Is Development a

form of Neo-Colonialism?*
Gabriel Jimnez Pea**
Fecha de recepcin: 17 de julio de 2014
Fecha de aceptacin: 3 de octubre de 2014
Fecha de modificacin: 26 de octubre de 2014

History does not repeat

itself, but constantly
reinvents everything
G. Rist

ABSTRACT
In this paper I will defend that development is a form of neocolonialism. In order to do so, I distinguish between a nuanced point of view and a radical one. I will present first (I) the
origins and the roots of the development in the colonialism,
then (II) the radical position and, finally (III) the nuanced
one, in order to show why this is a stronger argument to defend the general thesis of this paper.
Keywords
development, neocolonialism.

Es el desarrollo una forma

de Neocolonialismo

O desenvolvimento uma
Forma de Neocolonialismo?

RESUMEN

RESUMO

En este artculo sostengo que el desarrollo es una forma de

neocolonialismo, para demostrarlo, distingo entre un punto
de vista matizado sobre el desarrollo y uno radical; para ello,
en primer lugar presentar los orgenes y las races del desarrollo en el colonialismo (I). A continuacin, el punto de vista
radical sobre el desarrollo (II) y finalmente el punto de vista
matizado, para mostrar por qu este es ms fuerte al defender
la tesis general de este artculo.

Neste artigo sustento que o desenvolvimento uma forma de

neocolonialismo. Como respaldo para esta afirmao, distingo entre um ponto de vista matizado sobre o desenvolvimento e um radical. Para isso, em primeiro lugar, apresentarei as
origens e as razes do desenvolvimento no neocolonialismo
(I). A continuao, o ponto de vista radical sobre o desenvolvimento (II); e, finalmente, o ponto de vista matizado (III),
mostrando por que este argumento mais idneo para defender a tese geral deste artigo.

Palabras clave
Desarrollo, neocolonialismo.

Palavras-chave
Desenvolvimento. Neocolonialismo.

* Artculo de reflexin adscrito

al grupo de investigacin
de Colciencias: Conflictos
armados, construccin de
paz y estudios globales en
seguridad.
** Estudiante de PhD en Ciencia
Poltica, en la Universidad
de los Andes (tercer ao).
Profesional en Filosofa de
la Universidad Nacional de
Colombia, con estudios de
profundizacin en Ciencias
Sociales en la Europa
Viadrina Universitt. Correo
electrnico: g.jimenez28@
uniandes.edu.co

(I) INTRODUCTION: THE ORIGINS AND ROOTS

OF DEVELOPMENT PRACTICES IN THE
COLONIALISM

1 For a non-orthodox version of

the origins of Development,
Cf. Kothari (2005).
2 The merit of a colonizing
people is to place the young
society it has brought forth in
the most suitable conditions
for the development of its
natural faculties; to smooth
its path without hampering its
initiative; to give it the means
and tools that are necessary or
useful for its growth (LeroyBeaulieu, 1874, cited by Rist,
2002: 54).

According to an orthodox version of the origins of

Development1, this practice had their origin in the
European colonial project accomplished by France,
Britain, Belgium, Portugal, and Germany, particularly
in Africa in the period from 1870 to 1960 (Rist, 2002,
Cf. also Duignan and Gann, 1975) and it consolidated
since 1945 with the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall
Plan, and the Rostovian Modernization Theory. It
was the French Paul Leroy-Beaulieu the first thinker
who used the concept Development in his book De
la colonisation chez les peuples modernes2, although
this term had been already employed as well, e. g. by
Marx, Lenin, the League of Nations, etc. (Rist, 2002:
73). On the other hand, in 1949, the President of the
United States at that time, Truman, did exposed the
principal lines upon which the Foreign policy of his
Country was sustained after World War II through 4
points: American support for the UN, the Marshall
Plan for the reconstruction of Europe, the creation of
the NATO, and the fourth point, in which he talked
about mobilizing American advanced science and technological resources for Underdevelopment areas.
With this, it starts the new age of Development.
Since the instauration of the Marshall Plan in 1947
(1947, a, b), Development becomes a mode of thinking and a source of practices, which convert it into
an omnipresent reality (Escobar, 1988, 430). In other
words, Development professionalizes and institutionalizes itself through instruments and practices like planning, foreign aid, loans, and investment to fill in the
savings gap, promoted by institutions like World Bank
and IMF. This way, for instance, peasants, are managed
and controlled, obliged to maneuver within the limits
posed by the institutions. In other words, these practices are Western techniques of power and knowled-

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ge, in many ways resisted by indigenous people. Thus,

the Third World entered post-World War II Western
consciousness as constituting the appropriate social
and technical raw material for Development. This status of course depended, and still does, on an extractive
neocolonialism (Escobar, 149).
In Economics, development was conceived as an
evolutionary process, which ends in a modernization.
American Economist W. Rostow builds this naturalistic view in the celebrated book Stages of Economic
Growth (1959, 1-16). There, he considers 5 phases,
which countries must accomplish to take off in the
path of production: 1. Traditional society, whose productivity is very low, 2. Preconditions for takeoff, in
which modern science and creation of technology
come with the discovery of new lands thereby, justifying colonialism, 3. The takeoff or achievement of
growth: industry, railroads, and net investment 10%,
4. The drive to Maturity, in which the Values of traditional society are overcome, something Russia did not
accomplished, and finally, 5. High mass-consumption,
which could be characterized as American Fordism. Paradoxically, this anticommunist manifesto, according
to Rist, can be seen as a Marxism without Marx, insofar as both authors replace history with a philosophy
of history, which prevents todays underdevelopment
from being understood as historical in origin (2002,
101-102). The success of Rostows point of view in the
history of development consists, then, on assuring a
kind of legitimacy of West economic intervention into
the Third world (Rist, 2002: 103).
The terminological innovation development and its
antonym underdevelopment, in this context, thus,
appears to persuade surreptitiously the Third world
about the necessity of North-Western intervention,
in order to preserve values of free market, democracy,
and wellbeing, threatened by communism and the Soviet Union in the Cold war. So, development took

Is development a form of neo-colonialism? (pp. 36 - 42)

at this time a transitive meaning: an action performed

by one agent upon another, to catch up backward
areas, supposedly looking for their take off, according
to Rostows metaphor, while underdevelopment became a naturally occurring, apparently causeless, state
of things (Rist, 2002, 73). In this sense, Development
discourse is, then, a Western-American invention, a
piece of rhetoric power discourse, a performative act,
configuring the episteme of an epoch, in order to exert
more influence in countries not taken by the increasingly other side of world power, and creating, then, a
West/East North/South dichotomist division.
Thereby, given that Development, as showed above, is
a form of indirect intervention over the so-called Third
World or backward countries of the South, and if colonialism is understood as the way that one country exercises power over another, whether through settlement,
sovereignty, or indirect mechanisms of control (Kohn,
2012); hence, Development is a form of neocolonialism.
(II) THE RADICAL VIEW OF DEVELOPMENT.

This point of view, that I name the radical one, is represented by Goldsmith (1997) and others, and considers Development as a form of neocolonialism in the
extent to which its main target is merely to open up
markets, to ensure the laissez faire or free global market
in order to obtain raw materials. This kind of conspiracy theory explains development as being the result of
a predetermined plot by the IMF and the World Bank.
Thus, in this radical view, modern development is a
colonialism repacked (Goldsmith, 1997) and there is
continuity between both practices and together are
doctrines of indirect and direct intervention.
The arguments for this view are the following. First,
development as neo-colonialism is not a matter of free
choice for the Third World, but a matter of violent

Gabriel Jimnez Pea

imposition. This is accomplished through setting up

indigenous elites, engineering coups dtat, military
intervention, killing the domestic economy, lending
money under strong terms, and new corporate colonialism (Goldsmith, 1997). Second, a quick look at the
situation in the Third World today undoubtedly reveals the disquieting continuity between the colonial
era and the era of development (Ibid: 1). There is not
particular advance in backward areas or poor countries
after development intervention and, on the contrary,
there is deepen poverty and misery (Goldsmith, 1993).
Third, development leads to a retreat of the state and
the erosion of the sovereignty (Rush and Szeftel, 1994).
The imposition of structural adjustment programs and
the political conditionalities designed to effect good
governance have eroded state sovereignty for Third
World countries in order to receive essential foreign
assistance, to cede domestic political arrangements,
and policy options to international agencies and governments (Ahluwalia, 2001: 54-55). Fourth, the IMF
and the World Bank are institutions created just in order to complete this obscure plan through debt, and
the professionals who work in the development industry are, for the most part, economic hit men (Zeitgeist
addendum, 2008). I now take all this arguments and
criticize them from another point of view.
(II) The nuanced view. The point of view that I call
the sober one, the nuanced perspective of development as neocolonialism, is represented by, e. g., Ferguson and Lohmann (1994), Kothari (2005), and others.
According to this view, development studies rarely
acknowledge the colonial roots of development. This
perspective, also called post-developmental (Sylvester,
1990), attempts to reveal how contemporary global inequalities between rich and poor countries have been,
and continue to be, shaped by colonial power relations
(Kothari, 2005: 47). But despite affirming the colonial
continuity, for this point of view, it is a mistake to suggest that development discourse is simply a reworking of

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39

the colonial one, since development is not always and

inevitably an extension of colonialism (ibid: 49-50).
In the following, I offer some arguments, which will contrast the nuanced approach with the radical one and, if
there is no contrast, it is because there is commonality
between those views: the affirmation of development
as industry and neocolonialism. First of all, there is no
need of violent imposition, like engineering coups dtat
or military intervention in Development as neocolonialism, because its force depends on a new type of power,
which can be analyzed through the Foucaultian concept
of governmentality, which refers to the the conduct of
conduct, a particular modern form of power that is characterized by an increasing reliance on pastoral care and
techniques of normalization and consensus, as opposed
to more overtly coercive forms of power (Abrahamsen,
2004: 1459). This comprises what the Bretton Institutions had built with development discourse: Indirect
mechanisms of rule such as techniques of notation, computation, and calculation; procedures of examination
and assessment; the invention of devices such as surveys
and presentational forms such as tables; the standardization of systems for training and the inculcation of habits
and other ways to act upon individuals and whole populations (Anders, 2005: 39).
Second, according to Leftwich (1995), development
as colonialism led to a stronger state: the developmental state. In the first place, the internal autonomy of the
developmental states has increased by the inflow of
substantial amounts of foreign aid, loans and state-directed private investment which reduced government
dependence on locally-generated revenue capital (Leftwich, 1995: 411). In the second place, in the developmental state, bureaucracy has had authoritative and
pivotal influence in making development policy (Letfwich, 1995: 406). That produces a relative autonomy
of the elites, which constitutes a high technical bureaucracy and abroad-educated population. That leads to

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an increased autonomy of these elites, which have an

enormous political power to decide policies and perpetuate themselves in the government. Thus, there is not
a retreat of the State, but a metamorphosis of it: One
can also discern state strategies that appear to be in retreat, in decline, even in a state of decay, as part of the
process of continual formation of the state, as a new
modality to produce the political (Hibou, 2004: 3).
Third, development projects fail and that is just in order to perpetuate the development institutions and the
technical intervention. Notwithstanding this, as Ferguson explains, it is not part of a capitalist conspiracy, but
they bear a deliberated misunderstanding of the Third
world, a fancy construction of the realities of countries
(Ferguson, 1994, p. 176-177). In other words, as Naudet (2000) stresses, in particular about Aid operations,
but that we can extent to development projects, these
have been mainly one-size-fits-all and rarely tailor-made ones (127). Finally, development institutions hear
what they like to hear projects fail because absence
of compromise and entrepreneurship by people of the
third World, and the development project is a colonial one, but not a global conspiracy, and the way of
opposing to it consists in a political engagement, which
is looking for truly empowering the poor and unmasking
the false assumptions of this whole project.
Fourth, it is preposterous to affirm that development
professional and brokers are all just hit men (cf. Mosse,
2005), and is not a good idea to homogenize the institutions or individuals which work in the development
industry (Kothari, 2005: 57).
To conclude, colonialism did not repeat itself, but it
has reinvented itself through development: On the
basis of the old conceptual frameworks, together with
snatches of ancient mythological discourse, the present
was reinterpreted in such a way as to give it unchallengeable legitimacy (Rist, 2002: 54).

Is development a form of neo-colonialism? (pp. 36 - 42)

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The Marshall Plan Speech by George Marshall

(1947a): http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Marshall_Plan_Speech
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Peter Joseph. GMP LLC. 123 min.

Is development a form of neo-colonialism? (pp. 36 - 42)