Growth and Modernisation Theory

Especially in its early stages, the modernisation theory drew on the economic growth theory, which helped provide the rationale for guided intervention in a developing economy by local political elites and foreign donors. The modernisation theory emerged in the climate of the Cold War, conditioned by the strategic concerns of the USA, to counteract the actual and potential influence of the USSR in the Third World.

Indeed, by the early 1960s, the term and approach were widely seen as an alternative to the Marxist account of social development.

Post modernisation theories tend to assume that all societies’ progress in a linear fashion from a traditional state to modernity, with models of development based on historical processes that took place in the industrialised world.

“Historically, modernization is the process of change towards those types of social, economic and political systems that have developed in Western Europe and North America from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth and have then spread to other

European countries and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the South American, Asian and African continents” (Eisenstadt, 1966:1).

Such approaches represented the development of classic structuralist socio-economic theories, in the tradition of Durkheim and Parsons. These theories held that societies naturally progressed from the simple to the advanced, with more complex forms of economic activity necessitating more complex supporting social institutions. It should be noted, however, that the central theoretical concerns of other different sociological traditions, such as those embodied in the works of Marx and of Weber, also dealt with the issue of social progress. Unlike Marx or Weber, however, modernisation theories suggested that the advanced societies of the West represented a desirable end-goal for the developing nations of the Third World.

It should be borne in mind that there was something of an overlap in terms of concepts and perspectives. Also, subsequent versions of the Modernisation Theory in the later 1960s and 1970s were generally not as comprehensive, ambitious or predictive as earlier versions.

Although there are differing and sometimes competing theories and models within the broad modernisation tradition, there are several key features and motifs. There was a strong degree of methodological unit, within the broad positivist tradition:

modernisation theories held that social phenomena could be readily measured and compared against objective yardsticks. The nation state was the unit of analysis. Also, the bulk of modernisation theories saw modernisation as a comprehensive process, with the potential to transform all aspects of the society in question. And probably the majority of modernisation theorists – such as Rostow (1960), Hagan (1962) and Eisenstadt (1966) – saw the causes of Third World poverty and misery as primarily internal to a country, lying in pre-capitalist and pre-industrial institutional structures that are in effect antithetical to development needs and processes. Nonetheless, it was held that, through outside interventions aimed at strengthening physical infrastructure and human capabilities, social progress could be accelerated. A further defining feature of virtually all modernisation theories is the contrasting of traditional and modern.

The modernisation theory and its policy applications came in for significant criticism in the late 1960s, particularly for its assumption that the development experience of Western industrialised societies – the USA, most especially – could be relatively un-problematically applied to Third World countries (Martinussen, 1997:56-72). During the height of the Cold War, when Western powers were willing to dispense generous sums of aid to client states, the Modernisation Theory opened up the possibility of enduring ties through the active dissemination of Western modes of development and governance. Critics charged that this approach was both too optimistic and ethnocentric in its outlook (Martinussen, 1997:56-72).

“Because they assumed that all societies progressed in a linear fashion along the same path toward development, from which fascism and communisms were aberrations, modernisation theorists could not easily accept that the Third World might differ fundamentally from the First” (Rapley, 1996:17).

A major criticism was the inability or reluctance of the modernisation theory to take the global situation fully into account. Obstacles to change were seen as primarily internal, and the advanced industrial societies as the champions of industrial development; it was assumed that the process of modernisation and industrialisation was ineviTable and that newly developing countries had as good a chance or better of industrialising.

Critics also rejected the simplistic and a-historical nature of the traditional/modern dichotomy. They emphasised that categories of modernity and traditionality were not clear-cut, and that the preservation and even reaffirmation of traditionality were often crucial aspects of modernising societies. The growing influence of the dependency theory in the late 1960s and the 1970s contributed to the demise of the modernisation theory, although the assumptions, concepts and imagery remained influential among policy-makers in the OECD and Third World countries. Modernisation approaches were further weakened by policy shifts in the West in the 1980s: the decline of the Soviet Union freed the United States from having to actively bid for influence in the Western World; rather, debt-ridden Third World states were forced into the position of supplicants, adopting neo-liberal macro-economic policies, whilst being denied assistance in modernising government and associated social institutions. Hence, later modernisation or neo-modernisation theory adopted a more reflective and modest