Brad wrote: >>From today's perspective, Rostow looks much better: Italy,
France, and Japan have joined the core. Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, the
Hong Kong SEZ, Spain, and Ireland are joining the core, and there appear to
be a bunch more lined up behind them...<<
Doug riposted: >That's a rather optimistic interpretation. Italy, France,
Japan, and Spain were hardly peripheral in the sense that Haiti or Brazil
are/were; all four were imperialist countries in their own right. Singapore
and HK are small and rather anomalous places that don't seem easily
replicable as models elsewhere. The strongest cases you've got are SK and
Taiwan, but two exceptions out of over 100 countries aren't enough to
disprove the general rule. Ireland got lots of EU subsidies; Mexico should
be so lucky.<
It's important to remember that during the Cold War, the US did everything
it could to make sure that SK and Taiwan (and Japan and West Germany) were
showcases to "prove" that capitalism was superior to the "communist"
countries. They even allowed SK and Taiwan to have successful land-reform
programs and to engage in heretical export-led growth programs that weren't
based on official free-trade dogma. (It should be remembered also that
Chiang's KMT and the SK ruling class were also desperate to develop their
economies to avoid peasant revolutions a la China or N Korea.) This set up
SK and Taiwan (and Japan and W. Germany) to benefit from the massive
expansion of world aggregate demand during the US war against Vietnam.
None of this is in Rostow's theory. His theory is worse than the crudest of
the crude Marxian stage theories.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
