Decolonization by Jan C. Jansen

Author:Jan C. Jansen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2016-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

DEVELOPMENT AND BUSINESS STRATEGIES

Around the mid-1950s, it was no longer possible to overlook the fact that the United States, Western Europe, and a post-imperial Japan would be the future growth poles of the world economy. Trade would mainly be conducted between these regions and cause the old imperial contacts to recede. In the 1950s and 1960s, the countries in the global South that had already become independent or were in transition exhibited less economic growth than the industrial nations of the north. Within the world economy, therefore, they moved into a more marginal position than they had held during the colonial era. From the point of view of the metropoles, there were fewer and fewer economic reasons to maintain colonies or to court special relations with ex-colonies.

Since this period, economic development has been an overriding concern, not only for the new states. The ambiguous and protean concept of “development” became a powerful intellectual template that helped organize the postcolonial world into several groups or “worlds”—from the developed to the developing, less developed, or underdeveloped world. After European postwar reconstruction and in parallel to the unfolding Cold War, the two superpowers, industrialized countries (including the former colonial powers), and international agencies (such as the World Bank) turned toward international development as a new field of activity. Development aid—that is, different forms of financial and technical support for less developed countries—became an important element of bilateral and international cooperation, in which a growing number of national agencies, international organizations, NGOs, and think tanks engaged. Ever since the postcolonial states acquired more influence in the United Nations and its suborganizations, the criteria, goals, and means of international development, the terms of international trade, and the access to natural resources have been contentious issues in international politics and a main arena of the North-South conflict.

In many postcolonial states, this preoccupation with economic (and social) development was not entirely new. Attempts at modernizing agriculture by mechanization and land reform had been characteristic of the late-colonial phase; large and ambitious agro-industrial projects such as peanut plantations in British Tanganyika became famous for their failures involving heavy losses. There are numerous continuities with postcolonial development policy in terms of personnel, institutions, and concepts.28 Each of the new states dealt with this kind of late-colonial legacy in its own way, with differences among them about whether, in what form, and for how long each state persisted in retaining and continuing economic planification (characteristically, a French term) and social welfare services. The ideal of the interventionist state, a bequest from the late-colonial period,29 was fortified, from India to West Africa, by socialist models of varying strictness and design. Well into the 1970s, development under state guidance and technocratic-scientific planning remained a program on which nationalists of almost all shades could agree. While there was a great variety of strategies among the new states, quite a few among them saw state-run industrialization policy as the high road to development. Many postcolonial regimes and their international donors practiced modernization with a rigidity that was equal to what the late-colonial state had attempted to do.

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.