The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (review)

The Great American Mission examines the rise, fall, and rise again of a specifically American form of development: modernization. David Ekbladh uses a wealth of archival and printed sources, including materials from a large number of U.S. presidential libraries and from the papers of leading members of the U.S. development policy world. The book makes an important contribution to Cold War studies by following the ideas of the U.S. presidents and policymakers who were generally supportive of development for more than a century. Ekbladh also shows the continual interplay between domestic policy, foreign policy, and international development discussions. He demonstrates that exploring “how one segment of the international community—in this case the United States—interacts, refracts, and is itself influenced by international trends is a profitable means to interrogate the history of a larger global issue like development” (p. 6). This is not just an interstate story, however. Ekbladh also discusses non-state actors—missionaries, universities, businesses, and other non-governmental organizations—that influence the work of states, thus lending a transnational element to the story.

Ekbladh traces the shift from “reconstruction” in the period after the American Civil War through the U.S. occupation of the Philippines in the late nineteenth century and the “modernization” of entire societies in the 1930s. The United States, Ekbladh writes, took on “a new global mission” to develop societies outside its borders (p. 41). The Great Depression and the challenge of the Soviet Union caused many Americans to question laissez-faire economic development. In response, liberals created a new “liberal development” (pp. 41–42). According to Ekbladh, this new approach to development assumed a central role for the state, planning, technical experts, technology, social science, and rationality, and “sought a profound transformation of society” (p. 115). Both before and after World War II, advocates of the approach continually returned to the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) as a model for liberal development. The Cold War solidified this 1930s model, which, according to Ekbladh, remained the dominant American approach to development until the 1970s.

Ekbladh then turns to several case studies of the failed application of the TVA-inspired development model in Asia, specifically in China, South Korea, and Vietnam. These failures in the 1960s and 1970s helped to fuel a wide turn against stateled modernization. Even after the 1980s and 1990s witnessed a decline in international development assistance and the rejection of state-led modernization, American modernization thought, according to Ekbladh, remained within institutions like the World Bank and reemerged after the terrorist attacks of September 2001. In the face of the perceived threat to liberalism posed by al Qaeda, both Democrats and Republicans have again embraced state-led modernization.

Ekbladh convincingly shows the centrality to the U.S. development community of the TVA as a global model. Americans brought up the TVA again and again across decades and across continents as a liberal solution to Third World woes. A discussion of the TVA itself might have strengthened the book. We meet the most important figures involved in the TVA, but we do not learn when the TVA started, its exact programs and activities, the way these activities changed over time, and the nature of the activities labeled “grassroots” and democratic by TVA organizers. Ekbladh uses the TVA more as a symbolic model than as a concrete program. As a result, the reader may infer—without basis—that the TVA’s democratic claims were mostly propaganda, which people around the world apparently accepted without much question.

The focus on high-level American supporters of modernization brings a wealth of information but at some cost. Readers of Cold War history have come to expect dialogues, especially now that several historians have studied how development was discussed not only in the United States but also in conversation with those in other countries, as David Engerman has shown with India and Gregg Brazinsky has demonstrated with South Korea...