Dreaming in Technicolour?

Abstract

India is hardly the only country to suffer from having a brilliant future, even a glorious past, but always an unsatisfactory-if not wretched-present. The condition used to be called underdevelopment and, after centuries of capitalism and of development, it still affects most of the countries of the world, about 5/6th's of the world's population. But the word and the theories it represented-of dependency and imperialism-have all but disappeared from the discourse of social science. These theories were never part of social science's dominant discourse, but in the 1960s and 1970s they enjoyed a substantial presence, challenging the orthodoxies of modernization theory, the reigning discourse articulating the economic position and prospects of the third world in the 1960s. Against modernization theory's arguments that free markets, free trade, and free financial flows would foster development and end backwardness, dependency theory insisted that uncierdevelopment (not an original backwardness) was the result of precisely these policies. While many dependency theorists concluded that no development was possible under capitalism, others suggested that with extensive state intervention, managed trade, and control over international financial movements a version of it could be achieved. Soon after dependency theory emerged, however, the neoliberal offensive commenced. Neoliberalism's political success (it was never an intellectual one) came in tandem with the broader advance of the new globally. The result was to occlude talk of imperialism, dependency, and underdevelopment.The neoliberal offensive was conducted on many fronts. Amid the miraculous industrialization of the four East Asian tiger in the 19703,' neoliberalism sought to claim that their successes were the result of free-market strategies. Ensuing debates soon clarified, however, that these cases constituted no neoliberal refutations of dependency, nor were they viable neoliberal models for the rest of the developing world. Their intervened extensively in their economies and because they were major stakes in the Cold War, they had better external linkages (in terms of aid, access to markets etc.) than those available to any other developing country. A vast and sprawling literature emerged over the next decade that drew on the experience of these tigers to argue that the right kind of state with the right kind of strategy for intervention could successfully foster industrialization in third world contexts, thus conceding some of the main points of the dependency theory.2 However, this literature on states still overlooked many others: for example that the muchvaunted relative autonomy of the state that made key successful industrializers more effective and active in fostering industrial development was due to their being military and political allies of the US; or that the Cold War had created more favourable external linkages than would ever be available to other third world states.3 These oversights meant that while the tiger were indeed good examples of developmental states, they could not yield lessons for the rest of the third world.But such scholarly questions hardly undermined the political power of neoliberalism.4 In the rest of the developing world the debt crisis had struck, and the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which had already become converts to neoliberalism, used the occasion to impose neoliberal orthodoxies on the vast majority of developing countries in the form of structural adjustment programs. As a result, the 19803 and 19903 became known as lost decades of development with a great many countries registering negative growth rates and experiencing IMF riots. So dismal was the record of neoliberal policies that the 19803 closed with the World Bank being forced to admit at least a mild state role in development.5 Once again, however, this advance of critical discourse was easily reversed as the enthusiasm of the next decade came to the fore: the tide of globalization-another name for neoliberal policies-was going to lift all boats, even the leakiest ones with the most tattered sails. …