Friend or Foe: Failings of the United States’ Modernization Theory in Vietnam

Abstract

Friend or Foe: Failings of the United States’ Modernization Theory in Vietnam By Emily Vega B efore the United States government employed full-scale military intervention in Vietnam in the 1960s, policy makers sought counterinsurgent means of preventing a revolution and the anticipated communist takeover of the southern region. These strategies were aimed at stabilizing South Vietnam while crafting it into a new nation- state that would be an ally to the United States. Political and economic theorists during the Eisenhower (1953-1961) and Kennedy (1961-1963) administrations formulated that the key to stopping the revolution was to cultivate the modernization of Vietnam. What “modernization” meant will be further examined in the following pages. In collaboration with Ngo Dinh Diem’s South Vietnam regime, the United States implemented a number of strategic programs and poured monetary aid into South Vietnam in an aggressive effort to stabilize the region, pacify and gain the loyalty of local populations, and ultimately prevent communist influence from affecting the people living in the countryside. Efforts made by the United States ultimately proved futile as the National Liberation Front, known to the United States as the Viet Cong, gained control over South Vietnam. 1 Under inadequate theoretical assumptions about development, contradictions in the translation of American ideals into real-world policy, and a lack of cultural understanding, the United States and its modernization strategy clashed with the Vietnamese struggle for self-determination as it reproduced former colonial structures, political conflict and resistance, and South Vietnam’s unwanted dependency on resources from the United States. Contextualizing the Problem: Modernization Theory Defined Although “modernization theory” can be traced back as far as the eighteenth century’s Enlightenment period, along with notions of progress and humanism, ideas on modernization eventually combined in the mid-twentieth century as a compendium for the United States on which leaders based strategies to combat communist expansion on the world stage. One of the best-known enthusiasts of the concept was Walt Whitman Rostow (1916-2003), an economist and political theorist from Yale University who advised several United States presidents on national security from the 1950s through the 1970s and helped shape American foreign diplomacy for Southeast Asia. 2 In his work The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, Rostow draws from the course of world history to redefine modernization theory as a series of periods by which a society moves from an economy marked by limited productivity and an agricultural emphasis to one that features an increase in disposable income and durable consumer goods. Rostow names these five periods traditional, transitional, take-off, drive to maturity, and age of high mass-consumption. 3 An evaluation of how the United States government applied this theory to its foreign relations in Vietnam under Cold War objectives is The National Liberation Front (NLF) was a Vietnamese political organization with a military arm that was made of both Vietnamese Communist Party members and noncommunist members and sought to reunify North and South Vietnam. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, s. v. “Walt Whitman Rostow,” last accessed April 13, 2015, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/510297/Walt-Whitman-Rostow. Walt Whitman Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 4.