Slicing up ‘development’: Colonialism, political theory, ethics

Abstract

In this paper I argue that ‘development’ was not devised to ‘develop’ the South; it was invented to advance Western development and Western hegemony. What its aficionados fail to grasp is that the failure of ‘development’ is not accidental: colonial mastery of the South was necessary achieve this end. I thus spell out the political theory and ethics driving development and its links with the colonial project. I conclude that, theoretically and practically, development as usual has proved to be disastrous, notwithstanding its limited successes.

Notes

1 Cited in Edward Goldsmith's ‘Development as colonialism’, in Jerry Mander & Edward Goldsmith (eds), The Case Against the Global Economy, San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1996, p 254. Unlike other critics, Goldsmith grasps the logical overlap between colonialism and development.

2 John M Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, ch 10. Hobson's is an incisive, informed critique of the of deep roots of the racism of the ‘civilising mission’.

3 For example, see Vandana Shiva, Stolen Harvest, Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000; and Susan George, How the Other Half Dies, London: Penguin, 1977.

4 See the survey and thoughtful discussion by Des Gasper, The Ethics of Development: From Economism to Human Development, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.

5 Michael Crowder, ‘Whose dream was it anyway? Twenty five years of African independence’, African Affairs, 86 (342), 1978, pp 7 – 24.

6 See Conn Hallinan's fine critique, ‘India: a tale of two worlds’, Foreign Policy In Focus, 10 April 2006.

7 Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents, London: WW Norton, 2002, Preface. Stiglitz was in fact fired from world's foremost ‘development’ agency, the World Bank.

8 Jurgen Habermas, A Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2, Oxford: Polity Press, 1987, pp 355 – 357.

9 Wolfgang Sachs, The Development Dictionary, London: Zed Books, 1992.

10 Vincent Tucker, ‘The myth of development’, in Ronaldo Munck & Denis O'Hearn (eds), Critical Development Theory, London: Zed Books, 1999, pp 1 – 26.

11 Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents, pp 24, 40, 252, passim.

12 See the critical essays in Jonathan Crush (ed), Power of Development, London: Routledge, 1995.

13 Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982, p 213, emphasis added.

14 Amiya Bagchi, ‘The other side of foreign investment by imperial powers: transfer of surplus from colonies', Economic and Political Weekly, 8 June 2002; and Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization.

15 Cornelius Castoriadis, ‘Reflections on “rationality” and “development”’, Thesis Eleven, 10 – 11, 1984 – 85, p 21, original emphases.

16 Ibid, pp 21 – 24.

17 Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, Delhi: Oxford University, 1983, Preface and ch 1.

18 This false Western claim is still very potent. Yet the West's colossal debt to Asia and Africa was well understood by European scholars even then. See the analysis below and the evidence cited especially in footnotes 31 to 44.

19 Castoriadis, ‘Reflections on “rationality” and “development”’, p 18.

20 GWF Hegel, The Philosophy of History, New York: Dover Books, 1956, pp 54, 457, passim.

21 Peter L Berger, The Homeless Mind, New York: Random House, 1973, pp 6, 161, passim.

22 Ivan Illich, Shadow Work, Boston, MA: Marion Boyars, 1981, pp 9, 15.

23 Ashis Nandy, ‘The beautiful expanding future of poverty’, International Studies Review, 4 (2), 2002, pp 107, 115. See also Mahjid Rahnema, ‘Poverty’, in Sachs, The Development Dictionary, pp 158 – 176. In the liberal bourgeois view modest consumption is synonymous with ‘poverty’.

24 Ivan Illich, ‘Needs’, in Sachs, The Development Dictionary, p 94.

25 Rajni Kothari, Poverty, London: Zed Books, 1993, p 170, passim, original emphasis.

26 Ashis Nandy, ‘Revisiting the violence of development’, Development, 47 (1), 2004, pp 8 – 14.

27 Doug J Porter, ‘Scenes from childhood’, in Crush, Power of Development, pp 66 – 67.

28 Kenneth Pomeranz, ‘Empire & “civilizing” missions, past & present’, Daedalus, Spring, 2005, p 41.

29 Cited in Noam Chomsky, Year 501, Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1993, pp 4 – 5; and in André Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998, pp 13 – 14, 278 – 289.

30 Frank, ReOrient, p 277ff, original emphasis.

31 Marshal GS Hodgson, Rethinking World History (ed), Edmund Burke III, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp 68, 50, passim.

32 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol 1, New York: Vintage, 1977, pp 915 – 918, passim.

33 Marx, ibid, p 916, cites this passage by William Howitt, an English Quaker, from his book, Christianity and Colonialism: A Popular History of the Treatment of the Natives by the Europeans in all their Colonies, London, 1938, p 9.

34 Rosa Luxemburg, ‘The historical conditions of accumulation’, in Peter Hudis & Kevin Anderson (eds), The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004, pp 70, 65, passim.

35 Mark Curtis, The Great Deception, London: Pluto Press, 1998, pp 90 – 113 especially; and Curtis, The Web of Deceit, London: Vintage, 2003.

36 Curtis, The Web of Deceit, pp 316 – 333, emphasis added.

37 Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, London: Verso, 2001, Preface, pp 6 – 9, 32 – 40, passim.

38 Paul Bairoch, Economics and World History, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993, pp 88 – 89; Bairoch, very oddly and contrary to the thrust of his own analysis, also asserts that ‘the development of the West was not due to exploitation of the Third World’ (p 97).

39 Bagchi, ‘The other side of foreign investment by imperial powers’, Economic and Political Weekly, 8 June 2002. See also Frank, ReOrient, chs 6 and 7.

40 See Frank, ReOrient, pp 334, 324 – 327 for a summary of the rise of the West.

41 Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization, pp 2 – 3, 21, passim.

42 Peter L Berger, Pyramids of Sacrifice, New York: Anchor Books, 1976, p 9, passim.

43 David Klemm, cited in Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments, Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, pp 22 – 23.

44 Ibid, p 30. See also Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, pp 78 – 79.

45 Corporate and political corruption is rife in the West, but it has been legalised and sanitised as the necessary cost of freedom and free enterprise. See the excellent dissection by Sue Hawley, Exporting Corruption: Privatization, Multinationals and Bribery, June 2000, at http://icap.org; Dennis F Thompson, Ethics in Congress, Washington, DC: 1995, ch 2 and Conclusion; and Barry Hindess, ‘Investigating international anti-corruption’, Third Word Quarterly, 26 (8), 2005, pp 1389 – 1398.

46 CB Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962, pp 3 – 4, 263 – 264.

47 See for instance Ziauddin Sardar, ‘Beyond development: an Islamic perspective’, in Vincent Tucker (ed), Cultural Perspectives on Development, London: Frank Cass, 1997, pp 36 – 55. Sardar's references include leading critics of the mainstream trajectory of development.

48 Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1980, pp 71 – 78.

49 See Patrick Bond, Against Global Apartheid, London: Zed Books, 2003; and Patrick Bond, ‘South Africa's frustrating decade of freedom’, Monthly Review, March 2004, pp 45 – 59.

50 As Mary Beard notes in ‘The dangers of making lists’, Times Literary Supplement, 17 March 2000, p 6, Nussbaum ‘offers a narrowly overconfident, simplistic and ahistorical reading of world culture’. This tendency is evident in many of her pronouncements on India and on the South generally.

51 Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp 247, 292.

52 Mahatma Gandhi, Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, Ahmedabad, India, 1939, pp 53, 55, passim.

53 Anthony Arnove (ed), Iraq Under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War, Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002, esp chs 2 and 3. See also John Mueller & Karl Mueller, ‘Sanctions of mass destruction’, Foreign Affairs, 78 (3), 1999, pp 43 – 53.

54 Nivedita Menon, ‘Universalism without foundations?’, Economy and Society, 31 (1), 2002, pp 152 – 169. In this erudite essay, Menon also criticises Nusbaum's untenable claims about state power, Islam and dowry in India.

55 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, pp 78 – 80, 31 – 32, 36 – 37.

56 Simon Blackburn, Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp 7 – 8, passim.

57 The literature on this issue is substantial. For example, see the essays in Barbara Ehrenreich & Arlie Russell Hochschild (eds), Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, London: Granta Books, 2003.

58 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, p 104.

59 Hannah Arendt, ‘Some questions of moral philosophy’, in Arendt, Responsibility and Judgement, New York: Schocken Books, 2003, pp 50 – 51, passim.

60 Henry Shue, Basic Rights, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980, pp 18 – 19, 65, passim.

61 Kant, Lectures on Ethics, pp 191 – 194, passim.

62 Thomas Pogge, ‘The First United Nations Millennium Development Goal: a cause for celebration?’, Journal of Human Development, 5 (3), 2004, pp 393 – 394.

63 Thomas Pogge, ‘Recognised and violated by international law: the human rights of the global poor’, Leiden Journal of International Law, 18, 2005, p 723, passim.

64 Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002, p 6, passim. See also chs 3 and 8. This is an indispensable, learned analysis of the real reasons behind global poverty and oppression.

65 See Fred Feldman's comparative discussion of Peter Unger's Living High and Letting Die, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996; and Peter Singer's view, in Nous, 32 (1), 1998, pp 138 – 147.

66 Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, pp 2 – 3; and Pogge, ‘World poverty and human rights’, Ethics and International Affairs, 9 (1), 2005, pp 1 – 7, emphasis added.

67 Pogge, ‘Recognised and violated by international law’, pp 722 – 725.

68 Pogge, ‘The First United Nations Millennium Development Goal’, pp 392 – 393.

69 Pogge, ‘World poverty and human rights’, pp 1 – 2.

70 Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained, p 78.

71 Shue, Basic Rights, p 210, fn 17.

72 William Easterly, The White Man's Burden, New York: Penguin Press, 2006, p 285.

73 P Sainath, ‘What exactly is “development”?’, Counterpunch, 20 – 21 May 2006, pp 1 – 3, at www.counterpunch.org.