Kathleen Agena
U.S. POLICY AND THE THIRD WORLD
The current administration has made its foreign policy
position with respect to development issues in the Third World very
clear: the road to increased development, it argues, cannot be paved
by massive economic transfers, but must be forged by individual
initiative and private investment. On the surface, this policy is
hardly more than the traditional conservative remedy for all
economic ills, whether domestic or foreign , and it employs code
words that assume the existence of both democratic and capitalistic
economic and political systems. As such , the policy is open to the
usual liberal counterargument - namely, that to emphasize
individual initiative in the post-colonial and generally feudalistically
structured societies of the Third World is unrealistic, and rivals, in
its impropriety, the policy Procrustes applied to fit travelers into his
legendary bed.
Yet however well they may be argued as theories, both of these
views, in their extreme form, break down as policies, and both are
based on certain unexamined and erroneous assumptions about the
Third World. Generally speaking, both hard-line liberals and
conservatives seem to project upon the poorer developing countries a
myth of the past. On the liberal side, this projection takes the form of
idealizing the past, perceiving in the Third World a sort of
innocence and inherent purity that is Rousseauistic in its contours.
Conservatives, on the other hand, seem to blur the distinctions
between the long historical and cultural development that spawned
democratic institutions and the history and cultures of the
developing world. The conservative view also tends to project a
revisionist version of our own history onto these countries,
glamorizing the cult of the individual and ignoring, for example, the
fact that in its early stages this country was settled by immigrants,
most of whom had been educated or had acquired skills in Europe
before they arrived here.
The recent foreign policy debate over the exporting into Third
World markets of products banned in the United States reveals how
