Global Development: A Cold War History

by Sara Lorenzini

In the Cold War, "development" was a catchphrase that came to signify progress, modernity, and economic growth. Development aid was closely aligned with the security concerns of the great powers, for whom infrastructure and development projects were ideological tools for conquering hearts and minds around the globe, from Europe and Africa to Asia and Latin America. In this sweeping and incisive book, Sara Lorenzini provides a global history of development, drawing on a wealth of archival evidence to offer a panoramic and multifaceted portrait of a Cold War phenomenon that transformed the modern world.

Taking readers from the aftermath of the Second World War to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, Lorenzini shows how development projects altered local realities, transnational interactions, and even ideas about development itself. She shines new light on the international organizations behind these projects—examining their strategies and priorities and assessing the actual results on the ground—and she also gives voice to the recipients of development aid. Lorenzini shows how the Cold War shaped the global ambitions of development on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and how international organizations promoted an unrealistically harmonious vision of development that did not reflect local and international differences.

An unparalleled journey into the political, intellectual, and economic history of the twentieth century, this book presents a global perspective on Cold War development, demonstrating how its impacts are still being felt today.

Genres: History, Economics

293 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 2019

Reviews

[Nils · Rating 5 out of 5]

For many years, when I edited the journal Humanity, I wondered to myself whether it was possible to write a truly comprehensive history of global development. My basic answer was No: it's just too vast and variegated a topic, the archives are too enormous and multilingual, the boundaries too undefined. It would need to combined an intellectual history, economic history, political history, gender history, business history, international history, social history, and cultural history. It would need to draw on sources from the United States, Britain, France, India, Russia, China, as well as myriad sites in Latin America and Africa -- many of which are probably unavailable. A fully synthesized and integrated global history of development would entail an historical Gesamtkunstwerk of the wildest sort.

Given this impossibility, Sara Lorenzini's Global Development: A Cold War History makes about as good a go at as we are likely to get for some time, admirably synthesizing the secondary literature on the history of development history, a subfield that has exploded over the last two decades. Lorenzini structures the book around three main arguments: 1. The Cold War fundamentally shapes global aspirations and ideologies of development. 2. Even though development projects were usually framed in global terms, they were distinctly national, state-centric projects. 3. While development institutions tried to create a universal and homogenous concept, they ultimately failed in the face of the pessimisms of the 1970s concerning technology and Malthusian limits to growth.

Methodologically, Lorenzini's approach to write what she calls a "plural history" by which she means that "the global history of development" was "made up of projects with worldwide aspirations but clearly framed for national purposes and within regional dimensions." The basic challenge was that every aspect of development efforts, from the specific local project, to the grand conceptual schemas, always have been designed to solve multiple challenges at once -- whether it was addressing inequality, poverty, malnutrition, lack of economic growth, or what Lorenzini rightly describes as the pervasive "security nexus," e.g. the idea that development would help alleviate local or regional security threats, be that Communism during the Cold War, or more recently Islamic extremism. (For countries in the metropolitan north, local security issues were always seen as threatening to irrupt into their own domestic security concerns.) In other words, her solution to the problem of how to write a global history of development is to focus on the contradictory aspects of the different projects lumped into that rubric -- the competing definitions of development between the capitalist West and the communist East, between the Global North and the Global South, between donors and recipients, between national governments and international financial institutions, and so on.

Still, there are trajectories in the overall history of development that she underplays. For example, the definition of development, while continuously contested over time, has as a whole undergone a steady broadening from the colonial period (when it focused at first just on the development of exploitable resources, before eventually including "the well-being of the natives"), to the early postwar period (when the first priority was "reconstruction" which then morphed into "economic growth" as decolonization accelerated), to the high modernist period of the 1950s-60s (when increasing the capacity of the postcolonial state became seen as a crucial objective, and foreign aid reached its greatest vogue), to the drift and disillusion of the 1970s (when the Basic Needs of the poor became the primary focus of the World Bank, while the G-77 emphasized the importance of reducing inequality between nations, and environmental concerns became a bone of contention), to the 1980s and 1990s (when "human development," centered on education and health outcomes, as well as "sustainability" came into sharper focus as developmental goals). In each case, the new goals were additive to the previous goals, rather than replacing the prior ones. In short, the equation that development practitioners were trying to balance has become continuously more complex. One simple measure of this continuous scope creep has been the steady expansion of the number and variety of "development indicators" that the World Bank has issued in its annual flagship World Development Report. With so many competing objectives, no wonder it's debatable whether development as a global or local project has been a "success."

Global Development is primarily an account of the evolving doctrines of development emanating from various points across the globe: the evolving and competing statements by intellectuals and politicians concerning objectives, desires, principles, priorities, and measures. It touches only in passing on specific, on the ground development projects, and pays no attention whatsoever to the quotidian experience of development of the poor people who have been the recipients or subjects of the global development enterprise. This is not a criticism per se -- any history inevitably focuses on some dimensions of the total historical historical complex and not on others. But it is to underscore that a "total history" of global development continues to await its Braudel.

One point that is somewhat contestable about the framing of the book is whether a "Cold War history" is the right way to think about the global project of development. Indeed, her book quite rightly begins in the first half of the 20th century, long before the Cold War, when colonial powers first began to speak of development. And the era of development has now carried on for thirty years since the end of the Cold War; indeed, by the next decade, the history of development since the Cold War will have lasted longer than the Cold War itself did (assuming we take the Cold War to run from the late 1940s to the late 1980s). Given the many continuities of development practice and personal across the two caesurae marking the beginning and end of the Cold War, one must wonder whether the Cold War framing is the most useful one for the understanding the global project.

In particular, the rise of China seems all but certain to forth a dramatic rethinking of the global history of development, in ways Lorenzini touches on only in passing. Three points in particular stand out concerning the significance of China's rise for framing the overall global history of development. The first is that of all the poverty reduction and North/South rebalancing that has taken place over the last three decades, the lion's share is due to China's successful industrialization and creation of a middle class. Some five hundred million former Chinese peasants have moved from the countryside into cities, with the quality of nutrition, education and health care have improved dramatically, almost to OECD levels. Second, all of this improvement has taken place entirely outside the Western developmental matrix - virtually none of it is due to the effects of foreign aid or the transmission of best practices (though some of this growth is a result of technology transfers from the West, albeit much of that taking the form of intellectual property theft). Third, China's great economic growth, in particular when compared to the tepid growth rates in the West since the 2007-8 Global Financial Crisis, has increasingly been seen as a "model" that others can follow. As former the former lead economist in the World Bank's research department Branko Milanovic's new book Capitalism Alone has argued, we once again, as during the Cold War, find ourselves in a world with competing developmental models, with the West's tottering "liberal meritocratic" form of capitalism arrayed against the "political capitalism," of which China is the emblematic case.

[Oliver Kim]

Helpful summary of the Cold War history of global development, which in this case largely means aid from industrialized countries to poor ones. I learned a fair amount about the Soviet side of things, which is hardly ever covered, and about the building of the Tazara Railway, which is surely one of the great dramas of development history. But it's a relatively slim book (~180 pages), and such a broad subject probably deserves a longer treatment, or perhaps a more specific focus. I would pay good money for a book just about the intellectual history of development ideas.

[Luke Eure · Rating 3 out of 5]

A well-written book about exactly what it says.

[Lars E. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not quite the history I was looking for but still interesting enough. More on politics of development the the economic practice of development.