Twilight of the Money Gods by John Rapley

Author:John Rapley [Rapley, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

CHAPTER 15

MISSIONARIES IN HEATHEN LANDS

During the European Reformation of the sixteenth century, when the Vatican lost northern Europe to the new Protestant doctrines, it didn’t retreat into the Catholic bastion of southern Europe. It took the long view (no doubt something that fifteen centuries of institutional memory made easier). To fight a rearguard defence of Catholicism, the Vatican formed the Jesuit order and sent its missionaries across the globe, into the then newly acquired colonies of the Americas and East Asia. Today those parts of the world produce most of the world’s Catholics, send missionaries back to the West and account for most of the church’s clergy. Spurned at home, prophets must often travel to distant lands to find receptive soil for their message. If in greatly compressed fashion – it happened over decades rather than centuries – the neoclassical revival followed a similar model. Although it originated in First World academies, the new doctrine would win its first converts in the developing world.

Some Third World countries had begun experimenting with neoliberal policies as early as the 1960s, but only in a piecemeal fashion, like Christmas-and-Easter church visitors. But the 1970s would see the first major conversion to the neoliberal faith, and it would happen in Latin America.

Despite having won their political independence, throughout the post-war period most developing countries were falling further behind the West. Incomes rose during the world economy’s boom years in the 1950s and 1960s, but not as quickly as those in the West. It wasn’t merely the external environment, nor the continued dominance of the West, which was pushing them backwards – though these things mattered.1 By the late 1960s, when the earliest shoots of inflation had first emerged in the West, there were signs that the state-led import substitution model most former colonies were using to develop their economies was itself part of the problem. When explaining their halting success in building the rich, free future that independence had promised, Third World leaders kept closely to the narrative Deng Xiaoping had used in his 1974 United Nations speech, railing against the lingering effects of Western imperialism. But in their more reflective moments, they acknowledged that many of their problems might actually have begun closer to home. In its early years, the import-substitution industrialisation (ISI) model adopted by many developing countries – whereby import restrictions sheltered the market from foreign competition and assisted local manufacturers to get off the ground – seemed to have worked miracles. Turkey’s Kemalist economy kept growing strongly right through the 1930s Depression, Latin American countries developed so quickly after the war that analysts started speaking of things like the ‘Brazilian miracle’ and India multiplied its steel production six-fold in less than twenty years.2 But in the deeper currents of the Third World, turbulence was brewing.

In particular, although ISI was good at building factories, it was much less effective at ensuring that what went on in them was actually innovative or efficient. Countries that used the model – and by the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.