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(Posted February 7, 2004)
Notes on Understanding the New World Disorder:
"Societal Transformations and Time - Why Rome (or anything else) wasn't
built in a day"
by
Guntram Werther Ph.D.
Gold Canyon, Arizona
For strategic, political-economic, and humanitarian reasons -
among others - developed nations such as our own have long undertaken to
"develop" poorer and non-democratic societies worldwide. We have been
at "developing Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia for about fifty
years with relatively little to show for it; with, of course, some significant
exceptions such as Chile, Malaysia, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore.
Much of Africa and Latin America is, by many measures, worse off than when we
started while the remainder of the poorer nations have typically not developed
as rapidly as many people hoped. Recall that early 1990's press relating to
NAFTA's projected impacts on Mexico sold a vision of a rapidly modernizing
Mexico within ten years. Today, the majority of Mexicans see NAFTA as a failure.
This negative judgment of "rich country" development efforts is widely
held within the less developed world, with a sizable number of their citizens
thinking that we are doing less than our best on purpose; keeping them
"dependent", as it were.
I have another explanation; we don't usually know how to develop other nations.
We do not know how to solve their ethnic, religious, cultural, political, and
other societal problems. We do not know how to change long-standing norms,
psychological orientations, and goals. Neither does anyone else, with the result
that not much changes very rapidly.
When trying to explain this apparent disconnect between optimistic promise and
apparent reality, I typically ask executives to tell me how long it took to
"develop" the United States, if we begin in 1776 when most Americans
were farmers. Most settle on 1900 -1940 as the period when America became
"developed"; a span of about 120 to 160 years. For Great Britain most
settle on 220 years or so to develop; the period from the beginning of the
"industrial revolution" during the early 1600's to the Victorian era
ca. 1850.
Germany, Japan, Italy, and Russia did it faster, but then they forced
"development" with charmers such as Bismarck, Hitler, authoritarian
Meiji Japan, Mussolini, the Czars, and finally Stalin. Not a nice experience
there.
For the rest of Western Europe, the middle 1700's to the early-1900's seems
about right (with some individual variation) for development to occur. France
had horrible experiences (Napoleon and Vichy among them), while all of Europe
suffered wars, mass migrations, and political-economic turmoils too numerous to
list here.
Did the USA and Britain have any development problems along the way? Ours was
called The Civil War, plus a variety of recessions and depressions, labor riots,
political swings, and mass human migrations thrown in. Great Britain suffered
roughly the same. Among the first countries to do so therefore, we might notice
that 150 years to "develop" is about the norm, and that in no case did
that process go smoothly.
Among several later developing and generally smaller countries - I am thinking
here of Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, South Korea, and Chile (still in progress)
- development came faster at about 30-40 years, but in each case through
authoritarian leadership and "guided" political-economic change;
sometimes very harshly guided change indeed.
If one adds the European -style development of Canada, Australia, and New
Zealand we have pretty much exhausted the developed nations among the 220 or so
countries that now exist. Recapping, the larger "first developers"
took about 150 years with many problems, the second group took perhaps 50 years
using horrid methods, and the mostly smaller recently successful developers took
about 30-40 years with authoritarian "guided" change. Most countries
have not however developed in fifty years of our efforts to do so. Even India
and China have been at this for decades, and are not developed.
What makes us think that we will develop large and complex countries like
Mexico, Iraq, Afghanistan, or anywhere else faster? We do not know how!
Why might this be so? Leaving aside the fact that "development"
generally means shunting aside previously privileged rulers and elites by
replacing them with new rulers and elites (the former often resist this), one
simply cannot economically "develop" any country without
simultaneously and compatibly changing it's legal, political, cultural, and
psychological orientations, among many other things. This is very hard to do.
Additionally, one must educate teachers who can only then educate students (the
works of decades), build infrastructure (ditto), and solve previous problems
such as tribal, ethnic, religious, and other conflicts (good luck).
Then there is the issue of building democracy, which is a common development
goal thought by some to be absolutely necessary. Democracy means regularly
changing leadership through free and fair elections, which in turn involves
regularly trusting your ENEMY with the reins of power.
That is a lot of social trust, and few societies can manage that. Let me be
clear. Sustaining democracy entails regularly trusting your enemy with control
of the military, police, courts, prisons, taxing system, your job prospects and
retirement plan, and all the rest of the machinery of the modern state. That is
a lot of trust, takes generations to build, and is - in my opinion - the
principal reason why "development" is so hard to do.
Unless one can see a way to change these essential dynamics surrounding
development change (and a Nobel Prize surely awaits the person who does so), one
can count on "development" being a typically slow process awash with
difficulty.
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