Dieter Senghaas by Dieter Senghaas

Author:Dieter Senghaas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg

4.3 Experiences in the History of Development

List reached his conclusions on the strength of a comparative analysis of historical experiences and, in particular, his own perceptions. The chequered history of Venice, Spain, Portugal, the Hanseatic League, Holland and England provided evidence for his theses; so did his own experiences of development policy in various parts of Germany, France, the U.S.A. and Hungary. Yet only in the roughly 150 years since his time have the basic development problems that he formulated gained world-wide significance, particularly since the decolonization drive of the 1950s and 1960s.

Can any noteworthy lessons be drawn from the great plethora of historical and current experiences of development processes?6 Do they confirm or refute the Listian perspective?

List’s high evaluation of a broad-scale mobilization of a country’s agricultural potential has been underlined by both positive and negative experiences. Within and outside Europe, countries that successfully improved their performance in the agricultural sector prior to or during the process of industrialization certainly have enjoyed substantial successes in the process of development. By contrast, countries that did not undergo institutional agrarian reform and agro-technological modernization remained incapable of releasing their development potential; in general they came up against substantial bottlenecks.

It is irksome that nineteenth-century development planners, who believed they were building upon List, read into him a one-sided strategy of industrialization under the banner of protectionism but overlooked or disregarded his recommendations respecting the necessary development of agriculture. In East and South-East Europe in particular, this faulty interpretation was in vogue. Unfortunately, the same experience, whether building upon List or not, repeated itself in most Third World countries. In all these cases the development process remained fragile, or in List’s terminology ‘one-armed’ or ‘crippled’.

With these clear figurative concepts List characterized a state of society which recent development theory describes as inner cleavage or ‘structural heterogeneity’.7 What development processes taking place under these banners lack is a proportionate and broadly effective linkage between agriculture, industry and trade. Oriented to the limited markets of small-scale demand, industrialization in such societies leads primarily to withdrawal effects to the disadvantage of agriculture and the advantage of urban agglomerations (urban bias). The deepening political, socio-economic and cultural cleavage that thereby takes place becomes the scene of a number of mounting social catastrophes: the collapse of agriculture’s capacity for self-sufficiency, flight from the land and impoverishment in the countryside, excessive urbanization, unemployment and underemployment, and uncontrollable population growth. In the history of the peripheries within Europe (in East, South-East and South Europe as well as Ireland) these phenomena were no different than those in the contemporary Third World.

Experience teaches that homogeneous domestic markets can only be achieved by means of a Listian development programme: by the mobilization of dormant resources in all sectors of society, particularly those in agriculture, by means of the necessary institutional reforms and technological innovations as well as purposive protective measures on the part of the state. Any attempts at industrialization in the absence of prior or accompanying reforms have generally failed, as List’s perspective would lead us to expect.

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