More Economics ...
Dec. 25th, 2002 02:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldi honestly think a big reason why some places are poor is because their cultures don't have a the protestant work ethic. i don't think siestas are good for a country's success. also, how can they succeed when they don't believe in the primacy of the individual, rule of law, free market etc.?
That probably is a factor. I do also think that it's important to notice how, in many cases, imperialism by industrializing powers in the 19th century aborted modernization. Egypt under Mehmet Ali is the best example I can think of; one of the major provisions of the British peace treaty was Egyptian withdrawal from Syria (an area that had been linked to Egypt for the past several centuries) and dropping protectionist barriers to allow for British imports (although Britain was rather protectionist itself). Thailand later in the 19th century came perilously close to outright colonization itself. If liberal economics and pluralistic (if not outright democratic) politics are best accepted if they are a natural outgrowth of a society's developments, than in many cases foreign imperialisms halted these developments.
Another problem is that things are enormously more difficult. When western Europe and then the United States industrialized, they had basically the free run of the world: they could establish colonial empires or more informal economic/political hegemonies as they wished. Japan found it rather more problematic to emulate these early industrializers, with catastrophic results for East Asia. Japan's economic recovery after the Second World War depended critically upon its integration into Western economic structures, as did the economic booms of the Four Tigers and points elsewhere in Southeast Asia. (Economic growth in Latin America can also be tied to beneficial links with industrialized areas, though it's complicated by the fact that the countries with the relatively strongest economic growth of late are countries which had previously experienced significant economic decline--Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil all.)
I've said this in other arenas, but in the first half of the 20th century southern Europe had an abysmal time: high rates of population growth without any chance of large-scale emigration after most of the settlement countries closed their borders; highly contested relationships between Church and State marked by violence (the best example is the Spanish Civil War and the attacks by anarchists upon priests); authoritarian political policies like Fascism and Communism were seen as the only answers; ethnic conflict was rife (see the interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia, or the Greco-Turkish war in Anatolia, or the attempts at Basque and Catalonian separatism in Spain, or South Tyrol under Italian rule); et cetera.
The thing is, conditions in southern Europe in the first half of the 20th century were rather less difficult than conditions in (say) the modern-day Middle East.
The Middle East is in bad shape, but there are plenty of regions which are rather worse off. Consider sub-Saharan Africa, for instance; in wide areas of the continent, the bureaucratic state and capitalism are new introductions with relatively shallow roots. India has the advantage over the Middle East in that the Indian state is basically a multinational federation with a vast domestic market; but then, there's the Muslim Other without and without its own borders, alternatively a threat and a target. (Look at Gujarat.)
Other countries that are doing better--China, for instance, and large areas of Southeast Asia and Latin America--still have the same sort of problems. In the 19th century, a brisk walk was enough to keep up; now, you have to run, and if for some reason you can't keep up ...
That probably is a factor. I do also think that it's important to notice how, in many cases, imperialism by industrializing powers in the 19th century aborted modernization. Egypt under Mehmet Ali is the best example I can think of; one of the major provisions of the British peace treaty was Egyptian withdrawal from Syria (an area that had been linked to Egypt for the past several centuries) and dropping protectionist barriers to allow for British imports (although Britain was rather protectionist itself). Thailand later in the 19th century came perilously close to outright colonization itself. If liberal economics and pluralistic (if not outright democratic) politics are best accepted if they are a natural outgrowth of a society's developments, than in many cases foreign imperialisms halted these developments.
Another problem is that things are enormously more difficult. When western Europe and then the United States industrialized, they had basically the free run of the world: they could establish colonial empires or more informal economic/political hegemonies as they wished. Japan found it rather more problematic to emulate these early industrializers, with catastrophic results for East Asia. Japan's economic recovery after the Second World War depended critically upon its integration into Western economic structures, as did the economic booms of the Four Tigers and points elsewhere in Southeast Asia. (Economic growth in Latin America can also be tied to beneficial links with industrialized areas, though it's complicated by the fact that the countries with the relatively strongest economic growth of late are countries which had previously experienced significant economic decline--Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil all.)
I've said this in other arenas, but in the first half of the 20th century southern Europe had an abysmal time: high rates of population growth without any chance of large-scale emigration after most of the settlement countries closed their borders; highly contested relationships between Church and State marked by violence (the best example is the Spanish Civil War and the attacks by anarchists upon priests); authoritarian political policies like Fascism and Communism were seen as the only answers; ethnic conflict was rife (see the interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia, or the Greco-Turkish war in Anatolia, or the attempts at Basque and Catalonian separatism in Spain, or South Tyrol under Italian rule); et cetera.
The thing is, conditions in southern Europe in the first half of the 20th century were rather less difficult than conditions in (say) the modern-day Middle East.
- Population growth in southern Europe was rather less than in the Middle East--say, 1.5% per annum at peak in southern Europe versus 3.0% in the Middle East at peak--because death rates were higher in the first half of the 20th century, so, more pressure. Given how European states have been closed to non-professional Middle Eastern immigration for the past generation, and that it looks to become still more difficult over time, we can exclude emigration as having a substantial role. Southern Europeans had France, at least.
- In southern Europe, at least it was fairly clear what the state was and what the Church was given their institutional distinctness; the Middle East can't claim anything like the same clear separation.
- Democracy, liberalism, social democracy--none of these ideologies appear to have any constituencies with any kind of influence on the situation of Middle Eastern countries and their future political evolution.
- Intra-state ethnic strife is also fairly common: there's the immigrant societies of the Gulf States, the Berber minorities of Morocco and Algeria, the plural Iraqi and Syrian states, the Kurdish minority of Turkey, inter-ethnic tension in Israel (European versus non-European Jews, Jews versus Arabs), the legacy of the Lebanese civil war, and so on. As for inter-state ethnic conflict, well ...
The Middle East is in bad shape, but there are plenty of regions which are rather worse off. Consider sub-Saharan Africa, for instance; in wide areas of the continent, the bureaucratic state and capitalism are new introductions with relatively shallow roots. India has the advantage over the Middle East in that the Indian state is basically a multinational federation with a vast domestic market; but then, there's the Muslim Other without and without its own borders, alternatively a threat and a target. (Look at Gujarat.)
Other countries that are doing better--China, for instance, and large areas of Southeast Asia and Latin America--still have the same sort of problems. In the 19th century, a brisk walk was enough to keep up; now, you have to run, and if for some reason you can't keep up ...
