The first in a limited series of micro-essays, looking at the background to six theories of development commonly taught by Geography teachers.

July 1944, the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods. 

The 700 or so delegates at this meeting change the world, it's why they've come. Commenting later, Milton Friedman explained that "only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around." 

The ideas will come from those who've answered the call and assembled in Bretton Woods. They know that if a post-second world war Europe is to be rebuilt, it will need a massive injection of money. Most delegates were confident that it would work. The physical, legal, and social structures were already in place; all it needed was the cash to get itself going.

Or did it. What if it didn't 'get going' as everyone attending Bretton Woods hoped. While the likelihood of failure was low; the consequences would be high. No one country in attendance could afford to take on the risk single-handedly. It was decided that the risk would be shared equally amongst all involved. From the ideas lying around, the most distinguished of British economists, John Maynard Keynes, oversaw the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. 

On the 9th May 1946 , the first loan was issued, US$250million to France for reconstruction. It was followed with loans to the Netherlands, Denmark, and Luxembourg. More was needed. Enter the Marshall Plan. Four years, and over US$20billion dollars of aid later, the European powerhouse was fired up. America took on most of the risk of the Marshall Plan. An economic resuscitation package that deemed cost-effective if it succeeded in its goal of reducing the influence of communist parties in Western Europe. 

As Dambisa Moyo makes clear "the idea that the Marshall Plan is hailed as a success has remained, to a large extent, unquestioned". The institutions and practices established by the Bretton Woods Conference can be considered the birthplace of modern aid regimes and the emergence of the modernist development agenda, built, as it was, on the back of US-multilateralism. The approach had won allies through economic growth in Europe, brought benefit to the donor nation, and challenged the influence of communist parties. The method is not only a product of its place but of its time. It is as much History as it is Geography; the why of where, and when.

With Western Europe on it's way to recovery, and the U.S. looking down the barrel of a cold war scope at the Soviet Union, it's easy to see how talk could have turned to the need for more allies. It’s easy enough to follow the thinking, that if massive scale aid had worked in rebuilding a war-ravaged Europe, it should work elsewhere as well. 

Walt Whitman Rostow and John F. Kennedy

Walt Whitman Rostow was renowned as a staunch anti-communist. Rostow's parents were socialist activists, his father had fled Russia at 18 for New York; "americanising" his name from Rostowsky. It was in 1960, taking a brief professorship at Cambridge University after advising president Johnson on foreign policy and aid, that Walt Whitman Rostow published his model of development. Seeing his Kremlin equivalents refer to the Communist Manifesto in their speeches he felt the need for an American alternative. The title of his book says it all, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto.

Rostow saw the cold war as a global event, criticising colleagues and denouncing them as a racist for not seeing beyond Europe and not considering the role that Africa, Asia, and Latin American had to play. Rostow's plan of modernisation was to raise these third world countries, fast-tracking their industrialisation, and bring them into the fold of the first world. 

The five stages of Rostow's model clearly show his ambition, and an underlying belief in liberal ideas and free markets to make them a reality. 

It's easy to see, from this perspective, why Rostow's model would place his contemporary experience in America as the end goal of his development pathway. Rostow's model is a product of its time and place. It is a recruitment tool for allies in an era of bipolar hegemonic powers. It is as much a tool of third-world recruitment and American propaganda as it is a functioning model of development.

Modernisation theories were the dominant paradigm of social sciences in the 1950s and 1960s, attempting to identify the social and economic variables that lead to development. Development, is, of itself, a contested and debatable concept. Modernisation theories maintain the idea that traditional societies change as they adapt to make use of new technology. 

If we teach this model of development, without understanding its background and why it rose to prominence, we run the risk of presenting traditional lifestyles and cultures less permeated with technology as inferior. The position becomes one that there is only a single pathway to modernity, and modernity is only expressed as mass consumption. 

President Kennedy took on Rostow's advice on board and doubled the flow of aid in his first year in office. It's helpful to bear in mind that they both believed in what they were doing. To their minds, they were liberating people from the threat of communism, lifting nations into prosperity through what Kenndy branded 'the decade of development' and doing so because America had a moral obligation to uphold the Jeffersonian 'Empire of Liberty'.

As a result, aid became the currency of ideology. Turning a country capitalist or communist could be determined by which side of the cold war got there first with their chequebooks. The Soviet Union was as much a staunch supporter and financier of communist revolutionaries as America, Britain and France were of newfound Sons of Liberty. Sadly, for the people of many third-world nations, the quality of leadership and governance was less critical to financial benefactors as allegiance. As Dambisa Moyo, unfortunately, illustrates that whether they were a 'benevolent leader or vicious tyrant, as long as they were onside, what did it matter?'

It's no wonder that Rostow's Model has come under for heavy criticism, it didn't deliver on the promises of development that it made. Critics began to see a different pattern emerging, one of exploitation and neo-colonialism, setting us up neatly to the next model of development, Franks theory of Dependency.

TL;DR

Walt Whitman Rostow wanted to save the world from the threat of Communism, his Model shows how he turned the popular thinking among social scientists in the 1950s into an American foreign policy that drove aid expenditure made possible by the Bretton Woods Conference.

A THOUGHT ON POSITIONALITY

I think about development with the words of Andre Frank, Dambisa Moyo, Jeffrey Sachs, Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar, Milton Friedman, Thomas Piketty, John Maynard Keynes, Frantz Omar Fanon, Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson, Mahmood Mamdani, Deepak Lal, Peter Frankopan, Paul Collier, William Easterly, Jong-Dae Park, Thomas Sowell, and Albert Memmi. 

I also think with what I've made from all the people I've met, the conversations I've had, the countries I've lived in, and the languages I've learnt. We think with what we know. 

Our standpoints on development discourse are constructive. Mine is imperfect. I’m consenting to learn in public. Ancora Imparo.