Modernization Theory in the 1990s and Beyond

As a formal theory, modernization had been discredited in nearly all quarters by the late 1970s. If there is one way in which the postmodern school of development helps us, however, it is in reminding us how much modernist ideas about development are still (inescapably?) with us. As Craig Calhoun put it, after the 1960s, modernization theory lingered on, “its intellectual status deeply suspect but its theories . . . more critiqued than replaced.” Even as the main development debates turned toward structural adjustment and neoclassical economic analysis, and oppositional discourses focused on gender, ethnic, environmental, and linguistic concerns, most Americans’ preconscious ideas about the differences between rich and poor countries did not change. In the collective view of most Americans (including intellectuals), poor countries and their peoples remained irrational, corrupt, inefficient, excessively fecund, technologically inadequate, incompetent, disease-ridden, superstitious, mired in age-old ways of doing things, and so on—always in implicit contrast to the happy success of our own country. As Björn Hettne commented, the idea of a radical distinction between modern and traditional societies, equated with “us” and “them,” continued to inform the popular image of developing countries, regardless of the theoretical incoherence or political associations of this sort of thinking.7Furthermore, the postmodern prejudice against big narratives meant that no master narrative emerged (at least until the 1990s, with globalization theories) that could replace modernization theory’s explanation for what was going on in the third world. Many intellectuals—to say nothing of less scholarly sorts—refused to accept the Marxian counternarrative but remained uncomfortable living in a world without a “big picture.” As a result, modernization theory survived as the unstated, undefended, but nevertheless omnipresent vision of historical change, even as the content of the category “modernity” slowly evolved.

Given the dogged durability of the central images of tradition versus modernity, it is not surprising that sooner or later, modernization theory would come in for a more explicit rehabilitation. Predictably, the collapse of Communism provided the initial occasion for the rehabilitation of modernization theory. Some felt that the American victory in the cold war had “vindicated” modernization theory, as Lucian Pye among others claimed. (Modernization theory would experience a boom in particular among bewildered former Sovietologists groping for a theoretical framework to explain the collapse of the Soviet Union—even though others pointed out that modernization theory did little to explain the dynamics of that collapse.) Although the timing may have been miscalculated, and the correlation between economic and political growth not quite as tight as first supposed, the so-called third wave of democratization seemed to many to confirm that “in the long run,” all good things do in fact go together. Furthermore, as Raymond Lee pointed out, the disintegration of Eastern European Communist regimes left “the First World as the only model of modernity to be emulated.” The person who would do most to try to put these self-congratulatory feelings on a firm pedestal of theory would be American philosopher Francis Fukuyama.

In his celebrated essay The End of History, Fukuyama claimed that, though unacknowledged, modernization theory had continued to define the historionomic horizon for most American social scientists. Through the 1990s, Fukuyama’s major intellectual project was to resurrect modernization theory by placing it on a firmer philosophical grounding. He was explicit in stating his debt to modernization theory and its technological determinism: because technology “guarantees an increasing homogenization of all human societies . . . all countries undergoing economic modernization must increasingly resemble one another.” Fukuyama claimed that only bashfulness prevented American intellectuals from admitting that modernization theory formed their basic philosophy of history. “It is striking,” he has written, “that in all the rich literature on democracy and the democratic transitions published in recent years . . . it is difficult to find a single social scientist who will any longer admit to being a ‘modernization theorist.’ I find this odd because most observers of political development actually do believe in some version of modernization theory.” The time had come to discard the shame about modernization theory, for there was good empirical evidence, in Fukuyama’s view, that modernization “is a coherent process than produces a certain uniformity of economic and political institutions across different regions and cultures,” and that furthermore, this was a good and desirable thing. Like Lucian Pye, Fukuyama felt that the history of the past thirty years had vindicated Seymour Martin Lipset’s arguments about the correlation between democratic stability and rising per capita incomes.

Fukuyama sought to rehabilitate modernization theory by taking its historio-philosophical core, the convergence hypothesis, and grounding it in a Hegelian theory of history. “History” in Fukuyama’s terms, consisted of the history of an ideological battle between conflicting visions of civilization and social order. Fukuyama’s outré Hegelian claim was that the United States was standing at “the end of history,” a fact that permitted American intellectuals (i.e., himself) to apprehend the meaning of the historical process, namely that “liberalism in the classical sense” was the historical calling of mankind. Rehabilitating modernization theory did not mean a return to the “simpleminded and overly deterministic formulation . . . that posited that all societies would, in effect, end up like suburban America in the 1950s.” On the contrary, standing at the end of history in 1989, we knew that the ideological outcome of the historical process was neoliberalism. Everyone in the world that mattered could agree, according to Fukuyama, that liberal democracy and unfettered capitalism had become accepted as the only viable, legitimate ways of organizing human societies. The reason for this universal embrace of liberalism and capitalism, he said, invoking Hegel, is that these systems are better suited than any others for allowing individuals to achieve the mutual social “recognition” that is the existential aim of human life. (Although he did not argue it explicitly, Fukuyama apparently felt that the welfare state did not give as much scope for “recognition” as unfettered neoliberalism.) Although Fukuyama admitted that there remained some who would resist liberalism and capitalism on ideological grounds, he dismissed them as resentful and ultimately irrelevant losers in the modernization process. Eventually these losers would realize, Fukuyama claimed, that the historical game is up and would recognize that the way of “the West” was the only way. If Talcott Parsons was the Marx of modernization theory and Rostow its Engels, then Fukuyama is its Lukacs.

Before we turn to discussing how the ideals of modernization theory have changed from the 1950s to the 1990s, let us examine one last intellectual figure, the inimitable Samuel Huntington, who through the 1990s has continued to do battle against the liberal (and now neoliberal) program of modernization theory. During the 1990s, both Huntington and Fukuyama made widely read big claims about the state of geopolitics, and the divisions between the two can be traced to their differing takes on modernization theory. Both Fukuyama and Huntington saw cultural difference as the distinguishing feature of contemporary societies, but they disagreed about how cultural difference operated on the historical stage. Following modernization theory, Fukuyama argued that economic pressures tended to push societies, insofar as they want to be economically successful, toward a convergence on a high-trust model of “modern” social organization in which the state was best left out. By contrast, Huntington argued that contemporary history was leading toward a clash of incommensurable and irreconcilable “civilizations,” the latter term being defined in a Toynbean fashion. Huntington separated the cultural characteristics of the West from the techno-scientifically driven process of human domination over nature. Late developers could adopt the technical advances first generated in the West without emulating the cultural particularities of the West. In Huntington’s opinion, there was no reason to assume that material-economic convergence would lead to or even encourage cultural convergence. Because economic convergence did not necessarily lead to cultural convergence, Huntington rejected the notion that modernization was either inevitable or a good thing. There was no basis, Huntington claimed, for saying that any one of these civilizations was “universal” in the sense either of moral superiority or of having history on its side. Huntington instead seemed content to argue that simply because one of these civilizations was “ours,” we ought to fight like hell for it. Whereas Fukuyama adopted the neoliberal orthodoxy about getting the state out of social and economic affairs, Huntington continued to defend the conservative, militarist state as a requirement for keeping society in top fighting shape. Both Fukuyama and Huntington rejected multiculturalism and postmodernism—Fukuyama from a cosmopolitan-universalist perspective, Huntington from an authoritarian centralizing perspective.