slater - geopolitical imagination[1]

The Geopolitical Imagination and the Enframing of Development TheoryAuthor(s): David SlaterSource: Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, Vol. 18, No. 4 (1993),pp. 419-437Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The Royal Geographical Society (with theInstitute of British Geographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/622559Accessed: 09/02/2009 11:09

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with thescholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform thatpromotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Blackwell Publishing and The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) arecollaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Transactions of the Institute of BritishGeographers.

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/stable/622559?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black

419

The geopolitical imagination and the enframing of development theory DAVID SLATER

Associate Professor of Social Geography, Interuniversity Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation (CEDLA), Keizersgracht 395-397, 1016EK Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Revised MS received 9 June 1993

ABSTRACT It is argued that all the major conceptualizations of development in the post-war period contain and express a geopolitical imagination which has had a conditioning effect on the enframing of the meanings and relations of development. The Occidental deployment of modernization theory for the developing countries reflected a will to geopolitical power. It provided a discursive legitimation for a whole series of practical interventions and penetrations that sought to subordinate and assimilate the Third World Other. In a connected but far from identical manner, neo-liberal readings of development in the 1980s have accompanied and been inspired by rapidly changing geopolitical conditions. Similarly, it is argued that on the other side of the North-South divide the radical dependencia perspective of the 1960s and early 1970s cannot be separated from a series of geopolitical events such as the Cuban Revolution, nor from the perceived need on the part of critical Latin American intellectuals to confront and challenge the relevance of modernization theory for the periphery. Finally, it is suggested that in any attempt to rethink development for global times the nature of our geopolitical imagination must be a key element, just as the theorization of the geo-political is equally relevant for development theorists and political geographers.

KEY WORDS: Universalism, Ethnocentrism, Occidental gaze, Dependencia, Democracy, State

GEOPOLITICS AND NORTH-SOUTH RELATIONS

In the wake of the disintegration of the Second World and the sudden evaporation of the erstwhile 'Soviet threat', a new spectre is haunting the West. Visions of unruly, unpredictable and destabilizing regimes and religions of a non-Western world increasingly appear to occupy and perturb the Occidental gaze. During the same moment, ex- ponents of a more critical persuasion are placing on to the agenda the moral question of North-South relations. H6sle (1992, 229), for example, suggests 'the increasing gap between First and Third Worlds raises some of the most difficult moral questions of the modem world', and similarly, Arrighi (1991, 40) writes, 'the increasing inequality of the global dis- tribution of income is ... rapidly becoming the central issue of our times'.

Along a potentially connected analytical track, a variety of critical scholars invoke the name of

Trans. Inst. Br. Geogr. N.S. 18: 419-437 (1993) ISSN: 0020-2754

'geopolitics' or 'imperialism' to mark a central feature of contemporary global power. Mohanty (1992, 88), for instance, writes of the USA of the 1990s as a geopolitical power 'seemingly unbounded in its effects' and of the logics of imperialism and modernity sharing a common notion of 'space as territory'. Or, in other previous instances, a differentiation has been drawn between global capitalism (exploitation in economics) and nation-state alliances (domination in geopolitics).1 Going further, it can be argued that across a broad spectrum of intellectual enquiry, through literary theory, cultural studies, political and philosophical investigation, social and anthropological research, feminist theory, international relations and political geography, one can discern a growing focus on issues of space and power, in which questions of inside and outside, global and local, de-territorialization and re-territorialization, connections and separations punctuate the emerging debates. Interspersed through these discussions, we

Printed in Great Britain

can locate an expanding interest in a critical geopolitics. In the domain of international relations the work of, inter alia, Ashley (1987), Der Derian and Shapiro (1989) and Walker (1993), has shown the fertile possibilities of deploying post-structuralist and post-moder thought in new attempts to re-conceptualize the spatiality of political power. In a not dissimilar vein, recent contributions from a number of political geographers (Dalby, 1988 and 1991; O Tuathail and Agnew, 1992; Corbridge, 1993) have begun to emphasize the openings offered by a more discourse-orientated approach to global aspects of the geopolitics of power.2

Despite the existence of differences in conceptual and thematic emphasis, the above-mentioned literature is generally characterized by a double tendency. First, there is a strong inclination to

equate the analysis of geopolitics with the international or global, including the question of nation-state formations and relations. Secondly, although certainly not in all cases, there seems to be a predisposition to associate geopolitics with the ways in which a whole community of state bureaucrats, leaders and foreign-policy experts, the 'intellectuals of statecraft', spatially represent international politics. This twin tendency can lead us to

pose two interwoven questions: (a) in the first

place, is it sufficient to constitute the analytical field of a geopolitics on the level of international or global relations, and (b) to what extent can we accept the notion of a centred subjectivity for the analysis of geopolitics? In other words, can we indicate a variety of interconnected analytical levels for geopolitics and also is it possible to identify a heterogeneity of geopolitical imaginations with contrasting capacities for deployment? In attempting to answer both these questions, the analytical context is formed by what I shall refer to as the enframing of development theory across the North-South divide.

The questions I am posing here could take us into a very extended discussion. My objective, therefore, is to attempt to clarify certain general issues of geopolitical analysis before dealing in some detail with continuities and discontinuities in the forma- tion and deployment of development theory. By effecting an encounter between geopolitics and the constitution of development theory, the intention is to shed some further light on the ways in which development theory has been enframed, since in many critical accounts of the emergence of ideas on

development, the geopolitics of global power has

not infrequently remained unexplored. Similarly, it can be argued that in the growing literature on

geopolitical analysis, including the more critical currents, the nature of North-South relations and, in particular, the representation of societal development in the South, have tended to receive less attention than might have been expected given the increasing importance attached to globalization. In this sense, therefore, it is to be hoped that such a critical encounter might help to stimulate new questions in two fields of enquiry as well as generating a dialogue which could be mutually beneficial.

In its most basic form my first question on

geopolitics concerns the object of analysis. Tradi- tionally, this might have been taken to be a series of states conceived of as living organisms capable of growth and development.3 Such an approach has found recent application in the writings of the Latin American military but, in these cases (primarily in the Southern Cone) owing to the difficulties of territorial acquisition, the geopolitical strategy has been transformed from conquest of physical space into that of political space, while still preserving the organic concept of the state.4

On a broader canvas, the object of geopolitical reflection, as brought into being by the practitioners of statecraft in the United States, has been the changing constellation of global political forces. The terrain of analysis and of potential intervention has neither been restricted to one part of the globe, nor to an interpretation of the 'global' as constitutive of a level that is essentially 'above' or 'over' (the notion, for example, of superimposition). It has rather been conceived in terms of an imbrication of

spheres, or an interlocking of 'global', 'national', 'regional' and 'local'.5

Although very different from both the theoretical and political starting points, there is a critical French current which, not entirely unlike the above- mentioned practitioners of statecraft, has also

emphasized the importance of seeing geopolitics in terms of both the external and the internal. Thus, in a special issue of H rodote on geopolitics in Africa, Foucher (1987), Lacoste (1987) and associated authors have put on to the agenda the changing territoriality of political power inside African states.6 Similarly inside Brazil, the relations between space and power in the context of the colonization of the Amazon region, for example, have also been con- sidered as an inherent component of geopolitics (Becker, 1982).7

420 DAVID SLATER

The geopolitical imagination and the enframing of development theory

What I want to argue here, therefore, is that when we pose the question of how we might best characterize the terrain of a geopolitical analysis, it will be necessary to keep in mind the differential imbrication of transnational, national and regional/ local political spheres. Secondly and crucially, since the ways of seeing and interpreting the terrain or object of analysis vary, often quite dramatically, some clarification of the approach to be adopted is required. Faced with a related requirement, Ashley (1987) has developed what he refers to, after Foucault, as a genealogical approach to an analysis of geopolitical space. For my perspective on the enframing of development theory, I shall derive

support from those contemporary currents of critical thought that are enabling us to re-structure many of the questions of social and political analysis as well as to destabilize the apparent solidity of the official discourses of development. It is my contention that all the major conceptualizations of development in the post-war period contain and express a geopolitical imagination which has had a conditioning effect on the enframing of the meanings and relations of development.

Thus, I shall argue that the Occidental enframing and deployment of modernization theory for the so-called developing countries was a reflection of a will to spatial power. It provided a discursive legitimation for a whole series of practical interventions and penetrations that sought to subordinate, contain and assimilate the Third World as other. In a connected but far from identical manner, neo- liberal readings of development in the 1980s have accompanied and been inspired by rapidly changing geopolitical conditions. Similarly, in a previous period and on the other side of the North-South divide, the radical dependencia perspective of the 1960s and early 1970s cannot be separated either from the geopolitical impact of the Cuban Revol- ution, or from the perceived need on the part of critical Latin American intellectuals to confront and challenge the relevance of modernization theory at the periphery. Finally, in any treatment of the possible new horizons for 'critical development theory', one of the key dimensions will be formed by a questioning geopolitical imagination. My own perspective may be seen as forming one possible pathway within what is broadly referred to as critical geopolitics wherein post-structuralist and post-marxist reflections can help us move forward. I shall return to these questions at the end of the article.8

WAVES OF WESTERN DEVELOPMENT THEORY

Modernization, Euro-Americanism and the Three Worlds of Development It is important to remember that it was the Enlight- enment that created the language in which concepts of the 'modem' first came to be defined. In Enlight- enment discourse, the West was the model, the prototype and the gauge of social progress. It was Western progress, civilization, rationality, thought and development that were proclaimed. Equally, however, these projections were intimately related to the discursive couplets of 'civilized versus bar- baric nations', of 'peoples with history and those without', which were reflections of the need to create an opposed non-West other so as to cement a positive identity for the West itself. It is in this sense then that 'the West' is much more an idea than a fact of geography.9 Further, not only is the rise of the West a global story, but also, as Hall (1992, 291) puts it, the 'discourse of the West about the Rest' has been and continues to be deeply implicated in practice.

This was particularly evident in the Western construction of the idea of modernization, during the early post-War period. The development of the modernization paradigm, based as it was on a dichotomous view of 'modern' and 'traditional' societies, or West and non-West, took place in a world characterized by a new and expanding threat - Communism. In 1947, President Truman drew up a picture of two antagonistic 'ways of life'."0 On the one hand there was freedom and liberty and on the other terror and oppression. The West, led by the United States, defined the former and the Communist world the latter. Truman concluded

it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. (Ambrose, 1988, 78)

Two years later, a related policy statement helped to define the place of the 'underdeveloped areas' in the projection of US power. Truman's 'Fair Deal' for the world embraced a bold new programme 'for making the benefit of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas'. The poverty of more than half the people of the world was viewed as a 'handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas' (emphasis added). Truman

421

went on to propose that 'what we envisage is a common program of development based on the

concepts of democratic fair dealing' (quoted in Escobar, 1993). Subsequently, and in close affinity with the Truman doctrine, a group of experts convened by the United Nations designed a

programme for the economic development of

underdeveloped countries. This programme, whilst

affirming the Western vision of development, also

recognized that the developmental transition for the non-West, the underdeveloped countries, would not be an entirely smooth one. The authors wrote that

there is a sense in which rapid economic progress is impossible without painful adjustments; [emphasis added] ... ancient philosophies have to be scrapped; old social institutions have to disintegrate; bonds of caste, creed and race have to burst; and large numbers of persons who cannot keep up with progress have to have their expectations of a comfortable life frustrated. (United Nations, 1951)11

This report, as Escobar (1993, 2) emphasizes, ad- vocated a total restructuring of underdeveloped societies and reflected an emerging will to convert two-thirds of the world to the Western 'way of life'. In an associated manner whereby, a decade or so later, a connection was made between the Cold War and development, an eminent North American

geographer suggested that the

way in which the underdeveloped nations are taught to develop, and assisted in developing their geographical space to support their burgeoning populations

would be a crucial factor in the waging of the Cold War and the preservation of the Western way of life (Ackerman, 1962, 297) [emphasis added].

From these examples, it can be argued that the

knowledge which a discourse produces constitutes a modality of power which is exercised over those who are known as the other, the non-West. Further- more, when that knowledge is deployed in practice, those who are so known will be subject, or more exactly subjected, to it. Moreover, the political will that fuels such a knowledge has great difficulty in

accepting difference as autonomy; there is a profound fear of 'the shadowy outside' which must be made safe through penetration and assimilation; Ashley (1987, 423) defines one vital vector of such a will as 'the geopolitical domestication of global political space'. By the same token, when, within a structured ensemble of meanings, definitions about

the other are made, they are made to stick. And always one of the crucial objectives of resistance discourses is to deconstruct and displace those

subordinating definitions of the other. Occidental inscriptions of 'development' were

further elaborated within the frame of modernization theory which traversed an extensive field of

enquiry. As is well known, within this theoretical

configuration, the societies of the West were characterized as being modern, advanced, the centres of scientific and technical progress, as efficient, democratic, rational and free. In terms of the Western polity, there was a stress on the posited combination of:

(a) a high degree of structural differentiation; (b) a secularized political culture with a pragmatic attitude towards 'ideological movements', and (c) an autonomy of sub-systems within the system as a whole, referring in particular to the notion of an

enabling pluralism of groups and associations.

Not surprisingly, it was further conveyed that rational and analytical secularization had reached its zenith in the political cultures of Britain and above all the United States. In his cogent interrogation of these and related expressions of modernization theory in political science, Cruise O'Brien (1979, 53-4) presciently remarked that not only did the idealized versions of modernity have an American face, but that

this ideal type is in effect the end of history, the terminal station at which the passengers to modernization can finally get out and stretch their legs.

During the 1950s and beyond, political modernity was couched in terms of representative democracy. And, since the realization of the democratic ideal had reached its highest point in the United States, the modernization process for the less advanced nations was to be understood as one of 'transition' in which backward polities would increasingly come to resemble the American model. Hence, as one key protagonist of political modernization, Gabriel Almond, expressed it

in the new and modernizing nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America, the processes of enlightenment and democratization will have their inevitable way.12

Writing at a similar time, another North American

political scientist, Apter, celebrated modernization as a special kind of hope which

DAVID SLATER 422


embodied ... all the past revolutions of history and all the supreme human desires; indeed, the desire for modernization reaches around the world. (Apter, 1987, 54)

But the modernizing societies - countries such as Indonesia, Egypt, Ghana, Tanzania and India - were seen as almost all populist and 'predemocratic'. For

Apter (1987), 'such systems require both sympathy and understanding', but, in addition,

to approach such societies as predemocratic allows us to view certain institutions of coercion as perhaps necessary to the organization and integration of a modernizing community.

Already in this passage there is an early indication of the rising concern for political order.

From the 1950s through to the mid-1960s there was much emphasis in the work of political scientists such as Almond and Apter on the combination of industrialization, technological advancement and the diffusion of Western democratic ideals, practices and institutional arrangements. However, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, the emphasis had shifted to one of political order and stability. This emerging focus was expressed in the work of

Huntington, Pool and Pye. Pool, for example, in a well-known passage published in 1967, wrote that

order depends on somehow compelling newly mobil- ised strata to return to a measure of passivity and defeatism from which they have been aroused by the process of modernisation. (quoted in Higgott, 1983, 19)13

Huntington, in his classic text on political order, distanced himself from the earlier unilinearist visions of modernization and stressed the significance of breakdowns and dislocations in the political transition to development. In the mid-1960s, he argued that not only does social and economic modernization generate political instability, but the degree of instability is related to the speed of modernization. He also pointed to the fact that within 'traditional polities', it was the areas undergoing modernization rather than those which remained traditional that were the 'centres of violence and extremism' (Huntington, 1968, 45). He concluded, after a

sharp appraisal of Leninism and revolution, that political organization was crucial for stability and liberty;

the vacuum of power and authority which exists in so many modernizing countries may be filled tempor- arily by charismatic leadership or by military force, . . . but it can be filled permanently only by political organization ...; in the modernizing world he controls the future who organizes its politics. (Huntington, op. cit., 461)

In Huntington's text, the portrayal of the Second World exhibited a certain characteristic duality. The Soviet Union was no longer seen as a 'mystery wrapped up in an enigma' but rather as a world endowed with a certain rationality, as expressed in the scientific, technological and military achieve- ments of Soviet development since the 1920s. Nevertheless, its political system was subjected to fierce criticism for its totalitarianism, its lack of freedom, and its ideological/Communist founda- tions. In this context it was generally argued that the absence of political freedom and the continuance of state repression would eventually lead to the overall debilitation of the Soviet system. Moreover, the posited expansionist drive of Soviet totalitarianism was represented as a threat to the 'free world' in

general and to the vulnerable societies of the non-Western world in particular.14

The change of emphasis from the transference of democratic ideals and the values of the Western

Enlightenment to problems involved in maintaining political order and stability was closely related to a further clarification of geopolitical thinking in the United States. From the early 1960s, particularly in the aftermath of the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, the National Security Council of the United States came to approve a grand strategy toward the peripheral societies of the South. Within this strategy, confronting internal disorder and in-

surgency in the developing, modernizing world was viewed as essential. Even more than under previous administrations, it became the purpose of the US to ensure that 'developing nations evolve in a way that affords a congenial world environment'.15 Under the new Kennedy administration, all the relevant agencies, such as the State and Defense depart- ments, the CIA and the Agency for International

Development met frequently to analyse what Kolko (1988, 130) reminds us were officially defined as the 'problems of development and internal defense'. At this time programmes of counter-insurgency were initiated and Washington's military modernization strategy for the Third World began to be put in place. Already by 1962 a National Security Council document stated

423

it is US policy, when it is in the US interest, to make the local military and police advocates of democracy and agents for carrying forward the development process. (Kolko, 1988, 133)16

Whilst it is true, as Cruise O'Brien (1979) showed in his seminal article on the politics of modernization, that there was an erosion of the democratic ideal and a gradual shift towards a concentration on

problems of order and stability in the modernizing world, it is equally important to bear in mind that orthodox Western visions of democracy did not wither away. Rather, in a context where the exigen- cies of order and defence against the threat of Communism acquired a higher profile, democracy for the traditional polity was conceived of in much more circumscribed forms.

Neo-Liberalism and development under Western eyes Between the late 1960s and the onset of a new wave of Western development theory in the 1980s, between a phase characterized by the waning of the modernization paradigm and the resurgence of a

highly confident economic liberalism, there was an unstable transition period. In the sphere of political science, the 1970s saw a growing concern with

specific questions of public policy, and a greater interest in the connections between politics and economics (Higgott, 1983, 21-30). Defeat in Vietnam, the continuing vitality of resistance movements in the non-Western world and a growing realization of the shortcomings of modernization

theory,17 nurtured a greater awareness of the need for more empirically-based knowledge of Third World societies (including their rural peripheries), as well as for more aid to counter the challenges posed by poverty and backwardness.

In a landmark speech, delivered before the Board of Governors of the World Bank and the Inter- national Monetary Fund at their annual meeting in 1973, former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara argued for a greater concentration of World Bank resources on helping to alleviate the

problems of the developing world's rural poor. Following the McNamara speech, a series of sector

policy papers on rural development, basic education, basic health and low-cost housing were

produced by the World Bank's Development Research Center. The reorientation towards anti-

poverty programmes was dramatically reflected in

changes in the Bank's lending activities for devel-

opment. In 1968 Bank lending for agriculture and

rural development amounted to only $172.5 million, 181 per cent of its total lending, whereas by 1981 it had risen to $3-8 billion, or 31 per cent of its

lending (Ayres, 1985, 5).8 However, as Escobar (1991, 664) argues

the new focus on 'the rural poor' was more the result of increasing radicalism in the countryside and of the demise of modernization theories than of a real change in the thinking of the World Bank.

In the mid-1970s, whilst the World Bank began to emphasize poverty-oriented and basic needs

approaches, the US Agency for International Devel-

opment (AID) called for a more community-centred approach designed to deal with the basic human needs of the poor and especially 'the poorest of the

poor'. In addition, US AID came to insist on the

design of grassroots participatory approaches that would encourage the active participation of the

poor themselves (Escobar, ibid.). But for such

programmes to be effective, empirically-based knowledge and understanding of rural communities were deemed essential and, as a consequence, a

growing number of social scientists, especially anthropologists, came to find a role in organizations such as the US AID.19

By the end of the 1970s, an increasing number of Third World societies were burdened with growing debt problems; for example, from 1970 to the end of 1980 their foreign debt had increased dramatically from 67-7 billion US dollars to 438-7 billion (World Bank, 1981a, 57). In 1980 the World Bank of-

ficially approved what became known as 'structural

adjustment lending', that is

lending designed to support major changes in policies and institutions of developing countries that would reduce their current-account deficits to more manage- able proportions in the medium term while maintaining the maximum feasible development effort. (World Bank, 1981b, 69)

The argument might have sounded quite technical but as it was developed and extended it became clear that the implications were far-reaching.

On the institutional front, it was made clear that structural adjustment lending by the Bank was

complementary to support for adjustment programmes provided by the International Monetary Fund. This required, as was stated in the Bank's 1981 Annual Report, 'the development of procedures for ensuring closer collaboration between

DAVID SLATER 424


the staffs of the two institutions ...' (World Bank, 1981b, 70). For the World Bank, structural adjustment was closely connected to the stipulated need for policy and institutional changes within developing countries. In many cases such policy changes were designed to correct 'biases in incentive systems that deter exports and promote uneconomical

import substitution'; in other instances institutional

changes were related to

reforms of the public-sector institutions responsible for agricultural development ... improvement in the efficiency of state economic enterprises, or improvements in support to nontraditional exports. (World Bank, 1981b, ibid.)

In surveying progress along these lines, the Bank somewhat laconically observed

the difficulty that governments find in gaining political acceptance for the adoption and implementation of structural-adjustment programs has been and continues to be the single most important obstacle to rapid progress by the Bank with structural-adjustment assistance. (World Bank, 1981b, ibid.)

At the beginning of the 1980s, the World Bank re-asserted the cardinal importance of economic growth. It was argued that there was already sufficient evidence to indicate that 'economic growth generally contributes to the alleviation of

poverty' and that, in a more general sense, 'human

development depends on economic growth to provide the resources for expanding productive employment and basic services' (World Bank, 1981a, 67 and 97). As the decade came to a close

private sector development was becoming increasingly significant20 in shaping the Bank's strategies for development.

In its Annual Report for 1992, the Bank noted that two out of every three operations included

components that explicitly supported private sector

development, an increase of 40 per cent from four years earlier. In the promotion of private-sector development, three crucial tasks were distinguished: the creation of an

affirmative business environment, restructuring of the public sector, and the development of the financial sector for entrepreneurial activities. (World Bank, 1992a, 61)

Public-sector restructuring was seen as involving both the improvement of efficiency in critical func-

tions of the state, such as the provision of social and

physical infrastructure, and the creation of 'space for

private initiative through a shift in the boundary between the public and private sectors' (ibid.).21

Looking back on the 1980s, the Bank took the view that 'adjustment policies help most poor people - at least in the medium term', although it was acknowledged that economic reform programmes could cause 'temporary welfare declines for some' (World Bank, op. cit., 69). In the related

Development Report for 1992, a similarly up-beat, almost Panglossian view was offered for the future. Now

with near unanimity on the central importance of markets and human resource investments for successful development, the coming decades offer great prospects for progress. . . . within the next generation, wide- spread poverty could be eliminated. (World Bank, 1992b, 178)

As is known, the World Bank has not been deploying a strategy for development in isolation from other International Organizations. Apart from the IMF, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), which is charged with responsibility for Latin America, has also been active in drawing up neo- liberal policies for development. In its 1991 Report on Latin America, four 'strategic directions' are suggested for future change and reform. In the first

place, emphasis is given to the importance of outward orientation and hemispheric integration. Reforms are needed to open up Latin American economies to greater international competition while, at the same time, proposals for greater market integration within Latin America should be encouraged as envisaged in the Enterprise for the Americas Initiative, launched by former US President George Bush. NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Area) is accorded an overall welcome since all

parties are set to benefit.22 Secondly, from the standpoint of the Inter-

American Development Bank (IDB), Latin America has to modernize through private sector development. This is explained in terms of the fact that the public sector is seen as being involved in the 'process of closing down or privatizing most of its public enterprises' (IDB, 1991, 13). In addition, there is a connection to the underlying belief in the general superiority of the private over the public, which is seen as especially relevant for strategies of modernization and development. The priority given to private sector development goes together with

425

the identification of a variety of required reforms - financial, labour and regulatory.23 Next, what is referred to as 'public sector reform' calls for a reduction in the size of government, cutbacks on public expenditures and the development of a minimal technocratic state. The process of privatization and acceleration of the 'deregulation and debureaucratization of the economy' is seen as 'complementary to the dual strategy of greater outward orientation and stronger emphasis on private sector development' (IDB, 1991, 14).

Finally, a fourth strategy relates to what is referred to as 'human resource development'. Because it is anticipated that the process of outward orientation and modernization of the economy 'will encounter critical obstacles on the human resource side', it is argued that 'improvements in education and health need to be a top priority during the 1990s' (IDB, 1991, 17). The problems associated with poverty are also touched on - although no mention is made of the increase in poverty in Latin America during the 1980s24 and the view is

expressed that in the long term the solution to the

poverty problem

lies in the improvement of professional skills, which will allow an increasing number of people to partici- pate in the process of economic development and to share in the fruits of progress. (18)

To complete this very brief but illustrative review of the official discourse on contemporary development, one may turn to the recent OECD (1992) report on development cooperation. In a section on

privatization, which summarized a two-day review on the subject organized by the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in the early part of 1992, many of the ideas referred to above are again to be found. Notions of deregulation, of the provision of an 'enabling environment' for the private sector and of 'macroeconomic stability' are inter-

spersed through the text. A key concluding rec- ommendation on the private sector/public sector balance was that progress has resulted from actions 'that foster competitive markets, private initiative, and investment in physical and human capital'. Therefore,

donors ... should limit investments in public enterprises and focus institutional support on areas that help foster competition and the private sector and that improve a government's ability to provide basic social services. (OECD, 1992, 20)

What is clearly reflected in the various positions expressed in the above documents is the revival of an economic liberalism that is couched in terms of market-orientated development strategies, a minimal state, free trade, financial discipline, comparative advantages and prosperity through economic growth. These are not new ideas.25 Classical liberalism, for example, rested on a view of society in which certain fundamental areas of life were de-politicized, notably religion and economics. Religious toleration and a market economy made belief and the pursuit of wealth 'private' matters. Looking at market economics as a political project, Przeworski (1986, 219) has argued of the early 1980s that, for the first time for several decades, the Right

has an historical project of its own: to free ac- cumulation from all the fetters imposed upon it by democracy.

In this context, market economics became a self- legitimating process - a political project in itself, in which any effective political regulation over the economy was rejected. It was deemed necessary to rethink and restructure the public sector but the

private sector was to be protected from public control and involvement.

As ostensible examples of the success of the market-orientated strategy of development, the East Asian model is frequently cited; for instance, the OECD Report for 1992 asserts that from 1983 onward the 'East Asian economies enjoyed boom years based on market-oriented, outward-looking policies' (OECD, 1992, 35). What is glossed over is the historical fact that in the cases of Taiwan and South Korea the state played an indispensable role in developing an industrialization process. It was the state that led the market rather than the other way around. Even in the cases of Singapore and, more

especially, of Hong Kong (where the state, through its ownership of land and massive investment in

housing, directly intervened in the economy), it would be highly misleading to assume that it was

independent private sector development that

explained rapid economic change.26 In contrast to the historical reality of a strong

state in the dynamic processes of East Asian industrialization, the official protagonists of today's development doctrine equate the idea of a strong Third World state with inefficiency, waste, corrup- tion and centralism. On the other hand, a minimal

426 DAVID SLATER


state - a lean, fit, streamlined centre of political authority, effectively nurturing an 'enabling environment' for private enterprise, providing social services, and training new generations of human

capital - is seen as the desirable junior partner to an

expanding private sector.

Permeating all discussions of social and economic

development, of the public sector/private sector balance, of poverty and welfare, of science and education, of trade balances and financial flows, of recommendations for governmental policy, and so on, there exists a deeply-rooted belief that all things 'economic' have been purified of the political. Market mechanisms and rationally-operating individuals, dynamic entrepreneurs and efficient international investors, sound policies and effective actions, help to constitute solid building blocks for the official language of development. The overall objective is to place an unruly set of contestable orientations and approaches to development under the control of a settled system of understandings and priorities - a particular regime of truth.

The statements, conceptual priorities, lines of classification and the meanings that guide are all characterized by a politics of forgetting, which is vital in the construction of a new truth. It is as if the societies of the South have never experienced previous waves of capitalist penetration and modernization, as if their economies have never been open to the world market, as if the post-War diffusion of modernization theory had never occurred. It is as if, in the historical annals of real development, progress is set to begin with structural adjustment. Moreover, an image has been created that what went before was detrimental to the 'body economic' of the developing countries. The existence of a malaise, most clearly embodied in the debt crisis, required a long-term strategy for cure, including, where deemed appropriate, shock- therapy, rehabilitation, infusions, donors, special treatment for debt-distress, relief measures, support against adjustment fatigue and, always, continual monitoring.

The monitoring and supervision belong to a sense of mission and a belief in the need for tutelage. The World Bank reminds us, for instance, that adjustment lending has been part of the 'land- scape of the developing world for over a decade', and a few countries 'have clearly graduated' (in this case, Chile and Thailand), whilst others 'are on the road to graduation' (World Bank, 1992a, 68). The firm belief in the need to instruct and guide the

'developing other' is, of course, one more reflection of a much broader ethos of Occidental supremacy. Nor can we assume that the tutelage is applied only in the economic sphere.

More recently there has been a notable shift or, more accurately, an extension of the terrain on which development strategy is to be pursued and implemented. In its 1992 report on Development Cooperation, the OECD notes that the subject of participatory development and good governance is

receiving priority attention and that support is needed for developing countries going through their 'democratic transition' (OECD, 1992, 6). Developing this argument further, the Report notes that what is required is a general framework for establishing key characteristics of good governance within which support for the strengthening of judiciary systems, election monitoring, adminis- trative decentralization and ethnic relations, and protection of minorities, conflict resolution and demobilization are all key features (OECD, 1992, 7).

Fundamental to this new approach is the priority given to building institutional and economic capacities in the developing countries. In fact, it is commented that 'the key to mastering development and other global challenges' lies precisely in this task of construction for the developing countries.

Equally, it is argued that policy makers in the West are finding that

solutions to the domestic problems for which they have responsibility are increasingly associated with the economic and institutional functioning of other societies; .. . this creates new scope for mutual understanding and synergy among policy makers in donor goverments as they tackle development as part of achieving a global agenda. [emphasis added] (OECD, 1992, 49)

The OECD report echoes and emphasizes related World Bank orientations. In the early part of 1992, the Bank organized a workshop on participatory development and has come to recognize, so we are informed, the key role of intermediary organizations in development. Thus in Africa, for example, there is an increasing association with local NGOs in the design and implementation of the Bank's assisted projects; for instance, in 1991 forty-four were in partnership with NGOs compared to only seven each year in the period 1973-87 (Landell-Mills, 1992, 565). In his article on governance, cultural change and empowerment in Africa, which follows

427

the World Bank lead, Landell-Mills avers that civil society will be

strengthened by the economic liberalization and privatization measures that typically form a key part of the on-going structural adjustments being undertaken in most countries. (567)

Apparently, giving high priority to education, public management reform, privatization, the informal sector and lighter fiscal controls 'are consistent with the goal of strengthening civil society' (565).

With the new orientation in official thinking on

development, it is clear that the former concentration on essentially economic issues is being widened to establish what is in a very real sense an

all-encompassing agenda. Whereas in the past, dur-

ing the first wave of orthodox Western theory, one encountered important notions of 'political order', now we read of the growing significance of 'good governance'. Yesterday, there was a 'Communist threat' helping to cement into place rights of enforcement and rituals of order, whereas today the will to global power can rest more confidently on the presumed superiority of the West's development project - markets, good governance and rational, achieving individuals. This is the future for the developing world if it is able to learn effectively.27

Just under twenty years ago, Castoriadis, in a critical essay on the orthodox vision of devel-

opment wrote that, according to this orthodoxy, if the countries of the Third World were to 'be

developed' they would have to undergo a 'total transformation'; he went on,

the West had to assert not that it had discovered the trick of producing more cheaply and more quickly more commodities, but that it had discovered the way of life appropriate to all human society. (Castoriadis, 1991, 181)

In the current debates on the politics of multi- culturalism, on questions of identity and difference, and on the varied modalities of Western universalism and ethnocentrism, the connection with the

deployment of Occidental development doctrine is not always brought out. It has to be said here that, as with modernization theory, the neo-liberal discourse of the contemporary era bears within it a

supreme belief in the universal applicability and rationality of the Western development project. The Third World other has to be instructed and helped

to graduate into mature development. Knowledge has to be diffused to and institutionalized within the

developing countries. For example, in its discussion of education in Latin America, the IDB advises the reader that most universities in this part of the South have been concerned 'largely with repro- ducing knowledge as opposed to producing it' (IDB, 1991, 17). In other words, they have not been capable of generating their own knowledge and, therefore, have had to transmit or reproduce knowledge coming in from outside.28

Within the field of aid and development, international organizations endowed with financial

capabilities and donor responsibilities and driven by adherence to a particular way of constituting knowl-

edge, social practices, forms of subjectivity and

power relations, need, if they are to be seen as effective, to be able to instil and to internalize their norms, values and ways of thinking into the recipient other. This is done through discursive persuasion and external inducement. Of the former, dialogue on the basis of an already constituted agenda is central. The OECD for example highlights

the importance of expanded dialogue with the developing countries on the complex issues surrounding political transition, improved governance and economic reforms ... solid progress has been made ... [and] encouragingly, the dialogue indicates that the developing countries themselves - especially in Africa and Latin America - are taking the lead in supporting change. [emphasis added] (OECD, 1992, 9)

Of the latter, varying forms of conditionality are crucial. The politics of financial aid and supervision through the IMF and World Bank have been discussed in detail by Payer (1991).29 The power to monitor, discipline and intervene in the economy of the other generates profound effects, and the lan-

guage of expert omniscience helps to camouflage and also legitimate this disciplinary power.

I alluded above to the parallel between 'political order' and 'good governance'. Similarly it is possible to discern key emphases on modernization and democracy in both waves of Western development theory. In this context then, there is a sense of

continuity. Equally, however (and leaving aside the

significant question of the varied content of these terms as between the two waves of theory), there is at least one crucial difference. In terms of the public sector/private sector balance, neo-liberal ideas break with the previous sense of the need for some kind of

public/private articulation in the economy and set

428 DAVID SLATER


down a quite new agenda which consistently and

assertively privileges the private. This is not to

suggest that modernization theorists were advocates of state enterprises and nationalization, but neither were they the brash champions of privatization and market economics. They were, however, advocates of capitalist modernization and democracy through processes of geopolitical diffusion and

adoption. At this juncture, the dependentistas entered, left of stage.

THE SOUTH THEORIZES BACK

In going back to certain elements of the dependency perspective I want to recover some notions which are still relevant to our time. Whilst there is a

politics of forgetting, there is also a politics of memory.

Development specialists in the North frequently assume that in terms of the history of ideas, radical views on dependency and underdevelopment, though perhaps vividly inscribed, remain rooted in a

fading past. In Latin America, since the first critical incursions of dependencia thinking, a very varied and rich literature has been developed on, inter alia, issues of state and democracy, poverty, welfare and the informal sector, social movements, women's

struggles and power, environmental change, political culture, and modernity and post-modernity. Whilst in this other America, the critical pathways have been extended and diversified, dependency thought has not been rejected but rather situated in its time as a necessary and fruitful critique of both modernization theory and the erstwhile strategies of the Communist parties of Latin America. Together with all its limitations and shortcomings, it is

generally seen as an important part of the critical intellectual heritage of post-war Latin America.30

With a view to our previous consideration of the two waves of Western development theory, I want to summarize three of the original propositions emanating out of the dependency literature.31

First, it was emphasized that within modernization theory the characterization of the 'developing world' was little more than a caricature. Third World societies were not given any history of their own; their history began only with their contact with the West. Secondly, following a linear view of

development, the already modernized societies were

presented as offering a horizon, a future for the traditional society which, by adopting Western innovations, could eventually modernize. Critical

philosophers, such as the Mexican Zea (1970) argued that in 'our America' the evolution of

analytical thought had its own specificities and

complexities and it belonged on no such subordi-

nating continuum. The counter-position to the Western development canon was that Latin America not only had the right to independence but also the right of recognition.

Thirdly, within the modernization paradigm, relations between the West and non-West, and between the already modernized societies and the traditional societies of the periphery, were contextualized as

being essentially beneficial for the developing world. The critical reply was that the reality of these relations showed that the impact on the Third World was fundamentally negative. Through sla-

very, colonialism and imperialism, the relations between First and Third Worlds were characterized as being exploitative and oppressive and conducive of poverty and underdevelopment. Of course, these ideas were not only expressed in Latin America. Fanon, for example, underlined the crucial cultural dimensions of colonial domination in Africa, noting

the poverty of the people, national oppression and the inhibition of culture are one and the same thing. (Fanon, 1967, 191)

More recently, the Kenyan writer Nguigi (1985, 118) has appropriately observed that economic and

political control can never be effective without mental control:

to control a people's culture is to control its tools of self-definition in relationship to others.

In the Latin America of approximately two decades

ago, theoretical analyses of marginalization and the combination of external economic integration with internal disintegration provided an alternative series of starting points for further conceptual and empiri- cal enquiry (Nun, 1969; Quijano, 1974; Sunkel, 1972).32 Today, new studies of marginality and informalization are being developed, more in relation to issues of democracy, social movements and violence (Camacho, 1990; Tironi, 1990) and the context is quite different. Nevertheless, in terms of a critical ethic and a counter narrative to the traditional canon of development thinking, there is a clear connecting line.

Furthermore, the spirit of critical enquiry is still very much alive as Castells and Lasera (1989), for

429

example, show in their article on 'La nueva

dependencia'. In the context of an examination of

technological change and socio-economic restruc-

turing, they argue that the worsening social and economic situation in Latin America originates in the combination of new and old forms of dependency; new in relation to the technological revolution as a moving force of the new system of

production and old in terms of financial dependence and the imposition of policies of austerity by foreign capital. A similar position is taken by Kay (1989). From his discussion of Latin American theories of development and underdevelopment and, indeed, from even a cursory analysis of the

present state of North-South relations, it can be ascertained that the reality of financial dependence has hardly declined. Moreover, with the new

deployment of political conditionalities and the call for Western-style democracy, other forms of

dependence are already being installed. The objective of my argument here is not to

draw a veil over the deficiencies of the dependency persuasion including the relative absence of a theoretical analysis of international relations; the often

over-generalized portrayal of the state-society nexus; the tendency toward class essentialism; and the presence, in some texts, of terminal abstractions

employed to capture fluid processes.33 Instead, I want to suggest that in a geopolitical conjuncture characterized by the Cuban Revolution, the estab- lishment by the United States of an Alliance for

Progress, the persistence of foreign penetration (military, political, cultural), the increasing evidence of financial, technological and cultural forms of

dependence, and the diffusion of a theory which

purported to legitimize and rationalize a new colonization of the imagination, an intellectual/political movement emerged which argued, wrote and theor- ized back. This was the significance of dependencia. The facts that associated modes of reflection

emerged in other parts of the South during the same

years and that the ideas of the Latin American writers spread to other parts of the Third World

expressed the depth of the challenge. In the encom-

passing context of North-South relations, the

dependency writers constructed and deployed a

geopolitical imagination which sought to prioritize the objectives of autonomy and difference and to break the subordinating effects of metropolis- satellite relations. To the Western mind inculcated in the Cartesian tradition, 'dependency' seemed little more than a vague discontent, but in fact it

was a key body of alternative critical thought. The West might believe that it had a 'Manifest Destiny' to transmit and implant its way of life across the

globe, but the ethnocentric presumption inscribed in its discourse of development was now challenged, interrupted and destabilized. However, as we have seen, it was not long before the non-West came under the impact of a second wave of development truth.

CRITICAL PATHWAYS FOR GLOBAL TIMES

Under the influence of a somewhat melancholic sentiment, it has been suggested that in our new times, critical development theory lies in ruins. For others, development itself is the antithesis of

democracy, a kind of 'elastic prison'. In times of

perplexity and disenchantment, of the dissolution of meta-narratives, of living what can seem like a continuous present - in all these moments of being, there is a sense in which the future is immanently precarious and fragile. Must every horizon exist

only as mirage; are we living a time of perpetual deconstruction, or are there interstices and margins in which forms of reconstruction might emerge and

grow? How do we think the social and the political without revolution, beyond the traditional Marxist

paradigm with its old certitudes and informed truth of capital and class?34 How do we think development critically, in a world of limits and uncertain survival?

In a world where the relations of power that undermine the conditions for a sustainable development are themselves sustained, what does

'sustainability' mean? Connolly (1988, 1), reflecting on the order of modernity, suggests that perhaps 'modernity is the epoch in which the destruction of the world followed the collective attempt to master it'. The prevalence of master discourses on devel-

opment and the environment has been the focus of much feminist critique (Moghadam, 1992; Tickner, 1993) and it is certainly the case that modernization, neo-liberalism, dependency and Marxism have, overall, tended to move within the orbit of androcentrism.

There is, perhaps, in some of the new critical literature a trend towards greater prudence, and attention to what the other is thinking and saying. The bearers of master discourses are no longer assured of an attentive and accepting audience. But

perhaps also there is a need for adventure, for what

DAVID SLATER 430


Nietzsche (1983) referred to as the plasticity of human potential, the capacity to transform and

incorporate into oneself what is past and foreign, to

replace what has been lost, to recreate broken moulds. The new social movements have expressed this sense of plasticity, renewing amidst the ruins, living beyond the ghosts of old paradigms.

In our new more global times where do we locate our frame of meaning and analysis and how do we develop new geopolitical imaginations? One possible entrance can be found in the contemporary discussion of globalization. Let us take as an

example a recent article by Held (1991). Held

suggests that the meaning and place of democracy have to be rethought in relation to a series of

overlapping local, regional and global structures and

processes. Globalization has at least three main consequences (p. 222);

(a) the way processes of economic, political, legal and military interconnectedness are changing the nature of the sovereign state from above; (b) the manner in which 'local and regional nationalisms' are eroding the nation-state from below; and (c) the way global interconnectedness creates chains of interlocking political decisions and out- comes among states and their citizens which in turn impact on national political systems.

There is here an interesting geopolitical imagination at work.

First, we have the idea of global connectivity, the increasing need to link the different levels or spheres of problems and issues; secondly we have the place of the nation-state, as a two-way nodal point of power, conflict and dissonance and, thirdly, placed in a broader frame, we have the importance of social movements and political culture. The terrain of our geopolitical analysis, therefore, can be constituted by the intermingling of global relations, nation- states and local and regional movements and op- positions. Our imagination can be focused on questions of the nature of identities, difference and justice at all levels but increasingly in a global frame. Within the more specific territorial setting of particular peripheral societies, the analysis of democracy and emancipation can be given its required spatiality. The struggle for democracy has its local and regional domains so that in the debate on the possible meanings of democracy, territoriality enters as a crucial component. Democracy has its horizon- tality. Also, and within a global frame, the need to

extend the principles of democratization and accountability to the major institutions of world

development, within which the voices of the South must receive their legitimate representation in decision-making processes, has to form part of a critical geopolitical imagination. Such an imagination can help us subvert the traditional frames of meaning and practice which have constituted North-South relations for so long.

Within the approach sketched out above, importance is attached to broadening the terrain of geopolitical analysis and of connecting that ampli- fication to North-South relations. However, there still remains a deeper theoretical question concerning the status of the political in this kind of analysis. In the first place, I would argue that there can be no effective single-shot fixed function for the political. It is not desirable to assume that the political can be separated off as a 'level' apart, differentiated from an economic and an ideological level. Very often the political has been circumscribed within the domain of the state, against which a civil society must organize its institutional and interactive mechanisms of defence. Similarly, it is common to encounter the assumption of a binary division between the realm of the political (bounded within the state and including political parties) and the domain of the social (framed around the family, religion, education, the citizen, group relations, civic associations, movements and so on). In dissolving this binary split, as the post-Marxist would transcend the base- superstructure division or a post-structuralist would subvert any idea of a pre-supposed separation between institutions and discourse, we can suggest, after Lefort (1988), that any discussion of the political confronts us with a crucial ambiguity. This ambiguity resides in the fact that it is possible to talk both of the political and of politics.

Political sociologists and scientists acquire their object of knowledge by delineating political facts which they regard as particular and separate from other specific facts such as the economic, the juridical, the aesthetic, the scientific or the purely social. In this context, modern societies are characterized, inter alia, by the delimitation of a domain of institutions, relations and activities which appears to be political, as distinct from other domains which appear to be economic, juridical, religious and so on. However, the problem here is that the very fact that something we call politics should have been demar- cated within social life at a given historical moment has in itself a primal political meaning. Lefort (1988,

431

217) defines this originary meaning as the political, suggesting that this term refers to the principles that generate different forms of society. Rather than

accepting the social as given, Lefort stresses the necessity of investigating the principles of interal- ization which account for both the specific modes of differentiation and articulation between classes, groups and social ranks, as well as the specific modes of discrimination between economic, juridical, aesthetic and religious markers which condition the experience of the social. In a slightly more

complex formulation, it is argued that the political is revealed in a double movement whereby the mode of institution of society appears and at the same time is obscured. It appears in the ways in which the

process whereby

society is ordered and unified across its divisions becomes visible, . . . it is obscured in the sense that the locus of politics (the locus in which parties compete and in which a general agency of power takes shape and is reproduced) becomes defined as particular, while the principle which generates the overall configuration is concealed. (Lefort, 1988, 11)

Hence, revealing what is concealed - examining the

underlying generative principles that govern the 'temporal and spatial configuration of society' (218) - constitutes for Lefort a key aim of political theory.

Before situating these ideas in a specifically geo-political frame, I want to make one observation. With reference to the thesis that the political is rooted in the principles governing the development of society, it needs to be emphasized that the

temporal and spatial dimensions of these principles are quite crucial for any effective analysis. As

regards the temporal dimension, when the socially- given is questioned and referred back to the initial act that led to its constitution, the unstable sense of the given can be reactivated. This de-sedimentation of the social can be seen as a continuing process which reveals what Laclau (1990, 213) calls the

political essence of the social. Expressed more concretely we can argue that what is and what is not political at any moment changes with the

emergence of new questions, posed by new modes of subjectivity - for example, the personal is political. Nevertheless, the political does not eliminate the social conditions from which its question was born; gender relations, religious belief, environmental degradation and regionalism may become political at certain moments but they are not only

political. This suggests, therefore, that in the analysis of the principles which govern the constitution of society there may be a foundational meaning which Lefort, for example, traces back to the French Revolution and the idea of a historical break in the

political grounding of the social. Equally, however, through the emergence of new modes of subjectivity and new points of refusal and resistance, the challenging of the content of specific social forms can also reveal, through the process of de-sedimentation, a more dynamic formulation of the political.

If we now return to our context of the geopolitical imagination and development theory, the first

point that needs to be made concerns the importance of making a related distinction between geopolitics and the geopolitical. Aspects of the former were previously discussed and, after the above consideration of the political, we are now in a

position to suggest what might be meant by the

geo-political. Although Lefort refers to the 'spatial configuration of society', no further development of this conceptual orientation is offered. There are two

points that can be made. First, the generative principles that govern the constitution of a society must have a territorial grounding and the way the

principles themselves emerge, as during the French Revolution, cannot be divorced from the territoriality of the political forces that are in conflict. Secondly, and more directly relevant to the context of North-South relations, in the peripheral countries of the South, the international dimension has been

quite fundamental. For the societies of Latin America, Africa and Asia the principles governing the constitution of their mode of social being were

deeply moulded by external penetration. The

phenomenon of colonialism, for example, represented the imposition and installation of principles of the political that violated the bond between national sovereignty and the constitution of social

being. In this sense then the geopolitical for these other societies has been grounded in the violation of their right to bear their own principles of social

being. Furthermore, as the history of this century shows, the end of colonialism has not signified the demise of such violations.

This approach to the geopolitical is embedded in the imbrication of the external and the internal, but we can also think the geopolitical in relation to

changing modes of territorial subjectivity within

peripheral societies. The ways in which insurgent ethnic-regional identities have been emerging,

DAVID SLATER 432


whereby the meanings invested in particular internal

regions or territories have acquired a refusing, challenging dimension to the encompassing authority of the central state, define another form of the geopolitical.35 Similarly, the struggles for the territorialization of democracy and the installation of regional governments express a challenge to the socially and spatially given.

In both components of the geopolitical mentioned above, one relating more to the interlocking of the external and the internal and the second to the more specifically internal, we can posit a clear connection to our previous thoughts on development and power. Clearly, in both waves of Western development theory there has been a belief in the superiority of the Occidental model and a general acceptance of the supposedly beneficial impact of the West's will to geopolitical power over the non-West. In contradistinction, dependency thinking called into question the geopolitical principles governing the varying modalities of the West's impact within the societies of Latin America. As far as the more particularly internal component of the geopolitical is concerned, the new forms of ethnic- regional identity and the struggles for a territorialization of democracy provide an emerging frame for rethinking development along the lines of popular empowerment and a more enabling politics of social justice.

Finally, it may be suggested that future theoriz- ations of development need to give greater priority to the challenge of geopolitics, whilst political geographers might give greater attention to the relevance of the North-South divide for today's politics of spatial power. At the same time, and in the way in which feminist writers have used the term 'politics of location', new imaginations will need to include more self-reflexivity for the writer who imagines since, across the interface between development studies and political geography, the decolonization of the imagination is as critical as is the need for critique.

NOTES

1. This differentiation is to be found in Spivak (1988, 279). Although positing a relationship between global capitalism and domination in geopolitics, in her critique of Foucault and Deleuze, Spivak emphasizes the continuing validity and vitality of the Marxist analysis of the international division of labour and distances herself from what she argues to be their underprivileging of global (economic) power.

2. Of course geopolitical analysis has a longer and much more chequered history, which it is not the purpose of this article to pursue; for a recent overview of many of the relevant themes, see Taylor (ed.), 1993.

3. In the work of Rodolf Kjellen, for example, the organic metaphor was further extended into the claim that states were conscious, rational entities with interests, prejudices and an instinct for self- preservation. For a detailed consideration of Kjellen's work, see Holdar (1992).

4. For an overview of some of the most central features of this 'genre' of geopolitical strategy, see Child (1979) and Pion-Berlin (1989). For a specific text see Augusto Pinochet's (1968) Geopol tica.

5. In the context of what I refer to as the interlocking of spheres, there are a number of contentious issues. Der Derian (1990), for instance, has argued that when analysing simulation, speed and surveillance, chronol- ogy can be elevated over geography, and pace over space in their political effects. Here, Der Derian follows Virilio, noting that we can think of 'geopolitics' being displaced by 'chronopolitics' (Der Derian, 297). Now whilst this might be possible in certain kinds of discussions concerning war and intelligence questions, it is much less relevant in issues pertaining to Gramscian 'wars of position'. Here the intricate intertwining of territorial identities and contesting social forces requires an analysis which prioritizes the politics of territoriality, an analysis which is grounded in space as well as situated in time. Furthermore, I would argue that Virilio's (1986) treatment of speed and politics is primarily concerned with nuclear strategy and military technology, in which a certain reading of geographical localization and its posited loss of strategic value is unduly generalized. In the protracted discursive war for people's minds, knowledge of and power over particular spaces and territories remains a crucial vector of (inter)national politics. We do have to remember, however, that Virilio's original French text was written in 1977.

6. In the English language literature, the recent contributions of Sidaway (1991, 1992) on Mozambique also draw the reader's attention to the significance of the internal in geopolitical formulations.

7. However, in the Brazilian case, one can also find interpretations of geopolitics that prioritize the external dimension; see, for example, Martinez (1980) and Vesentini (1987).

8. On other occasions I have gone into more detail on the post-modern, development and the politics of difference across the North-South divide; see, for instance, Slater 1992a, 1992b and 1993.

9. It is worth noting here that in the case of military intervention in the Southern Cone and, specifically in relation to state terror in Argentina, defence of the 'West' as a mythical construction, was an important

433

element of the junta's overall discourse. One Admiral commented, 'the West today is a state of the soul, no longer tied to geography', and another posited, 'the West is for us a process of development more than a

geographical location' - see Graziano (1992, 123 and 271).

10. The continuance of what we might call the geopolitics of 'ways of life' found expression in the work of highly influential geographers. In the early sixties, for example, in a discussion of the Cold War, Ackerman (1962, 296) wrote, 'we are fighting for the adherence of nations and social groups to a way of life on which we believe the future of mankind depends'. At the same time, Cuba and North Vietnam were described by Ackerman as

'geographical losses', so that decisive positions in the Cold War 'must be measured ultimately in the

coinage of geography'. 11. I am particularly grateful to Arturo Escobar for

communicating this reference - see Escobar (1993). 12. This is a 1970 citation taken from the influential work

of Gabriel Almond who was Chair (1954-63) of the American SSRC Committee on Comparative Politics - see Cruise O'Brien, 1979.

13. Similarly, one of Pool's colleagues, Lucien Pye, a founder of counter-insurgency, and Almond's succes- sor as Chair of the SSRC Committee on Comparative Politics, wrote in 1966 of the importance of 'protect- ing a traditional society politically and militarily from the calculated attempts by well organized enemies of freedom to use violence to gain totalitarian control of vulnerable societies' - quoted in Cruise O'Brien (1979, 62). Pye's statement clearly echoed the Tru- man doctrine.

14. As one critic noted in the mid-1980s, certainly not without justification, since the late 1940s the 'depic- tion of the international scene as one of chronic threat has colored the thinking of governments of the US and its NATO allies ever since' (Horesh, 1985, 504).

15. This statement is taken from a National Security Council paper, referred to by Kolko (1988, 130), in his well-documented study of US strategy towards the Third World in the post-war period.

16. It should also be remembered that the strategy being developed was closely linked to the role played by a number of key social science advisors. W. W. Rostow, for example, who argued that Communism was an 'international disease' of the transition to modernization, was highly influential in the policy circles of the time (Kolko, 1988, 130-3).

17. I shall return to the deficiencies of the modernization

approach in the section on dependencia perspectives. 18. It ought not to be forgotten, however, that most of

the Bank's lending continued to be orientated toward

large-scale projects to promote economic growth but now, for the first time, key resources were

devoted to programmes targeting the rural and urban

poor. 19. For example, while in 1974 the number of anthro-

pologists working on a full-time basis for US AID was one, the number had grown to 22 by mid-1977 and to at least 50 by mid-1980. In addition, the number of anthropologists working for other governmental development bodies also increased substan- tially in this period (see Escobar, 1991, 665).

20. At the beginning of 1988, the World Bank set up the Private Sector Development Review Group to stimulate initiatives for the further extension and strengthening of the private sector in developing countries. As was noted in 1989, 'the World Bank Group has

long emphasized the advantages of market discipline and private initiative in promoting efficient

development' (World Bank, 1989, v). 21. The following examples are given: in Argentina, a

$325 million Bank loan, approved in 1992, was to

support reforms which are to include a reduction of about 20 per cent in federal employment and a reversal of wage compressions from 3:1 to over 10:1. Other related operations were approved for

Madagascar, Mauritania and Pakistan; further, structural adjustment operations in Bolivia, Bulgaria, Burundi, India, the Lao People's Democratic Republic, Peru and Romania all had public-sector restructuring components (see World Bank, 1992a, 62).

22. Mexico and the United States are seen to have

complementary economies and, through NAFTA, the access of US firms to Mexico's low-cost production conditions will be improved whilst Mexican com-

panies will benefit from an 'infusion of technology', 'the disparity in per capita income levels between Mexico and its northern neighbours would narrow

rapidly, and the excess supply of labor in Mexico would be absorbed locally' (see IDB, 1991, 11).

23. For instance, investment should be encouraged to flow to those activities with the highest expected economic return; workers should be encouraged to move to occupations and sectors in which they are most productive and hiring and firing procedures should be reasonably flexible; private entrepreneur- ship should be facilitated by eliminating bureaucratic and legal impediments, and price controls and sub- sidies should be phased out - all these recommendations and others are to be found in IDB (1991, 14).

24. For example, as the data collected by ECLAC show, from 1980 to 1989 the percentage of the Latin American population living in poverty increased from 41 per cent to 44 per cent (see United Nations, ECLAC, 1991, 66).

25. In a related article, I have briefly explored some features of the history of these ideas (see Slater, 1993). For a recent and useful discussion of the

political sources of privatization in Latin America and Western Europe, see Schami (1992).

DAVID SLATER 434


26. For a detailed analysis of the Taiwanese case see, for example, Amsden (1985) and for an excellent review of some recent analyses of East Asian industrialization see Henderson (1992).

27. In a recent intervention in the debate on the political conditionalities of aid in Africa, Barya (1993) makes a number of relevant propositions noting the emergence of a global scheme by the West to create a new economic and military world order following the collapse of state socialism and the end of the Cold War.

28. The point here, of course, is that not only does the

perspective put forward by the IDB represent a lack of knowledge of the rich heritage of Latin American social and economic sciences, which have been very much characterized by an impressive and autochtho- nous generation of knowledge, but the Bank's

approach already assumes that the West is the carrier of knowledge and the Latin American other, is, in the main, its dependent recipient. I have discussed some of these issues in Slater, 1992a and 1992b.

29. Also, Ayres (1985, 71) has indicated that in the case of Chile, for instance, the World Bank produced a

report in late 1975 that painted an exceedingly grim picture of the economic situation in that country but by early 1976 a number of key loans were approved. As Ayres suggests 'it was difficult to explain these actions with reference to arguments about credit- worthiness'. The approval or withholding of loans is, of course, only one aspect of the politics of economic policy.

30. For the seminal Latin American text on dependency see Cardoso and Faletto (1969); the English trans- lation appeared ten years later.

31. For a useful overview of the history of dependency writing in Latin America, in which attention is paid to the lesser-known earlier literature of the 1950s, see Chilcote (1984) and, more recently, Kay (1989).

32. In the African context, work by Amin (1976) developed a similar series of arguments on the specificities of peripheral capitalism in which the phenomenon of marginalization was related to the particular forms of incorporation of African economies into the world system.

33. In the limited space available here, it is not possible to go into the different currents within dependency thinking, but this is by now a well-known theme - see Kay's (1989) detailed analysis, as well as the more general treatment provided by Larrain (1989). It remains the case that the more cultural and philosophical strands informing the overall evolution of dependency thinking in Latin America have received far less attention in the West than the more social and economic formulations.

34. On other occasions, I have tried to indicate what were the main problems with the Marxist approach to development theory and practice (Slater, 1992a

and 1993). I am not advocating an anti-Marxist

perspective, since there are still many relevant orientations within Marxism seen in its fullest scope and this is especially the case for the lineage going back to Gramsci.

35. For one recent account of such a phenomenon in Colombia, see Findji's (1992) interesting essay.

REFERENCES

ACKERMAN, E. A. (1962) 'Public policy issues for the professional geographer', Annals of the Association of American Geographers 52, 3: 292-8

AMBROSE, S. E. (1988) Rise to globalism (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth)

AMIN S. (1976) Unequal development: an essay on the social formations of peripheral capitalism (The Harvester Press, Hassocks, Sussex)

AMSDEN, A. H. (1985) 'The State and Taiwan's economic development', in EVANS, P. B., RUESCHE- MEYER, D. and SKOCPOL, T. (eds) Bringing the State back in (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge) 78-106

APTER, D. (1987) Rethinking development - modernization, dependency and postmodern politics (Sage, London)

ARRIGHI, G. (1991) 'World income inequalities and the future of Socialism', New Left Review September/ October 189: 39-65

ASHLEY, R. K. (1987) 'The geopolitics of geopolitical space: toward a critical social theory of international politics', Alternatives XII: 403-34

AYRES, R. L. (1985) Banking on the poor: the World Bank and world poverty (The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.)

BARYA, J-J. B. (1993) 'The new political conditionalities of aid: an independent view of Africa', IDS Bulletin 24, 1: 16-23

BECKER, B. K. (1982) Geopol tica da Amazonia: a nova fronteira de recursos (Zahar Editores, Rio de Janeiro)

CAMACHO, A. (1990) 'Informalidad politica - mov- imientos sociales y violencia', Nueva Sociedad 106: 36-49

CARDOSO, F. H. and FALETTO, E. (1969) Dependencia y Desarrollo en Am rica Latina (Siglo XXI, Mexico)

CASTELLS, M. and LASERNA, R. (1989) 'La nueva dependencia: cambio tecnol6gico y reestructuraci6n socioecon6mica en America Latina', David y Goliath - Revista de CLACSO XVIII, 55: 2-16

CASTORIADIS, C. (1991) Philosophy, politics, autonomy: essays in political philosophy (Oxford University Press, Oxford)

CHILCOTE, R. H. (1984) Theories of development and underdevelopment (Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado)

CHILD, J. (1979) 'Geopolitical thinking in Latin America', Latin American Research Review XIV, 2: 89-111

CONNOLLY, W. E. (1988) Political theory and modernity (Blackwells, Oxford)

435

CORBRIDGE, S. (1993) 'Colonialism, post-colonialism and the political geography of the Third World', in TAYLOR, P. (ed.) Political geography of the twentieth century - a global analysis (Belhaven Press, London) 171-205

CRUISE O'BRIEN, D. (1979) 'Modernisation, order and the erosion of a democratic ideal', in LEHMANN, D. (ed.) Development theory (Frank Cass, London) 49-76

DALBY, S. (1988) 'Geopolitical discourse: the Soviet Union as Other', Alternatives XIII: 415-42

DALBY, S. (1991) 'Critical geopolitics: discourse, difference and dissent', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 9, 3: 261-83

DER DERIAN, J. (1990) 'The (S)pace of international relations: simulation, surveillance and speed', Inter- national Studies Quarterly 34: 295-310

DER DERIAN, J. and SHAPIRO, M. J. (eds) (1989) International/intertextual relations - post-modern readings of world politics (Lexington Books, Lexington)

ESCOBAR, A. (1991) 'Anthropology and the devel-

opment encounter: the making and marketing of devel-

opment anthropology', American Ethnologist 18, 4: 658-82

ESCOBAR, A. (1993) Encountering development: the making and un-making of the Third World, 1945-1992 (mimeo) (forthcoming)

FANON, F. (1967) The wretched of the earth (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth)

FINDJI, M. T. (1992) 'From resistance to social movement: the indigenous authorities movement in Colombia', in ESCOBAR, A. and ALVAREZ, S. (eds) The making of social movements in Latin America -

identity, strategy and democracy (Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado) 112-33

FOUCHER, M. (1987) 'Geopolitique en Afrique du Sud:

I'enigme sud-africaine', H rodote 46: 108-49 GRAZIANO, F. (1992) Divine violence: spectacle, psycho-

sexuality and radical Christianity in the Argentine 'Dirty War' (Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado)

HALL, S. (1992) 'The West and the rest: discourse and

power', in HALL, S. and GIEBEN, B. (eds) Formations of modernity (The Open University, Polity Press, Oxford) 275-331

HELD, D. (1991) 'Democracy, the nation-state and the

global system', in HELD, D. (ed.) Political theory today (Polity Press, Cambridge) 197-235

HENDERSON, J. (1992) Against the economic orthodoxy: on the making of the East Asian miracle Working Paper No. 230, Manchester Business School, Manchester

HIGGOTT, R. A. (1983) Political development theory (Routledge, London)

HOLDAR, S. (1992) 'The ideal state and the power of

geography: the life-work of Rudolf Kjellen', Political

Geography 11, 3: 307-23 HORESH, E. (1985) 'Labelling and the language of

international development', Development and change 16, 3: 503-14

HOSLE, V. (1992) 'The Third World as a philosophical problem', Social Research 59, 2: 227-62

HUNTINGTON, S. P. (1968) Political order in changing societies (Yale University Press, New Haven and London)

INTER-AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT BANK (IDB) (1991) Economic and social progress in Latin America: 1991 Report (Washington DC)

KAY, C. (1989) Latin American theories of development and

underdevelopment (Routledge, London) KOLKO, G. (1988) Confronting the Third World: United

States foreign policy, 1945-1980 (Pantheon, New York) LACLAU, E. (1990) New reflections on the revolution of our

time (Verso Books, London) LACOSTE, Y. (1987) 'tditorial: Geopolitiques Internes en

Afrique', Hrodote 46: 3-22

LANDELL-MILLS, P. (1992) 'Governance, cultural change and empowerment', Journal of Modem African Studies 30, 4: 543-67

LARRAIN, J. (1989) Theories of development (Polity Press, Cambridge)

LEFORT, C. (1988) Democracy and political theory (Polity Press, Cambridge)

MARTINEZ, P. F. (1980) Fronteras abiertas: expansionismo y geopol tica en el Brasil contemporneo (Siglo XXI, Mexico)

MOGHADAM, V. M. (1992) 'Development and women's emancipation: is there a connection?' in NEDERVEEN PIETERSE, J. (ed.) Emancipations, modern and postmodern (Sage, London) 215-55

MOHANTY, C. T. (1992) 'Feminist encounters: locating the politics of experience', in BARRETT, M. and PHILLIPS, A. (eds) Destabilizing theory - contemporary feminist debates (Polity, Cambridge) 74-92

NGUGI WA THIONG'O (1985) 'The language of African literature', New Left Review 150: 109-27

NIETZSCHE, F. (1983) Untimely meditations (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge)

NUN, J. (1969) 'Superpoblaci6n relativa, ejercito industrial de reserva y masa marginal', Revista Latinoamericana de

Sociolog a 5, 2 OECD (1992) Development cooperation: 1992 report Paris,

December O TUATHAIL, G. and AGNEW, J. (1992) 'Geopolitics

and discourse - practical geopolitical reasoning in American foreign policy', Political Geography 11, 2: 190-204

PAYER, C. (1991) Lent and lost: foreign credit and Third World development (Zed Books, London)

PINOCHET, A. (1968) Geopol tica (Santiago, Chile) PION-BERLIN, D. (1989) 'Latin American National

Security doctrines: hard- and soft-line themes', Armed Forces and Society 15, 3: 411-29

PRZEWORSKI, A. (1986) Capitalism and social democracy (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge)

436 DAVID SLATER


QUIJANO, A. (1974) 'The marginal pole of the economy and the marginalized labour force', Economy and Society 3, 4: 393-428

SCHAMI, H. (1992) 'Conservative political economy in Latin America and Western Europe: the political sources of privatization', in CHALMERS, D. A., CAMPELLO DE SOUZA, M. and BORON, A. (eds) The right and democracy in Latin America (Praeger, New York) 48-67

SIDAWAY, J. D. (1991) 'Contested terrain: transformation and continuity of territorial organisation in

post-independence Mozambique', Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie lxxxii, 5: 367-76

SIDAWAY, J. D. (1992) 'Mozambique: destabilization, state, society and space', Political Geography 11, 3: 239-58

SLATER, D. (1992a) 'Theories of development and politics of the post-modem - exploring a border zone', in NEDERVEEN PIETERSE, J. (ed.) Emancipations, modern and postmodern (Sage, London) 283-319

SLATER, D. (1992b) Exploring other zones of the postmodern: problems of ethnocentrism and difference across the North-South divide (CEDLA, Amsterdam) and forthcom-

ing in RATTANSI, A. and WESTWOOD, S. (eds) On the Western Front: studies in racism, modernity and identity (Polity Press, Cambridge)

SLATER, D. (1993) 'The political meanings of development: in search of new horizons', in SCHUURMAN, F. (ed.) Beyond the impasse - development theory in the 1990s (Zed Books, London) 83-101 (forthcoming)

SPIVAK, G. (1988) 'Can the subaltern speak?' in NEL- SON, C. and GROSSBERG, L. (eds) Marxism and the

interpretation of culture (University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Ill.) 271-313

SUNKEL, 0. (1972) Capitalismo transnacional y desinte- graci n nacional en Am rica Latina (Ediciones Nueva Visi6n, Buenos Aires)

TAYLOR, P. J. (ed.) (1993) Political geography of the twentieth century: a global analysis (Belhaven Press, London)

TICKNER, A. J. (1993) 'States and markets: an ecofeminist

perspective on international political economy', Inter- national Political Science Review 14, 1: 59-69

TIRONI, E. (1990) Autoritarismo, modernizaci n y margin- alidad (Ediciones Sur, Santiago de Chile)

UNITED NATIONS, DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMIC AFFAIRS (1951) Measures for the economic development of underdeveloped countries (New York) (quoted in Escobar, A. 1993)

UNITED NATIONS, ECLAC (1991) Sustainable development: changing production patterns, social equity and the environment (Santiago de Chile)

VESENTINI, J. W. (1987) Imperialismo e geopol tica global (Papirus Editora, Campinas, Brazil)

VIRILIO, P. (1986) Speed and politics: an essay on dromology (Semiotext, New York) (published in French in 1977)

WALKER, R. B. J. (1993) Inside/outside: international relations as political theory (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge)

WORLD BANK (1981a) World Development Report, 1981 (Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford)

WORLD BANK (1981b) World Bank Annual Report, 1981 (Washington DC)

WORLD BANK (1989) Developing the private sector: a challenge for the World Bank group (Washington DC)

WORLD BANK (1992a) The World Bank Annual Report, 1992 (Washington DC)

WORLD BANK (1992b) World Development Report, 1992 (Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford)

ZEA, L. (1970) Am rica en la historia (Ediciones de la Revista de Occidente, Madrid) (copyright Leopoldo Zea, 1957)

437

slater - geopolitical imagination[1]

Documents

conditions of use

geopolitical imagination

geopolitical conditions

jstor archive

jstor transmission

noncommercial use

relations of development

geopolitical power