Modernization Theory, Old and New

As the case of Fukuyama suggests, the 1990s witnessed the emergence of a new school of modernization, based on a philosophy of history spelling convergence on a universal, singular model of modernity. The idea of technologically driven historical convergence on single, interconnected, ideologically unified global modernity (curiously similar to the contemporary United States) has returned to popularity among American social scientists, policy makers, and pundits, providing theoretical credentials for a new agreement on U.S. development policy known in some circles as “the Washington Consensus.” Just as coeval ideas about the American national identity and mission grounded modernization theory in the 1950s, so, too, did contemporary conceptions of America’s national identity and international mission encourage its return. As during the 1950s, the apparent economic success of the United States in the 1990s, in contrast to the stagnation or decline of other countries (Southeast Asia, Japan, the former Soviet Union), provided the emotional underpinning to these ideas. As during the 1950s, technology (this time information technology) appeared as the driving force of history, possessed of an immanent logic beyond human control, making technocratic prescriptions seemingly value neutral and above politics. As during the 1950s, a global ideological challenge (this time from politicized Islam) galvanized efforts to market the virtues of modern civilization. Again, for a certain set of Americans, the definition of modernism came to resemble an idealized vision of the contemporary United States. And just as in the 1950s, bringing about organizational parallelism between rich and poor countries was the aim for post–cold war modernization theorists. The functional, epistemological aspect of the new modernization theory was nearly identical to the one in the 1950s, and with Fukuyama’s Hegelian rereading of modernization theory, it was now on firmer historionomic footing.

Although the function and cognitive operation of this new modernization theory is remarkably similar to postwar modernization theory, the substantive content of “modernity” at the core of the new theory has changed considerably. Among post–Gulf War I neoliberals (who sometimes, confusingly, call themselves neoconservatives), the definition of “modernity” has focused on the economic dimensions of American modernity. Reflecting the changes in the American economy from the 1950s to the 1990s, the old bottle “modernity” has been refilled with neoliberal wine. In the 1950s and 1960s, modernity signified New Deal ideals of collective action to achieve financial aid and social uplift. It signified the achievement of welfare states everywhere in the world that would more or less look the same. The postwar modernization theorists argued that modernizing states would impose a steeply progressive income tax, endorse social leveling, promote high-quality public education, sponsor industrial research, and intervene regularly to direct the economy. By contrast, neoliberals see not welfare guarantees but raw economic productivity as the United States’ grandest achievement, often arguing that it was the basis for the American victory in the cold war and the cause of the United States’ emergence as the unique global hyperpower. That productivity, they continue is the result of deregulation, which has allowed corporations and nations to realize their full economic potential. The current vision of modernity promoted by the neoliberal elite jettisons the old postwar idea of a state-led (if not state-owned) economy in which union and corporate leaders collaborate to set policy and production goals. Instead, it is unfettered “turbocapitalism” that is the essence of the new economic modernism.

Because of the changed content of the category “modernity,” there are crucial differences between what the new and the old versions of modernization theory have to say about change in the postcolonial world. Whereas the old version of modernization theory considered the state the vehicle for realizing modernity, the modernization theory promoted by Fukuyama and other neoliberals suggests that free markets lead to modernity. In economics, “structural adjustment” and trade liberalization policies dictated by the IMF have replaced the focus on state-directed heavy industrial production. In both cases the perceived economic engine in the United States—the state in the 1950s and the market in the post–Gulf War period—are assumed to be panaceas to underdevelopment. The World Bank justifies the evisceration of postcolonial state power by suggesting that the proper role for the state in the economy is to “steer not row.” In both the old and the new versions of modernization theory, the supposed agent of the growth process instead becomes the end in itself: development under the old modernization theory was equated with the penetration of the state into the social order, whereas development under the new theory has become synonymous with the penetration of market forces into an economy; “getting the institutions right” is the mantra of the new orthodoxy.

As John Brohman has argued, however, the differences between Keynesian-based modernization theory and its neoliberal successors belie important continuities. Both share a disregard for indigenous knowledge and popular participation; both favor universal rules of economic development, developed originally to confront the domestic problems of the rich nations; and both elevate Western values and history to a normative position. In politics, the new modernization theory is, of course, no longer motivated by the Soviet threat, but like old-school political development theory, it retains the notion of a transnationally comparable “transition” process, this time from “authoritarian” to “democratic” rather than from “traditional” to “modern.” Neoliberal modernization theory has found particular favor among the drafters of “transition programs” in Eastern and Central Europe, despite producing mixed results.

Neoliberals assume that with the demolition of trade barriers and the encouragement of further global economic integration, economic benefits will accrue to all in the world economy—though they are conspicuously silent on how to ensure that these benefits get fairly distributed. Avoiding this question, they have instead quietly resurrected Lipset’s hypothesis that economic liberalization “in the long run” leads to democratization. Leaving aside the issue of when the long run will arrive, or whether there is any tangible reason to believe that this linkage exists, it is certain that the 1990s ended with more global poor than it began with, and that even where democratization has proceeded, the vitiation of state power in the face of globalization in many postcolonial countries has made democratization a Pyrrhic victory. In sum, the neoliberal school takes on many of the worst assumptions of 1950s modernization theory— that what is good for the rich countries will be equally good for the poor, that modernization has the force of history behind it, that democratic accountability is unnecessary if scientifically trained elites (whether technocrats or entrepreneurs) run things, and that democracy is an inevitable epiphenomenon of economic liberalization.

So are the postmodernists right? In the face of this neoliberal vision of modernity, do we need to retreat into the purely critical stance? Must we lash ourselves to the mast of discursive theory to avoid the sirens of modernity? Were Horkheimer and Adorno right that modernity, as the highest realization of the Enlightenment, is inevitably fraught by a dialectic of domination? Or, to cite another angle of resistance to modernity, are conservatives everywhere right to decry modernity for its destruction of national sovereignty? What about Islamic radicals bent on imposing their own moral system on everyone they can get their hands on? What about unionized workers in rich regions who wish to preserve their protected markets and welfare benefits? Are all these diverse groups right to decry globalization and modernity as anathema?

The answer is no. The postmodernists and others may be right to decry the neoliberal vision of modernization, especially its naïve and often brutal ways of promoting modernity. But they are wrong to decry modernity tout court. It is the way the postwar generation and its neoliberal successors have executed their modernist dreams—not the content of the dreams themselves—that must be rejected. What we need is more modernity, not less; we need to realize the emancipatory promise of the Enlightenment, not scoff at modernity as either a moribund project or some sort of infernal machine that destroys identity, transcendence, locality, and meaning, giving nothing in return. Post- and antimodernists argue that fascism and Communism stand as indictments of the modernist project; and they are right to the extent that renewing a faith in modernity will require that we unflinchingly face the many earlier failures of modernist projects so as not to recapitulate them (as, for example, the Chinese are doing with the Three Gorges Dam). We must not allow these failures of modernity to drive us into the cultural despair of postmodernism.

The main reason to reject postmodern hopelessness is that, in addition to the neoliberal version of modernization theory, there exists a more hopeful moment in the contemporary geopolitical discourse of modernity. This moment appeals not to the rationalizing and economizing aspects of the Enlightenment tradition, but instead to its emancipatory and ethical dimensions. It calls for human rights, whether Michael Ignatieff’s modest form of respect for democracy, political expression, and the right to self-determination, or Amartya Sen’s more ambitious definition of human rights as the right to economic development. These scholars consider modernity’s most salutary feature to be not its economic productivity but its commitment to common, universal, inalienable rights. This human rights moment in the contemporary discourse on geopolitical modernity aims to build a moral order based on a transnational consensus against victimization, but without glorifying or sentimentalizing victimization. Interestingly, neoliberals often claim a natural association between their ideology and that of the more modest wing of the human rights movement: they claim that neoliberal economic institutions, by providing growth, will inevitably bring about democratization and greater respect for human rights. And while it would be a mistake to assume, as the neoliberals too often do, that a natural or necessary connection exists between neoliberal economics and the advancement of human rights, the possibility of finding a synthesis between the neoliberal modernizers and the human rights modernizers does exist. This synthesis turns on global, transnational institutions and a new transnational cosmopolitanism. The emphasis on democracy and human rights, when combined with international economic institutions, provides the material and moral foundation for building welfare institutions on a global, transnational scale. Only the building of such institutions would realize the emancipatory dimension of the modernist project, without which modernity is scarcely defensible.

The neoliberals are right about one thing: it is a world economy, and retreat into autarky is the commercial equivalent of Luddism. In a globalized world economy, therefore, institutions must be built on a global level. One of the central failings of modernization theory was that its emphasis on building nation-states meant that little effort went into promoting the transnational solidarities necessary to sustain global institutions. Each country’s modernization was a one-off affair, although foreign aid could be used to push these countries in the right direction. In the last thirty years, not only have few transnational solidarities been built (the European Union being a possible exception), but postmodern ideologies have eroded cross-class solidarities within nations, while globalization has eroded the power of states. Even more sadly, few voices in the ongoing globalization debate speak of the transnational solidarity that must go with efforts to build welfare policy on that scale. On the one hand, neoliberal advocates of globalization want no system of international taxation and redistribution to impede the individual pursuit of wealth. On the other hand, critics of globalization wish to slow or revise the process of globalization altogether. These two blocs collude in preventing the creation of welfare institutions on a global level. If they do not reject this vision explicitly, both at least believe that meliorism should be executed on a local scale, whether through entrepreneurialism, giving to the church or mosque, or protecting a local tract of old growth forest.

The way to promote a safer and more just world is not by retreating from globalization but by promoting more democratic forms of global governance. Between the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund, financial institutions are the most elaborated of current transnational organizations, but these need to have their mandate both expanded and reformed so that social justice becomes an explicit goal. Debt forgiveness, international standards for financial institutions, and obligation sharing during financial catastrophes can be promoted by augmenting the power of the WTO and the IMF in ways that will let them investigate and enforce international transactions in much the same way that OECD countries regulate banking within their own borders today. International organizations are relatively well developed to fight criminal activity, though the legal infrastructure needs to be backed not just by national courts but by an International Criminal Court. To legitimate these and other new organizations will require the creation of global representative institutions, perhaps under the auspices of the United Nations, but perhaps with an altogether new institutional foundation. True international leadership will entail the creation of multilateral governing bodies that can help move us beyond the dangers inherent in the perception that globalization is really a code word for a hyperpower that sets and enforces all the rules in its own favor.

Such transnational global institutions constitute the only way forward toward realizing the “good intentions” of postwar modernization theory, namely toward building social democracy on a global scale. To achieve this long-term goal will require recasting on a global level the kinds of national solidarities that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe, Japan, and some European immigrant societies. Such a cosmopolitan sense of identity must, in the words of Cora Bell, see “the individual as a citizen of ‘the universal city’—that is, of a single worldwide community of humankind, all of whose members are deemed to be entitled to equal rights independent of what their existing national governments are prepared to allow them.” There is nothing natural about such cosmopolitan solidarity—it must be imagined and evangelized. But what may give us hope is the knowledge that such solidarities have been built before, in nation-states that before were often as divided among themselves as global communities are today. Furthermore, these national histories show that nations and national solidarities have most often followed the building of successful state institutions, not the other way around. Building transnational institutions and governance thus can be conceived as a step toward, rather than the result of, transnational solidarities and a transnational civil society. The success in building such a dynamic in the European Union (in a region that was the most violent in the world in the first half of the twentieth century) provides a model for moving forward in this direction. Transnational civil institutions such as Amnesty International, the International Chamber of Commerce, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and Greenpeace can be enlisted to support the creation of more formal rules-based activity across state boundaries. The real challenge of globalization is how to build institutions that can be democratically inclusive and responsive on a planet in which there are seven billion voices to be heard, with a hundred thousand more arriving daily.

One way that Fukuyama moves beyond anterior “end of ideology” arguments is that he defends liberalism as an ideology and seeks to uncover its social and cultural underpinnings. Fukuyama realizes that if modern civilization is about nothing more soulful than letting some people have an opportunity to get rich, then it is difficult to defend it from the attacks of Zapatistas, to say nothing of the likes of Osama bin Laden. Some vision of a global welfare state remains the best defense of the Enlightenment as a global ideal. Recasting modernization around the aim of building transnational, welfare-providing institutions provides a much more compelling justification for the radical changes being wrought on the world than the banal encomiums to “efficiency” offered by The Economist, and a more realistic program than the neoimperialism being promoted by the regnant American foreign policy regime. The aim must be to actualize the best parts of 1950s modernization theory—its vision of a healthier, wealthier, more equal, and more democratic world. It is these benefits that the postcolonial poor want more than anything else, postmodern nonsense about cultural play and resistance notwithstanding. They want the Great Powers to live up to the positive side of the modernist promises that were made in the 1950s; equalitarian inclusion in global decision making on ecological, political, and economic policy; and an opportunity for economic improvement and access to a greater share of the world’s riches. United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, in a speech on February 12, 2000, called on the rich nations not to use populist protestors against the WTO as an excuse for not fulfilling the promises of development. Calling for a “Global New Deal” that would spread goods, jobs, and capital among all countries, Mr. Annan asked, “Can we not attempt on a global level what any successful industrialized country does to help its most disadvantaged or underdeveloped regions catch up?” The promise of a global Fair Deal enunciated by President Truman in his Point Four address remains the standard against which the achievements of justice on a global scale must be measured.