Universal Modernization? Competing Concepts of Development

Modernization has received much attention from historians in recent years. “Modernizers” like Walt Rostow have been studied as technocratic experts willing to employ their expertise to implement a specific political order abroad. In the context of the Cold War, decolonization, and the American ascent to superpower status, modernization, as a scientifically backed version of the “civilizing mission”, took on a global character. Currently, more work is underway that looks at the European colonial heritage that provided the basis for many industrialized nations’ postwar modernization policies and development practices. Whatever its precise historical origins, by the early 1960s modernization had become a constitutive element of most Western nations’ foreign policies and international activities. What united them was a twofold universalist claim: First, that modernization was an inescapable historical process, and second, that this process was similar everywhere, regardless of geographic and cultural differences. This notion mirrored the process of intensified globalization and simultaneously helped to foster it. However, the gospel of modernization was no Western monopoly, and the spread of modern ways not a one-way street toward a liberal capitalist world order. The newly independent nations’ elites had their own visions of how to reach modernity, and many created models that relied on “traditional” elements of their societies’ cultures as well as on Western theories and methods. Those hybrid modernization approaches need to be considered as part of the global epistemic community shaped in forums provided by international organizations; in expert meetings in Rio, London, Delhi, Paris, Nairobi, and Washington; and at the local sites of modernization: villages, industrial locations, farms, schools, city offices, forests. Whatever was universal about modernization was challenged by the sheer mass of divergent perspectives and experiences that existed in those localities. Examples from India will be presented to support this claim.