DEVELOPMENT & DEMOCRACY: SOME PROBLEMS OF THE THIRD WORLD
Wrong, Dennis H. & Heilbroner, Robert L.
I. Dennis H. Wrong ROBERT HEILBRONER'S ESSAY, "Counterrevo lutionary America," is the most intelligent and forceful statement of a point of view that is widely held by writers on economic...
...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...
...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, thus justifying the claim that a large military establishment is necessary for national security...
...not until the "infrastructure" of a modern economy has been built will it be possible for the resulting gains in productivity to be widely distributed...
...Clearly, this description is matched most closely by a revolutionary regime that has seized power after mobilizing a sizable segment of the population against the old order or foreign imperialists, or, most probably, a combination of both...
...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...
...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 consider this an entirely possible state of affairs for the next generation...
...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...
...278 ROBERT L. HEILBRONER AND DENNIS H. WRONG Unlike Africa, most Asian and LatinAmerican 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...
...Their reactions, however, have usually failed to go beyond ringing reaffirmation 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...
...But are Communist countries likely to check population 'growth...
...Wrong states that the Communists have so far delivered no more than promises...
...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...
...It is worth reviewing step by step the reasoning by which Heilbroner reaches this conclusion...
...5. LAST, I AM NOT much alarmed over the possibility of my counsel becoming a selffulfilling prophecy...
...The question then arises as to the relevance of Western (or Japanese post-Meiji) experience to the critical areas of the underdeveloped world...
...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...
...18-20...
...Communists have won power primarily by their own efforts in only five countries: Russia, Yugoslavia, China, North Vietnam, and Cuba...
...The 4 Heilbroner, The Great Ascent, p. 100...
...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 277 capital, and of collecting part of the agricultural produce of the remaining peasants to feed this new nonagricultural labor force...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...I do not think so for the following reasons, some mentioned by Wrong and some not: 1 I omit the Western and Eastern parts of Africa, where the problems of nation-building are now all-important...
...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...
...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...
...A more general argument against democracy in the Third 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 longrange development programs...
...3. TAKING OFF FROM THESE premises, I go on to state that left-authoritarian regimes, very likely, although not necessarily Communist, probably offer the best chance for a breakthrough in the backward areas...
...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...
...To be sure, if I could choose to be an intellectual in both nations I would opt for the other side...
...Hence it means little to claim, no doubt correctly, that the peasants do not like Communists...
...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...
...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...
...2 And they will be imposed...
...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.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...
...11 Including myself...
...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...
...It isthis kind of change that I believe to be an absolutely necessary condition for development...
...So might revolutions led by men like Mao's original cadres...
...I shall draw on some of them to flesh out his thesis...
...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 intrauterine devices and even pills...
...proceed with the urgent task of modernizing backward societies...
...There is no reason why they can14 Moskos and Bell, op...
...2. ARE THE CHANCES PROPITIOUS for the emergence of democratic governments as the modernizing forces in these areas...
...But are they only promises...
...Heilbroner's denial notwithstanding, the United States has not been consistently 'antirevolutionary nor indeed consistently anything except opposed to states that have directly aligned themselves politically and militarily with the Soviet Union or China...
...It is still altogether possible that in China, Mao's "cultural revolution" will be terminated by an army take-over...
...444-452...
...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...
...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...
...DEVELOPMENT & DEMOCRACY 285 One cannot be sure...
...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...
...This, 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...
...As to China, I agree with Heilbroner—who knows?—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...
...Latin America, however, is obviously the area where Heilbroner's label "Counterrevo15 Heilbroner in Commentary, July 1967, p. 20...
...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...
...In such circumstances, determined revolutionary movements have their best chance of succeeding...
...See, for example, Dennis H. Wrong, "Population Myths," Commentary, November 1964, pp...
...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...
...They will not like any zealous modernizers...
...None of the three conditions Heilbroner adduces for doubting the relevance of past Western 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...
...I. 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...
...Much depends on the personalities of the development leader and his opposition, on the tradition and circumstances of the country, etc...
...nonrevolutionary regimes seem unable to change even the few things that cry out for it...
...I forecast as well that the successes of milder, democratic government in bringing modernization to the peoples of Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East will be small, if any...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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, May 1967, pp...
...It is this above all that sets the timetable...
...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...
...The Heilbroner thesis might thus ironically help bring about the conditions it claims to deplore in counseling us to resign ourselves to their inevitability...
...The evidence as to Cuba buttresses my feeling that Castro has instituted a genuine and deeply rooted change...
...I agree that promises are better than nothing, but Communists are not the only people in the Third World promising modernization...
...a larger number are rightwing, strongly anti-Communist, or even protofascist (e.g., Argentina, Brazil, Greece, Indonesia...
...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...
...13 See William McCord, "Armies and Politics: A Problem in the Third World," DISSENT, July— August 1967, pp...
...31-38...
...However, these achievements— assuming their reality—at most facilitate economic development rather than constituting development itself...
...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...
...67-72...
...What is more, I rather doubt that Wrong would disagree with this pessimistic appraisal, although he would no doubt wish to see it qualified...
...England and Suez...
...12 J. Mayone Stycos, Human Fertility in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968...
...III...
...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...
...9 Heilbroner, "Counterrevolutionary America," p. 32...
...I am more hopeful than he that some modernization will take place under a variety of political regimes...
...The issue of the timetable for modernization is really the crucial one...
...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...
...Nation-building can occur under many kinds of regimes...
...Those who argue this confuse the strong state that is indeed required for economic development with a monolithic, authoritarian state...
...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...
...Maybe Bogue will turn out to be a false prophet, but it is 10 Donald Bogue, "The End of the Population Explosion," Public Interest, Spring 1967, pp...
...9 He praises Cuba for its educational effort, and China for having freed its youth from the bondage of the traditional family system...
...Would Egyptian national communism differ in any important way from Nasser's regime...
...Thus I hesitate to apply the lessons of the West to the East and South...
...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...
...When Heilbroner suggests that the United States is unlikely to allow any nations in the Third World to remain neutral in the Cold War, 16 he seems to be taking seriously Dulles's rhetoric of a decade ago--even then the rhetoric did not correspond to American practice...
...Far from foreseeing any upsurge of democratic modernizing forces in the Third World, .1 argued that the present trend was toward the overthrow of both democratic governments and left-authoritarian regimes by the armed forces...
...A Rebuttal by Dennis H. Wrong I AM GLAD Robert Heilbroner finds that I have correctly understood and presented his views...
...286 ROBERT L. HEILBRONER AND DENNIS H. WRONG making a historical forecast, not in preparing a blueprint for action...
...3 Most of the states in the Third World are far from being genuine nations...
...And so 'these sceptics 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 functions have succeeded, as Michael Walzer has argued, in demystifying the very idea of the state itself...
...Some Western nations also went through a military-expansionist phase in the course of their modernization...
...If so, I opt for the party of "total" change...
...2) Will a revolutionary regime succeed in "breaking through...
...If this should happen it will not remove entirely the urgency of the need for rapid modernization in the larger, more densely populated areas, for even a rate of growth that is half the present one (and this Notestein considers possible) will still be an economic burden...
...and that a measure of freedom may be functional rather 'than otherwise, I would not disagree...
...4. 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...
...Furthermore, I suspect Wrong would too...
...Here several points are to be examined: (1) Is such a breakthrough needed...
...DEVELOPMENT & DEMOCRACY 283 lutionary America" is most applicable...
...But what if birth rates should turn downward before the "takeoff" point in economic development has been reached...
...So might revolutions led by orthodox Marxist-Leninists like most of the national Communists of Eastern Europe...
...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 Communisttype totalitarian dictatorship can alone be expected to overcome them and 1 Robert L. Heilbroner, "Counterrevolutionary America," Commentary, April 1967, pp...
...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...
...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...
...282 ROBERT L. HEILBRONER AND DENNIS H. WRONG 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...
...A democratic multiparty system will perpetuate and even accentuate the fragmentation of their populations...
...As Wrong points out, my prognosis rests heavily on the urgency of the population program...
...Can we really expect such parties, should they win power, to be as relentlessly futureminded as the puritanical, iron-willed Bolsheviks who are the prototypes for our model of totalitarian modernization...
...Heilbroner refers natronizingly to India's failure to control the birth rate, but there is not the slightest evidence that China has had any greater success...
...3) The backward world is handicapped by the deformations of imperialism...
...Such expenditures are, of course, an utter waste from the standpoint of economic development...
...But if Heilbroner is right and Communist revolutions do take place in much of the Third World, can they achieve modernization...
...Democracy is likely to be no more than a facade behind which these groups retain full power, occasionally lulling the masses with token reforms...
...But "when we look at the positive side of our ledger sheet, we perceive an astonishing fact...
...In short, with the ambiguous exception of the Soviet Union, the Communist promise of rapid industrialization remains no more than a promise...
...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...
...Do not forget that populations will double in the most impoverished areas by the year 2000...
...But in the end I am interested in 3 Let me object in passing that armies are not "utter waste" in backward areas...
...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...
...3) The changes needed to bring modernization are not only political, but economic, social, intellectual, and even religious...
...The very polycentrism of the Communist world that makes nonsense out of the antiCommunist slogans invoked by Washington to justify the Vietnam war reduces the likelihood that future national Communist regimes will be 'the ruthless modernizers HeilDEVELOPMENT & DEMOCRACY 287 broner expects them to be...
...What cannot, I think, be tolerated is a recognized and potentially powerful opposition party...
...11-20...
...So writes Robert Heilbroner on page 89 of his book The Great Ascent...
...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...
...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...
...Actually, the demands of the masses in underdeveloped areas are likely to be too modest rather than excessive from the standpoint of stimulating development...
...But in the present century technology has made even "conventional" warfare far more destructive than in the past...
...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...
...Certainly one reason for their bellicosity (I do not say the only reason) has been our own intransigent opposition to them...
...Only a handful of neoclassical economists disagree...
...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...
...Most experts on economic development concede (in the large view 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...
...This brings us back to my initial two premises...
...The state must be -a strong state if it is to initiate successful programs of economic development...
...DEVELOPMENT & DEMOCRACY 279 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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...1. 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 living standards of the peasants, who constitute the mass of the population...
...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...
...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...
...3) Is there any evidence that the Communists can mount a successful development effort...
...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...
...It is indeed hard to imagine the United States passively tolerating any anti-American, revolutionary government in this hemisphere...
...that a degree of tolerance is compatible with a strong modernization movement...
...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...
...If Bogue is right, the timetable may be much extended and the necessity for rapid and radical action accordingly reduced...
...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...
...Here and there I disagree with him on small points, most of which will emerge in the paragraphs below...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...North Vietnam has been involved in wars for over a decade...
...But is Bbgue right...
...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...
...He has done as well with mine, and I hope that the absence of rhetoric and polemical flourishes in our exchange will clarify the issues between us...
...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...
...There is apparently no intrinsic connection at all between economic progress and formal political institutions...
...Barrington Moore, Jr., observes that military defeat in World War II was part of the price paid by Japan for following a conservativefascist 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.' 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...
...But once again I am forced back to choosing between ugly alternatives...
...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...
...FINALLY, let us suppose that American policymakers accept Heilbroner's analysis and become convinced that modernization of the Third World is possible only under Communist or authoritarian left-nationalist auspices...
...Heilbroner, "Counterrevolutionary America," p. 34...
...even a few military regimes have made considerable progress as in Turkey and Mexico...
...Heilbroner is entitled to reply to such protests—indeed, he has already so replied (see the correspondence columns of the July Commentary 5)_ "don't blame me for being the bearer of bad news...
...2 Robert L. Heilbroner, The Great Ascent, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963...
...More probably, he has 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...
...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...
...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...
...not be trusted to accept the guidance of enlightened modernizing elites that truly consult them and give them a sense of participation in the process...
...I agree that this is an entirely possible outcome for the next generation...
...Russia, to be sure, is a great mystery—is her development the result of Communism or of pre-1913 industrialization...
...Not only do the pocketbook interests of American businessmen have a greater influence on gdvernment 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...
...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...
...Modernization is a kind of cultural imperialism that is forced upon the masses...
...Yet such a conclusion would clearly be unjustified...
...Military dictatorships have also replaced shaky democratic civilian governments in Nigeria, the Congo, Greece, and a number of smaller African nations...
...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...
...I too would prefer a Communist Third World and an isolationist United States to a succession of Vietnams...
...Or it may just make terrible mistakes...
...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...
...If they fail, the United States cannot be blamed...
...Heilbroner is more hopeful—given his assumptions— ,than I am that there will be successful Communist revolutions...
...The 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...
...True, the desire for national strength and military glory may indeed 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...
...But only a tiny few of the particles of humanity are intellectuals...
...Military dictatorships, a third and at present the most common 'type of regime in the Third World, have not been notoriously successful modernizers either...
...The essentials of his position are shared by many other writers—indeed, some of them have become virtual commonplaces in discussions of economic development...
...He immediately observes that both the gains already achieved as well as future gains risk "being washed out by population growth...
...2. THERE IS LITTLE- in this analysis so far that is likely to arouse much disagreement...
...France and Algeria...
...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...
...Let us wait 10 or 20 years and see which of us is right...
...The United States has given aid to Communist Yugoslavia, to nationalist, pro-Communist, and anti-American states such as Ghana under Nkrumah, or Algeria and Egypt, •as well as to non-Communist revolutionary regimes such as Bolivia in the 1950s...
...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...
...What countries have achieved economic development to date as a result of nationalistcommunist revolutions...
...Indeed, China's leaders lag behind India's in their awareness of the need for an DEVELOPMENT & DEMOCRACY 281 antinatalist population policy...
...Now I am indeed not fully convinced that Donald Bogue is right in predicting the imminent end of the population explosion...
...Although a secondary issue, this was ostensibly the main subject of Heilbroner's essay...
...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 [in "Communism in Asia," Commentary, February 1965, pp...
...The next step in Heilbroner's argument, however, goes beyond the limits of general consensus...
...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...
...But I fear that in the existing condition of things we will have to make a far less palatable choice...
...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...
...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...
...284 ROBERT L. HEILBRONER AND DENNIS H. WRONG (1) In many states only a revolutionary party will be able to oust the incumbent regimes...
...3. THE HEILBRONER THESIS OUTLINES certain social prerequisites for economic development and maintains that democratic institutions are bound to present obstacles to fulfilling them...
...They are often very useful as a means of performing labor tasks, educating the peasants, and instilling morale...
...Would an Algerian revolution create a state markedly different from the Ben Bella and Boumedienne dictatorships...
...and its military adventures...
...4. 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...
...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...
...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...
...However, if Wrong is merely arguing that the developing elites need not display the worst forms of totalitarianism...
...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...
...Will not a slower process of change suffice...
...Or its ideological fervor, etc., may fall on deaf ears...
...but we shall let this pass for the moment...
...2) In most nations the tradition of democratic opposition is unknown or thinly held, and the tradition of "strong-man" government very widely accepted...
...I am certainly far from convinced, and evidently neither is Wrong...
...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...
...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...
...Who can have complete confidence in any forecast of something that has never happened before, such as the mass adoption of birth control by peasant populations within a de288 ROBERT L. HEILBRONER AND DENNIS H. WRONG cade or two...
...Moreover, even if population growth slows down, will the deceleration come in time to avert economic and social crisis...
...In addition, the enhanced importance of the army makes a military take-over more probable should the revolutionary regime falter...
...2 Against these doubts Wrong suggests some counterarguments...
...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...
...The question is, what kinds will they be...
...Heilbroner reiterates his conviction that left-authoritarian or communist movements "offer the best chance for a breakthrough in the backward areas...
...The Dominican tragedy reveals the panic that may strike an American Administration if it persuades •itself that there is even the slightest possibility of a repetition of the Cuban experience...
...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 reply that promises are better than nothing...
...I am aware that Heilbroner is making a forecast rather than advocating a course of action...
...cit., p. 69...
...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 Corn8 Heilbroner in Commentary, July 1967, p. 20...
...The results may be curious indeed...
...H. Robert L. Heilbroner Replies I AM GRATEFUL TO DENNIS WRONG for his thoughtful and carefully argued reply to my article in Commentary and to The Great Ascent...
...7 Ibid., p. 104...
...Cuba, a partially modernized country before Castro, has at most established some of the prerequisites for balanced modernization (e.g., mass literacy) while undergoing actual economic decline...
...and the U.S...
...Stalin's army purges, his opportunistic foreign policy toward Germany, and his unpopularity with the peasants who first hailed the Nazi invaders as liberators, all stemmed from his totalitarian rule and con8 Barrington Moore, Jr., The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1966), p. 271...
...As Wrong points out, a Communist government may be ideologically unable to institute birth control...
...Such deep-seated changes are extraordinarily difficult to achieve under the best of circumstances...
...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...
...Do I dare mention India and Goa...
...The pace of economic development has also varied greatly, particularly among smaller nations free from the tensions of international rivalry...
...And no other kind will succeed...
...They cannot proceed according to the more leisurely timetable of past Western industrialization...
...This argument has been applied most widely in defense of one-party dictatorships in Africa...
...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...
...A few of these new regimes are national socialist and even pro-Communist in ideological orientation (e.g., Algeria...
...What other force does anyone suggest...
...I suspect that only authoritarian regimes can impose them...
...The doctrinal anti-Malthusianism of Communist ideology imposes a special handicap on Communist countries with regard to birth control...
...I. Dennis H. Wrong ROBERT HEILBRONER'S ESSAY, "Counterrevo lutionary 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...
...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...
...munist parties in free elections...
...What about American policy toward the Third World...
...Yet one must ask, What is the chance for modernization if there is not an all-out revolutionary effort...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...But, more important, it must command the allegiance of a significant portion of the population...
...worth recalling that sharp reversals of demographic trends have happened simultaneously before in a number of quite different countries, sothere 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...
...14 Democracy, moreover, may take many different forms: ancient village communal bodies, such as 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...
...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...
...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...
...53-58...
...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...
...The United States accepted, after all, a neutral government in Laos...
...This is of course so...
...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...
...280 ROBERT L. HEILBRONER AND DENNIS H. WRONG tributed to Russian military defeats in the early stages of the war...
...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...
...Writing about Latin America, another demographer, J. Mayone Stycos of Cornell, also expresses cautious optimism in a recent book reporting his research in Peru and several Caribbean nations.'2 5. I HAVE ARGUED that, although the difficulties faced by democratic governments in carrying out economic development are indeed real, totalitarian revolutionary regimes also face difficulties peculiar to -them which Heilbroner and others tend to slight...
...One of these is that "democracy" is capable of many guises...
...But that is only a guess...
...2) There has been no period of preparation comparable to the three centuries of European commercialization...
...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...
...Revolutionary regimes bring a ruthless will and a desire to change "everything...
...But what if we start by asking, What are the difficulties that a totalitarian revolutionary regime is likely to face in carrying out development programs...
...What matters is that the outcome after the present power struggle is resolved...
...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...
...Admittedly, the bulk of American aid has gone to such "client states" ruled by conservative dictatorships as South Korea, Taiwan, and South Vietnam...
...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...
...Let me therefore attempt to answer him by restating my position and emphasizing where I think the issue lies between us...
...Commentary, July 1967, pp...
...Now as for China, who knows...
...But forecasts can become self-fulfilling if those who possess power are persuaded by and act on them...
...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...
Vol. 21 • April 1974 • No. 2
