After Developmentalism and Globalization, What?

In 1900, in preparation for the Exposition Universelle in Paris, the French Ministry of Colonies asked Camille Guy, the head of its geographical service, to produce a book entitled Les colonies françaises: la mise en valeur de notre domaine coloniale. A literal translation of mise en valeur is "making into value." The dictionary, however, translates "mise en valeur" as "development." At the time, this expression was preferred, when talking about economic phenomena in the colonies, to the perfectly acceptable French word, "développement." If one then goes to Les Usuels de Robert: Dictionnaire des Expressions et Locutions figurées (1979) to learn more about the meaning of the expression "mettre en valeur," one finds the explanation that it is used as a metaphor meaning "to exploit, draw profit from."

Basically, this was the view of the pan-European world during the colonial era concerning economic development in the rest of the world. Development was a set of concrete actions effectuated by Europeans to exploit and draw profit from the resources of the non-European world. There were a number of assumptions in this view: Non-Europeans would not be able or perhaps even willing to "develop" their resources without the active intrusion of the pan-European world. But such development represented a material and moral good for the world. It was therefore the moral and political duty of the pan-Europeans to exploit the resources of these countries. There was consequently nothing wrong with the fact that, as a reward, the pan-Europeans who exploited the resources drew profit from them, since a secondary advantage would go to the persons whose resources were being exploited in this way.

This rationale of course completely omitted discussion of the cost in life and limb to the local people of such exploitation. The conventional calculus was that these costs were, as we would say in today's euphemisms, the necessary and inevitable "collateral damage" of Europe's "civilizing mission."

The tone of the discussion began to change after 1945, primarily as a result of the strength of anticolonial sentiments and movements in Asia and Africa, and a new sense of collective assertiveness in Latin America. It is at this point that "development" came to be used as a code word for the belief that it was possible for the countries of the South to "develop" themselves, as opposed to "being developed" by the North. The new assumption was that, if the countries of the South would only adopt the proper policies, they would one day, some time in the future, become as technologically modern and as wealthy as the countries of the North.

At some point in the post-1945 period, Latin American authors began to call this new ideology "desarollismo" or "developmentalism." The ideology of developmentalism took a number of different forms. The Soviet Union called it instituting "socialism," which became defined as the last stage before "communism." The United States called it "economic development." Ideologues in the South often used the two terms interchangeably. Amidst this worldwide consensus, all the states of the North—the United States, the Soviet Union (and its East European satellites), the West European colonial (now becoming ex-colonial) powers, and the Nordic countries plus Canada—began to offer "aid" and advice concerning this development that everyone favored. The Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL) developed a new language of "core-periphery" relations, used primarily to justify a program of "import-substitution industrialization." And more radical Latin American (and other) intellectuals developed a language about "dependency," which, they said, needed to be fought against and overcome in order that dependent countries be in a position to develop.

The terminology may have differed but the one thing that was agreed upon by everyone was that development was indeed possible, if only . . . When therefore the United Nations declared that the 1970s would be the "decade of development," the term and the objective seemed virtually a piety. Yet, as we know, the 1970s turned out to be a very bad decade for most of the countries of the South. It was the decade of the two successive oil price...