Agents of Development: Recovering the Agency of the ‘Global South’

Scholarly perspectives that have centred on colonial development or adopted a critical approach that looks at the ways the ‘Third World’ has been produced by the discourses and practices of development since the Second World War have tended to privilege Western perspectives, frequently omitting the voices of actors from post-colonial countries.Footnote ⁴ By restoring agency to populations that were portrayed as mere recipients of development programmes and offering a fresh perspective of pluralising world orders, they question the viability of the centre-periphery lens. The chapter by Christy Thornton in the edited collection The Development Century: A Global History, edited by Stephen J. Macekura and Erez Manela, titled ‘Mexico Has Ideas’, captures this shift well:

Similarly, in Chapter 4, Cyrus Schayegh's account of developmentalism in the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries challenges a view of development as a project of the imperial core, as its history ‘transcends the metropole-colony and Global North-South dyads’.Footnote ⁶

Likewise, in her monograph African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania, Priya Lal brilliantly exemplifies how regional development disparities in post-colonial Tanzania reveal the importance of disaggregating centre and periphery in order to show their unevenness and fuzziness.Footnote ⁷ She argues that the competition for development in Africa was not so much between the Eastern and Western blocs, but rather between the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and China. This perspective foregrounds the relevance of other actors in the global Cold War and shows the potential contribution of the history of development in advancing global and Cold War history. In addition, it shows the critical importance of a longue durée approach to decolonisation, with a view of the subsequent geopolitical shifts, for the advancement of our understanding of the developing world as an agent and maker of its own destiny.

Several of the books not only disclose a plethora of new actors but also a range of forums where the agency of non-Western actors became visible and could have a tangible impact, from the Non-Aligned Movement and the United Nations (UN), to the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the Arab League and the Organisation of African Unity (OAU). In these forums, the language of economic decolonisation and development was spoken both as a matter of national policy and as a programmatic international goal. Crucially, a number of authors expose the multi-layered, non-uniform nature of these developmentalist visions and ideals. They reveal development agendas as context dependent – at times deployed as a source of political legitimacy, at other times presented as a more ambitious challenge to the global economic order. As Nathan J. Citino argues in The Development Century, in the case of Egypt, President Nasser ‘created successive development narratives as a way of establishing his own authority in the face of revolution, decolonization, and contests over Arab leadership’.Footnote ⁸ In the case of Tanzania, on the other hand, as Lal demonstrates, the country borrowed and adapted different models, as its relations with Israel and Yugoslavia directly informed its socialist experiment – the ujamaa villagisation initiative of 1967–75.

However, whilst the monographs uncover the voices and visions of post-colonial, revolutionary, expert elites, they in turn omit other voices, in particular those of women in developing countries (with the notable exception of Lal). Christopher R. W. Dietrich's Oil Revolution: Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization focuses predominantly on male, anti-colonial elites – a privileged ‘new international class’ and ‘an internationalist intelligentsia’ that is easy to assume was detached from the lifestyle and concerns of the rural or less privileged populace in their own countries.Footnote ⁹ Similarly, Jeffrey James Byrne in Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order posits Third Worldism as a mode of elite cooperation. International feminist movements, and particularly socialist, non-aligned and Third World activists and scholars in the 1960s and 1970s, engaged in important critiques of modernisation theory and development practices as failing to integrate women in development programmes, and in overlooking the role of women in developing countries as actors for socio-economic development.Footnote ¹⁰

Decolonisation as Development

As Byrne demonstrates in his rich analysis of the Algerian revolution, state-led developmental models were rooted in a vision of decolonisation as part and parcel of a socio-economic transformation on a global scale. This was underpinned by a radical rethinking of the deep-rooted structural inequalities in the world economy that came to international attention through the Non-Aligned Movement. As the opening quote from the World Conference on Women cited above also shows, development and in this case gender equality were seen as inseparable from the realities of a world economic system that was perceived as inherently asymmetrical.

For his part, Dietrich highlights the important fact that economic inequality was one of the fundamental drivers of decolonisation and rebellion in the ‘Third World’.Footnote ¹¹ He engages with the political, social and legal aspects of what he terms the ‘economic culture of decolonization’, foregrounding oil elites from the Global South, and the ways OPEC assumed a role that went far beyond the sphere of oil politics.Footnote ¹² These oil elites pioneered permanent sovereignty – ‘the sovereign right to control production and prices’ – and unequal exchange and sovereign rights became standard arguments articulated and shared across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.Footnote ¹³ In this case, development was inscribed in an international legal framework, which formed the core of the sovereign rights programme that his book, Oil Revolution, explores.

However, as Byrne shows and as we have argued elsewhere, post-colonial developmental agendas joined in the processes of Western-led economic globalisation, and in that sense the struggle led by the alliance of developing countries was not directed at a radical redefinition of the existing ‘system of transnationalised capitalism’. Instead, it was directed at the redefinition of existing economic relations and hierarchies, which would allow newly independent countries to partake in the international division of labour and economic exchange as equal partners.Footnote ¹⁴ Countries such as Yugoslavia, Algeria, Tanzania and most of those in the non-aligned camp sought to diversify and intensify their international economic exchanges ‘in order to reduce their dependency on any single partner’ – in Algeria's case that was France.Footnote ¹⁵

As we will discuss in more detail in the following section, decolonisation and the rise of the Non-Aligned Movement allowed for a degree of ideological plurality, experimentation and cross-fertilisation of ideas around economic development. In her comparative analysis of early post-colonial development projects in Tanzania and Zambia, Lal shows how local governments adhered to ‘multiple and sometimes conflicting development models’ when seeking to regulate development strategies in the post-colonial context.Footnote ¹⁶ This highlights the existence of a wide array of development ideologies and strategies at play in early post-colonial African socialist countries, which mirrors ‘the plurality of developmental approaches available across the globe’.Footnote ¹⁷ As Jeremy Adelman perceptively notes in the ‘Epilogue’ to The Development Century, ‘Cold War narratives of development not only erased anything developmental about what came before, and what endures after 1989, they reduced the idea of development to policies of assistance from have to have-not countries, the former the superpowers, the latter the basket cases’.Footnote ¹⁸

Like the hybridity of the Algerian revolution, the socialist experiment in villagisation in Tanzania was located within a wider and more fluid spectrum of developmental theory and practice than conventional labels such as ‘developmentalism’ or inherited Cold War ideological binaries allow for. Ujamaa formed part of a larger ideological trend of ‘Third World’ socialism (in which China also featured prominently) and, more particularly, a distinctive transnational repertoire of African socialism. Development programmes in Ghana, Guinea, Mali and Tanzania, among other countries, shared common discursive themes and institutional configurations that tended to generate similar political patterns.Footnote ¹⁹ Lal and Byrne show that, if we take into account the Global South, development was not necessarily synonymous with industrialisation, but rather with nationalisation, land reform and agricultural/rural development. In the case of Tanzania, the Non-Aligned Movement's principle of self-reliant development was strongly echoed in political discourse and present as a policy goal.

The Socialist Alternative

New historiography on the socialist world's path to global integration has compellingly argued for the integration of state socialism into any history of twentieth-century globalisation.Footnote ²⁰ Mapping the extraordinary richness and diversity of economic, diplomatic, political, social and cultural links between East and South, scholars of global socialism have analysed the impact of these entanglements on the post-Second World War global order. In the books under review, too, the history of the socialist (alternative) way to development plays a crucial role.

It is within the context of decolonisation in the early Cold War years that projects of development and international solidarity bourgeoned in developing countries, thanks to the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) and non-aligned support. Cold War geopolitics also combined ideological contests with competition for access to resources, and ongoing processes of decolonisation intensified the volatility of this mix.Footnote ²¹ In that sense, the African, Algerian and Yugoslav brands of socialism were very much products of the ‘bipolar modernity’ that they sought to transcend.Footnote ²²

The 1950s and 1960s saw the rise of bilateral cooperation, trade agreements and economic assistance between the socialist world (the COMECON, but also non-aligned Yugoslavia) and the developing countries. Beyond the exchange of manufactured goods for fuel and raw materials, state socialist regimes established technical cooperation projects, where technical training was delivered to developing countries’ officials and experts through study exchanges as well as projects on the ground. Large engineering initiatives, such as dams and power plants, railroads and large industrialisation schemes, were also carried out through these agreements. While it might seem easy to schematise the Soviet approach to development as following the blueprint of industrialisation carried out in the Soviet Union's own developing backyard (i.e. the Central Asian Republics), Alessandro Iandolo's chapter in The Development Century demonstrates that the Soviet model of development was ‘in dialogue with the global evolution of the idea and policy of development, rather than a separate tradition altogether’.Footnote ²³

Similarly, in The Mecca of Revolution Byrne reveals the intricacies in the relationships between newly independent countries such as Algeria and the Cold War superpowers, playing these tensions in their own favour, or even actively undermining détente and re-intensifying the Cold War for their own purposes.Footnote ²⁴ As Byrne argues, the Algerians cultivated a multitude of foreign influences and, through their close engagement with smaller socialist non-aligned partners such as Yugoslavia, pursued what they saw as more ‘authentic’ forms of socialism – in this case workers’ self-management (autogestion).

These insights – and others drawn from the new field of research on socialist development – emphasise the multifacetedness of development ideas. On the one hand, countries within the COMECON were often advocates of a much less centralised model of development and often competed with each other in the Global South.Footnote ²⁵ On the other hand, post-colonial developing countries were not just recipients of aid but also exerted their leverage in demanding, accepting or rejecting aid.Footnote ²⁶ For example, countries like Algeria and Cuba were simultaneously recipients of Soviet and non-aligned assistance, as well as promoting their own revolutionary agendas in the post-colonial world, with Cuba seeking to gain a central role in the NAM during the 1970s. South–South cooperation was strengthened in this period, and this contributed to the pluralisation of international development.

Afterlives of the Anti-Colonial Development Agenda and the Sustainability Turn

The decade of the 1970s was the high point of the challenge from the South in the form of the ‘New International Economic Order’ (NIEO), the energy crisis following the oil shocks, and the institutionalisation of North–South dialogue through the Brandt Commission. However, the 1970s also ushered in the debt crisis, worsening terms of trade for developing countries, the withering away of global Keynesianism and a shift in development thinking within the United Nations and the World Bank. As Dietrich demonstrates in Oil Revolution, by the end of the 1970s US strategy had managed to effectively shift the focus away from negotiations on the establishment of a New International Economic Order to the contrary concept of sovereign debt.Footnote ²⁷ Proposals for relieving national debt coming out of the US Treasury and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were ‘market-oriented’ and ‘not ideologically neutral’, complained Tanzania's Nyerere.Footnote ²⁸ In addition, the decline of sovereign and state rights was accompanied by the rise of a human rights discourse espoused by the United States.Footnote ²⁹

As Corinna Unger's monograph International Development: A Postwar History notes, the 1970s were the decade when the development order established in the post-war era became an object of criticism. It was not a ‘concerted attack on mainstream development ideas; it was rather a multiplicity of very different, if sometimes overlapping, types of critique with very different suggestions for changes and alternatives’.Footnote ³⁰ Although these criticisms signalled many of the shortcomings of Western-led development, they did not question the growth-orientated principles of development policies. Debates arose as to how much, or how little, countries should provide for international development, particularly as the debt crisis and global recession had an acute impact on the global economy and entailed a significant reduction in development assistance. In addition, the gradual retreat of major players from the Global South, such as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the 1980s, their decision to reduce development commitments due to their own economic upheavals and to redirect trade and economic cooperation towards Europe and the industrialised West signalled the unravelling of ‘Third World’ solidarity.

Nevertheless, the ‘conservative counterrevolution of the 1980s’ does not mean that neoliberal development policies were just a Western invention imposed on the Global South.Footnote ³¹ ‘Governments in Asia and Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s’, as Unger argues, ‘actively embraced market-centred development strategies – not primarily as a reaction to American or World Bank pressures but because it fit their own needs and interests’.Footnote ³² ‘Neoliberalism as a development strategy’ offered many (authoritarian) governments in the Global South a way to solidify legitimacy by fostering economic growth, abandoning industrialisation and thus weakening labour movements. Often explicitly framed as a form of anti-communism, it satisfied emerging entrepreneurial and old capitalist milieus and secured US diplomatic support – particularly in the case of Latin America.

The ‘downward’ parable of international development in the 1970s is often painted in broad brushstrokes as a moment of general disillusionment and fatigue with the development-centred North–South dialogue, a moment where many development ‘alternatives’ ran out of steam and left room for a realignment around market-led development and the withdrawal of the state. That the 1980s and 1990s can be seen as the ‘lost decades’ for development is undeniable, especially if one looks at general development indicators. But we know comparatively little about how market-oriented ‘neoliberal’ reforms in contexts as diverse as Tanzania, Chile, Egypt and Yugoslavia superseded other development ‘alternatives’ – or, indeed, whether they did so at all.Footnote ³³

Perhaps for lack of comparable research on the latter decades of the twentieth century, the post-1970s phase does not attract the same kind of rigorous analysis dedicated to the earlier periods – albeit with some exceptions, as Paul Adler shows in his contribution on the ‘NGO international’ and alternative development in The Development Century.Footnote ³⁴ In the same volume, Timothy Nunan notes that ‘if a global moment of Western state-centric development did end in the mid-1970s, future global histories of development must take seriously the transition from that world to the NGO-centric order that replaced it’.Footnote ³⁵ This new order entailed only an apparent removal of state institutions from the development equation. While NGOs and INGOs gained greater prominence, particularly in developing countries, they rarely operated without concertation with state institutions. The extent to which this shift to NGO-centric development also led to the mushrooming of GONGOs (Government-Organised NGOs) across the world would merit further study.

Over the past few years there has been a renewed interest in the abandoned premises of the 1974 ‘New International Economic Order’. In 2016 the UN published an updated overview of the economic and policy challenges that must be addressed to achieve the aims of the 1974 Declaration on the Establishment of a NIEO. Crucially, the report found that some of the ideas raised at the time – such as South–South cooperation, technology transfer, debt sustainability and the reform of the Bretton Woods institutions in order to give more voice to developing countries – are ‘still highly relevant’ and useful for implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.Footnote ³⁶ While major steps have been taken in the direction of increasing developing countries’ representation within the UN system, especially in light of the sustainability turn of the mid-2010s, the main demand of the NIEO's signatories to significantly rethink global economic structures and address inequalities between the Global North and the Global South still remains unanswered. Civil society and activist groups, such as the global justice movement and the World Social Forum, have taken up some of these demands and voiced their rejection of exploitative and unequal global economic structures. Their ongoing activities, paired with a growing environmentalist movement, are renewing the urgency to address global inequalities.

Towards a Global History of Development

The books reviewed in this article all make significant contributions to advancing the history of development and add nuance to multiple fields of historiographical research, from the history of internationalism and globalisation, to Cold War and global history. They signify an important step in advocating for a truly global approach in the study of development as both an intellectual category and a set of practices. We believe the field could benefit from pushing further some key arguments and approaches.

Firstly, the field could advance further into studying the last two decades of the twentieth as well as the beginning of the twenty-first century. Thanks to their long-term perspective, many of the works analysed here emphasise unconventional chronologies that connect phenomena across points of perceived historical rupture. As Jeremy Adelman puts it, development ‘never goes away as long as global integration, whether under Victorian-era empires or post-1989 globalization, frames interdependent relationships between societies; it gets summoned to redress in some ways what the world economy so unfairly apportions’.Footnote ³⁷ The works under review successfully show the myriad of approaches to development and trace the diverse ways in which actors select or combine them at particular historical junctures. They illustrate multiple examples of state-led and non-state-led development. However, in their attempt to collate these experiences within a single historical narrative encompassing the development phenomenon in the second half of the twentieth century, they tend to reinforce an understanding of international development as characterised by a downward trajectory of internationalism since the zenith of development politics in the 1960s, after which both the United States and the Soviet Union withdrew from state-led development.Footnote ³⁸ This may not tell the whole story.

Secondly, we know from the history of late socialism, as well as from studies on the neoliberal turn of the 1990s, that the Eastern Bloc and the Global South were co-producers of the turn towards market reforms and stability programmes.Footnote ³⁹ The authors examined here foreground the agency and role of developing countries in the shift towards a different understanding of development, including a stronger focus on human development and poverty reduction, as well as a shift from UN- and state-led development agendas to smaller scale, often private- or NGO-led projects. Yet the link between this shift and that of turning towards market-led development is not clarified. Does this reflect back on national and local economic reforms, or vice versa? Were changes in development thinking also accompanied by a shift in elites and expert networks? While the books reviewed here incorporate local, regional, national and international perspectives, the wider field of the history of international development still needs to grapple with the question of whether development is by definition an international/transnational/global phenomenon, or whether it stems from local needs which are then circulated and debated within the international arena. In other words, how do we go about reconciling a top-down with a bottom-up perspective, and how do we establish an approach to the subject that addresses these multiple dimensions of development?

Finally, it remains unclear whether the ‘neoliberal’ or market-oriented shift in international development actually signified a diminished role for the state – and, if so, who the new protagonists of development are. If we are to maintain a truly global perspective, then China's involvement in Africa and South Asia surely signifies a major exception to the ‘withdrawal of the state in development’ argument.Footnote ⁴⁰ As a matter of fact, China already played a crucial role in the interwar period in steering the international community towards understanding the necessity of development in order to obtain aid.Footnote ⁴¹ We believe that further studies could historicise and critically examine this ‘downward’ narrative of internationalism, thus illuminating the shifting role of states and governments in international development since the ‘neoliberal’ turn.