In late 1949, Department of External Affairs officials prepared a brief for the Australian delegation attending the upcoming Conference of Commonwealth Foreign Ministers to be held in Colombo in January 1950. They were commenting on the increasingly prominent post-war ‘problem’ of underdevelopment in Southeast Asian countries. In the brief, the departmental officials indicated that the Australian attitude towards technical assistance was favourable, given that “since the establishment of the United Nations, Australia has insisted upon the importance of providing the utmost assistance for the development of the under-developed countries.”1 More importantly, the department placed a clear emphasis on developmental objectives, arguing:
The most important criterion for the selection of projects should be the effect of assistance on increasing productivity of the various factors of production (the essential characteristic of economic development).2
Fast-forward almost three decades. By the 1970s, Australian aid policy had undergone numerous alterations that reflected the evolving nature of developmental ideas. Writing in 1973, Prime Ministerial advisor Peter Wilenski commented on Australian aid policy in the context of the proposed establishment of a stand-alone aid agency. He wrote that:
Aid should be given very largely for developmental, humanitarian and social reasons within the broad framework of the various aspects of Australia’s national interest rather than to seek political influence or favour. The use of aid to further political objectives may be counter-productive in the long run as the experience of some major aid donors has shown.3
In 1973, as in 1949, Australian aid policy was proposed as a solution to the developmental ‘problem’ in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Southeast Asia.
Development was not invented in 1945, nor did it disappear after 1975. Nevertheless, the three decades following the Second World War mark a high point in thought and policy regarding the promotion of international development. During this period, the concept of ‘development’ was often seen at the time as interchangeable with terms such as ‘modernisation’, ‘growth’ and ‘progress.’ Eugene Staley was one of the clearest and earliest advocates for what, after 1945, would become ‘development.’4 In 1944, Staley asked himself the question, “What is Economic Development?” His answer typified the broad meaning of the idea:
It is a combination of methods by which the capacity of a people to produce (and hence to consume) may be increased. It means introduction of better techniques; installing more and better capital equipment; raising the general level of education and the particular skills of labour and management; and expanding internal and external commerce in a manner to take better advantage of opportunities for specialisation.5
Over two decades later, Gunnar Myrdal, one of the World Bank’s ‘pioneers in development’, presented a definition that also revealed the interchangeability of terminology.6 In his 1968 Asian Drama, Myrdal demonstrated the compatibility of ‘modernisation ’ and ‘development’: “The desire for development and planning for development flows directly from the quest for rationality and represents in the economic and social field the all-embracing and comprehensive expression of the modernization ideals.”7 The ambiguity as to the precise meaning of ‘development’ made it particularly useful to experts and policymakers in the decades following the Second World War.
In economic terms, Frederick Cooper argues that this semantic ambiguity rests in the simultaneous notions of “increasing production and increasing welfare.”8 As Staley showed in 1944, development was an economic process that was spurred by increased production. Nevertheless, the Myrdal quote reveals a broader meaning, with ‘modernization ideals’ involving shifts in a society’s ways of thinking. Taking these observations as its starting point, this book understands development to be a comprehensive process of social, economic and political progress that was largely perceived as positive until at least the mid-1970s. More specifically, economic development was seen as a process that would improve people’s standard of living as a result of increased production. This improvement in living standards was expected to then lead to positive social and political change.
Modernisation was one form of development that revolved around the belief that social, economic and political change had a specific destination, which was generally exemplified by ‘modern’, Western civilisation. The definitive statement of modernisation theory was Walt Rostow’s 1960 The Stages of Economic Growth.9 Rostow’s central premise was that all societies go through a series of stages, from ‘the traditional society’ through to ‘the age of high mass-consumption.’ The pivotal stage was the third, the ‘take-off’, where societies would make the transition from the ‘traditional’ to the ‘modern.’ While Rostow’s analysis mostly revolved around the economic processes required to progress through the stages, he also engaged with the social and cultural features of modernisation. In the conclusion to The Stages of Economic Growth, Rostow argued that a loosely defined ‘democratic creed’, marked by acceptance of diversity and support for “private areas of retreat and expression,” would be “what most human beings would choose, if the choice were theirs.”10 For Rostow, the United States was the epitome of modernity, and all other societies were to emulate their historical development. The intellectual and political influence of these ideas was enhanced by Rostow’s involvement in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. The combination of the intellectual and emotional appeal of American-style modernity with the political ability to promote that process overseas caused modernisation to reach the peak of its influence in the early 1960s.11 This was as much the case in Australia as in the United States.
More broadly, developmentalism was the ideological belief held by many experts and policymakers that the process of development was an inherently positive thing and was something to be actively encouraged. For much of the post-Second World War period, modernisation was the orthodox conception of this belief. While most commonly associated with Walt Rostow and reaching its peak in the early 1960s, this orthodoxy did not emerge out of nowhere. In the mid-1940s, Eugene Staley and Paul Rosenstein-Rodan emphasised the role of government policy in driving economic growth, which would thereby facilitate the development process.12 For these theorists, increased production needed to be actively encouraged in order to safeguard the welfare of poorer peoples. It was in this capacity that development took on what Gilbert Rist refers to as a “transitive meaning.” No longer was development a process that just happened; “now it was possible to ‘develop’ a region.”13 This growth-centric model assumed its level of orthodoxy throughout the 1950s and 1960s, enhanced first by the work of West Indian born-British economist, W. Arthur Lewis, and then by American modernisation theorists such as Rostow.14 In Australia, this approach was epitomised in the immediate post-war period by John Crawford and Douglas Copland, and then later by Heinz Arndt.15
Alternatively, another set of ideas aimed to revise the Western-oriented, growth-centric assumptions of Rostow and his international counterparts. From the 1950s onward, economists—mostly in the Global South—challenged the orthodox position, arguing that developmental policy brought benefits not to the poor, but rather to those already in a position of economic and political power. Argentinian economist Raul Prebisch developed the earliest iteration of what would eventually become known as dependency theory in 1950, and by the mid-1960s, the notion had taken hold.16 The earliest demonstration of the political power of dependency theory was the 1964 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), which posed significant challenges to Australia’s previous conception of its own developmenta...