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What Does Political Development Mean in Africa?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Henry Bienen
Henry Bienen
Affiliation:
Princeton
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Extract

There is disagreement among analysts about political development in Africa. Debate over the meaning of political development is not confined to those concerned with Africa, of course. Once the question, What does political development mean? is reformulated as, What do we mean by political development? there is no dearth of people willing to provide definitions and to free us from value-laden concepts.1 The lack of consensus on definitions is neither more nor less profound among those who study African politics than among those who concentrate their inquiry elsewhere, and the major ingredients of dispute are present in both groups in approximately the same mixture.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , October 1967 , pp. 128 - 141
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1967

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References

1 I do not intend to review this debate here. Many issues of World Politics have included articles that explore the meaning of political development. And as studies of the “developing areas” have become “modernization” studies, that ancient concern to understand modernity once again has become prominent. Much of the discussion has centered on the relationship of political development to modernization. See Huntington, Samuel P., “Political Development and Political Decay,” World Politics, XVII (April 1965), 386–430CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Manfred Halpern, “Toward Further Modernization of the Study of New Nations,” ibid. (October 1964), 157-81; Harold D. Lasswell, “The Policy Sciences of Development,” ibid. (January 1965), 286-309; Gabriel A. Almond, “A Developmental Approach to Political Systems,” ibid., 183–214.

2 For a discussion, see Spiro, Herbert, ed., Africa: The Primacy of Politics (New York 1966)Google Scholar, particularly Spiro's own chapter, “The Primacy of Political Development,” 150–69, and Edouard Bustin's, “The Quest for Political Stability in the Congo: Soldiers, Bureaucrats, and Politicians,” 16–48.

3 See Apter, David E., “Political Religion in the New States,” in Geertz, Clifford, ed., Old Societies and New States (New York 1963), 57–104Google Scholar; Grundy, Kenneth W., “Recent Contributions to the Study of African Political Thought,” World Politics, XVIII (July 1966), 674–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Andrain, Charles, “Democracy and Socialism: Ideologies of African Leaders,” in Apter, David, ed., Ideology and Discontent (New York 1964)Google Scholar.

4 Les damnés de la terre (Paris 1961)Google Scholar. That Zolberg was himself influenced by Fanon can be seen in his “Frantz Fanon: A Gospel for the Damned,” Encounter (November 1966), 56–63.

5 “L'Afrique Est Mai Partie,” Jeune Ajrique, No. 106 (1963), 22–23.

6 Africa: From Independence to Tomorrow (New York 1965)Google Scholar.

7 Politics in West Africa (New York 1965), 63Google Scholar.

8 Ibid., 86. Hapgood also expressed a growing feeling on the part of observers that “the leaders seem to be in the grip of forces stronger than themselves . . .” (p. 77).

9 “Single-Party Systems in West Africa,” American Political Science Review, LV (June 1961), 294–307.

10 Coleman, James S. and Rosberg, Carl Jr., Political Parties and National Integrationin Tropical Africa (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1966), 1–12Google Scholar.

11 Tucker, Robert C., “On Revolutionary Movement Regimes,” in his Soviet Political Mind (New York 1963), 3–19Google Scholar.

12 Apter, David E., The Political Kingdom in Uganda (Princeton 1961), 22–24Google Scholar.

13 Coleman and Rosberg.

14 Apter, Political Kingdom in Uganda.

15 These points are made in my study Tanzania: Party Transformation and EconomicDevelopment (Princeton 1967)Google Scholar.

16 I have made some of these points in “The Ruling Party in the African One-Party State: TANU in Tanzania,” Journal of Commonwealth Political Studies (forthcoming).

17 The aforementioned authors are themselves conscious of these questions. In fact, their typologies are designed to seek out the data that will tell us how much tactical flexibility parties have or how hierarchical their authority is. See, e.g., Apter, Political Kingdom in Uganda. Nonetheless, the typologies are dependent on forma! structures and political rhetoric rather than on hypotheses about party function insofar as they purport to describe concrete African systems.

18 See Deutsch, Karl W., “Social Mobilization and Political Development,” American Political Science Review, LV (September 1961), 492–514Google Scholar.

19 See Easton, David, A Framework for Political Analysis (Englewood Cliffs 1965)Google Scholar.

20 Zolberg makes a contribution when he notes that it can be useful to view concepts like mobilization as concepts that refer to aspects of the political process in given countries rather than as mutually exclusive tendencies.

21 I have dealt with the military as a ruling group in the Introduction and in “Public Order and the Military in Africa: Mutinies in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika,” in Bienen, Henry, ed., The Military Intervenes: A Case Study Approach to Political Change (New York 1967)Google Scholar.

22 See my “The Party and the No-Party State: Tanganyika and the Soviet Union,” Transition, in (March-April 1964), 25–32. The argument for the “no-party state” designation is made in Rotberg, Robert I., “Modern African Studies: Problems and Prospects,” World Politics, XVIII (April 1966), 571Google Scholar; and Wallerstein, Immanuel, “The Decline of the Party in Single-Party African States,” in LaPalombara, Joseph and Weiner, Myron, eds., Political Parties and Political Development (Princeton 1966), 201–16Google Scholar.

23 It might be mentioned that Kilson has explored some of the avenues of research that Zolberg, in his Conclusion, suggests are necessary: (1) a more thorough examination, through field study as well as use of documents, of the period preceding independence; (2) analyses of the “output” of political systems in the legal sphere as well as in the political economy and administrative spheres; (3) moving outward from the study of ideology as now approached to, specifically, concern with cognitive apparatus and, more generally, attention to political culture; (4) a stress on micropolitics, or “government locally”; (5) study of the interplay between traditional societies in any one territory and the relationship between tradition and modernity in contemporary African states; and (6) employment of a “comparative persuasion.”

21 Among the noteworthy exceptions are Apter, David E., “The Role of Traditionalism in the Political Modernization of Ghana and Uganda,” World Politics, XIII (October 1960), 45–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and C. S. Whitaker, Jr., “A Dysrhythmic Process of Political Change,” ibid., XIX (January 1967), 190–217.

25 Among the studies that treat the blending of modern and traditional institutions are Ann Ruth Willner, The Neotraditional Accommodation to Political Independence: The Case of Indonesia, Center of International Studies, Princeton University, Research Monograph No. 26 (Princeton 1966); Lloyd I. Rudolph, “The Modernity of Tradition: Democratic Incarnation of Caste in India,” American Political Science Review, LIX (December 1965), 975–989; and Whitaker.

26 Kilson cites Marx and Weber here. In African studies he could have associated himself with Lucy Mair; cf. her New Nations (Chicago 1963).

27 In his “African Political Change and the Modernization Process,” Journal of Modern African Studies, iv (December 1963), 425–40, Kilson said he would use “political change” instead of “political development” because it was more akin to the rather value-free term “social change.” Moreover, for him the term “political change” better evokes interrelated norms, institutions, and processes (p. 425). Tha t is, it emphasizes, nonpolitical processes more than “political development” does.

28 I understand Zolberg to equate political development with the creation of effective political instruments (p. 93).

29 I have made this point at greater length in “Public Order and the Military in Africa.”

30 “Corruption and Self-interest in Kampala and Nairobi,” Comparative Studies inSociety and History, VIII (January 1966), 200.

31 Banfield, Edward and Wilson, James Q., City Politics (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), 126Google Scholar, cited in Greenstone, 208.

32 I have used Greenstone's formulation to argue a different point; he talks of offf-setting a decline in political capacity resulting from a loss of dedication to the goals of ”good government.”

33 Greenstone, 207.

34 As Huntington argues in “Political Development and Political Decay,” and as he argued in “Political Modernization: America vs. Europe,” World Politics, XVIII (April 1966), 412–13.