1 | P age 2 | P age Mal-Development - Anatomy of a Global Failure Table of contents General Editor: Samir Amin THE UNITED NATIONS UNIVERSITY/THIRD WORLD FORUM STUDIES IN AFRICAN POLITICAL ECONOMY The United Nations University's (UNU) Project on the Third World and World Development aims to study contemporary global developments from the perspective of the South: ongoing trends and structural changes in the world-system are analysed in terms of their consequences for the different regions of the third world and their implications for development strategies and policy options that the developing countries can pursue, singly and collectively through South-South co-operation. Through an interdisciplinary and global comparative framework, the Project integrates the UNU's previous research work on the regional perspectives of Africa, Asia, and Latin America - research which has been undertaken over the last decade and has involved, worldwide, hundreds of researchers organized into regional networks. (The Studies in African Political Economy series grew out of the work of the African regional network as part of an earlier UNU project, Transnationalization or Nation-Building in Africa.) The comparative research into the different regions' experiences of the 1980s provides a basis for comprehending their expectations for the 1990s and for formulating development strategies that would be fully cognizant of the changes that hew occurred at all levels of the global system. Those changes have been analyzed in this Project through five main themes: the process of transnationalization, the crisis of states, the emergence of social movements, the cultural dimension of contemporary developments, and conflicts and the possibilities of co-operation in the third world. TITLES IN THIS SERIES M.L. Gakou The Crisis in African Agriculture 1987 3 | P age Peter Anyang' Nyong'o (editor) Popular Struggles for Democracy in Africa 1987 Samir Amin, Derrick Chitala, Ibbo Mandaza (editor) SADCC: Prospects for Disengagement and Development in Southern Africa 1987 Faysal Yachir The World Steel Industry Today 1988 Faysal Yachir Mining in Africa Today: Strategies and Prospects 1988 Faysal Yachir The Mediterranean: Between Autonomy and Dependency 1989 Azzam Mahjoub (editor) Adjustment or Delinking? The African Experience 1990 Hamid Ait Amara, Bernard Founou-Tchuigoua (editor) African Agriculture: The Critical Choices 1990 Samir Amin Maldevelopment: Anatomy of A Global Failure 1990 Fawzy Manour The Arab World Nation. State and Democracy 1990 THE UNITED NATIONS UNIVERSITY/THIRD WORLD FORUM STUDIES IN AFRICAN POLITICAL ECONOMY United Nations University Press Tokyo Zed Books Ltd. London and New Jersey 4 | P age Maldevelopment Anatomy of a Global Failure was first published in 1990 by: Zed Books Ltd., 57 Caledonian Road, London N1 9BU, UK, and 171 First Avenue, Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey 07716, USA and: United Nations University Press, The United Nations University, Toho Seimei Building, IS-I Shibuya 2-chome, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 150, Japan in co- operation with The Third World Forum, B.P. 3501, Dakar, Senegal. Copyright © The United Nations University, 1990. Translation by Michael Wolfers Cover designed by Andrew Corbett. Typeset by EMS Photosetters, Rochford, Essex. Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd. Guildford and King's Lynn. All rights reserved. British Library Cataloguing in Publication data Amin, Samir 1931 Maldevelopment: anatomy of a global failure. - (The United Nations University/Third World Forum Studies in African Political Economy). 1. Economic development. Sociopolitical Aspects 1. Title II. Series 330 9 ISBN 0-86232-930-2 ISBN 0-86232-931-0 pbk Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Amin, Samir. Maldevelopment: anatomy of a global failure/Samir Amin; translated from the French by Michael Wolfers. p. cm. ISBN 0-86232-930-2. - ISBN 0-86232-931-0 (pbk.) 1. Developing countries - Economic policy. 2. Africa - Economic conditions - 1960 - 3. Economic history - 1971 - 1. Title. HC59.7.A7777 1990 338.9'009172'4 dc20 89-70607 CIP 5 | P age Contents Introduction: why a political analysis? Notes 1. Africa's economic backwardness Sources and methods for the analysis South of the Sahara The origins of Africa's agricultural failure Analysing the exploitation of peasants North Africa and the Arab world: from statism to comprador capitalism False analyses, false solutions Conceptions of Africa's agricultural development: a critique Industrialization and the agricultural revolution Notes 2. The decade of drift: 1975-1985 The excitement of the Bandung plan (1955-73)2 The battle for a new international economic order (NIEO): 1974- 1980 Structural costs; the stakes; the struggle for the NIEO Africa: from the Lagos plan (1980) to the world bank plan and the United Nations Conference (1986) Debt and the threat of a financial crash The efforts of radical African nationalism: adjustment or delinking?6 Notes 3. The crisis of state Nation-state and the ideology of nation in crisis' Ethnicity: myth and reality The cultural dimension of development in Africa and the third world 6 | P age The cultural dimension: the example of the crisis in the arab world today - the end of the Nahda?7 New forms of the social movement Notes 4. Complexities of international relations: Africa's vulnerability and external intervention African economies' vulnerability vis-à-vis the challenge of capitalism's new worldwide expansion Some specific aspects of Africa's economic integration in the world system, ACP-EEC association and Euro-American mercantile conflict1 Special links with France: the Franc zone2 Evolution in Euro-Arab relations: interwoven economics and politics Conflict and national and regional security in Africa The Middle East conflict in a world perspective Africa and the Arab world in the world system Notes 5. Alternative development for Africa and the third world Inequality in income distribution the centre and periphery1 The alternative: popular national development, social and political democracy, delinking3 Obstacles to popular national, autocentric and delinked development Notes 6. Political and social conditions for alternative development in the third world Impossibility of the bourgeois national state in the peripheries of the world system1 Inequality in the worldwide expansion of capitalism; the state's central role The worldwide spread of value3 A return to the third world?4 The consequences of unequal development The issue of democracy The historical subject of the popular national option; the role of the intelligentsia Notes 7 | P age 7. Inter-African and south-south co-operation Pan-Africanism in the light of the colonial inheritance1 The problematic of the Arab nation2 Afro-arab co-operation3 Prospects for south-south co-operation4 Notes 8. A polycentric world favourable to development: a possibility? The scope and stakes of the global crisis Conservative forces' offensive The difficulties of forecasting The real options for the peoples of the West Options for socialist societies and east-west relations The genuine long-term option, transnationalization or a polycentric world and broad autocentric regions Conclusion: a crisis of transnationalization, ideology and development theory Notes 8 | P age Introduction: Why a Political Analysis? Notes If the 1960s were characterized by the great hope of seeing an irreversible process of development launched throughout what came to be called the Third World, and in Africa particularly, the present age is one of disillusionment. Development has broken down, its theory is in crisis, its ideology the subject of doubt. Agreement on failure in Africa is sadly general. Opinions are more varied in regard to Asia and Latin America. Some emphasize the economic successes of the newly industrializing countries, such as South Korea, Brazil and India, and conclude that the only possible development is one that intelligently succumbs to the increasing worldwide expansion of all economies on the earth. These examples should be followed, and the illusions of alternative paths to the transnational model abandoned, since, in the meantime, socialism is itself in crisis in the countries of the East, and the Third World countries who look to them for inspiration, and the socialist countries themselves are obliged to yield to a harrowing revisionism and are seeking reintegration in the expansion of a world economy. In this book it is proposed to analyse this failure of development from a political stand-point, for discussion of the options in the framework of macroeconomic schema provides no more than commonplace and foreseeable findings. We must aim higher and integrate in the discussion all the economic, political, social and cultural facets of the problem and at the same time fit them into a local framework that takes account of interaction on a world scale. We acknowledge that this aim comes up against major theoretical difficulties. Social reality as a whole has three facets: economic, political and cultural. The economic aspect is perhaps the best known. In this field, conventional economics has forged tools of immediate analysis and with greater or lesser success of management of an advanced capitalist society. Historical materialism has sought to plunge deeper and has often succeeded in illuminating the character and extent of social struggles underlying the economic choices. The field of power and politics is relatively less known; and eclecticism in the theories advanced shows the inadequate scientific mastery of the reality. 9 | P age Functional political thought, like its former or recent ingredients (geopolitics, systems analysis, etc.) may sometimes be of immediate use in shaping strategies but remains conceptually impoverished and does not warrant the status of a critical theory. It is true that historical materialism provides a hypothesis as to the organic relationship between the material base and the political superstructure, and the hypothesis is fruitful if it is not too crudely interpreted. The Marxist schools, however, have not conceptualized the issue of power and politics (modes of domination) as they have the categories(modes of production). The propositions in this direction, by Freudian Marxists for example, have the undoubted merit of drawing attention to neglected aspects of the issue but have not yet produced an overall conceptual system. The field of politics lies virtually fallow. It is not by chance that the first chapter of Volume One of Capital includes the section entitled 'The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof. Marx intends to unveil the mysteries of capitalist society, and the reason why it appears to us as directly governed by economics, in the forefront of the social scene and the determinant of the other social dimensions that seem then to accommodate to its demands. Economic alienation thus defines the essence of the ideology of capitalism. Conversely, pre-capitalist class societies are governed by politics, which takes the forefront of the stage and provide the constraints that other aspects of the social reality - including economic life-seem bound to obey. If a theory of these societies were to be written, the work would be entitled 'Power' (instead of capital for the capitalist mode) and the opening chapter would deal with 'the fetishism of power' (instead of the fetishism of commodities). But no such work has been written. There is nothing analogous to the clockwork precision with which the economic operation of capitalism has been described. Marxism has not provided a theory of politics for pre- capitalist society (and hence a theory of politics in general) as it has provided a theory of capitalist economics. At best there are concrete analyses of the relationship of politics and economics in such and such a capitalist society (in Marx's political writings devoted particularly to the vicissitudes of France) highlighting the degree of the autonomy of politics in these circumstances and especially the conflict that may arise between the logic of power and that of capitalist management. As for the cultural dimension, it is an even more complex mystery, as empirical observation of this aspect of reality (of religious faiths for example) has so far yielded no more than intuitive forays. This explains why discussion of the cultural dimensions of history remains imbued with culturalism, meaning the tendency to treat cultural characteristics as trans- historical constants. Furthermore, culture has no generally accepted 10 | P age