Organized by DANIEL SPEICH (Institut für Geschichte der ETH Zürich) and HUBERTUS BÜSCHEL (Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam) „Towards a Global History of Development“ aimed explicitly at taking a historical, analytical perspective of the post-colonial development endeavour. Announced to be an ‚experiment‘ the conference did produce a wide range of case studies on development experiences and tried to understand how they form a complex global history. However, the need to periodize and localize development practices showed clearly in the presentations and in the extended discussions during this conference.
In the opening keynote, MICHAEL GEYER described development, or rather development theory, as a distinct historical trajectory based on state intervention into social reproduction in order to accelerate growth, a „strategy of staging growth“. He argued that development had been cast as a rollback against socialist development ideas and therefore as an American brand. The history of development-ideology however has produced a series of historical ironies. One of those is that a relentlessly market driven development, based on capital moving transnationally, prevailed not until but from the end of the Cold War. GESINE KRÜGER supported the centrality of the 1989 periodic rupture and argued for periodization: Not all global connectivity should be looked at under the analytical assumption that it is an expression of ‚development‘.
ANTHONY ANGHIE gave a keynote lecture on the legal history of the idea that a nation needs to develop and effectively use all its resources in order to be awarded sovereignty. Anghie’s reflections on the importance of sovereignty, often negated in interventions aimed at „bringing development“ were reflected in KAPEPWA TAMBILA‘s statement in the concluding session of the workshop reminding that development took place in an unequal world where sovereignty and the risk to be intervened upon has been, and still is, unequally distributed.
Presentations in the first sessions concentrated on looking at the many dimensions of ‚development brokers‘ and ‚brain circulation‘ (rather than ‚brain drain‘). THOMAS HÜSKENS deconstructed the ‚development expert‘ and advocated that the experts do not constitute a unitary group with a shared notion of development. KATJA FÜLLBERG-STOLBERG showed in an amazing case study how former Nazis found a new professional field in propagating modernization and development in the service of Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana by installing and leading a glider school aimed at Ghanaian youth. Not actually training any Ghanaian pilot, the school turned out to be more of a symbolic icon of modernization and an exercise of disciplined youth organisation – a testimony to the character of the post-colonial development state. YOUNG-SUN HONG showed how Korean health professionals had been mobilized, as a part of a national development agenda to be ‚exported‘ and how they, working in Germany, subsequently re-invented themselves as global citizens („my home is everywhere I was and will be“). Equally both ANETTE SKOVSTED HANSEN and KONRAD KUHN showed that development aid histories cannot be looked at in national boundaries but in terms of the transnational networks and discourses they established. While Skovsted concentrated on individuals, Kuhn showed how national – and transnational – collective actors formed around the resistance against the „Cabora Bassa“ hydropower project in Mozambique. Adding to this, KAPEPWA TAMBILA used his comment to highlight the need to study south-south relations.
STEPHAN MALINOWSKI‘s account of the French „Section Administrative Spécialisée“ being deployed to enforced modernisation during the Algerian War opened the debate beyond actors. This is one case where development and military intervention became interchangeable. It showed the intrinsic violence of development and also stimulated reflection on the rhetoric contents of humanitarian interventions during the last decade.
The next sessions queried the function of development aid in national discourse and international relations. MARC DIERIKX proved that it was not morality but money and national self-interest that drove the Netherlands development aid programs and that the local environment of development projects was hardly taken into account. LUKAS ZÜRCHER addressed the same topic analyzing the construction of a national self-imagination: He showed how Swiss development aid to Ruanda reinforced concepts of „Swissness“ and national self-confidence. On a more political analyst note, GÖKSER GÖKÇAY and MIRIAM LIMOEIRO CARDOSO reflected the history of development in Turkey and Brazil, showing how development programs and ideologies shaped national politics in relation to an international context. GREGORY WITKOWSKI set out to grasp the historical impetus that philanthropy lent to the development enterprise and he made a case to take into account that emotions play a central role in solidarity. DANIEL MAUL and PERRIN SELCER presented details on the history of international organisations as actors for development. ILO as well as UNICEF both proved to be active in promoting specific fields and approaches to development on which these institutions grew to become expert bodies. Many of the topics were raised again in CORINNA UNGER‘s study on the Ford and the Rockefeller foundations‘ activities in modernizing Indian agriculture. In this example interests of the Indian state met with a resourceful American ‚philanthropy‘. Ungers description of the programs initiated in India (like „community development“) underlined HUBERTUS BÜSCHEL’s attack on the seemingly innocent development concept of‚self-help‘. He exemplified in his dissection of the said concept how it has a history predating the 1920s, and how it stands for a history of development concepts and instruments that is a history of tidal movements rather than radical innovations. In doing so, Büschel exposed a history of so-called „self-help“ concepts which are oppressive in character, mirroring Unger’s Indian examples where intricate links of public and private activities in birth-control programs eventually undermined individuals’ rights.
The language and discourses of development were specifically problematized by NIELS PETERSSON and MARC FREY. Petersson highlighted the centrality of temporal concepts for development. Often development was projected as time-compressed social development. In Mao’s great leap time was even collapsed. The discussion again addressed the problematic, even violent, aspects of ‚urgency‘ that guide social intervention. Frey showed how a global epistemic community of demographers was constructed while they established a specific „population-control“ discourse that influenced governmental policies especially in the 1970s. In this truly global discourse, the idea of an imminent ‚explosion‘ of human populations put the fate of the planet at stake and necessitated urgent action.
DANIEL SPEICH’s presentation focused on the production of epistemic concepts and communities. Analyzing the invention of the GNP he showed how economics became a global lingua franca for development experts. GNP became the yardstick by which societies could be measured in terms of their ‚development‘, or even the ‚health of the nation‘. At the same time economic discourse de-politicized development discourse. As an epistemic concept ‚economy‘ was contrived as a closed system that could be manipulated to reach any goal identified and from the 1930s it shaped new forms of global intervention. In her comment ANJA KRUKE stressed the need to study epistemic communities, the interplay of experts and politicians in producing „development“, and the reality behind the rhetoric of apolitical science.
MARTIN REMPE, HARRO MAAT and PATRICK NEVELING discussed the negotiation of development in local contexts. Rempe showed how local „vulgarisateurs“ were designed to be African custodians of development in Senegal’s groundnut schemes by the French SATEC (Société de l’Aide Téchnique et de la Coopération) in the 1960s. Just as in Maat’s presentation of food security programs in Surinam, the prolongation of colonial development-debates, production patterns and structures of authority into the post-colonial era was revealing. Such case studies establish the historical facts that show how development undercut strict periodic divides between the colonial and the post-colonial era. And they exemplify the complex negotiation processes between the local and the global that shaped the experiences and outcomes of development projects where they were actually put in place. Neveling‘s presentation of the idea of „Export Processing Zones“ as ‚islands of modernization‘ travelling around the globe, however, aimed at exposing the limits of agency. Presentations and discussions of this workshop clearly showed the need for case studies of development practices in the south that bring developers and the developed into the same analytical field in order to integrate diverse histories of development into a global history. At the same time, this calls for a methodology of comparison that allows analysing case studies in a global history perspective. One of the tools suggested in this context was to compare diverse local experiences on the level of global markets (Geyer).
Comments in the final session were given by Andreas Eckert and Richard Rottenburg. ANDREAS ECKERT called for a deeper examination of the term ‚development‘ and its implications for the project of a global history. His was a claim to take different temporal and geographical structures into account to avoid a teleological history of development that merges phenomena that cannot be linked. What emerged clearly from the workshop was the need to look closer at the production of knowledge and the travelling of such knowledge. RICHARD ROTTENBURG went as far as to suggest a specific analytical framework for development. He wants to understand development as a figuration, and the „project“ as a new social form in Norbert Elias’ terms. Development then is the idea and practice of progress in an organised and predictable manner. Contrary to most speakers who had described ‚scientification‘ as a main trajectory of the development discourse, Rottenberg suggested rather to look at „experimentalization“. „Pilot projects“ as much as the localisation of projects in a permanent state of emergency have become characteristic for „development“. Against the background of the so-called weak states in Africa interventions in the name of development do no longer intent to improve national economies but aim at rescuing the life of individuals. Others, like Speich and ARAM ZIAI pushed the fact that development is an empty signifier, a container that could be filled with very different meanings. Hüskens added to this his observation, that development strategies and projects are never really given up but rather accumulated. Obviously there remain many global histories (the plural is indispensable) of development to be written. This conference was a springboard for more insight in this field of studies and the planned publication of the proceedings will be a valuable contribution.
Conference Overview:
Büschel, Hubertus (Univ. of Potsdam, Germany)/Speich, Daniel (ETH Zurich, Switzerland): Welcome Address
Michael Geyer (Univ. of Chicago, USA): Develop Man! – Development? The Confrontation over Development in the 1960s and 1970s
Session 1: Moving People I
(Focus on global experts and their networks in development.)
Arens, Esther Helena (Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Univ. Bonn, Germany): In the Field of Translation: West German Politicians, Diplomats and Experts Facing Indonesia in the 1960s
Füllberg-Stolberg, Katja (Univ. of Hamburg, Germany): Prominent Nazis as Development Aid Volunteers and Political Advisors in Post-Colonial Ghana
Hüsken, Thomas (Univ. Bayreuth, Germany): Hybrid Experts. Myths and Realities about Development Experts
Malinowski, Stephan (Univ. Freiburg, Germany): Shock Troops of Modernization? Military Violence and Modernization Programs during the Algerian War 1954-1962
Tambila, Kapepwa (Univ. of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania): Commentary
Session 2: Moving People II
(Focus on global connections with respect to migration and grass-root movements.)
Hong, Young-sun (State Univ. of New York, USA): Gender and Race of Uneven Development and Global Migration: Asian Drama in West Germany
Skovsted Hansen, Annette (Univ. of Aarhus, Denmark): Developing Global Networks. Personal Ties Financed by Japanese and Danish Foreign Aid, 1947-2007
Kuhn, Konrad (Univ. of Zurich, Switzerland): Unity of Liberation Struggle All Over the World – Development Policy and International Solidarity Movement in Western Europe
Krüger, Gesine (Univ. of Zurich, Switzerland): Commentary
Session 3: Connected Countries I
(Focus on national experiences of the global development endeavour.)
Dierikx, Marc (Institute of Netherlands History The Hague, Netherlands): Between Aid and Trade: Dutch Development Policy, 1949-1973
Zürcher, Lukas (Univ. of Zurich, Switzerland): “We Have a Special Role to Play”. Swissness and Swiss Aid in International Development Cooperation in the 1960s and 1970s
Gökçay, Gökser (Dokuz Eylul Univ. Izmir, Turkey): A Multidimensional Approach to Turkey’s Foreign Aid Experience in the Post-War Period
Cardoso, Miriam Limoeiro (Univ. Federal Rio de Janeiro, Brazil): The Ideology of Development in Brazil
Engerman, David (Brandeis Univ, Waltham, USA): Commentary
Keynote 2
Anghie, Anthony (Univ. of Utah Salt Lake City, USA): Colonialism, Development and the League of Nations
Session 4: Connected Countries II
(Focus on the interplay between nations and international agencies.)
Witkowski, Gregory R. (Ball State Univ. Muncie, USA/Center on Peace and Conflict Studies at Ball State): Giving, Peace, and Change: Creating Peace Cultures through Charity and Aid
Maul, Daniel (Justus-Liebig-University of Giessen, Germany): The ILO and Development
Unger, Corinna (GHI Washington, USA): American Foundations in India and the Modernization of Indian Agriculture, 1950 to 1975
Eckert, Andreas (Humboldt Univ. Berlin, Germany): Commentary
Keynote 3
Gupta, Akhil (Univ. of California Los Angeles, USA): National Poverty, Global Poverty, and Neoliberalism (ausgefallen)
Session 5: Topics and Flows I
(Focus on the global development discourse.)
Lepenies, Philipp H. (KfW Bank Group, Frankfurt-Main, Germany): Dichotomies and Development. An Inquiry into the Roots of the Modern Concept of Development
Petersson, Niels P. (Univ. of Konstanz, Germany): Time and Development – Great Leaps Forward and Natural Evolutions
Büschel, Hubertus (Univ. of Potsdam, Germany): Help and Self-Help. A Global Principle of “Development” in African Colonialism and Post-Colonialism
Ziai, Aram (Univ. of Vienna, Austria): Commentary
Session 6: Topics and Flows II
(Focus on attempts to dynamize markets and to incite innovation.)
Rempe, Martin (Humboldt Univ. Berlin, Germany): The Reform of the Senegalese Groundnut Economy in the Sixties. Colonial Aftermath and the Culture of Co-operation
Neveling, Patrick (Univ. of Bern, Switzerland): Export Processing Zones within the Project of Development: A Theoretical and Empirical Re-evaluation
Speich, Daniel (ETH Zurich, Switzerland): Views from Lake Success. Technical Assistance, the United Nations, and the Economy as Artefact
Rottenburg, Richard (Martin-Luther-Univ. Halle-Wittenberg, Germany): Commentary
Session 7: Topics and Flows III
(Focus on the interconnections between population, food and agriculture.)
Frey, Marc (Jacobs Univ. Bremen, Germany): Population and Development: Notes on the Evolution of a Global Discourse in the Post-War Period
Selcer, Perrin (Univ. of Pennsylvania, USA): Men Against the Desert. Arid Lands Research and the Growth of Development, 1948 to 1964
Maat, Harro (Wageningen Univ., Netherlands): Development and Food Security: The Prolongation of a Colonial Debate
Kruke, Anja: (Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Bonn, Germany): Commentary
Final Comments
Eckert, Andreas (Humboldt Univ. Berlin, Germany)
Rottenburg, Richard (Martin-Luther-Univ. Halle-Wittenberg, Germany)