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Political Modernisation. Modernisation theory and Third World Development. Additional list for those who care to find out more about the subject. Tornquist, Olle (1999) Politics and Development. London. Thousand Oaks. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Part 2 chp 5.
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Political Modernisation Modernisation theory and Third World Development
Additional list for those who care to find out more about the subject • Tornquist, Olle (1999) Politics and Development. London. Thousand Oaks. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Part 2 chp 5. • Leftwich, Adrian (2000) States of Development: On the Primacy of Politics in Development. Cambridge, UK: Polity. • Hulme, D. and Turner, M. (1990) Sociology of Development. • Smith, B. C. (1996) Third World Politics.
Elements of Political Modernisation • There are many perspectives that make up modernisation theory. However, while there are common strands within this perspective, there is no “monolithic structure”. (Hulme & Turner 1990: 39). • In the case of political modernisation, thoughts were cast more in terms that after independence, developing countries should be on the way towards establishing an ideal type European or Western model of democratic state. • Political modernisation reflects the ability to bring about change by way of politics. A research area evolved which looked at political development. This tradition has survived to-date. • Political modernisation is a post WW 2 creation. American led; a project of both academics and policy makers, especially Foreign policy and Aid officials.
Elements cont’d • Political Modernisation has a lot to do with Cold War rivalries and the need to assert American hegemony and win friends in the Third World. Early political scientists borrowed concepts from sociologists and economists. Parsons’ perspective, Weber’s categories of “tradition, prebendal, and ‘legal rational authority’”. Weber’s legal rational authority was to be the basis on which Public Administration in the new states was to be organised.
Foundations of a concept • Decolonisation presented a fertile ground for the transfer of the modernisation ‘ideology’. • Main elements of political modernisation include: a carry over of ideas from European and American scholarship about social change; of which Progressive continuity was an off-shoot.
Main elements and assumptions underlying the concept • Progressive continuity involved two sets of transformations: (1) Increased complexity; and (2) Greater specialisation in human organisation and activity in the social, economic and political spheres. • Mid-C20th political modernisation placed emphasis on two things, (1) universal vrs ascriptive criteria in governance:- i.e. ascribed status is contrasted with achieved status. • (2) Secularisation: The divide between ‘traditional’/(religious) and ‘modern’.
What was political modernisation supposed to be about? • The modernisation project was about political development in the Third World. • It was to involve: the building of nation-states, economic growth, welfare, extended political representation. • It also involved finding answers to ‘how would it be possible to contain radical nationalists and communists’. • How do you manage fledgling democracies most of which were built on less than a decade of political party development? • Political modernisation should have tackled the issue of how do you manage development? If politics is about ‘the authoritative allocation of values’ (Eastern 1953)
Critique • Modernisation tended to see political development as a unilineal progression; the new countries were to borrow from the established institutions in the developed democracies and apply then and look like them. • Is modernisation an end state? Consider the revolution at the House of Lords under Blair’s New Labour from 1999-2001. • The concept of tradition poses many problems. Tradition was seen as an obstacle to development: the tendency was to characterise as traditional anything in developing countries which appears to be an obstacle. • It perceived much of the conflict in developing countries in terms of a clash of tradition and modernity.
Critique • It does not have a tool to handle the resurgence of religion. E.g. Islam in the Middle East and Nigeria. • The crisis of enforcing democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq can be discussed in light of modernisation. • Secularisation by technocratic elites in some Middle Eastern countries has magnified the ideological significance of Islam, especially for the poor and other excluded classes (Smith 1996). In deed, Smith argues that as well as spiritual guidance, Islam is seeking to provide a political framework and an alternative to the materialism and immorality associated with modernisation and secularisation. But there are difficulties here which must be equally examined.
Critique • Ethnic conflict after decolonisation tended to be seen as a conflict between the primordial values of tribe and race and the modern values of nationalism, (when people should think of themselves as individual members of a nation state, rather than as members of some sub-national collectivity such as a linguistic group.
Critique • Modernisation theory has also been charged with ideological conservatism in the way it blames backwardness on the traditions of a people rather than on internal conflicts or external interventions, such as imperialism, and in the way it rules out revolutionary change (Smith 1996). • Some scholars think that Modernisation missed the point in that theorists disregarded evolving subnational politics and concentrated so much on national politics. • It was too eurocentric in its methodologies.
Survival of policy and praxis? • The neo-liberal project and its revisions, especially, the “good governance agenda”. • The concern with political order (Huntington 1968). Third World state formations were seen as being too fragile to accommodate the sort of participation associated with liberal democracy. • Certain conceptualisations of social capital see modernisation as part of the traditions of the people.
