[A-List] Imperialism: one size does not fit all shock

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

The road to riches discredited
By Anatol Lieven
Financial Times; Aug 12, 2002

Latin America's economic crisis has intellectual implications which extend
far beyond that continent. It sounds the death-knell of "transitionology",
the belief that by following a simple set of universal rules, countries all
over the world can in a short space of time make the transition to democracy
and the free market. This mantra is now intellectually dead, though it will
doubtless live on in the mouths of politicians, pundits and diplomats. What
we are left with is history, with its many winding paths and lack of final
destinations.

There was always something odd about the degree of belief invested in such
an ideological and teleological framework of analysis. In its main outlines,
transitionology has resembled the modernisation theory of the 1950s and
1960s. Indeed, they were developed in similar circumstances. Modernisation
theory was meant to help the newly independent former colonies of European
powers to develop in a western direction and reject Communism.
Transitionology was meant to do the same for the former Soviet empire.

But by the time the Soviet Union crumbled, the former European colonies had
decades of experience to show that there is nothing inevitable about such
progress, and no universal rules that can bring it about. Of the former
European colonies, many have experienced some development, but only a tiny
handful have joined the developed world. A considerable number in Africa
have experienced not progress but catastrophic decline, with steep falls in
living standards and services, and in some cases the complete collapse of
the state.

Similarly, the former Communist dependencies in central Europe and around
the Baltic have achieved great progress (though this by no means applies to
their entire populations). Other states such as Russia are experiencing
uncertain recoveries from very steep declines, while some, in the Caucasus
and central Asia, have experienced what amounts to radical demodernisation.
None have sunk to African levels, but some are a great deal further from the
developed world than they were in the 1980s. Even Russia and Ukraine stand
no chance of real integration into the west in the foreseeable future.

Latin America is a particularly striking example of the triumph of hope over
experience. Several states have achieved very real progress, and are of
course vastly richer than they were a century ago. But very few indeed have
achieved western standards of living and levels of democracy. Argentina was
probably closer to such a breakthrough a century ago than it is today.
Millions of Mexicans continue to risk their lives by illegal immigration to
the US.

How many times in the course of that century have we heard of one Latin
American country or another instituting a bold economic reform programme and
experiencing an economic miracle? And how many times have we seen that
economy collapse into crisis again as a result of an external economic
shock, mass domestic unrest, or both? How many times have we seen countries
move from dictatorial rule to democracy and back again? How many times has
democracy proved only a facade for an incompetent and greedy oligarchy? For
that matter, how many of these democracies have made a real difference when
it comes to the brutish treatment of the poor by the police, the courts and
the bureaucracy?

Despite all the works on this subject, a general theory of capitalist
development, valid across widely different cultures, remains a distant
dream. There is also no clear-cut or universal relationship between
democracy and development, or for that matter between dictatorship and
development. Arguments derived from central Europe forget that these
societies were already close to the west before being conquered by
Communism, and that after 1989 both democratic and free market reform
derived a unique extra political charge from the nationalist desire to
escape from the hated Russians and to join the west.

In this context, the possibility of European Union and Nato membership has
provided an incentive which also cannot be replicated elsewhere: a clear
badge of having arrived in the west, and one which could be gained only by
genuine and successful reform. The EU accession process has also led to
comparatively large amounts of western aid to central Europe and, more
importantly, aid that has been strictly controlled. We are however unlikely
to be able to encourage reform in Pakistan or Peru by telling them that this
will lead to escape from the Russian empire and to membership of the EU.

Objectively, the centres of successful capitalism remain today what they
were 100 years ago: western Europe, its overseas white colonies and its
immediate European periphery; and Japan. Since 1945, to this group have been
added two former Japanese colonies already developed under Japanese rule -
South Korea and Taiwan - and a handful of international entrepots such as
Singapore.

Some of the south-east Asian states and parts of China may be heading in the
same direction, but they are very far indeed from arriving at stable market
prosperity, let alone stable democracy. And thanks to the cold war, at key
moments parts of east Asia benefited from a uniquely favourable attitude on
the part of the US: not just in terms of massive flows of aid and military
spending, but more importantly the openness of America's markets to their
exports.

This is not to suggest that the free-market reforms of the past decade were
mistaken, and that a swing back to leftwing populism would produce better
results in Latin America or elsewhere. Of course, some of these reforms were
monstrously inequitable in their effects and should be modified; but the
real lesson is bleaker and more tragic.

Latin America over the past century suggests rather the old comparison of
human polities to a sick man on a bed, continually changing his position in
an effort to find relief from his pain, and always finding only a temporary
respite. Nor should this be a matter for smug self-congratulation on the
part of the developed world. No economic or political system is eternal and
100 years from now, this unhappy picture may be true of the west as well.