The Right Kind of Revolution : Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present

Michael E. Latham

ISBN 10: 080144604X / ISBN 13: 9780801446047

Edité par Cornell University Press Jan 2011, 2011

A propos de cet article

Neuware - A critical history of modernization theory in American foreign policy.

N° de réf. du vendeur 9780801446047

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: The Right Kind of Revolution : Modernization, Development, and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present
• Éditeur: Cornell University Press Jan 2011
• Date de parution: 2011
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 080144604X
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9780801446047
• Reliure: Buch
• État de l'article: Neu
• Dimensions: 235 L x 155 H x 22 P (en millimètres) 235 millimètres de largeur par 155 millimètres de hauteur par 22 millimètres de profondeur
• Poids: 907 grammes

A propos de ce titre

Synopsis

After World War II, a powerful conviction took hold among American intellectuals and policymakers: that the United States could profoundly accelerate and ultimately direct the development of the decolonizing world, serving as a modernizing force around the globe. By accelerating economic growth, promoting agricultural expansion, and encouraging the rise of enlightened elites, they hoped to link development with security, preventing revolutions and rapidly creating liberal, capitalist states. In The Right Kind of Revolution, Michael E. Latham explores the role of modernization and development in U.S. foreign policy from the early Cold War through the present.

The modernization project rarely went as its architects anticipated. Nationalist leaders in postcolonial states such as India, Ghana, and Egypt pursued their own independent visions of development. Attempts to promote technological solutions to development problems also created unintended consequences by increasing inequality, damaging the environment, and supporting coercive social policies. In countries such as Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Iran, U.S. officials and policymakers turned to modernization as a means of counterinsurgency and control, ultimately shoring up dictatorial regimes and exacerbating the very revolutionary dangers they wished to resolve. Those failures contributed to a growing challenge to modernization theory in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Since the end of the Cold War the faith in modernization as a panacea has reemerged. The idea of a global New Deal, however, has been replaced by a neoliberal emphasis on the power of markets to shape developing nations in benevolent ways. U.S. policymakers have continued to insist that history has a clear, universal direction, but events in Iraq and Afghanistan give the lie to modernization's false hopes and appealing promises.

À propos de l'auteur

Michael E. Latham is Professor of History at Fordham University and Dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill. He is the author of Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and "Nation Building" in the Kennedy Era and coeditor of Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War and Knowledge and Postmodernism in Historical Perspective.