This chapter examines the plight of the world’s less developed and postcolonial countries. The colonial history of many of these countries has contributed to their persistent underdevelopment and the political, economic, and social problems associated with it. The chapter begins by examining the colonial experience of these countries, followed by their experiences with decolonization. It then turns to the controversies surrounding nation building, modernization, and nonalignment. It concludes with an analysis of China’s economic liberalization and development.
1. Europe’s empires and the developing world
Europe’s early contact with other regions was infrequent and limited to acquiring luxury goods from Asia, often from Arab merchants.
a) The conquerors
- Europe’s expansion outward began with voyages of discovery in the 15th and 16th centuries. Spain and Portugal were first, followed later by the Dutch, British, and French.
- Early empires were initially built by trading companies. The European states gradually established colonies and built military and economic institutions to protect them.
- In the nineteenth century, there was renewed competition for new colonies in Asia and Africa, fueled by industrialization, nationalism in Europe, the need for raw materials and investment opportunities, a desire for prestige, and a strong belief in European superiority.
b) Imperialism in the Americas
- The first wave of European expansion occurred in the Americas.
- Latin America was colonized by Spain and Portugal. Portugal’s initial trading empire included Brazil, East and West Africa, and the Malay Peninsula. Spain controlled all of Central and South America (except Brazil), Mexico, and much of North America.
- In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the British and French competed over North American territories, in an extension of their contest in Europe.
c) Imperialism in Asia
- China and India became the key elements in Europe’s Asian empires in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
- Japan was opened to the West in 1853 and soon began to colonize China and Korea.
d) Imperialism in Africa
- Beginning in the late nineteenth century, there was a scramble for African colonies such that only one-tenth of the continent remained independent (Ethiopia and Liberia). These colonies, too, were initially established by trading companies.
- The most successful colonizers were Britain and France.
- The boundaries of Africa’s colonies were imposed by Europeans and rarely corresponded with ethnic or tribal divisions.
- The Belgian Congo was the most blatant example of European exploitation of people and resources in the African colonies.
2. Decolonization
The world wars weakened Europe and spread the idea of national self-determination, both factors in the unraveling of Europe’s colonial empires. Decolonization occurred in two stages: first in Latin America and then in Asia and Africa.
a) Latin America
- Decolonization took place in only two decades in Latin America.
- Toward the end of the process, the US issued the Monroe Doctrine to prevent Spain from attempting to retake its American colonies.
b) India: From Colony to Great Power
India was initially penetrated by the British East India Company but came under London’s direct control after the Sepoy mutiny.
- Gandhi and India’s Decolonization Movement
Mahatma Gandhi helped found India’s Congress Party, and his philosophy of nonviolence guided India’s independence movement.
- From World War II to Independence and Partition
India’s independence movement gathered speed during and after World War II, climaxing in 1947 with the bloody partition and independence of Pakistan and India.
- The Kashmir Dispute
- Although dominantly Muslim, most of Kashmir became part of India following partition and the first India-Pakistan war.
- Following two additional India-Pakistan wars, the Kashmir problem remains one of the most dangerous issues in global politics.
c) Indonesia
- Indonesia gained independence from the Dutch between 1945 and 1948.
- Indonesia’s first post-independence leader, Achmed Sukarno, gradually became more authoritarian. His dictatorship ended when a 1965 communist coup attempt brought the military to power, a situation that persisted until after Asia’s 1997-98 economic crisis.
- After 1998, Indonesia evolved into a democracy.
d) Decolonization in Africa
Decolonization in Africa was rapid and largely peaceful, creating state boundaries that separated tribal groups or enclosing several such groups in the new states.
- British Africa
- Decolonization in British Africa was almost entirely peaceful with the exception of Mau Mau violence in Kenya.
- However, significant violence took place before the white settler governments in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia were forced to surrender power to African majorities.
- French Africa
The major exception to a peaceful transition in French Africa was the 1954 Algerian Revolution that saw the end of France’s Fourth Republic, and the beginning of the Charles de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic.
- Portuguese Africa
Portugal was the last European country to surrender its African empire and was involved in lengthy struggles in Angola and Mozambique that continued after the Portuguese departure.
3. The politics of nation-building and economic development
Post-independence leaders sought to build European-type nations but largely failed to do so, and many African countries came under the control of single mass parties with charismatic leaders who followed socialist political and economic principles.
a) Modernization theory
- Theorists initially propounded a linear approach to modernization that encouraged LDCs to become more like the developed West.
- Later modernization theorists were critical of Western neocolonialism or viewed modernization as a process of expanding individual horizons and self-identity.
b) World System Theory
Proponents of this Marxian theory view the world as divided between core and periphery in which the former exploits the latter.
c) Dépendencia Theory
This approach, popular in the 1960s and 1970s in Latin America, advocated economic self-sufficiency as a means of escaping exploitation by rich countries.
d) Nonalignment
During the Cold War, many LDCs tried to follow a policy of remaining outside the two superpower blocs while acquiring economic and military aid from both.
4. An economic giant awakens
In recent years, a number of LDCs have undergone dramatic economic development, China and India in particular. This transformation is largely a product of market-based economic policies.
a) China joins the global economy
China’s membership in the World Trade Organization marked its entry into the global economy.
b) China from Mao to Deng
- Mao Zedong’s economic policies, designed to produce a uniquely Chinese form of socialism, were failures that produced economic turmoil in China.
- His successor, Deng Xiaoping, unleashed market reforms that promoted unprecedented economic growth, but he refused to allow political reform.
c) China’s economy today
China’s rapid economic growth poses political and economic challenges including privatization of state-run businesses, migrant workers, corrupt officials, and uneven economic development.
d) Chinese-American trade relations
U.S.-Chinese interdependence has thickened as trade has increased. Concerns about Chinese influence over the American economy is exaggerated and both countries would suffer from a loosening of these ties.
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Q1 What were the first stages of Europe's expansion into the developing world?
A1 Spain and Portugal were the first European states to build overseas empires. Following explorers like Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama, Spanish and Portuguese adventurers conquered indigenous empires in Mexico and Peru and along the coasts of West Africa and India. By the Treaty of Tordesillas, Portugal was awarded Brazil and Spain obtained sovereignty of much of the rest of South America. The Spaniards and Portuguese were followed a century later by the Dutch who established trading companies and penetrated the East Indies (Indonesia) and North America and expelled the Portuguese from Ceylon and Malaya. While retaining some of their Asian possession, the Dutch were then expelled from North America by the British, who then began to compete intensively with the French for control of North America. Like the Dutch, the British and French made use of autonomous trading companies, the most important of which, the British East India Company, extended British control into India. Britain established colonies in North America and Canada, expelling the French after a series of wars in the 18th century. The British themselves lost much of their North American empire a few decades later when their American colonies successfully rebelled.
Q2 How did the second wave of European imperialism unfold?
A2 A second wave of European imperialism began in the 19th century, resulting in the carving up of virtually all of Africa, despite the end of the slave trade. Contributing to the new imperialism were rising European nationalism, industrialization and the need for new markets, a desire for naval bases, coaling stations, raw materials and opportunities for capital investment, a desire to export "surplus" population, missionary zeal to spread Christianity, and a belief in the superiority of European civilization. In time, British control in Africa extended southward from Egypt to South Africa. France unsuccessfully sought a belt of territories extended across the continent from east to west but did control a vast region called French Equatorial Africa as well as most of the North African coast. The Belgians took the Congo, and Germany seized a number of territories in Africa including Tanganyika, as well planting colonies in China and taking control of a number of islands in the Pacific. Italy was the last European country to descend on Africa, unsuccessfully trying to conquer Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and seizing Libya from the Ottoman Turks. An American empire was established after the Spanish-American War of 1898, and American naval vessels were instrumental in opening Japan to Western trade. Thereafter, Japan, too, sought an empire by extending its influence into China and Korea. Elsewhere in Asia, France extended its empire into Indochina, and Britain took Burma, Malaya, and Singapore. All the major European powers including Germany, as well as the United States and Japan, penetrated China. And in India imperial control was shifted from the East India Company to Britain itself after the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857.
Q3 What were the key steps in the process of decolonization?
A3 Decolonization in Asia and Africa took place quickly as the norm of national self-determination spread much in the way that constructivists describe norm diffusion. In 1931, Britain's "White Dominions" (Canada, Australia and New Zealand) were granted independence. Unrest in Latin America grew in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and the rapid decline of Spanish and Portuguese power ended in the independence of most of South America by the 1820s. This event was ratified by America's Monroe Doctrine (1823), backed by the British navy, which forbid a return of European influence to the Western Hemisphere. Agitation for Indian independence grew in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as nationalists like Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru built the Congress Party. Influenced by Thoreau and Tolstoy, Gandhi pioneered the strategy of non-violent civil resistance. The world wars greatly weakened the Europeans and speeded up decolonization, especially in Asia. In areas occupied by Japan in World War II such as Indochina, Burma and Indonesia, the mystique of European colonial rule was destroyed, and efforts by the French, British and Dutch to retain their colonies ended quickly. The Indian subcontinent, which had been the scene of nationalist agitation during the war, was partitioned into a Muslim state (Pakistan) and a largely Hindu state (India), and both were given independence in 1947. However, the partition was accompanied by great violence and bloodshed, and gave birth to one of the world's most intractable issues, the dispute over Kashmir, a largely Muslim area that at the time of independence was ruled by a Hindu prince. In Africa, decolonization gained speed in the 1960s after British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's "Winds of Change" speech. The independence of Britain's colonies was largely peaceful, but France unsuccessfully sought to hold Algeria in a bloody colonial conflict (as well as Indochina in Asia). Portugal, too, tried unsuccessfully to use military force to retain its colonies in Angola and Mozambique. And when the Belgians left the Congo in 1960, chaos followed. In South Africa, which had been conquered by British during the Boer War, independence in 1948 produced a minority white government that imposed a policy of apartheid (racial separation) on the majority blacks until it was forced to surrender control to a government headed by Nelson Mandela.
Q4 What theories have sought to explain economic development?
A4 Many of Europe's former colonial territories remained impoverished even after independence, and indigenous leaders sought to build prosperous nation-states similar to those in Europe. As a result, a number of theoretical perspectives emerged to explain how these societies could develop economically and politically. One of the first of these was modernization theory. Two were influenced by Marxism and argued that the developing world remained dependent upon the wealthy capitalist world. Modernizations theorists saw a linear progression for traditional societies to modernity through the process of industrialization. Its several variants saw the developing world passing through stages during which they became increasingly like the modern states they were trying to emulate. The idea of modernization went beyond economic and technological change to incorporate changes in political culture—beliefs, identities, and values of a society—necessary for ideology and superstition to be replaced by rational and pragmatic problem-solving. However, modernization theory was criticized because it assumed that Western beliefs and practices were superior and were models to be copied by the less-developed world. More recently, British sociologist Anthony Giddens has pointed to the need for individuals in less-developed countries to break free from long-standing customs that determine their role in society. Early post-colonial leaders sought to emulate the central planning and government control characteristic of socialist societies, even while remaining nonaligned in order to avoid becoming ensnared in the Cold War, but their efforts proved disappointing. Their efforts were accompanied by neo-Marxist theories, notably, world-system and dépendencia theories that contended that even though formal colonialism had ended less-developed countries were still locked in a neocolonial relationship with the capitalist West. World-system theory took a historical system-level perspective, arguing that that a wealthy "core" of states had evolved that exploited the poor "periphery" that exported raw material by unfair terms of trade. Making similar claims about unfair terms of trade, dépendencia theory proved popular in Latin America where it encouraged a generation of leaders to follow protectionist policies that would promote economic self-sufficiency. However, these policies largely failed owing to an absence of foreign capital necessary to build industries.
Q5 How did China become an economic superpower?
A5 Both India and China, the two most populous countries in the world, have experienced dramatic economic growth in recent decades. The Chinese case is especially important as that country is likely to have the largest economy in the world in the foreseeable future. The death of Mao Zedong and the rise of Deng Xiaoping in China witnessed a transition from the radical socialist but disastrous economic policies of Mao to an increasing capitalist economic orientation. Deng introduced material incentives and private property and encouraged China to join the world economy, foster export industries, turn its back on Mao's policy of self-sufficiency. To this end, China joined the World Trade Organization in December 2001. Deng's policies and those of this successors encouraged entrepreneurship, foreign investment, and market reforms that reward profitable enterprises and allow unprofitable ones to fail. China's economic growth continues to soar as a result of enormous foreign investment and growing exports, but growth has been uneven, with rural China seeing far fewer benefits than coastal cities. One unanswered question is whether single-party political rule can continue in a society with an open economic system. Another is whether China can cope with the strains posed by uneven development and resulting unrest in rural areas. US-Chinese economic interdependence has grown to the point where China depends heavily on its ability to export to the United States while the US relies on China to purchase American securities that allow Washington to finance its enormous deficits. Were China to sell those securities and shift its monetary holdings from US dollars to some other hard currency, the result would be economic hardship in both countries. |
