The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization Development and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present

About this book

"Michael E. Latham has provided a very interesting and useful synthesis of the rise and decline (and eventual reappearance) of modernization theory in the United States exploring both its intellectual roots and its deep connections to the countrys foreign policy." Michele Alacevich Technology and Culture After World War II a powerful conviction took hold among American intellectuals and policymakers: that the United States could profoundly accelerate and ultimately direct the development of the decolonizing world serving as a modernizing force around the globe. By accelerating economic growth promoting agricultural expansion and encouraging the rise of enlightened elites they hoped to link development with security preventing revolutions and rapidly creating liberal capitalist states. In The Right Kind of Revolution Michael E. Latham explores the role of modernization and development in U.S. foreign policy from the early Cold War through the present. The modernization project rarely went as its architects anticipated. Nationalist leaders in postcolonial states such as India Ghana and Egypt pursued their own independent visions of development. Attempts to promote technological solutions to development problems also created unintended consequences by increasing inequality damaging the environment and supporting coercive social policies. In countries such as Guatemala South Vietnam and Iran U.S. officials and policymakers turned to modernization as a means of counterinsurgency and control ultimately shoring up dictatorial regimes and exacerbating the very revolutionary dangers they wished to resolve. Those failures contributed to a growing challenge to modernization theory in the late 1960s and 1970s. Since the end of the Cold War the faith in modernization as a panacea has reemerged. The idea of a global New Deal however has been replaced by a neoliberal emphasis on the power of markets to shape developing nations in benevolent ways. U.S. policymakers have continued to insist that history has a clear universal direction but events in Iraq and Afghanistan give the lie to modernizations false hopes and appealing promises.