Louw, P. Eric. 2010. Roots of the Pax Americana: Decolonization,
Development, Democratization and Trade (Manchester: Manchester
University Press).
  154: Bringing down the Japanese, German and British empires created
a power vacuum. Soviet power and the new Chinese revolution created
new complications for the Pax Americana.
  156: During the 1950s, as decolonization accelerated the Third World
development industry developed, grounded in Western paternalism. The
idea was to find ways that emergent middle classes could govern
liberal democracies and create useful trading partners.
  181: Modernization theory presented itself as benevolent and
grounded in science. Each society must pass through a series of
predetermined stages. "Modernization theory was American middle class
utopianism which postulated the "American way" as the endpoint of a
progressive teleology."  America would be a civilizer of the world and
an agent for the spread of "universal" values.
  182: Modernization had no need to analyze indigenous values and
cultures. Instead, the client states were backward, only needing
American guidance to achieve modernization -- in effect, a cloning of
American society.
  184-5: The counterweight to modernization theory was dependency
theory, which suggested that poverty in the periphery was a product of
capitalist development in the core.


-- 
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA
95929

530 898 5321
fax 530 898 5901
http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com