| Modernization and the related concept of development played pivotal roles in the conduct of U.S. foreign relations in Asia during the twentieth century. Americans had long believed that the route to stability and prosperity for less developed areas lay along a path that put a particular faith in technological cures for social, political, and economic ills. This general vision guided policy by American non-governmental groups eager to foster development in China during the 1920s and 1930s. These organizations were heavily influenced by new methodologies inspired by the budding social sciences and other international reform ideas that could be turned to the task of modernization. Non-governmental groups were particularly influenced by domestic examples emerging from the New Deal. Most conspicuous was the Tennessee Valley Authority, which they took as proof that large-scale multipurpose development, grounded in social science and dependent on the application of technology, could produce rapid social and economic change. Following World War II, the U.S. government mobilized many of these existing concepts, incorporating them prominently into its Cold War foreign policy. The United States also took the lead in creating new international institutions committed to international development—many of which were attached to the new United Nations. Despite this state activity, development remained a multisided activity, engaging not only the state but also a host of non-governmental actors. This roster included foundations, business, missionaries, universities, and voluntary organizations. The multisided approach was central to “nation building” programs in South Korea during the 1940s and 1950s, and in South Vietnam during the 1950s and 1960s. The close connection of modernization ideas to the controversial war in Vietnam, along with the growing environmental movement, highlighted development's increasingly apparent ecological and human costs. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the consensus on modernization, that had appeared following World War II and had been cultivated by the United States, was profoundly altered. However, many institutions and ideas that were products of the postwar consensus persist into the present. |
