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Article Excerpt
As a liberal relation of governance, development has a long genealogy spanning the colonial and postcolonial periods. This article attempts to uncover these interconnections. Development is first examined in terms of its singular ability to constantly reinvent itself as a "new and improved" formula for sharing the world with others. After discussing the relationship between development, liberal imperialism, and racism, decolonization is considered in relation to the emergence of a global biopolitical divide between "developed" and "underdeveloped" population. That is, life supported by social insurance as opposed to life excepted to be self-reliant. As a technology of security, development policies thus divide. The article argues that the ability of effective states to declare a humanitarian emergency within ineffective ones has played a central role in the post-Cold War reexpansion of the West's external sovereign frontier. Since humanitarianism ignores the state, however, within liberal strategies of governance, consolidating this frontier has fallen to development. While respect for territorial integrity remains, sovereignty over life within ineffective states is now internationalized, negotiable, and contingent. KEYWORDS: development, biopolitics, governance, territory, security
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For policy discourse, the relationship between development and security is such that "if we help people who are less fortunate than ourselves, not only is it good for them, it is also good for us." (1) In fostering 'their' development, we improve 'our' security. While such enlightened self-interest is often presented today as an essentially new departure, (2) as a liberal design of power it has a much longer genealogy. As part of his inaugural address in January 1949, for example, US President Harry Truman is credited with making the first call, unconnected with war or postwar reconstruction, for interstate development assistance.
More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate, they are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat to both them and to more prosperous areas. For the first time in history humanity possesses the knowledge and the skill to relieve the suffering of these people. (3)
William Easterly has argued that within this 1949 enunciation, apart from the connection between development and security, one can detect a number of recurrent themes that have continued to define development policy ever since. This includes "the call for a new program, the rationale in terms of poverty, the optimism that foreign aid programs can make a difference." (4) As Easterly argues, since the end of World War II, aid organizations have exhibited an enduring tendency to define outputs in terms of money disbursed rather than services delivered; to produce low-return but observable outcomes such as framework reports, attractive brochures, and high-level meetings rather than less observable but more important independent, ex-post program evaluations; a tendency toward institutional amnesia; and, not least, a willingness to engage in obfuscation and spin control "like always describing aid efforts as 'new and improved.'" (5)
To substantiate his argument, Easterly uses a table containing three columns headed "Stone Age" (roughly 1950s to 1970s), "Iron Age" (1980s to 1990s), and "Silicon Age" (the 2000s). (6) The rows are represented by different aid declarations such as the need to improve donor coordination; the need to increase aid volumes; that aid works in good local policy environments; the need to increase emphasis on poverty; the importance of debt relief; that Africa desperately needs reform; and that Africa is already reforming. The resulting boxes are filled with appropriate Stone, Iron, and Silicon Age quotes from UN reports, US Presidential statements, World Bank documents and G7 briefs. The table reveals that what we take as today's informed policy position (aptly summarized by the row descriptions above) was also cutting-edge thinking during the "Stone Age" of the international aid system. Rather than a steady, experience-based refining and progression of policy, the table suggests an institutional "Groundhog Day" in which every decade or two similar pronouncements are repackaged by a new generation of aid administrators and presented afresh as the way forward. When, since the eighteenth century, for example, has international development not been linked with economic growth and how its benefits can be made to work for the poor? With a few basic tools and a problem it has yet to solve, what is singular about development is its institutional ability to both survive and prosper. Despite periodic crises of confidence, it unfailingly reinvents itself as "new and improved." Development is able to insist on being judged by a yet distant future, rather than a past that has been lived and experienced.
In attempting to understand this phenomenon, Easterly offers an institutional explanation. For example, compared to private companies, official aid bureaucracies exist within a noncompetitive industrial structure and are subject to little customer feedback. Within this industry, moreover, to admit failure risks losing political patronage and its associated public funding. Among its practioners this political economy tends to promote collective spin and obfuscation producing "a cartel of good intentions." (7) Easterly's solution, however, is disappointingly conventional. Through the agency of the UN and NGOs, for example, he makes yet another call to seek flexible alternatives to the bureaucratic delivery of aid. While his description of the aid cartel raises some important issues, for the purposes of this article it is inadequate. In particular, the regularity with which development reinvents both itself and the publics enduring perception of underdevelopment, suggest that we are dealing with something different.
Development represents a liberal strategization of international power, some of the elements of which have already been touched upon: The urge to compensate for the perceived vulnerabilities of others through technologies of betterment whose success, because they require constant renewal and improvement, is always staked against the future. Rather than this strategization of power being the result of institutional determinants, it is more the other way around. In the specific context of post-World War II decolonization and the emergence of a world of independent states, what Easterly describes is the institutional consequences of development configured and functioning as an interstate relation of biopower. Instead of being institutionally determined, as a power design development can be analyzed separately from its current bureaucratic moorings within the aid industry. This enables its much longer genealogy to be examined. In this respect, the relationship between development and liberalism is important.
Liberalism and Empire
Despite shaping our present predicament, the formative connection between nineteenth-century liberalism and imperialism has been neglected in mainstream international relations and development studies. (8) This disregard has helped conceal and hence sustain liberalism's enduring paradox: the ability to support liberty, equality, and democracy as the necessary benchmarks of civilized society while, at the same time, accepting illiberal forms of rule as necessary or sufficient for a barbarian, backward, or underdeveloped one. Robert Cooper, puts a contemporary gloss on this longstanding paradox when he claims that among European states, "We keep the law but when operating in the jungle, we need to also use the laws of the jungle." (9) Liberalism's early architects, for example, James and John Stuart Mill, Lord Macaulay, and Sir Henry Main, apart from many practitioners of Empire, were not only aware of the liberal paradox, they consciously sought to normalize it and interpret the emergence of representative government in Europe as proof of its unlikely occurrence elsewhere and, consequently, justifying varying degrees of despotic, paternalistic, or ameliorative rule abroad. (10) This "liberal imperialism" also informed the emerging social democratic movement. Conscious of the European need for tropical raw materials, the "'Fabian' imperialists," for example, argued that such economic dependence carried a justifiable concern that resources were properly managed and developed, ideally using appropriate industrial technologies and educational measures that stimulated a desire for social progress within the backward country. Given this need to promote rational development, "there can be no inherent natural right in a people to refuse that measure of compulsory education that shall raise it from childhood to manhood in...
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