation and ownership, as well as the impact of the 'war on terror' and the 'securitisation of development'
• institutions in international development: from the emergence of development agencies, their policies and the provision of different types of aid to changing aid flows and the growth of a more integrated 'development community' with implications for developing countries. Finally, it looks at the how the 'war on terror' and the 'securitisation of development' have shaped what these agencies do
• the practices of international development: these chapters examine a number of countries and their relations with development agencies; the kinds of projects and programmes these agencies supported; and the outcomes of these projects and programmes.

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This valuable and important teaching tool will be of interest to students of development, international relations, politics and economics.

Part I

Development and the sovereign order

1 The Sovereign Order

Introduction

This chapter examines the global context within which, and partly because of which, the project of international development emerged. It begins in the period after the Second World War because it is only then that this project becomes institutionalized in international politics through the regular provision of aid to developing countries and the establishment of permanent aid agencies. This suggests that there is something particular about international order during this period that explains the emergence of the project of international development. This chapter argues that this is US hegemony. ‘Development’ played an important role in the hegemonic project pursued by the United States after 1945, and there are good reasons for thinking that the project of international development is in important respects an American project. The second aim of the chapter is provide a sketch of international order during this period. Apart from US hegemony, the chapter focuses on the Cold War and superpower competition as the key power-political feature of global politics during this period, which had important implications for the project of international development and for the international relations of developing countries. The chapter then examines the global economy, with a particular focus on the rise and fall of what is known as the ‘golden age’ of capitalism. The changes in the global economy during this period affected all developing countries (and all developed countries too of course) in significant ways. The ‘good times’ of the 1950s and 1960s crucially shaped the way development agencies thought about development, and the end of the ‘golden age’, the extended economic crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s, was a significant turning point in the history of international development. Finally, the chapter examines some of the norms that emerged and shaped international order, with a focus on the connected norms of self-determination, sovereignty and non-intervention, and on the idea of ‘development’ itself as a norm.

The elements of international order in this period reinforce one another to produce what is called here the ‘sovereign order’. This is an order in which sovereignty crucially structures global politics. This is produced by US hegemony and Cold War competition and by the ‘golden age’ of global capitalism, as well as by the ideas of self-determination and non-intervention. It is an order in which developing countries are accorded a certain kind of protection, and in which they have a certain kind of autonomy to pursue their own ‘development’, and where there exists a form of political pluralism.

US Hegemony and the Cold War

‘Development’ and the Post-War Order

It is commonplace to begin a history of international development with Harry Truman’s ‘Four Point’ speech delivered at his presidential inauguration on 20 January 1949 (Craig and Porter 2006; Easterly 2006). The fourth point of his speech was this:

We must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas. More than half the people in the world 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 handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas … I believe that we should make available to peace-loving peoples the benefits of our store of technical knowledge in order to help them realize their aspirations for a better life … All countries, including our own, will greatly benefit from a constructive program for the better use of the world’s human and natural resources … Only by helping the least fortunate of its members to help themselves can that human family achieve the decent, satisfying life that is the right of all people.

(http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/50yr_archive/inagural20jan1949.htm)

The actual practice of foreign aid was slow to match this vaulting rhetoric. Nonetheless, this speech signals something very important in the history of the project of international development as it provides one of the first explicit articulations of, and justifications for, the project of international development: a deliberate attempt to assist developing countries on the road to ‘development’ for their benefit and for the benefit of the already developed world.

The significance of Truman’s inaugural speech for the history of international development, however, is that a concern with development was only one part of a much larger programme for, in Truman’s words, ‘peace and freedom’. The first part of this plan was to ‘continue to give unfaltering support to the United Nations and related agencies’. The second part was to continue the programme for ‘world economic recovery’, which meant continued support for the European recovery programme, the Marshall Plan, and plans for ‘reducing the barriers to world trade and increasing its volume’. The third part was to ‘strengthen freedom-loving nations against the dangers of aggression’, which meant establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and other bilateral security agreements in the face of potential challenges from the Soviet Union and other communist states. Truman’s speech illustrates, then, not just the origins of the project of international development, but the project of US hegemony more generally, within which development was seen as having an important role.

There is no doubt that the United States ended the Second World War in a hegemonic position. The unprecedented nature of US predominance is illustrated by the fact that in 1948 the United States accounted for 48 per cent of global industrial production (Ikenberry 2006: 26). The United States was alone among the ‘victors’ of the war in having suffered relatively little damage to its economy – the exception was loss of life in the fighting (about 400,000 killed), but even this was relatively small compared with the other ‘victorious’ states (the UK lost about 450,000 people out of a much smaller population and the USSR a staggering 24,000,000). Britain ended the war in significant debt and had experienced extensive damage to its infrastructure and industrial capacity (Broadberry and Howlett 1998). Britain started the war with an economy about one-third the size of that of the United States, but ended it with an economy about one-fifth as big (Harrison 1998a: 10). The USSR had experienced destruction of its physical capital – by some estimates 25 per cent – to go along with its massive human losses, and had suffered a decline in the relative size of its economy compared with the United States similar to that of the UK (Harrison 1998b: 293). The Axis powers were defeated and occupied, and certainly in the last years of the war experienced significant destruction of both physical and human capital. The United States, then, was in a particularly privileged position at the end of the war (Layne 2006: ch. 2).

More important than the United States’ material superiority was the willingness to use this to construct a post-war order that preserved and enhanced US hegemony. In other words, the United States was not just in a position to play the defining role in shaping post-war international politics; it was also very willing to do so. As President Roosevelt said in March 1945, ‘there can be no middle ground here. We shall have to take responsibility for world collaboration, or we shall have to bear the responsibility for another world conflict’ (Burley 1993: 130). What makes this willingness all the more remarkable was that US planning for the post-war international order started as early as 1939, although it accelerated after the United States joined the war in 1942. Charles Maier quotes a 1942 Council on Foreign Relations report:

Americans are inclined to believe that the period at the end of the war will provide a tabula rasa on which can be written the terms of a new democratic order. The economic and political institutions of 1939 and before are clearly in suspension and need not be restored intact after the war.

(Maier 1978: 35)

In some respects the basic aims of US planners were the same as those of any other hegemonic state: to construct an international order that served its security, economic and political interests. This is right, but ultimately not especially revealing as it does not explain why the United States thought that certain kinds of specific goals, institutions and practices were ones that would serve its interests. In other words, the crucial thing is not American hegemony, but American hegemony (Ruggie 1998a). To cast America’s hegemonic ambitions simply as another variant of great power hegemony resulting from America’s preponderant material power is to radically downplay quite how different America’s vision of international politics actually was, and thus how different its understanding was of what would serve its interests. The three defining features of the international order the United States was trying to build were institutionalism, multilateralism and a self-confident assertion of liberal political and economic values.

The United States undertook a great programme of institutional engineering before and after 1945. A simple list makes the point: the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Bretton Woods exchange rate system, the World Bank (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development or IBRD, as it was originally known), trade organizations (the aborted International Trade Organization or ITO and then the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade or GATT) and NATO as only the most well known. All these served US interests in various ways and enshrined US power. A relatively open trading system (via GATT) allowed access for US exporters to overseas markets. The Bretton Woods exchange rate system provided exchange rate stability and established the US dollar as a global reserve currency. The United Nations gave the United States (and its wartime allies) veto power through the Security Council and provided some mechanisms for managing international conflict (although they never worked as intended). NATO as well as bilateral security arrangements, particularly with Japan, provided security alliances and helped project US power in Europe and beyond. It seems relatively uncontroversial to say that the great programme of institutional engineering undertaken from 1944 would simply not have taken place without specifically American predominance.

As this programme of institutional creation suggests, however, US hegemony was not of a unilateral kind. Instead it evidenced a significant commitment to multilateralism in at least two ways (Ruggie 1982; Deudney and Ikenberry 1999). First, the creation of these institutions required the agreement and cooperation of other states. Famously, the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 involved significant cooperation with the UK over the design of the IMF and World Bank, and 44 states attended the conference, of which 19 were from Latin America (Ruggie 1982; Helleiner 2006). But the creation of all these institutions required the agreement of other states, even if this agreement was given in the context of the relative power of the United States. Second, the functioning of these institutions involved extensive and on-going cooperation with other states. The United States was certainly the most important state in these institutions, but they operated only because other states participated in them and because they were based on (albeit unequal) reciprocity. It is important to note that the United States wanted this kind of multilateralism. As Harry White, the leading US negotiator of the Bretton Woods agreements, said: ‘the absence of a high degree of economic collaboration among the leading nations will … inevitably result in economic warfare that will be but the prelude and instigator of military warfare on an even vaster scale’ (quoted in Pollard 1985: 8). This kind of multilateralism was a novel and very important part of the post-1945 international order.

Finally, US planners expressed a series of classically liberal views about international politics. At the broadest level they were convinced that the kind of international political and economic order they were creating would be good not just for them but for other states as well. In making these arguments they drew on the long tradition of liberal international thought that equated economic freedom with peace and prosperity. Cordell Hull, one of the key architects of the post-war order, argued that:

unhampered trade dovetailed with peace; high tariffs, trade barriers, and unfair economic competition, with war … if we could get a freer flow of trade … freer in the sense of fewer discriminations and obstructions … so that one country would not be deadly jealous of another and the living standards of all countries might rise, thereby eliminating the economic dissatisfaction that breeds war, we might have a reasonable chance of lasting peace.

(Hull 1948: 81)

This stress on the need for open trade (in both America’s interests and the interests of other states) was also linked to the desirability of spreading American ideology. As Layne has put it, ‘US strategists believed that the nation’s core values could be safe only in an international system underwritten by hegemonic US power and open both to US economic penetration and to the penetration of American ideology’ (Layne 2006: 9). In this way American policymakers fused a self-interested argument with the spread of liberal economic and political ideas and institutions.

The place of development within this hegemonic order reflected all three of these features: multilateralism, institutionalism and liberalism. During the late 1930s, the United States had begun to support development projects in Latin America through loans from the US Export–Import Bank as part of the ‘Good Neighbor Policy’ instituted by Roosevelt. These loans were justified on the basis that they would help Latin American economies themselves, but also increase trade and prosperity within the western hemisphere in general to the benefit of the United States (Helleiner 2006: 946–51). In mid-1940, Cordell Hull was stressing America’s desire to promote ‘methods for improving the standard of living of the peoples of America’ (quoted in Helleiner 2006: 952). These ideas were carried over into the US project for the post-war order. There was a general agreement among American planners that ‘development’ of less-developed countries (LDCs) was important in terms of the security and prosperity of the United States itself, as Truman’s speech illustrates, invoking again the classic arguments about the links between prosperity and peace.

The project of international development was institutionalized most importantly through the creation of the World Bank. Article 1(1) of the Articles of Agreement of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development signed on 22 July 1944 states that the purpose of the Bank was:

To assist in the reconstruction and development of territories of members by facilitating the investment for productive purposes, including the restoration of economies destroyed or disrupted by war, the reconversion of productive facilities to peacetime needs and the encouragement of the development of productive facilities and resources in less developed countries.

(http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTABOUTUS/Resources/ibrd-articlesofagreement.pdf)

As we shall see in Chapter 3, actual practice took a few years to live up to this, but it is clear that as early as 1944 the multilateral and institutional basis for the project of international development was being created. Many developing countries certainly saw it that way and lent their support to the agreements (Helleiner 2006: 963). Although it was not established as a development agency the Articles of Agreement of the International Monetary Fund reflect the same kind of concerns. They say that one of its purposes is to:

facilitate the expansion and balanced growth of international trade, and to contribute thereby to the promotion and maintenance of high levels of employment and real income and to the development of the productive resources of all members as primary objectives of economic policy.

[http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/aa/aa.pdf: Article 1(ii)]

This raises the possibility that the project of international development as it manifested itself after 1945 would not have happened without American dominance. Despite Britain’s being substantially involved in the negotiations at the Bretton Woods conference, there is no great reason to think that left to their own devices the colonial powers would have enacted anything like this, and in any case they were in no position to do so. There are, as many commentators have noted, a significant set of connections between colonialism and the ‘project of international development’, and it is possible to read into the colonialism some of the origins of the idea of development. At least some of the justification for European colonialism had always been that it would bring ‘progress’ and ‘civilization’ to colonized societies (Pitts 2005; Williams and Young 2009). This idea was enshrined Article 22 of the League of Nations Charter:

To those colonies and territories which as a consequence of the late war have ceased to be under the sovereignty of the States which formerly governed them and which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world, there should be applied the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilisation and that securities for the performance of this trust should be embodied in this Covenant.

(http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/leagcov.asp)

There are more prosaic connections too. Before the Second World War, for example, colonial officials in Britain were beginning to take the idea of the economic development of their colonies more seriously and, as Uma Kothari has shown, many colonial administrators made the transition to being development practitioners (Hyam 1999; Kothari 2005). There is, however, no evidence at all that Britain or the other colonial powers were concerned with the broader project of international development in the way that the United States was. It seems then that as an international project, institutionalized and generalized within international politics, ‘development’ originated within and significantly because of US hegemony. Over the years since the end of the Second World War, the United States’ record on development issues and its relationships with developing countries have been severely criticized, often with good cause. Thus it is easy to forget that the project of international development is itself significantly, if not largely, the result of US predominance in global politics in the period i...