The Pax Americana and Development

Abstract

Development in its many iterations was born from the needs of the Pax Americana to create reliable and competent compradors, plus viable trading partners in order that its post-1945 informal empire would function. This chapter will examine the way the Pax Americana replaced Europe’s formal empires, the reason informal empires need comprador partners, and the difficulties encountered by the Pax Americana with identifying and appointing satisfactory comprador partners. The relationship between this “comprador problem” and the founding of a development industry and aid industry will be unpacked, as will the core assumption underpinning Pax Americana “development.” The differences between Pax Americana and Pax Britannica governance and development will also be examined, as will the continuities and discontinuities between these two varieties of imperialism. The idea of “development” emerged in the 1950s as one of the consequences of howWorldWar II transformed the world by replacing British global hegemony with the Pax Americana (see Louw PE Roots of the Pax Americana. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2010). Before this war European empires (especially the British Empire) straddled the globe, while the USA found itself in the frustrating position of being a new rising global power which kept finding its opportunities for expanding its trade thwarted by the fact the Europeans had gotten there first. And so, even before America had entered World War II, the US State Department had established working committees charged with conceptualizing how to terminate European imperialism through decolonization (O’Sullivan CD Sumner Welles, postwar planning, and the quest for a new world order. Columbia University Press, New York, 2008: chapter 4), plus how to replace Europe’s formal empires with an American informal empire. After 1945, American power was used to implement this State Department planning such that Europe’s empires were deconstructed and a Pax American trading empire constructed in their place. This shift from formal empire to informal empire is significant because it created conditions that produced the “development” phenomenon.