The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present by Michael E Latham (review)

In The Right Kind of Revolution, Professor Michael E. Latham has added another dimension to the study of clear linkages between scholarship in modernization theory and the practice of politics as it was applied by different US administrations. As he expatiates in the book, this coupling of theory with politics is underpinned by the belief, among modernization theorists in academia and embraced by politicians, that modernization and development will provide security for the United States and global peace, especially with the onset of the cold war. During the period under discussion, the expectation was that “planning, development, and foreign assistance could become key elements in a broad strategy to steer nationalist forces toward liberal capitalism” (p. 57).

With the blueprint for modernization well formulated in the United States, Latham explores three countries into which this paradigm was transplanted and used as testing grounds for these concepts. These countries—two of them on the African continent—were Ghana, Egypt, and India. Latham underscores that these countries had politically influential leaders.

The three independent polities had not fully been married into the communist ideological worldview, but they were mostly nonaligned. The success of the modernization program with them could be perceived as an acceptable prototype for replication by other developing countries if it succeeded. These leaders embraced and welcomed the American modernization concepts as they sought socioeconomic growth and development for their countries; however, they refused to acquiesce to the prescriptions unilaterally dictated to them by American authorities: they changed the guidelines to suit their own political, economic, and social realities. They syncretized the American and Soviet models in their bid to develop and modernize their countries.

Latham discusses the genesis and history of modernization, from Europe to the United States, with deeper emphasis on the roles of American sociologists Talcott Parsons and Harold Lasswell, MIT theorists W. W. Rostow, Dan Lerner, Gabriel Almond, Lucian Pye, Edward Shils, Max Millikan, and Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, and the Center for International Studies, based at MIT. These academics espoused the worldview that a modernization-centric paradigm of development in the developing world could transform traditional systems in these societies away from the flawed status quo to an appropriate modern system so as eventually to be on par with the West. Their main target of experimentation was the postcolonial polities in the developing world.

From the volume, readers learn that in the 1950s, modernization became an indispensable imperative for development for US foreign policy, more so because of national forays into China and Korea by communism, which by that time had become an existential threat to the American ideals of freedom and liberty, espoused since the founding of the United States. Different American administrations focused particularly on the postcolonial world; because “they viewed many postcolonial leaders as politically immature and unprepared for self-determination, they exercised little restraint in trying to undermine governments that, in their assessment, opened doors to communist subversion” (p. 39). When it came to Africa and other developing societies, most colonizers had been Westerners, and communist central-government control as well as industrial development in the Soviet Union appealed to these leaders.

According to Latham, one area which modernization experts sought to control was collaboration with demographers to deal with perceived population growth and modernization of agricultural practices and systems. Multinational corporations, wealthy entrepreneurs, and individuals in the United States joined the bandwagon in these efforts. Birth-control measures were put in place because of the “fear that postcolonial population growth might ultimately derail modernization” (p. 98), and hybrid seeds were distributed to farmers in various parts of the world to promote a green revolution. Experts argued that if the population growth of a country was controlled, food security and political stability would be achieved, and these changes would not halt development...