10 - US Foreign Policy and the End of Development

Summary

For nearly three decades after the end of World War II the US government, across both Republican and Democratic administrations, pursued a foreign aid strategy premised upon the expansion of state capacity to achieve what US scholars, policymakers, and their brethren in industrialized and decolonizing states around the world, called development. The US and other Western governments, philanthropic foundations, multilateral development agencies such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, self-described “development economists,” and even private corporations broadly agreed that strong states could perform functions that markets performed poorly or not at all. States could build infrastructure, create new institutions of governance and administration, train teachers, scientists, engineers, and bureaucrats, modernize armies and agriculture, engage in varieties of economic and social planning, create social capacity among ordinary people, and pursue strategies for industrialization toward a common modernity.