A third successor movement to modernization, which emerged in the 1990s, was what would come to be known as globalization. While a thorough discussion of the intellectual roots of globalization discourse goes beyond what we can discuss here, it is useful to consider the relationship between modernization theory and recent discussions about globalization. The first thing to observe is that globalization is a phenomenon, not a theory. Reduced to its most basic element, globalization is the result of what David Harvey has referred to as "time-space compression": as a result of improved transportation and communications technologies over the past two centuries, there has been a continuously accelerating reduction of the amount of time needed to move objects, ideas, and capital across space.
Driven by the possibilities for profit that result from bringing things and ideas together faster than ever before, the capitalist world economy has unleashed unimaginable possibilities for intellectual, cultural, economic, and human exchange—and at the same time destroyed older systems of power and knowledge unable to cope with the incursion of faraway things, ideas, and capital. For most of the postwar period, Marxism (under the influence of Lenin and Luxembourg) and modernization theory competed for this role of explaining the geo-historical implications of time-space compression. Globalization as a term arose in the 1990s to fill the discursive void left by the collapse of Marxism (some tried to revive modernization theory to fill this space), and globalization discourses have contrasted themselves both to modernization theory and to Marxist theories of globalization, while at the same time borrowing freely from both of these earlier discourses. In essence, theories of globalization differ from modernization theory (and Marxism) in four crucial respects:
- A changed ethical tone: Globalization discourse contains both advocates and opponents of the process.
- A changed view of the state: Whereas the state was the vehicle of modernization, globalization discourse sees the state as eroded by transnational forces and of growing irrelevance.
- A heightened emphasis on the determining role of culture: Globalization discourse makes cultural analysis grounds for both judging and explaining the globalization process.
- A denial of convergence: Globalization discourse emphasizes geography and space as key variables for analyzing globalization. As these distinctions suggest, contemporary discussions of globalization are thus bound up with the postmodern turn more generally. Let us examine each of these changes in further detail.
Modernization theorists were always cheerleaders for the process they described: reaching modernity was a good thing, and the only worry was whether all countries would make it as painlessly as possible. By contrast, globalization is a self-criticizing phenomenon. On the one hand, there are those who see globalization as an unabashed boon, and they often do so for many of the same uncritical reasons that modernization theorists celebrated modernity: advocates of globalization share with modernization theorists the idea that the human race is in the process of creating a "universal civilization." Particularly during the first world economic boom of the late 1990s, there were many who discussed globalization breathlessly as the triumph of the market and democratization, with capitalism delivering all things to all people as efficiently as possible. As Alan Ryan put it, "Where Marx envisaged a universal utopia founded on the common ownership of the means of production and exchange, globalization in this sense imagines a utopia built around a free market."
On the cultural front, likewise, some see globalization as opening new spaces for difference, diversity, hybridity, multiplicity, and localism. For advocates of the process, the solution to the problems caused by globalization is to have more globalization. On the other hand, as a hopeful vision of consumerism itself as liberation, no one has built a politically compelling ideology around globalization—even if its advocates defend it mostly as inevitable. Ironically, critics of globalization attack it for the same reasons its champions celebrate it: as the triumph of capitalism. In the eyes of many critics, who form a kind of twenty-first century New Left, globalization is a cipher for the decline of community, a disregard for the environment, and a simultaneous exacerbation of economic inequality and cultural homogenization. In sum, globalization spells the triumph of many aspects of liberal modernization (all except the welfare parts) but without the gusto and the passion. Both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the protesters in Genoa and Seattle at the turn of the century used the term "globalization" to refer to a more-or-less agreed upon phenomenon, despite differing sharply on whether they considered this process salutary.
The second way that contemporary discussions of globalization differ from modernization theory is in their conception of the role of the state. If the modernizing developmental state was the third world analog to the welfare state, then globalization sees the nation-state as withering away. Modernization theorist Lucian Pye defined modernization as "the diffusion of a world culture—a world culture based on advanced technology, and the spirit of science, a rational view of life, a secular approach to social relations, a feeling for justice in public affairs, and above all else, the acceptance in the political realm of the belief that the prime units of the polity should be the nation-state." For Pye and other modernization theorists, the nation-state was the fundamental force for the diffusion of modernization, disrupting traditional societies on the way to building welfare states. But globalization theory suggests that state-led development may have been a historical anomaly of the twentieth century. Where nation-states and national economies were the subject-object of modernist development, globalization theorists posit that nation-states are declining in influence and that the causal agents of globalization are transnational extra-state organizations, especially multinational corporations, the IMF, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO). The heroes (or villains) are international technocrats and swashbuckling entrepreneurs who push technological innovation and engage in "creative destruction." Even advocates of globalization concede that globalization involves a surrender of power to non-elected and technocratic, rationalistic transnational institutions. Inevitably, the decline of the state necessarily means the decline of the welfare state, which is a main reason for resistance to globalization in places like the European Union.
The third important distinction between modernization theory and globalization discourse is that the latter has a heightened emphasis on culture. Modernization theory focused on culture either as a dependent variable that would be transformed by modernization or as an "obstacle" to that transformation. Walt Rostow was typical in reducing culture to "propensities" that were exogenous to his developmental model. On a cultural level, modernization theory often assumed that diverse local cultures were giving way to a single world culture; the destruction of these cultures, insofar as it was considered at all, was justified primarily on economic and political grounds. However, de-emphasizing the state as a developmental actor has opened a space to make culture a more determining variable in the analysis of globalization. This theoretical opportunity has been seized in particular by anthropologists, who beginning in the 1980s began a desperate search for how to redefine their discipline as the last of their traditional subject matter ("indigenous peoples") disappeared under the pressure of globalization. By reinventing ethnography as the study of any local group, these scholars found a way to carry on the Boasian ethnographic tradition of assuming that culture is the primary determining variable in accounting for human difference. Continuing a tradition of protest anthropology, some globalization theorists have considered globalization’s destruction of local cultures as an unquestionably bad thing, while others have seen it as opening new cultural possibilities. Some critics even try to do both things at once, castigating capitalism for homogenizing world culture while celebrating the fecund imaginations of postcolonials for inventing new hybrid forms of cultural expression off the ruins that capitalism has made of their "traditional" cultures.
The fourth way that globalization discourse differs from modernization theory is in its emphasis on geography and on the diverse impact of modernity/globalization in different places. Edward Shils defined modernization as a "model of the West detached in some way from its geographical origins and locus." Daniel Lerner would reiterate the same point: "The modernization process... is (or should be) relatively geography free. Urbanization, industrialization, literacy, media participation and the rest work their main effects in general ways—with particular variations due to geography or culture as potentially important side effects." Globalization theorists, by contrast, have drawn from world-systems theory to argue that globalization paradoxically both annihilates distance and at the same time creates increasingly differentiated outcomes in different locales. Globalization suggests that some regions will specialize in industrial labor (such as sweatshops), while other places will specialize in services (such as software and nouvelle cuisine). However, these spaces are not delimited along the lines of nation-states, nor can they be neatly divided either into three worlds or centers, peripheries, and semiperipheries. Instead, as Frederic Jameson notes, "what used to be characterized as the Third World has entered the interstices of the First one." In other words, the interdigitated world of high rollers has nodes not just in New York and London but also in Bombay and Panama City, while the “ghetto” spans the world from the slums of Brooklyn to the vast shanties surrounding practically every tropical metropolis. Modernization theory, by contrast, stated that all countries would be sites of "High Mass Consumption" with more or less equal access to consumer goods and with similar industrial mixes. When their work has been at its best, globalization theorists have moved beyond modernization theory by examining the microgeographic patterning of developmental processes—in other words, how modern cultural elements coexist in space and time with non-, or post-, or pre-, or antimodern ones.
Implicit in this new focus on differential geographic outcomes in the globalization process is a denial of a central tenet of modernization theory, namely the convergence hypothesis. Modernist development theories (in both Marxist and liberal guises) ignored geography, since they posited eventual convergence on a single model of modernity. Even though they admitted that some groups were temporary "losers in the modernization process," modernization theorists emphasized that everyone would be delivered to the golden future of modernity. Globalization discourse underscores the fact that even though liberal capitalism won the political battle against Communism, there is no necessary happy ending because the welfare state was not the final destination of modernity.
One important faction in the critical school of globalization discourse was the efflorescence in the 1990s of what I will refer to as the postmodern school of development theory, and which included writers like Arturo Escobar, Ali Mirsepassi, Serge LaTouche, Gilbert Rist, Wolfgang Sachs, Gustavo Esteva, and Timothy Mitchell. The arrival of the postmodern school can be dated from the 1992 publication of the collective polemic
The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, which, as the title suggests, pointed to a linguistic turn within development studies. Synthesizing ideas about Orientalism drawn from Edward Said, theories of power and discourse adapted from Michel Foucault, and the populist rage of the dependency theorists, scholars of the postmodern school spend their time reading and deconstructing what they refer to as development discourse. Modernization theory has been a preferred subject of attack, along with other programmatic schools of thought on development that the postmodernists grouped together under the heading "developmentalism."
The poster child for the postmodern school has been anthropologist Arturo Escobar, whose widely read Encountering Development (1995) purports to describe the "discursive construction" of the third world. According to Escobar, "the" discourse of development has taken place both in the literature on development and through development agencies in the postcolonial world. This "hegemonic" discourse has "essentialized" the third world through a "dominant paradigm" that has "privileged" economic narratives. Behind the humanitarian rhetoric, the real point of developmentalism has been to erode "poor people’s ability to define and take care of their own lives." Instead of conceiving of development as a “cultural process,” developmentalism reduces people and societies to "abstract concepts" and "statistical figures." Development economics, in particular, has historically "occupied the discursive space in such a manner that it precluded the possibility of other discourses." What other discourses? "A view of social change as a project that could be conceived of not only in economic terms but as a whole life project." According to Escobar, development discourse is geared not toward improving the lives of the postcolonial poor but toward extending the power of the developmentalists (i.e., the modernist development authorities). "In the Third World, modernity is not ‘an unfinished project of Enlightenment,'" Escobar explains. "Development is the last and failed attempt to complete the Enlightenment in Asia, Africa, and Latin America." The postmodernists believe that modernism in unredeemable. Not only does modernism essentialize (always in a diminishing way) (post)colonial others, but indeed, according to Ali Mirsepassi, "all of the 'liberal,' 'enlightened,' and 'progressive' triumphs in Western modernity have had their interdependent counterpart in utterly illiberal, violently totalizing, and destructive assaults upon other people." Postmodern skeptics decry the very notion of development as a powerknowledge regime for extending the scope of capitalism, as well as the World Bank and the IMF, institutions with classically modernist hopes for universalism. In the hands of Escobar, there is no sense that modernity itself is a fragmented experience, while for Mirsepassi, the emancipatory side of modernity is inseparable from its dimension of domination. Hostility to the Enlightenment and modernity (whether in liberal or Marxist form) is the unifying theme of the postmodern school of development.
In contrast to the monolithic views of modernists, Escobar claims to know what is happening in "real villages"; there, on the ground, "they have developed a hybrid model of sorts, ruled neither by the logic of modern farming nor by traditional practices." Escobar detects a third world that is "manifold and multiple" and "increasingly illegible to any known idiom of modernity." It turns out that contemporary Columbians (apparently the only postcolonials that Escobar has spent significant time with) have already erased all the modernist binaries of high and low, urban and rural, and so on. Always in a descriptive rather than prescriptive voice, Escobar claims that contemporary postcolonials, rather than succumbing to the modernist myth of economic growth, are embracing "a hybrid modernity characterized by continuous attempts at renovation, by a multiplicity of groups taking charge of the multitemporal heterogeneity peculiar to each sector and country." Their efforts at continuous cultural reconfiguration of modern and traditional elements resist efforts of development agencies to essentialize them.
In the postmodern analysis, postcolonial cultural play becomes the only authentic form of resistance (yay!) to the hegemonic discourse (boo!) of economic development agencies. The problem with all of this is not so much its analytical content—though in the case of Escobar, this too is often sloppy. The main problem is that postmodern discourse is guilty of the very thing for which it castigates developmentalism: it is not geared at improving the lives of the postcolonial poor. As Jonathan Crush points out, "To assert, like Esteva, that 'development stinks' is all very well, but it is not that helpful if we have no idea about how the odour will be erased." Beyond cheering the supposed cultural habits of contemporary postcolonials, the postdevelopment school has no program. Indeed, Escobar calls on intellectuals to "resist the desire to formulate alternatives at an abstract macro level" and denies that alternatives can come from "intellectual or academic circles." Having thrown out the social modernist baby with the developmental bathwater, these postmodernists find themselves incapable of imagining a plausible alternative on a policy level either to the modernist discourses of the 1950s and 1960s or to contemporary neoliberal discourses.
Although I have spent a lot of time in this blog showing how modernization theorists constructed their own national identity through the discourse of modernization, the idea that this is the only way that either the United States or modernity might define itself is merely wrong. (For most of this nation’s history, Americans defined themselves mainly in contrast to Europe, not to any other part of the world—and it may yet happen again.) Likewise, the conception that modernity must abject a (post)colonial other is an assertion rather than an argument. Celebrating "alternative ways of experiencing and knowing" is sweet, but it fails to answer what thinkers as different as Kant and Lenin have emphasized is the most fundamental question, namely "What is to be done?" This self-regarding refusal to advocate actionable programs for confronting postcolonial disempowerment represents not just an intellectual failure, but outright moral cowardice.
There is an almost neurotic quality to the way in which these scholars eternally return to attacking modernism. One suspects that what this school really represents is historionomic sour grapes: these writers are the intellectual offspring of the dependency theorists who considered socialism or Communism to be modernity’s highest ambition, and the failure of that project has thus condemned all modernism in their eyes. On an intellectual level, the inability of these postmodernists to articulate any viable policy alternative to modernism consigns them to permanent parasitism vis-à-vis modernist development discourse—and irrelevance from the point of view of policy makers. All postmodernists can do is celebrate "multiplicity," "destabilize dominant modes of knowing," and tear down the shibboleths of modernist developmentalism.
While pretending to iconoclastic radicalism, this amounts to conservatism: postmodernism undermines the national solidarities that have grounded North Atlantic welfare states from the late nineteenth century on, but proposes no alternative form of cosmopolitan or transnational solidarity in its place. It is corrosive, cynical, and decadent in a precise Nietzschean sense. Though modernism failed in many respects, refusing to think about how the aims of modernism might be realized in nondominating ways is an easy luxury for comfortable professors.
