Economic Development and Democracy: A Debate on Some Problems of the Third World
Heilbroner, Dennis H. Wrong and Richard L.
Robert Heilbroner's essay, "Counterrevolutionary America," is the most intelligent and forceful statement of a point of view that is widely held by writers on economic development in the Third...
...Since 1960 revolutionary national socialist or left-nationalist reformist regimes have been overthrown in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Algeria, Ghana, and Indonesia, and have been discredited —to put it mildly—in Egypt and Syria...
...2. In most nations the tradition of democratic opposition is unknown or thinly held, and the tradition of "strong man" government very widely accepted...
...2 Robert L. Heilbroner, The Great Ascent, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963...
...These difficulties are conceded in passing by Heilbroner, but they fail to receive the attention they deserve because of the initial critical focus on the difficulties apt to be encountered by "mild," democratic governments...
...Not only do the pocketbook interests of American businessmen have a greater influence on government policy there than elsewhere in the world, but the fall-out in domestic politics of victories by Communist or protoCommunist revolutionaries is bound to be far greater...
...He immediately observes that both the gains already achieved as well as future gains risk "being washed out by population growth...
...as well as to non-Communist revolutionary regimes such as Bolivia in the 1950's...
...Only a handful of neoclassical economists disagree...
...They cannot proceed according to the more leisurely timetable of past Western industrialization...
...There is apparently no intrinsic connection at all between economic progress and formal political institutions...
...In the past there have been a variety of paths to modernization: it has been achieved by essentially conservative regimes in Germany and Japan, by postrevolutionary bourgeois democracies in England and France, under a pure bourgeois democracy in the United States, and by Communist dictatorship in Russia...
...Hence it means little to claim, no doubt correctly, that the peasants do not like Communists...
...Maybe Bogue will turn out to be a false prophet, but it is worth recalling that sharp reversals of demographic trends have happened simultaneously before in a number of quite different countries, so there is no reason why sudden mass adoption of family planning resulting in lower birth rate might not occur in large areas of the Third World...
...Unlike Africa, most Asian and Latin-American nations do not confront the immediate necessity of welding together collections of tribal peoples who have often been traditional enemies and have never acknowledged any central political authority...
...There is good reason to believe, he insists, that by the end of the present decade the efforts of government and private agencies promoting family planning will at last pay off and birth rates in India and several other Asian countries will begin unmistakably to decline...
...The absence of rising commercial and entrepreneurial classes resembling the European bourgeoisie, or of any group imbued with an ethos favoring, like the Protestant ethic, hard work and the sacrifice of present material gains for the future, means that the state alone can play the necessary role in today's backward countries...
...functions have succeeded, as Michael Walzer has argued, in de-mystifying the very idea of the state itself...
...But slower population growth will certainly make it easier for any regime committed to modernization to make some progress and will allow a wider margin for retrievable error...
...Only the starting point of the argument involves an economic proposition: namely, that the task of initial capital accumulation in underdeveloped countries requires the holding down for a time Of the I Robert L. Heilbroner, "Counterrevolutionary America," Commentary, Vol...
...The relatively sparsely-settled Soviet Union never faced a population explosion comparable to that of Southeast Asia—a further reason, incidentally, for questioning the necessity of totalitarianism for Russian economic development...
...Since I wrote my original article, another leading American demographer, Frank Notestein, president of the Population Council, has expressed in the October Foreign Affairs qualified optimism over the prospect of new birth control methods spreading in the underdeveloped world and reducing current rates of population growth before the end of the century...
...But the probability of this happening seems to me somewhat greater than the probability of a wave of Communist revolutions in the Third World followed by the rapid achievement of modernization by the revolutionary regimes...
...3. The backward world is handicapped by the deformations of imperialism...
...Russia, to be sure, is a great mystery—is her development due to Communism or to pre-19'13 industrialization...
...See, for example, Dennis H. Wrong, "Population Myths," Corrtnientary, Vol...
...Nonetheless, I would argue (and again I doubt that Wrong would disagree) that strong tendencies must exist for extending and deepening the control of leadership, not only over political and economic life but into social and intellectual life as well...
...So might revolutions led by men like Mao's original cadres...
...Who can have complete confidence in any forecast of something that has never happened before, like the mass adoption of birth control by peasant populations within a decade or two...
...I consider this an entirely possible state of affairs for the next generation...
...Revolutions led by hard-bitten, Moscow-trained Stalinist orgmen might have a chance of successfully using totalitarian methods to impose the drastic surgery of modernization on a recalcitrant peasantry...
...China may indeed have been "profoundly and irreversibly changed," but such change may or may not in the end facilitate the particular kind of "profound and irreversible change" we call modernization...
...It is this kind of change that I believe to be an absolutely necessary condition for devel opment...
...As Wrong points out, my prognosis rests heavily on the urgency of the population program...
...The New Republic of July 8, 1967, reports that a privately distributed newsletter subscribed to by Wall Street insiders suggests that it may very well be in the American national interest to allow the Third World to go Communist...
...Some Western nations also went through a military-expansionist phase in the course of their modernization...
...Heilbroner's denial notwithstanding, the United States has not been consistently anti-revolutionary nor indeed consistently anything except opposed to states that have directly aligned themselves politically and militarily with the Soviet Union or China...
...Actually, the demands of the masses in underdeveloped areas are likely to be too modest rather than excessive from the standpoint of stimulating development...
...The very polycentrism of the Communist world that makes nonsense out of the anti-Communist slogans invoked by Washington to justify the Vietnam war reduces the likelihood that future national Communist regimes will be the ruthless modernizers Heilbroner expects them to be...
...When Heilbroner suggests that the United States is unlikely to allow any nations in the Third World to remain neutral in the Cold War,15 he seems to be taking seriously Dulles's rhetoric of a decade ago—even then the rhetoric did not correspond to American practice...
...My forecast is that if modernization takes place in the backward world (and again I caution that it may not), it will be because of the efforts of revolutionary, and very likely Communist, regimes...
...If they fail, the United States cannot be blamed...
...They are often very useful as a means of performing labor tasks, educating the peasants, and instilling morale...
...2 (May 1967), pp...
...Should not the Soviet Union's enormous losses in World War II be assessed, along with the victims of Stalin's purges and enforced collectivizations, as part of the price of totalitarian Communist modernization...
...Heilbroner"s rejection of the belief or hope that democratic, constitutional governments, preserving and fostering the political liberties of the individual citizen, are capable of achieving economic development is presented in less detail than his reasons for thinking that some form of totalitarian collectivism can do the job...
...One of these is that "democracy" is capable of many guises...
...12 V I have argued that, though the difficulties faced by democratic governments in carrying out economic development are real ones, totalitarian revolutionary regimes also face difficulties peculiar to them that Heilbroner and others tend to slight...
...A second counterargument of Wrong's is that the Western nations have climbed to modernity under various sorts of governments, including a number of democratic (although not always very consultative) ones...
...Writing about Latin America, another demographer, J. Mayone Stycos of Cornell, 10 Donald Bogue, "The End of the Population Explosion," Public Interest, Vol...
...Nation-building can occur under many kinds of regimes...
...43 (November 1964), pp...
...Do I dare mention India and Goa...
...14 Democracy, moreover, may take many different forms: ancient village communal bodies like the old Russian mir and the Indian panchayats can serve as two-way communication channels between modernizing elites and the base of the social structure, giving rise to a kind of "democratic centralism" that is a reality rather than a facade for unilateral dictation by the leadership...
...But "when we look at the positive side of our ledger sheet, we perceive an astonishing fact...
...I agree that none of the existing regimes in the Third World, neither the formal democracies, the collectivist one-party states, nor the military dictatorships, have achieved full modernization...
...Military dictatorships have also replaced shaky democratic civilian governments in Nigeria, the Congo, Greece, and a number of smaller African nations...
...The question then arises as to the relevance of Western (or Japanese post-Meiji) experience to the critical areas of the underdeveloped world...
...The thesis, both in Heilbroner's and other versions, has evoked vigorous objections from liberals and democrats unwilling to accept the necessity and inevitability of the totalitarian trend it postulates...
...even a few military regimes have made considerable progress as in Turkey and Mexico...
...we start by asking what are the difficulties that a totalitarian revolutionary regime is likely to face in carrying out development programs...
...But what if 4 Heilbroner, The Great Ascent, p. 100...
...What is more, I rather doubt that Wrong would disagree with this pessimistic appraisal, although he would no doubt wish to see it qualified...
...The state must be a strong state if it is to initiate successful programs of economic development...
...The extent to which Heilbroner's argument rests on the population explosion is striking, considering that, though there are many exceptions, economists as a rule are more optimistic than demographers in their estimates of the prospects for economic development in backward countries...
...18-20...
...The sceptics about democracy, with all their talk of avoiding ethnocentric evaluations of the institutions of non-Western people, often project the experience of Western democracies into the different social context of backward societies when they contend that Asian and African electorates will use the ballot to advance their short-term interests like voters in the West accustomed to government whose rationalized welfare and service 12 J. Mayone Stycos, Population Control in Latin America, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1967...
...The issue of the timetable for modernization is really the crucial one...
...4 There is an obvious contradiction between the assertion that democracy in the Third World is doomed to be a mere facade manipulated by the traditional ruling classes and the expressed fear that it will result in the mass electorate voting for immediate, "uneconomic" gains in income...
...One cannot be sure...
...Now I am indeed not fully convinced that Donald Bogue is right in predicting the imminent end of the population explosion...
...Clearly, this description is matched most closely by a revolutionary regime which has seized power after mobilizing a sizable segment of the population against the old order or foreign imperialists, or, most probably, a com bination of both...
...But once again I am forced back to choosing between ugly alternatives...
...But his case against democratic government is implicit in much of his argument and has been more fully stated by other writers who share his general outlook...
...However, underdeveloped nations are more likely to purchase the sinews of war from the advanced nations by intensifying their production of staple raw materials—the very condition that is part of the whole syndrome of their economic backwardness...
...Much depends on the personalities of the development leader and his opposition, on the tradition and circumstances of the country, etc...
...a larger number are right-wing, strongly anti-Communist or even protofascist (e.g...
...Far from foreseeing any upsurge of democratic modernizing forces in the Third World, I argued that the present trend was toward the overthrow of both democratic governments and leftauthoritarian regimes by the armed forces...
...It seems to me much more probable that disciplined, authoritarian revolutionaries will be able to seize power under conditions of mass famine and chaos than that they will succeed in overthrowing present governments which are maintaining some degree of order and economic progress, painfully slow though the latter may be...
...7 Ibid., p. 104...
...If they succeed, they will in a decade or two become moderate and "bourgeois" in spirit like the Russians and not only can we live in peace with them but we can engage them in mutually profitable trade...
...Heilbroner's argument, anticipated in his earlier book but stated far more strongly and without qualification in the more recent article, is that the obstacles posed to rapid economic development by traditional values and old established ruling elites are so great that a revolution bringing to power a Communist-type totalitarian dictatorship can alone be expected to overcome them and proceed with the urgent task of modernizing backward societies...
...Admittedly, the bulk of American aid has gone to such "client states" ruled by conservative dictatorships as South Korea, Taiwan, and South Vietnam...
...Revolutionary movements in the Third World are likely to be shaped to a greater extent by national character traits than was the case in past Communist revolutions and such traits have usually been an obstacle—though by no means the only one—to modernization...
...He has done as well with mine...
...A few of these new regimes are national socialist and even pro-Communist in ideological orientation (e.g...
...England and Suez...
...43 (April 1967), pp...
...The masses in the Third World are not going to leap at once into the political arena to make short-sighted and selfish immediate group demands...
...However, if Wrong is merely arguing that the developing elites need not display the worst forms of totalitarianism...
...cit., p. 69...
...Argentina under Peron, and particularly the persistence of Peronist sympathies among the industrial workers long after the dictator's fall from power, are frequently cited as the standard horrible example...
...It is this above all that sets the timetable...
...Do not forget that populations will double in the most impoverished areas by the year 2000...
...Whether he is right or wrong in this belief, he fails fully to confront the prior question of how likely in the near future such movements are to come to power at all and win the chance to show what they can do...
...What about American policy toward the Third World...
...In addition, the enhanced importance of the army makes a military take-over more probable should the revolutionary regime falter...
...None of the three conditions Heilbroner adduces for doubting relevance of past V.Testern experience to the contemporary underdeveloped world was fully present in Russia or Yugoslavia, so their record is scarcely more pertinent to the argument than the successful modernization achieved under democratic auspices by England and the United States...
...Only a militant revolutionary state can make the sharp break with the past and impose the strict totalitarian discipline on a sprawling agrarian society that are needed to begin "the Great Ascent" to the heights of modernization...
...But are Communist countries likely to check population growth...
...The United States has given aid to Communist Yugoslavia...
...f Wrong states that the Communists have so far delivered no more than promises...
...Moreover, the trouble with large defense expenditures is that they tend to become self-perpetuating, not merely because they create vested interests, but because they persuade insecure neighbors to arm themselves and thus make the claim that a large military establishment is necessary for national security...
...in mind the war in Vietnam, but the flimsy American justification for the war rests on the assumption that China is the "real" enemy, not the Viet Cong or Hanoi...
...It is still altogether possible that in China, Mao's "cultural revolution" will be terminated by an army take-over...
...Finally, let us suppose that American policy-makers accept Heilbroner's analysis and become convinced that modernization of the Third World is possible only under Communist or authoritarian left-nationalist auspices...
...Barrington Moore, Jr., observes that military defeat in World War II was part of the price paid by Japan for following a conservative-fascist path to modernization.6 In other words, the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Tokyo fire-bomb raids, and the Pacific islands campaigns must be cast into the balance against the "preventable deaths" from starvation and injustice under the old regime in toting up the costs of Japanese modernization...
...Let me therefore attempt to answer him by restating my position and emphasizing where I think the issue lies between us...
...I do not think so for the following reasons, some mentioned by Wrong and some not: 1. In many states only a revolutionary party will be able to oust the incumbent regimes...
...Thus I hesitate to apply the lessons of the West to the East and South...
...However, these achievements—assuming their reality—at most facilitate economic development rather than constituting development itself...
...Democratic institutions such as parliamentary government, elementary civil liberties and the rule of law, though not—except in the United States—universal suffrage, preceded economic development in the Western bourgeois democracies...
...IV Heilbroner's case for the necessity of totalitarian ruthlessness to achieve modernization rests ultimately on his conviction of the enormous urgency of the problems of the backward countries...
...They will not like any zealous modernizers...
...His main tangible evidence is based on studies in several countries, the most impressive of which was conducted in South Korea, showing that peasant women have in surprising numbers adopted in an exceedingly short space of time such recently developed contraceptive methods as intra-uterine devices and even pills...
...Against these doubts Wrong suggests some counterarguments...
...But is Bogue right...
...4 Even if it were, I would prefer the difficulties of living in a world that was largely Communist in the backward areas and isolationist here in the U.S., to one that threatens to go Communist and that evokes from us the military response of a Vietnam...
...I1 There is little in this analysis so far that is likely to arouse much disagreement...
...It is indeed hard to imagine the United States passively tolerating any anti-American, revolutionary government in this hemisphere...
...Bogue is unable to present decisive evidence supporting his forecast—he claims that the "catching on" of new birth control methods in peasant populations is still too recent to have been statistically recorded...
...As Wrong points out, a Communist government may be ideologically unable to institute birth control...
...13 One might conclude in an even more pessimistic vein than Heilbroner that neither democracy, revolutionary collectivism, nor military rule are capable of achieving modernization and that it is therefore unlikely to take place at all...
...2. Will a revolutionary regime succeed in "breaking through...
...4 If I may be allowed one more footnote, I would also suggest that the temper of revolutionary regimes will be affected to some extent by our own attitudes...
...Or it may just make terrible mistakes...
...3. The changes needed to bring modernization are not only political, but economic, social, intellectual, and even religious...
...Algeria...
...What other force does anyone suggest...
...Certainly one reason for their bellicosity (I do not say the only reason) has been our own intransigent opposition to them...
...The United States accepted, after all, a neutral government in Laos...
...and the U.S...
...Taking off from these premises, I go on to state that leftauthoritarian regimes, very likely, although not necessarily Communist, probably offer the best chance for a breakthrough in the backward areas...
...Their reactions, however, have usually failed to go beyond ringing reaffirmations of democratic and humanitarian values, and expressions of moral outrage at the apparent readiness of so many Western writers to regard violence and repressive government as the unavoidable price of modernization...
...Nor do non-Communist revolutionary elites imbued with aggressive nationalism and anti-Western fervor seem promising candidates to assign high priority to diffusing family planning over building steel mills and armies...
...But American policy has on the whole been shortsightedly opportunistic rather than ideologically consistent, willing to support almost any government, Left or Right, that is not a direct dependency of Russia or China...
...True, the desire for national strength and military glory may powerfully motivate a nation to modernize its capital equipment and thus lay the foundation for eventual increases in productivity that will wipe out mass poverty and improve every citizen's material lot...
...2 (Spring 1967), pp...
...This is of course so...
...But strictly economic considerations are transcended as soon as we ask what groups and agencies in contemporary underdeveloped countries are capable of organizing and directing the economic task of drawing a portion of the peasantry off the land to build capital, and of collecting part of the agricultural produce of the remaining peasants to feed this new nonagricultural labor force...
...If Bogue is right, the timetable may be much extended and the necessity for rapid and radical action accordingly reduced...
...Although a secondary issue, this was ostensibly the main subject of Heilbroner"s essay...
...3. Is there any evidence that the Communists can mount a successful development efort...
...A nation that can send sputniks into outer space is presumably capable of mass-producing shoes and automobiles, although the Soviet Union has yet to confirm this...
...Let us wait 10 or 20 years and see which of us is right...
...If, as Heilbroner argues, greater population growth and density make economic development more urgent in the Third World today than in the West in the last century, then the changed scale of warfare and a more unstable international environment should also be taken into account if militaristic regimes are to be recommended as arch modernizers...
...I am grateful to Dennis Wrong for his thoughtful and carefully argued reply to my article in Commentary and to The Great Ascent...
...This plausibility carries over to the next step in the argument, where it is asserted that a government lacking democratic features will be able to avoid the problems of democracy and meet the requirements of modernization...
...they must take a giant step forward within the next three or four decades or mass famine and internal chaos are sure to be their fate...
...III...
...Will not a slower process of change suffice...
...Democratic institutions and practices, it is held, can only delay the task of nation-building by encouraging all the diverse ethnic, religious, tribal, and linguistic groups that make up the populations of the new states to articulate their distinctive values and interests...
...but is Heilbroner really prepared to give up all hope that the United States and the West in general can have any constructive influence on the economic development of the backward areas...
...To begin with, the inflammatory nationalism, the xenophobia, and the exaltation of the state—which are, according to Heilbroner, invariable ingredients of the "mobilizing appeal" of revolutionary elites— lead to the investment of considerable resources in armaments and the maintenance of large standing armies...
...If any "wave of the future" is discernible in the Third World at the present moment, it is in the direction of military dictatorships rather than Communist revolutions...
...But post-Stalinist Moscow no longer tightly controls the Communist parties in the Third World (or, indeed, anywhere) , and Maoism today has little in common with traditional Marxist-Leninist doctrine...
...Or its ideological fervor, etc., may fall on deaf ears...
...43 (July 1967), pp...
...In short, with the ambiguous exception of the Soviet Union, the Communist promise of rapid industrialization remains no more than a promise...
...8 But by his own admission "it may well be that Cuba has suffered a considerable economic decline" since Castro took power, and "we may not know for many years whether the Chinese peasant is better or worse off than before the revolution...
...If we could have the best of both worlds—the enthusiasm, the dedication, the clear-cut program of the revolutionary, and the tolerance, open-mindedness, and decency of the gradualist—who would not welcome it...
...1. The essential starting point must be whether or not one believes that modernization will take place under the aegis of present governments in most of Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Near East.' I have made it clear that I do not think it will...
...But are they only promises...
...Argentina, Brazil, Greece, Indonesia...
...Finally, aggressive nationalism and militarism may induce nations to seek territorial expansion, causing wars that risk spreading to engulf entire subcontinents, if not the world...
...V. Last, I am not much alarmed over the possibility of my counsel becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy...
...There is no reason why they cannot be trusted to accept the guidance of enlightened modernizing elites that truly consult them and give them a sense of participation in the process...
...But in the end I am interested in making a historical forecast, not in preparing a blueprint for action...
...Such a view may very well spread among those whom C. Wright Mills once called "sophisticated conservatives," and it may become more influential than the anger and frustration at the failure of American capitalism to convert the world that Heilbroner imputes to our leaders...
...Against all the obstacles to development that we have described, economic progress has in fact been taking place, and at a pace which by comparison with the past amazes us with its rapidity...
...The results may be curious indeed...
...but we shall let this pass for the moment...
...and its military adventures...
...Indeed, China's leaders lag behind India's in their awareness of the need for an anti-natalist population policy...
...The Heilbroner thesis might thus ironically help bring about the conditions it claims to deplore in counseling us to resign ourselves to their inevitability...
...That is, it must, in the first instance, possess the power and the will to coerce or buy off traditional elites that resist modernizing measures...
...The case against democracy in Asia and Latin America rests less on the alleged requirements of nation-building than on the contention that democratic governments cannot succeed in breaking the resistance to far-reaching social reform offered by old classes and elites—parasitic landlords, village moneylenders, compradore merchants, corrupt military and bureaucratic cliques, hoary priestly oligarchies...
...In order to win the support of the masses, the argument runs, the state must promote a new ideological creed that will penetrate their minds and hearts, win them away from traditional habits, beliefs and loyalties—"reach and rally them," as he puts it—and induce them to acquiesce in the sacrifices and rigors of the period of capital accumulation...
...But in the main I feel that somehow even Wrong, who so scrupulously avoids the rhetoric of outrage, has failed to come squarely to grips with the contentions on which my own point of view is based...
...But forecasts can become self-fulfilling if those who possess power are persuaded by and act on them...
...The United States will save money in economic aid as the new Communist regimes seek development by sweating their own peasantries whose labor will have to carry the whole burden of capital accumulation...
...living standards of the peasants, who constitute the mass of the population...
...11 Including myself...
...Can we really expect such parties, should they win power, to be as relentlessly future-minded as the puritanical, iron willed Bolsheviks who are the prototypes for our model of totalitarian modernization...
...I am impressed by Edgar Snow's observation in The Other Side of the River that whatever one may think of the Communist effort, there is no doubt that China has been profoundly and irreversibly changed...
...North Vietnam has been involved in wars for over a decade...
...Such in broad outline is Heilbroner's thesis, omitting only his observations on the probable attitude of the United States to revolutionary regimes in the Third World, which I shall discuss very briefly later...
...Heilbroner, "Counterrevolutionary America," p. 34...
...Cuba, a partially modernized country before Castro, has at most established some of the prerequisites for balanced modernization (e.g...
...Moreover, even if population growth slows down, will thedeceleration come in time to avert economic and social crisis...
...This argument has been applied most widely in defense of one-party dictatorships in Africa...
...11-20...
...If this should happen it will not remove entirely the urgency of the need for rapid modernization in the larger, more denselypopulated areas, for even a rate of growth that is half the present one (and this Notestein considers possible) will still be an economic burden...
...61-64...
...If demonstration steel mills and airlines are to be regarded as economically irrational national status symbols, how much more so are jet planes, tanks, and well-drilled armies...
...Also, even after universal suffrage was in effect in the Western democracies, the political organization and mobilization of the lower classes was a long, slow process...
...43 (July 1967), p. 20...
...Hopefully, the absence of rhetoric and polemical flourishes in our exchange will clarify the issues between us...
...IV...
...The populations of the advanced countries, including Japan, have altered their childbearing habits in very short periods of time and without having been exposed to large-scale, state-directed campaigns urging them to do so...
...I am glad Robert Heilbroner finds that I have correctly understood and presented his views...
...milder, democratic government in bringing modernization to the peoples of Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East will be small, if any...
...I shall draw on some of them to flesh out his thesis...
...I forecast as well that the successes of Let me object in passing that armies are not "utter waste" in backward areas...
...Here several points are to be examined: 1. Is such a breakthrough needed...
...Stalin's army purges, his opportunistic foreign policy toward Germany, and his unpopularity with the peasants who first hailed the Nazi invaders as liberators, stemmed from his totalitarian rule and contributed to Russian military defeats in the early stages of the war...
...To refute me you must first show that the news is not as bad as I've reported, that my analysis is mistaken, and this you have failed to do...
...And no other kind will succeed...
...More probably, he has 14 Moskos and Bell, op...
...The pace of economic development has also varied greatly, particularly among smaller nations free from the tensions of international rivalry...
...67-72...
...14 (July—August 1967), pp...
...But that is only a guess...
...6 Barrington Moore, Jr., The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Boston: The Beacon Press, 1966, p. 271...
...Did the author of The Future as History mean by that phrase that it is as futile in the end to reflect on what still might be as it is to mourn over what might have been...
...II...
...He apparently regards such recent events as China's declining prestige in the Third World, the turmoil inside China, the overthrow of left-nationalist "strong men" in Indonesia, Algeria, and Ghana, the misadventures of "Arab socialism," and the repeated failures and defeats of Cuban-sponsored guerrillas in Latin America, as mere eddies in a broad historical current favoring revolutionary authoritarian regimes and movements...
...444-452...
...Such a creed is bound to be intolerant of all dissent and is likely to contain a strong negative component, branding foreigners, in particular the West, as carriers of evil and as actual or potential supporters of oppositionists at home...
...As for China, who knows...
...If this is so, then economic development will have to wait until the regimes that now seem incapable of mounting a successful modernization program are replaced by other regimes...
...If so, I opt for the party of "total" change...
...Heilbroner tells us that for himself he would rather be "an anonymous peasant" in China or Cuba than in India, Peru, or Ecuador...
...I would suggest that without Communism Russia would today be a kind of Brazil, with the extremes of Sao Paolo and the San Francisco Valley...
...The new states must create an overriding sense of national purpose and identity transcending parochial group loyalties if they are to carry out effective economic development programs...
...31-38...
...I am aware that Heilbroner is making a forecast rather than advocating a course of action...
...So writes Robert Heilbroner on page 89 of his book The Great Ascent...
...that a degree of tolerance is compatible with a strong modernization movement...
...Heilbroner reiterates his conviction that left-authoritarian or communist movements "offer the best chance for a breakthrough in the backward areas...
...This brings us back to my initial two premises...
...Wrong emphasizes the destructive side of authoritarianism and its penchant for war.3 There is something to be said for this, although I fear that democracy provides no guarantee of peace...
...I, on the contrary, think that the Viet Cong may be the leaders of the last Communist-directed "war of national liberation" rather than the forerunners of a new revolutionary wave...
...So might revolutions led by orthodox Marxist-Leninists like most of the national Communists of Eastern Europe...
...Are the chances propitious for the emergence of democratic governments as the modernizing forces in these areas...
...Reston's New York Times articles (written after my Commentary piece) provide grist for my mill...
...Yet one must ask, what is the chance for modernization if there is not an all-out revolutionary effort...
...But in the present century technology has made even "conventional" warfare far more destructive than in the past...
...And, as is so often the case in politics, the diagnosis may become self-confirming if America reduces instead of expands its aid to the Third World in expectation of a wave of totalitarian revolutions...
...But I fear that in the existing condition of things we will have to make a far less palatable choice...
...Latin America, however, is obviously the area where Heilbroner's label "Counterrevolutionary America" is most applicable...
...Robert Heilbroner's essay, "Counterrevolutionary America," is the most intelligent and forceful statement of a point of view that is widely held by writers on economic development in the Third World.' Although Heilbroner is an economist, his conclusions rest only to a minor degree on economic expertise...
...Surely, those nations that have followed most closely Heilbroner's prescription—Russia, China, Egypt, Sukarno's Indonesia—have diverted enormous human and material resources from peaceful economic development to military uses...
...The Dominican tragedy reveals the panic which may strike an American Administration if it persuades itself that there is even the slightest possibility of a repetition of the Cuban experience...
...I would reply that promises are better than nothing...
...It is worth reviewing step by step the reasoning by which Heilbroner reaches this conclusion...
...Yet such a conclusion would clearly be unjustified...
...9 Heilbroner, "Counterrevolutionary America," p. 32...
...The next step in Heilbroner's argument, however, goes beyond the limits of general consensus...
...Heilbroner is entitled to reply to such protests—indeed, he has already so replied (see the correspondence columns of the July Commentary5)" don't blame me for being the bearer of bad news...
...If Heilbroner is right that Communist revolutions offer the only hope for modernization and I am right in doubting that there will be many successful revolutions in the near future, then the obvious conclusion is that there may be little or no modernization and that economic deterioration and political fragmentation are likely results...
...Such expenditures are, of course, an utter waste from the standpoint of economic development...
...Heilbroner refers patronizingly to India's failure to control the birth rate, but there is not the slightest evidence that China has had any greater success...
...A democratic multiparty system will perpetuate and even accentuate the fragmentation of their populations...
...I too would prefer a Communist Third World and an isolationist United States to a succession of Vietnams...
...Since democracy runs the risk of promoting anarchic factionalism, permitting privileged classes to retain covert control over the government, and encouraging all groups to seek to use the state to advance their material interests, the thesis possesses an immediate plausibility...
...13 See William McCord, "Armies and Politics: A Problem in the Third World," DISSENT, Vol...
...To be sure, if I could choose to be an intellectual in both nations I would opt for the other side...
...I suspect that only authoritarian regimes can impose them.2 1 I omit the Western and Eastern parts of Africa, where the problems of nationbuilding are now all-important...
...Heilbroner might also reflect that the peasants of India and Peru evidently do not share his view of their prospects, having rejected in large numbers the opportunity to vote for Communist parties in free elections...
...Those who argue this confuse the strong state that is indeed required for economic development with a monolithic, authoritarian state...
...But if Heilbroner is right and Communist revolutions do take place in much of the Third World, can they achieve modernization...
...Economists perceive the economic job to be done and are impressed by the ample technical resources—including their own counsel—available to do it, while demographers, horrified by the floods of additional people indicated by extrapolated population growth rates, insist that without birth control any development program is doomed to founder...
...3 Most of the states in the Third World are far from being genuine nations...
...Democracy is likely to be no more than a facade behind which these groups retain full power, occasionally lulling the masses with token reforms...
...a He praises Cuba for its educational effort, and China for having freed its youth from the bondage of the traditional family system...
...Revolutionary regimes bring a ruthless will and a desire to change "everything...
...Let us concede the case of the Soviet Union, although the entire issue of whether the Bolshevik October revolution as distinct from the February revolution, let alone Stalin"s totalitarian rule, was necessary for Russian economic development remains highly debatable among economists and historians...
...This is certainly true and some measure of "democracy" in a consultative sense (e.g., the Russian soviets, at least in theory) may exist even under dictatorships...
...Would Egyptian national communism differ in any important way from Nasser's regime...
...I am more hopeful than he that some modernization will take place under a variety of political regimes...
...By summarizing the argument as schematically as possible, shorn of Heilbroner's considerable eloquence and richness of allusion, it should be possible to see its main structure and to separate the truths from the assumptions and hypotheses contained in it...
...Essentially, Heilbroner sees the continuing population explosion as imposing the need for an all-out attack on backwardness which must have priority over other values and objectives...
...Modernization is a kind of cultural imperialism that is forced upon the masses...
...to nationalist, pro-Communist and anti-American states such as Ghana under Nkrumah, Algeria, and Egypt...
...I agree that this is an entirely possible outcome for the next generation...
...Communists have won power primarily by their own efforts in only five countries: Russia, Yugoslavia, China, North Vietnam, and Cuba...
...France and Algeria...
...I repeat that if I had to take my chances here and now as an anonymous particle of humanity in China or India or in Cuba or Brazil, I would unhesitatingly choose the Communist side...
...I think the relevance is slight for the following reasons: 1. The population crisis enjoins a much greater degree of haste for the contemporary backward world...
...one that is more closely linked to the initial prerequisites for economic development, holds that the masses are likely to vote themselves welfare state benefits, opting for immediate improvements in their standard of living rather than for capital investment and thus defeating long-range development programs...
...In a recent article in Public Interest,10 Donald Bogue, the University of Chicago demographer, departed from the conventional pessimism of his colleagues, 11 to predict the imminent end of the population explosion in the Third World...
...Would an Algerian revolution create a state markedly different from the Ben Bella and Boumedienne dictatorships...
...But only a tiny few of the particles of humanity are intellectuals...
...Most experts on economic development concede (in the large at least) that the state must assume the entrepreneurial function in the majority of the nations of the Third World and that these nations are therefore likely to adopt some form of collectivism or "state socialism...
...Both in the article and in his earlier book-length essay, The Great Ascent,2 he fully recognizes that economic development necessarily involves massive social and political changes in addition to the changes in the techniques and the organization of production that the term connotes in its narrow sense...
...But, more important, it must command the allegiance of a significant portion of the population...
...Furthermore, I suspect Wrong would too...
...8 Heilbroner in Commentary, Vol...
...Here and there I disagree with him on small points, most of which will emerge in the paragraphs below...
...not until the "infra-structure" of a modern economy has been built will it be possible for the resulting gains in productivity to be widely distributed...
...As to China, I agree with Heilbroner—who knows...
...What cannot, I think, be tolerated is a recognized and potentially powerful opposition party...
...In that case, I should think the probable outcome would be that mentioned at the end of his piece—there will be no modernization, and the future will be one of gradual deterioration, starvation, etc...
...nonrevolutionary regimes seem unable to change even the few things that cry out for it...
...In such circumstances, determined revolutionary movements have their best chance of succeeding...
...5 Commentary, Vol...
...2 And they will be imposed...
...Such deep-seated changes are extraordinarily difficult to achieve under the best of circumstances...
...mass literacy) while undergoing actual economic decline...
...In its exaltation of an ascetic, chiliastic revolutionary brotherhood, Mao's "cultural revolution" appears to be directed against assigning high priority to economic development and the materialism it inevitably brings rather than the reverse...
...43 (July 1967), p. 20...
...1 am certainly far from convinced, and evidently neither is Wrong...
...Why should it be so widely assumed that democracy can only emerge in the Third World after modernization has been carried out by authoritarian governments...
...Perhaps I should point out, although Wrong has been good enough to do so for me, that in making this prediction I am not saying what I wish to have happen, but only what I think will happen, whether I wish it or not...
...The question is, what kinds will they be...
...The essentials of his position are shared by many other writers—indeed, some of them have become virtual commonplaces in discussions of economic development...
...15 Heilbroner in Commentary, Vol...
...A more general argument against democracy in the Third World, 3 For a critique resembling in some respects the present one of prevalent assumptions about modernization in the Third World, see Charles C. Moskos, Jr., and Wendell Bell, "Emerging Nations and Ideologies of American Social Scientists," The American Sociologist, Vol...
...It makes a specifically political case against democracy in the Third World, seeing nation-building as the prime requisite for the strong state that is in turn a prime requisite for economic development...
...It is precisely such a sense of participation that Heilbroner sees as the forte of Communist revolutionaries, but there is no inherent reason why they alone should be capable of instilling it...
...and that a measure of freedom may be functional rather than otherwise, I would not disagree...
...What matters is the outcome after the present power struggle is resolved...
...After all, in four of the five countries where indigenous communist movements have triumphed (Cuba is the one exception), the Communist seizure of power occurred during or immediately after devastating wars and foreign invasions that had disrupted agricultural life and destroyed the control of the previous governments over much of their territories...
...I agree that promises are better than nothing, but Communists are not the only people in the Third World promising modernization...
...But this possibility is not what Heilbroner has in mind: he sees Communist revolutions as a way of averting political and economic collapse rather than as an eventual consequence of collapse...
...2. There has been no period of preparation comparable to the three centuries of European commercialization...
...The doctrinal anti-Malthusianism of Communist ideology imposes a special handicap on Communist countries with regard to birth control...
...But what if birth rates should turn downwards before the "takeoff" point in economic development has been reached...
...Heilbroner is more hopeful —given his assumptions—than I am that there will be successful Communist revolutions...
...and at the base of my argument is my belief that among the existing political forces in the world only Communism is likely to be able to administer such a change...
...Not the entire Third World, but "primarily the crowded land masses and archipelagos of Southeast Asia and the impoverished areas of Central and South America" must look to revolutions led by modernizing elites to rescue them from deepening poverty...
...Military dictatorships, a third and at present the most common type of regime in the Third World, have not been notoriously successful modernizers either...
...11I The Heilbroner thesis outlines certain social prerequisites for economic development and maintains that democratic institutions are bound to present obstacles to fulfilling them...
...also expresses cautious optimism in a recent book reporting his research in Peru and several Caribbean nations...
...What countries have achieved economic development to date as a result of nationalist-communist revolutions...
...The evidence as to Cuba buttresses my feeling that Castro has instituted a genuine and deeply-rooted change...
...The degree to which Communist parties in the Third World base themselves on dissatisfied ethnic, religious, and caste minority groups in their struggle against existing governments has been documented by Donald Zagoria...
Vol. 14 • November 1967 • No. 6
