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Book Review - Dynamics Among Nations : The evolution of legitimacy and development in modern states A
�avid Hales , Ph . D� B
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Introduction
After the fall of the Berlin Wall , in
1989 , prominent Western Liberal intellectuals declared the “ end of history .” The West had won . Liberal democracy , driven by open markets and global capital , was inevitable and the historic destiny of all nations . The only question was how long it would take them to get there . Hence international development became a process , for the West , of helping all nations along the road towards the final utopia , a utopia the Western powers had already attained .
This narrative was expressed within the wider conception of “ Modernisation Theory .” A set of ideas and practices that had great influence on Western international development programmes in the final decade of the 20th Century and early 21st Century . The basic plan was this : take the institutions , practices , market systems and governance structures from the developed West and transplant them into the post-communist states and developing nations to help them along the way .
This presupposed a linear notion of economic and political change at the level of the nation state . It also depended on the idea that social and political change would follow economic determinants such that the elites of diverse nation states would be forced to make economic reforms that would inevitably lead to demands for further political reforms such as democracy , rule of law , and convergence to Western liberal values . This mechanistic , linear and downright historicist view of the world had influence within Western international development circles directly affecting policy , programmes and actions . One can easily see the appeal from a Western liberal perspective . But there was a problem . History did not end .
Economic reforms did not lead automatically to liberal political reforms . Institutions from one nation and culture could not be transplanted simply to another . Modernisation Theory failed spectacularly in many regions . Why ? What was wrong with Modernisation Theory ? More importantly
A
A book by Hilton L . Root . The MIT Press . 2013 , Hardcover , 332 pages .
B
Senior Research Fellow , Department of Computational Optimization , University of Szeged , Hungary�
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