International Development: A Postwar History by Corinna R. Unger (review)

Over the last two decades, the history of international development has become a major topic of interest among international and global historians. These scholars have written extensively on the Cold War era, when the superpowers heartily embraced international development and foreign aid as important foreign policy tools to use in the hopes of winning hearts and minds and bolstering strategic ties to the so-called developing countries or Third World. Corinna Unger has contributed greatly to this wave of scholarship. She published a series of influential articles and manuscripts in English and German and edited and co-edited multiple volumes and journal special issues on topics such as the history of U.S. philanthropy overseas, rural development (with a focus on South Asia), European development aid, and Cold War development politics. To this long list she now adds another impressive feat: an excellent single-volume synthetic history of international development. Her book nicely encapsulates many of the major themes and findings from the recent scholarship on international development history.

International Development: A Postwar History focuses on international development politics, ideas, and policy. While noting the range of meanings affixed to development across time and space, Unger demonstrates that development became a major global pursuit during the mid-twentieth century amid the interconnected processes of postwar reconstruction, decolonization, and the surge of Cold War tensions. Leaders across the world viewed development “as a promise of a better future, a tool of liberation, and a vision of a feasible alternative to the past and present” (p. 9). Much of her book focuses on the “discursive and ideational levels of development thinking,” but she is also attuned to the importance of the “practical and material aspects of development” (p. 11). Unger argues that for Communists, liberal capitalists, and postcolonial revolutionaries alike, development offered hope “that poverty could be overcome with constructive means, that individual nations or societies could be designed in better, improved ways, and that regional inequalities could be leveled” (p. 8). Defying any single line of argumentation, her book introduces readers to the deep origins of postwar development thought and practice, the key institutions and actors in development policy, and the range of development forms (community development, rural development, modernization theory, sustainability) that captivated thinkers and leaders worldwide.

Unger has expertly woven the latest published scholarship in English, German, and Italian into a richly detailed summary of how and why countries adopted international development as a tool of policy, the international politics of development aid, and the important consequences of development intervention. The strongest parts of the book show how countries with vastly different ideologies nonetheless embraced similar modes of foreign aid and developmental planning to achieve similar political ends. An effective exploration of U.S., West European, and Soviet foreign aid policies during the early Cold War reveals how aid was always connected “to larger political, economic, ideological, and strategic positions” (pp. 97–98). In this discussion and similar comparisons throughout the book, Unger successfully balances reasoned generalization with illustrative case studies of particular development policies, projects, and thinkers. Moreover, Unger is especially adept and convincing in drawing out the long intellectual, political, and personal connections between colonial developmentalism in the early twentieth century and the interwar competition between fascist, Communist, and liberal development efforts and the Cold War era. The title of the book in this sense is a misnomer, and for good reason. Unger’s title suggests it is a “postwar” history, but she shows persuasively that 1945 is an often overstated and misused dividing point in the history of international development because so much of postwar development flowered from prewar roots.

As a work of synthetic history that relies on available published sources, the book is necessarily thin on the contemporary era (for which there is little historical scholarship). Unfortunately, this means the post-1991 period receives only brief attention in a short (eight-page) chapter that provides a very general narrative of international politics and intellectual shifts. As a result, major aspects of recent...