http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081006/mazower
Mandarins, Guns and Money
By Mark Mazower
Economists With Guns: Authoritarian Development and US-Indonesian
Relations, 1960-1968
by Bradley R. Simpson
America's Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War
by David Milne
International Political Economy: An Intellectual History
by Benjamin J. Cohen
In Theory and in Practice: Harvard's Center for International
Affairs, 1958-1983
by David C. Atkinson
Early in 1966 the historian Fritz Stern traveled to Washington to
solicit support for an appeal of academics against the Vietnam War.
At the airport, returning home, he ran into a colleague--MIT
political scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool. Professor Pool did not share
Stern's misgivings about the war. "Vietnam," he told Stern
enthusiastically, "is the greatest social-science laboratory we have ever had!"
Such was the mind-set among some of the scholars at MIT's Center for
International Studies, where Pool's international communications
project was bringing behavioral science to bear on the study of
international relations. His colleague, the economist Walt Rostow,
had left the center for a new career as a presidential policy
adviser, which culminated, in April 1966, in a position as Lyndon
Johnson's national security adviser. There were like-minded men in
other well-funded think tanks across the country. Over the previous
two decades, cold war presidents had successfully enlisted academia
in the search for usable knowledge about the world they hoped to
lead. Ample funding, entrepreneurial professors and policy-makers
thirsting for anything that looked like technical expertise provided
a combustible mix.
How this happened, and what the effects were--on the world of policy
and on ideas--is a complex and still highly pertinent story. Vietnam,
as the books considered here show, bankrupted the world-molding
optimism of modernization theorists like Rostow and Pool, but it
certainly didn't put an end to academic theorizing about global
affairs or to the desire of American academics to demonstrate the
usefulness of their theories to their political masters.
Indonesia--the often neglected counterpart to Vietnam--was the more
typical model, as Bradley Simpson shows: a playground for "economists
with guns." The politics were often ugly, and the intellectual output
was unedifying and deeply compromised.
It all really started with World War II. Before the Depression there
had been plenty of serious American scholarship in international
affairs, much of it shaped by Wilsonian idealism and a keen interest
in the administrative and legal institutions established at the
Versailles peace conference. Columbia University president Nicholas
Murray Butler's belief in the pacific powers of "the international
mind" set the tone. But government interest--and funding--was
minimal. It was wartime science projects like the Manhattan Project
and the Radiation Laboratory that got Washington used to paying top
dollar for academic expertise. Military service cemented personal
ties between policy-makers, funding bodies and academics. Above all,
the experience of the war provided a template for cold war theory and
strategy. David Milne points this out very clearly in Rostow's case:
America's Rasputin offers a lively, well-researched read, connecting
recent scholarship on the development of American social science to
the Vietnam catastrophe. In Milne's telling, Rostow makes a very
effective antihero, an epitome of intellectual hubris whose story
casts a vivid light on our early twenty-first-century warmakers.
Rostow had had a good war. In 1942 he had worked in the Office of
Strategic Services and had selected bombing targets in the Third
Reich; ever after he remained convinced that the policy of strategic
bombing had crippled Hitler's war machine. Germany remained a
preoccupation of his beyond 1945, when he passed up the chance of a
job at Harvard in order to help Gunnar Myrdal oversee the economic
reconstruction of Europe. Strategic bombing and the Marshall Plan:
this was the essence of Rostow's plan for the cold war front line in
Southeast Asia. Two decades after Hitler's death, Rostow suggested
confronting the Vietcong as if they were Nazis: knock them out of the
war by destroying their industrial infrastructure, then win the
battle for hearts and minds with a serious program of socioeconomic
transformation through development assistance.
To get to this point, Rostow needed a theory, one that would allow
him to soar above the differences between the Germans and the
Vietnamese. The answer was the concept of modernization, an
evolutionary approach to contemporary history. Milne says little
about this, perhaps because the subject has been well covered by Nils
Gilman in Mandarins of the Future. But Rostow's The Stages of
Economic Growth (published in 1960 and subtitled, with typical
modesty, A Non-Communist Manifesto) gives the fundamentals, outlining
the "stages" of development all countries allegedly had to pass
through in order to achieve their "takeoff" into the modern era.
Critically, Rostow argued, most new states would need help before
they could become self-sustaining. If the United States did not
provide aid, Communists would move in, taking advantage of the
disorientation that sudden social change induced. Initially, he
assumed--as in the case of postwar Germany and Japan--that
modernization would spread democracy. But by the time modernization
theory was sufficiently influential to shape American policy, it had
acquired a distinctly authoritarian cast. As Ike's State Department
put it, the dictators and military strongmen who had emerged
throughout the underdeveloped world by the end of the 1950s offered
certain short-run advantages to the United States. Indonesia was a
vital example, well described by Simpson in his disturbing and
illuminating book. Its army's slaughter of half a million people
there--in the name of wiping out the country's Communist Party--did
not stop Rostow and his colleagues from treating the generals as
partners. Quite the contrary: at least the Communists had been disposed of.
Theory alone guaranteed nothing, unless politicians and their
staffers listened. Rostow's connections boosted his advancement. From
his Yale undergraduate days he knew Richard Bissell (the Bay of Pigs
and other CIA achievements still before him) as well as the man who
brought him to MIT, his old friend Max Millikan. Like Rostow,
Millikan had been involved as an economist in the European
reconstruction effort of the late 1940s--in his case as assistant to
the Marshall Plan administrator Paul Hoffman. Between joining MIT and
setting up the Center for International Studies, Millikan also served
briefly as assistant director of the CIA under Walter Bedell Smith.
All these connections proved vital. The center grew out of Project
Troy, an early State Department commission to research radio jamming
and psychological warfare against the Soviet Union. When State's
money dried up, Millikan turned to his old employers, the CIA, and to
the Ford Foundation (by now run by his former boss Hoffman). Harvard
stood aloof; led by sociologist Talcott Parsons, its social
scientists were engrossed in the loftier goal of creating an entirely
new theory that would unite all the social sciences. MIT was happy to
do the nitty-gritty problem-solving for the government, and it got
the loot. In 1953 Ford assured the center's future with an enormous
$1.8 million grant. For MIT it was a bargain: it put in almost no
money and got terrific input into the shaping of foreign policy.
Millikan had wanted Rostow at the center because they basically
agreed on what America needed. In the early 1950s the cold war
suddenly became a global competition for influence in the
decolonizing world, and many felt that Washington needed to compete
much more aggressively. In 1954, a week after the battle of Dien Bien
Phu, Rostow and Millikan took part in a conference to generate a
"world economic plan" that would ensure the triumph of freedom. The
two men wrote the resulting report, forwarded to Eisenhower,
emphasizing development aid as the key to securing American foreign
policy goals: it had worked in Europe, and now America needed to
spend in the Third World. This got nowhere with Ike: he was too much
of a fiscal conservative, and his inner circle disliked Rostow's
boosterish tone. But others were listening, especially a young
senator from Massachusetts. Rostow wrote some speeches for Kennedy,
then joined his Administration, whose Alliance for Progress, the
centerpiece of what Kennedy proudly proclaimed to be the Decade of
Development, marked the modernizers' moment. In Washington, as
assistant to McGeorge Bundy--Kennedy's national security
adviser--Rostow was given special responsibility for Southeast Asia.
Vietnam was his bailiwick, a chance to show what modernization theory
could do to win the cold war. After Kennedy's death, Rostow replaced
Bundy as Johnson's national security adviser--"my goddamn
intellectual," the Texan growled. Rostow's hour had come. No wonder
Professor Pool was gung-ho.
The moment of triumph did not last long. As Vietnam went from bad to
worse, ideas for a Mekong Delta TVA were scrapped. Harvard professor
Samuel Huntington, advising the State Department, supported forcing
the civilian population into cities; but even the "strategic hamlets"
scheme backfired. Still, the hawkish Rostow remained optimistic. He
ignored those who argued that strategic bombing had failed to knock
out the Germans or that Vietnam was different, just as he ignored the
evidence of Chinese support of the North Vietnamese. Above all, he
closed his eyes to the inconvenient fact that he was not fighting
homo economicus but an enemy whose morale depended on the resolve to
drive out an imperialistic invader. Rostow did not understand this,
because he did not think of himself as an imperialist. All he wanted
was to live up to his poet namesake--his middle name was Whitman--by
helping nations make the transition from colonialism and thereby
transforming the world. Milne compares him with the ideologically
driven neocons on the eve of the Iraq War. Both saw America as the
model for being modern, and both saw war as one way to spread the
gospel. But the differences are as important. Rostow was a man of the
1960s who thought states could make a difference, whereas the neocons
were also neoliberals--all for dismantling the state and allowing
free-market forces to work their magic. Just as important, Rostow and
his cohort were key players in the intellectual and academic world of
1960s America, whereas by 2000, the neocons, ensconced in think
tanks, and academics had almost nothing--nothing civil, anyway--to
say to one another.
After Vietnam, modernization theory lost its shine, as did Rostow,
who was unable to obtain a job on the East Coast: MIT did not invite
him back. Only LBJ's foresight got him a berth in Texas, at the state
university's Lyndon B. Johnson School for Public Affairs. But this
certainly did not mean the end of the love affair between the social
science professoriat and the policy world, merely a changing of the
guard and a new paradigm or two. Modernization theory had been one of
the winners in the scramble among social scientists for cold war
funding, but we should not forget that there had been losers too:
anthropology had gotten very little, despite Margaret Mead's sterling
wartime service and her desire to show how Russian swaddling customs
shaped the Soviet mind-set. Geography--the subject that had smoothed
the path of Isaiah Bowman, director of the American Geographical
Society and president of Johns Hopkins, to the highest reaches of
government service in two world wars--seemed to have become so
irrelevant by the late 1940s that first Harvard and then many other
leading universities closed their departments. In area-studies
centers, a little money trickled down to Assyriologists, Sanskritists
and experts on Sufism and Confucius. But as the behavioral revolution
swept sociology and political science, the gulf between the
culture-bounded area-studies folk and the rest widened. For those who
regarded history, languages and the values other societies actually
lived by as something of a distraction, economics was now the
discipline to emulate. Economics, as Philip Mirowski has demonstrated
so brilliantly, had successfully refashioned itself first on the
basis of physics and then on the basis of wartime operations research
and cybernetics. Studying politics in the new economistic vein meant
studying "systems," relationships, actors, agents. It was all
supposedly value-neutral, timeless and formal--animated by a vision
of science arguably already some two decades out of date.
International relations initially remained somewhat aloof from the
rush to scientism. In the 1950s, its theorists spoke as though the
world comprised little besides states locked in a perennial struggle
for power. They were critical of interwar scholars who had worn their
Wilsonian internationalism on their sleeve and of the cold war
fanatics who spoke about evil and morality whenever they mentioned
the Soviet Union. Men like Hans Morgenthau prided themselves on their
realism, their lack of ideological zeal, their powerful sense of the
limits of what was possible. Morgenthau, in particular, insisted that
the category of "the political" was simply irreducible--conflict was
thus a permanent fact of international life. Rostow's humiliation in
Vietnam, and the collapse of modernization theory, created an
opening. In the realm of policy, Rostow was succeeded by a very
different breed of academic: the realist Henry Kissinger. Kissinger
was a historian, not a social scientist, a student of the art of
diplomacy and a practitioner, rather than a theoretician, of
negotiation in the nuclear age.
In the universities, though, the realist school of international
relations was coming under fire. It was not only Vietnam that cast a
shadow. There was also the first oil crisis and the collapse of the
Bretton Woods monetary system; the dollar was finally decoupled from
gold, and unprecedented quantities of petrodollars sloshed around the
world. It was in these circumstances that American international
relations theorists--and their discipline's need for a "theory" was
something they keenly felt--took issue with the idea that states were
the only entities that counted in the world, and that military and
diplomatic power were the only ways nations projected their
influence. What they came up with was international political
economy, the subject of Benjamin Cohen's informative insider's account.
Kissinger's home at Harvard--the Center for International Affairs,
the subject of David Atkinson's new book In Theory and In
Practice--was the pivot of the intellectual reorientation. With
Kissinger and Robert Bowie, former head of the Policy Planning Staff
at the State Department, in charge, it is not surprising that the
center had started off focused on diplomacy, defense policy and
nuclear strategy. From 1970 onward, however, younger scholars there
pushed to include the international economy as a subject for
political analysis. Not that international political economy ever
rocked the boat of global capitalism. What it promised to do,
however, was valuable enough--to cut across the ever more rigidly
policed demarcation line between economics and political science.
Susan Strange, the pioneering British student of international
relations, had condemned the "enclosure movement," in which social
scientists had turned their backs on the older conception of a
unified field of political economy to till their smaller grounds. The
process had started in the nineteenth century. But the exponential
postwar growth of the American social sciences had made the problem
much worse. Economists, for example, built an entire
subdiscipline--microeconomics--on the philosophical foundations of
early nineteenth-century utilitarian psychology; but with no
incentive to ask what this meant and how reliable a basis it was for
anything at all, they were losing themselves in ever more elegant
flights of mathematical fancy.
Unfortunately, the move to rethink social scientific disciplinary
boundaries quickly ran out of steam. In 1972 Harvard's Department of
Social Relations was closed and its members trotted back to their
separate disciplines, testifying to the collapse of the most
sustained effort to create a unified social theory seen since the
war. Economics, now less interested than ever in words, reclaimed its
role as the model for social scientific research in the American
academy. International political economy reincorporated elements of
the older realist approach--the focus on states was extended to
international governmental organizations--but yoked these to an ever
more emphatically "scientific" structure of argument. Cohen's book is
a lament by a scholar hoping against hope that his discipline can
still learn from its history. The harvest has been disappointing, he
admits, the crop blighted. International political economy has failed
to live up to its early promise and has succumbed to the same bogus
scientism that infected other social scientific approaches to the
world before it.
Indeed, his data reveal that the problem is getting much worse. The
wartime generation--whose education had been wide and
multidisciplinary--is passing and being replaced by wannabe
scientists whose professional training devalues real knowledge of the
world. In the nineteenth century it was not at all uncommon for those
commenting on international affairs to have a knowledge of languages;
in today's universities, most literary scholars can't tell their
balance of trade from their balance of payments while increasingly
the only language international relations theorists are trained in is
a bizarre kind of quasi mathematics. In the late 1970s, fewer than 10
percent of the articles published in the field stressed formal
modeling or econometrics, which use statistical models to test
economic principles; by the early years of the twenty-first century,
the figure had risen to nearly half. Mathematicians, it is worth
noting, have been underwhelmed by this work; in the 1980s they
blocked an eminent Harvard political scientist from membership in the
National Academy of Sciences, alleging pseudoscience. Today you can
get tenure as a scholar of international relations without knowing a
single foreign language or ever quoting a foreign-language source.
But leave out the equations and the variables, and your career path
will be a rocky one.
There was, to be sure, an alternative to this increasingly recherché
use of quantitative techniques and scientific jargon. Cohen discusses
the British version of international studies, which was from the
start and has remained more catholic in its disciplinary borrowings
and more critical of existing power relations, as befits the work
produced by the underfunded employees of a world power in decline.
But as Cohen shows, there has been little contact or understanding
between theorists on either side of the Atlantic. British academics
charge their US counterparts with being Washington's lackeys and
overly abstract; the latter accuse the former of woolly thought, of
being unscientific and lacking the discipline to generate verifiable
claims about the world.
Both charges are probably true. The British scholars are not good at
generating law-like observations about international affairs
(although cynics will not necessarily see this as a failing). As for
American scholars, it is striking how much the theorization of
international relations has fostered a detachment from the real
world. For all its numerous sins, modernization theory did generate a
body of knowledge about characteristics of countries like India and
Indonesia. But since the 1970s, international relations has withdrawn
to such lofty mathematical heights that detailed expertise about
specific areas of the world may today be enough to write a scholar
off as--dreaded phrase--an area specialist. The only alternative to
generating theory seems to be providing counsel for the prince, a
sort of international management consultancy for the
diplomat-statesman. From the august heights of Professor Joseph Nye's
The Powers to Lead (2008) to the less refined insights provided by
books like Donald Kettl's Team Bush: Leadership Lessons From the Bush
White House (2003), the tendency is to talk about international
relations in terms of the problem of America's place in the world and
to reduce the problem to that of leadership. Formulated in such
terms, there soon ceases to be very much that is particularly
political about political science: useful lessons can be drawn from
CEOs, Mafia bosses, sports coaches and anyone else in charge.
I confess to having finished these books in a mood somewhere between
perplexity and despair. Was the choice faced by social scientists
always between a frighteningly lethal developmentalism and a
pseudoscience of international relations? How can the world's
wealthiest country, with vast resources at its disposal, have ended
up with such a paltry intellectual--and diplomatic--return on its
investment? It is all too easy to understand that scholars enraptured
by access to power ended up rationalizing deeply unethical foreign
policies; diplomacy and ethics have, by their nature, an uneasy
relationship. More troubling, surely, is how to explain the depth of
the failure of the social sciences to produce substantial and lasting
knowledge about the world, to have succeeded only in making American
policy on the whole more rather than less parochial.
For something happened in the cold war, something that ultimately
benefited neither scholarship nor government. Huge sums of money were
suddenly poured into the universities. Those with knowledge to offer
were not necessarily those to whom policy-makers listened. The social
scientists who got the grants offered technical advice that
simplified the world and made it governable, using behavioral science
or mathematical economics as their models. They turned human affairs
into data sets, cultural patterns into forms of behavioral response,
and they replaced the messy multiplicity of words and tongues with
the universal and quantifiable language of science. This was not so
much a military-industrial complex as a governmental-academic one.
With the collapse of modernization theory, international relations
offered itself as a new way of understanding the world. But world
affairs continued to be seen as a problem to be managed, and the view
adopted was almost always that from Washington. The rise of the think
tanks made a bad problem worse, because as they adopted ever more
partisan identities--and as American politics became more
polarized--so academics reified the idea of value-neutral science and
banished any explicit consideration of politics from their treatment
of the world. Alternative approaches--dependency theory,
underdevelopment, Marxism--found their niche in the American academy
but rarely in mainstream politics departments.
Can social scientists these days do anything like the harm Walt
Rostow inflicted? The short answer is yes. What of the Stanford
political scientist turned policy-maker who has tried applying the
lessons she mistakenly derived from the Soviet collapse to the
dictatorship of Saddam Hussein? Condoleezza Rice is only the most
obvious case, and the country's continuing love affair with technical
expertise guarantees a receptive audience for applied social science.
Last year the National Research Council recommended that the Pentagon
double the research funding for the behavioral and social sciences;
scholars are already helping to build computer-simulated models to
predict insurgencies in Iraq and identify "the root causes of
terrorism." Professor Pool's heirs march on.
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