Wiarda, Howard J.
Transaction Publishers form Society.
Vol. 24. No. 6. Septiembre/octubre 1987.

Ethnocentrism and Third World Development

Howard J. Wiarda is professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; a research scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington, D.C.; and a fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Among many books, he has written Ethnocentrism in American Foreign Policy: Can We Understand the Third World?

That body of literature focusing on political development has come under severe attack. Once the dominant paradigm within the discipline, the political development approach has been strongly criticized in various ways. Among these is the charge that political development heretofore has been conceived in almost exclusively Western (Northwest European and North American) terms. That is, that the categories and understandings of extant political development are derived ethnocentrically from the EuroAmerican experience and have little or no relevance to the non-Western world.

This charge is serious from several vantage points. First, it has major implications for the Third World: whether the development process is universal, whether Third World nations are but pale and retarded versions of the Western model, whether they will repeat the experience of the early developers, or whether they will fashion an indigenous model of development-or some blend of the Western and the indigenous. Second, it has important ramifications for the social sciences, with most of their concepts based on the Western developmental experience which may or may not be relevant to the Third World. Third, it has important implications for the foreign assistance donor nations-chiefly the United States but increasingly those of Western Europe-concerning the relevance of the developmental models and programs they seek to export to the Third World.

This article explores the problem of ethnocentrism in the study of political development. It is part of a larger project examining both Western and non-Western theories of development. This work suggests that the models of development most familiar in the literature are all derived from the Western experience, of a particular time and place, and therefore have but limited relevance to today's Third World nations. The study emphasizes the efforts of various Third World areas to devise indigenous models of development or to blend these with the Western and presumably more universal models. It suggests that Western foreign assistance programs, largely based on the older ethnocentric understandings, have seldom been successful; yet it concludes pessimistically that because Western policymakers, regardless of party, generally lack the comprehension and knowledge base to understand the Third World on its own terms, in its own language, and in its own cultural and institutional terms, the mistakes of the past are likely to be repeated.

In other papers and publications I have dealt with the ethnocentric assumptions of the social sciences, as well as the effort by Third World leaders to articulate and fashion an indigenous developmental model. In one paper I considered this issue as it affects human rights and United States human rights policy; in another, the revived effort to export democracy abroad; in still another, the ethnocentrism of United States economic assistance programs, expectations regarding the political role of the middle class, the armed forces and "professionalization," and the model of trade unionism the United States has tried to implant abroad.

I concentrate here on a series of other, but closely related, development assistance efforts: agrarian reform, community development, the United States-sponsored law and development program, and family planning. All of these programs derive from the same ethnocentric assumptions; together they form a social and political history (a pathology?) of developmentalism. I touch briefly on the common intellectual and programmatic assumptions of all these efforts, as well as Third World attempts to devise their own developmental paradigms. The theme and cry of "let us do it our way" is now becoming a global chorus. I also deal with the politics of the developmentalist approach and why it will be such a difficult paradigm to change or supersede.

I conclude that the often misguided and misdirected developmentalist programs analyzed here grow chiefly out of naiveté and wrong assumptions, not from venality, malevolence, or even "imperialism." American development assistance programs are generally based not on evil scheming but on good intentions gone away for various reasons. I question as to where, other than their own experiences, Americans could conceivably have derived their developmentalist models. I fault them here for their biases and ethnocentrism, but realistically it seems unlikely that any model other than their own could have been used. Additionally, the Third World lack of understanding of the United States is often at least as great as our malcomprehension of them. Here I concentrate on the latter theme, but the former also requires attention.

Development and Developmentalism

The literature of development and the practice of developmentalism, as an approach to alleviate underdevelopment, were uniquely American phenomena- although scholars and political leaders from other areas also accepted and participated in the formulation of this paradigm. It was uniquely American in that it was extremely, perhaps excessively, optimistic; it derived from the American experience of development (including Lockean liberalism and pluralism); it was largely written by Americans; it reflected a long American "missionary" tradition to bring the benefits of our civilization to other lands; and it became an integral part of American foreign policy toward the Third World, particularly Latin America.

The development literature and developmentalism were not just some abstract intellectual formulations confined to the academy. Rather these ideas had both direct and indirect impacts on policy. Through the incorporation into the Kennedy administration of intellectuals associated with developmentalist themes-such as Walt W. Rostow, McGeorge Bundy, John Kenneth Galbraith, Adolph Berle, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Lincoln Gordon-the ideas of developmentalism were often translated directly into policy Indirectly this body of literature also had a major impact: as developmentalism became something of the leitmotiv of the 1960s, the thing to do, and the basis for United States policy toward the Third World, the ideas of the leading theorists of development were gradually infused into the bureaucracy This came about by the developmentalist intellectuals attending the almost endless conferences that agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) and the Department of State organize, and by the widespread dissemination of the intellectuals' ideas through the universities and among university_trained technocrats of development. Just because a government bureaucrat did not know specifically that it was Walt Rostow's or Seymour Martin Lipset's ideas that he was implementing is hardly sufficient reason to deny the immense impact on United States foreign assistance programs that these ideas had for a long time, and that they continue to have in many government circles today.

Two themes particularly command our attention here. The first is the need for a social and political history of the idea of development itself, tracing its rise in the 1950s and 1960s, its gradual decline in the 1970s and 1980s, and the reasons for this decline. The second involves a history of the rise and fall of various developmental panaceas- agrarian reform, community development, infrastructure development, family planning, basic human needs, the democracy agenda, and private sector initiatives-that have been proffered by the developmentalist school over the years. Such a history would examine the often fickle elevation and then abandonment of these ideas, their intellectual and political origins, and their fate when tested against the hard realities of Third World and non-Western areas.

Agrarian reform in the Third World is part of a larger scheme to promote economic development, build a stronger middle class, and, from the point of view of its United States sponsors, reduce or eliminate the appeal of radical groups. Agrarian reform must thus be looked at in the broader context of the United States effort to fashion a Marshall Plan-like assistance program for the Third World, one component of which was designed for the rural sector. Walt W. Rostow's significantly titled The Stages °f Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto served as a key volume in providing the intellectual rationalizations for such an effort. Rostow argued that the stages of economic growth (such as "preconditions for take-off' and "take off") outlined in his book were universal, that all societies (including those of the Third World) went through the same processes, that the United States was the most advanced nation and therefore provided the model for others, that the United States should assist the Third World in its growth, that the funds thus generated would trickle down, that by our assistance a middle_class society would be created that looked just like our own-stable, moderate politically, socially just, and so on. I have dealt critically with the Rostow arguments in other writings. Here, l hope to show that agrarian reform was simply one aspect of a much larger assistance program which had at its base a definite political agenda.

I favor agrarian reform under the proper circumstances and am supportive of the other social assistance programs discussed here: community development, law and development, and family planning. My purpose is not to attack these programs as such but only to discuss the context out of which they emerged and the particular biases of United States official efforts in these areas. I seek not to tear these programs down but to provide a basis to refashion and foment them in ways that make them culturally and socially relevant to the societies in which they are applied and that enable them to take hold and have more lasting effects than they have in the past.

Agrarian reform, as part of a broader United States assistance program, was viewed as an extension of the Rostow analysis to the Third World countryside. It was aimed, especially in Latin America, at creating a rural middle class where none had existed before. According to much lore and popular literature, the Latin American countryside was characterized by immensely large landholdings, latifundia, and dominated by a rapacious oligarchy more interested in exploiting the peasants and using land as a symbol of social status than for greater production. By dividing up this land, the argument maintained, the back of this quasifeudal system could be broken, the oligarchy destroyed, and a new class of mediumsized rural landholders created. Because they would own their land and thus have a stronger stake in their own futures, these new middle_class family farmers would be loyal to the system and would no longer be prey to the appeal of either fascism or communism. Agrarian reform was seen as the rural counterpart to what overall United States economic assistance a la Rostow was designed to create in urban areas: a prosperous middle class that could serve as a bastion of democracy, stability, and anticommunism.

Agrarian Reform

As a form of social engineering, agrarian reform originated in the postwar United States occupation of Japan and in the nationalist occupation of Taiwan. Initially, virtually everyone involved in the agrarian reform programs promoted by the United States in Latin America had first learned their lessons through experience in Japan and Taiwan. Indeed, Japan and Taiwan served as the models for the programs in Latin America. Scholars are still discussing whether and to what degree the programs in Japan or Taiwan may be termed "successes." I concede that the successes in these two countries outweigh the failures, but, aside from that, we must have doubts about the applicability of the Japanese or Taiwanese "models" to Latin America, where conditions are entirely different. Far more open space exists which gives agrarian reform less immediacy; there is no occupation army to enforce the program as there had been in Japan and Taiwan, and (although I hesitate to use the term) the Latin American ethos, behavior patterns, social structure, and attitudes toward land are different than those of the two Asian nations. The contrast is so great that we can doubt the feasibility and appropriateness of transferring a Japanese or Taiwanese model to a set of societies in Latin America.

While the "model" and experience of those active in the agrarian reform movement came from Japan and Taiwan, the real example, as might be expected from Rostow's analysis, was the United States. Agrarian reform in Latin America and other Third World areas derived from an idealized version of the American family farm. That farm was medium-sized-neither too big (latifundia) nor too small (minifundia); it was managed by self_sufficient yeoman farmers who were educated and used the most modern techniques. These farmers were civically conscious, active participants in local government and town meetings; they were politically moderate, not subject to the appeal of radical ideologies of Left or Right. Although the foreign experience of the early agrarian reform practitioners was in Asia, the real model was in the United States: the American midwest or the New England family farm.

Whether or not the American farm and farmer was portrayed accurately, whether the family farm was really the rock of stability it was imagined to be, or even whether the family farm has any future in America-all serious concerns-we must question the applicability of this model to Latin America and other Third World areas. Upon close examination, the differences between the United States and these other areas are more significant than the similarities. The social structure is entirely different (there is no rural middle class in most of Latin America), class and ethnic differences are large, economies are different (capitalist versus neomercantilist), and political structures are different. These differences are so pronounced that it is far_fetched and beyond the realm of possibility to expect a North American rural structure to ever be transplanted into Latin America.

The United States' effort to bring agrarian reform to Latin America and the rest of the Third World was born of the cold war and launched in the wake of the great fear following the Cuban Revolution that all of Latin America was about "to go communist." Agrarian reform was in part a cold war strategy initiated in some desperation and without its prospects and possibilities having been thoroughly thought through. The arguments seemed so plausible: American technology and funds would help the Latin American nations to achieve democracy, development, and stability through the reform of the rural sector. At the time, no one paid much attention to the impossibility of the United States transferring its institutions to societies where they did not fit, or could fit only imperfectly. John ~ Kennedy was in office, the United States was at the height of its power and influence, optimism and hope ran high, Vietnam and Watergate had not yet occurred, and the United States still seemed to be both policeman and inspiration to the world. Only later would we come to see why the program not only did not work but could not work.

Agrarian reform was not just a program the Latin Americans could take or leave; rather, the adoption of an agrarian reform law was the condition by which a country qualified for Alliance for Progress assistance. Hence most of the Latin American countries dutifully enacted an agrarian reform law. Since their hearts were not really in it, or not fully committed, or because they soon developed other priorities, relatively little agrarian reform was ever implemented. Some peasants received titles to land under the program; this was usually accompanied by presidential helicopters, expansive media coverage, and great celebratory outpourings. But in no country was the structure of rural life fundamentally affected by the United States-inspired agrarian reform efforts.

There are various forms of agrarian reform. The one at which the United States is most successful involves technical assistance, farm credits, agricultural extension, and the like. None of these involve changing the pattern of ownership; instead they provide aid to those who already own land. We must also distinguish between an agrarian reform carried out for economic purposes versus one carried out with social or political goals in mind. The conclusion of the experts is that in general agrarian reform does not make sense economically because production falls, at least initially, as a result; whether agrarian reform makes much sense sociologically or politically is more difficult to decide. It could be argued that agrarian reform has helped buy the United States some time and perhaps some limited stability in Latin America, but the revolutions in Nicaragua and El Salvador as well as ferment in a number of other countries seem to indicate that it may not have been enough.

Eventually the United States itself lost interest in agrarian reform-except in emergency cases such as El Salvador. The results were generally disappointing; the Latin American governments were not cooperative; and other agendas came to the fore. Agrarian reform was the great developmentalist panacea of the 1960s; by the 1970s there were other concerns.

Overall, pervasive ethnocentrism characterized many aspects of the United States' efforts to export agrarian reform. This is evident by: (1) the political agenda and cold war considerations that undergirded the United States agrarian reform efforts; (2) the strong influence on these programs of the Japanese and Taiwanese experiences which had little relevance for Latin America; (3) the implicit reliance on the United States family farm model, as if that could be transferred to Latin America; (4) the heavy grounding of these programs on United States political assumptions; and (5) the naiveté and lack of knowledge or sophistication about Latin America of so many of the United States officials and technicians involved in the program. It is small wonder that the program produced only limited results.

Community Development

The social and political history of community development is remarkably parallel to that of agrarian reform. Both programs flourished with considerable romance and pizzazz in the early 1960s. Both emerged as major public policy agenda items during the era of Camelot, the presidency of John F. Kennedy. Both were products of what has been called the "Peace Corps mood" of those times- that is, the urge not just to study development but to bring its agreed-upon benefits to less-favored lands. By the end of that decade both programs had faded. They did not entirely disappear. There are still some true believers, although they are a dwindling number and without the levels of enthusiasm and support that characterized the earlier halcyon and optimistic years.

The community development programs of the 1960s grew directly out of the United States programs of the same name and era. In Latin America and elsewhere in the Third World a large share of the program was carried out by American Peace Corps volunteers. In addition, there was a cottage industry of community development experts-all trained in the United States, deriving their models from the United States, and often closely connected with the United States civil rights movement and other forms of political activism. In those Latin American countries where there was little or no community development, the United States proceeded, as it did with agrarian reform, to create a special agency to administer the program within the host country government structure.

Again, I add a cautionary note: I have nothing against community development; indeed I tend to favor such programs. The problem is not community development but rather the models used and the appropriateness of these in a non-Western, partially Western, or Third World context.

Community development was the special preserve of the Peace Corps, and considerable literature developed out of that experience. Some of this literature even had more ambitious general and theoretical pretensions. In their training programs, Peace Corps volunteers "majored" in community development. Most of the volunteers, in those early days, had been liberal arts students as undergraduates; they often lacked necessary technical expertise or experience. What they meant by "community development" was often rudimentary: building latrines, digging ditches, aiding various self_ help projects and what was called "organizational literacy." The latter referred to the basic organizational principles of running a meeting; talking in order; contacting a local official or congressman; forming a cooperative; or lobbying local authorities for housing materials, well-drilling equipment, sewers, roads, and electricity

These Peace Corps activities were generally harmless enough and sometimes something positive was accomplished. In the long run, the advantages of Peace Corps service were probably greater for the volunteers themselves (in learning a new language and culture) than for the host community. The model with which the volunteers had to work was a major problem.

That model was derived almost entirely from the United States experience. The kind of community-based, grass-roots, self-help programs the Peace Corps sought to initiate came from the North American experience; they were grounded in the tradition of the New England town meeting and local self-governance. They were based upon a liberal, Lockean, Jeffersonian notion of direct and participatory democracy that had almost no basis in Latin America. The historical base of the Latin American systems is not Lockean; it is derived from the organic monism and unity of Saint Thomas and Francisco Suarez. Lockean liberalism is a relatively recent implant in Latin America, and in most countries it remains a minority strain.

The other major problem pertained to the structure of Latin American local government. Local government in Latin America is patterned after the French system. Almost all power is concentrated in the central state and its agencies. Local governments have almost no independent authority. They have almost no power to tax, to set policy, or to initiate new programs. Activities which in the United States are administered at the local level-concerning schools, utilities, health care, police, water supplies, sewers, and so on, the activities with which Peace Corps volunteers were trained to assist-are in Latin America handled not at the local but at the national level. The national government and its ministries determine educational policy, health policy, and so forth. Even if the Peace Corps volunteers could convince local authorities that they needed roads or well_ drilling equipment or virtually anything else, the local government had no funds, no authority, no requisitioning power to get any of those things done. The result was a great deal of unhappiness and disillusionment on all sides.

The response took various forms. To overcome these bottlenecks, the United States helped create in several Latin American countries a national Office of Community Development that would help organize and facilitate development activities. These agencies were almost 100 percent United States agencies: staffed, funded, and largely run by the United States or by nationals trained in the United States-so much for self-help. To compound the problem, these offices tended to serve as agencies for even further centralization in countries already highly, some would say overly, centralized. In many instances they took away the already slight residual power that had been located at the local level.

The Peace Corps volunteers were also frustrated. In some notorious early cases they all but completely took over the local communities to which they had been assigned. At least one was elected mayor of his town-a perfectly rational step from the point of view of local townspeople who felt they would get more for their community that way, but unacceptable to Peace Corps officials who rightly pointed out to this particular volunteer that he was there to help at the local level, not to take over the place. Many volunteers put to work the lobbying and political organizational skills they had learned in the United States by leading demonstrations, marching on town hall, or leading delegations to the capital city to push for their particular projects. Again, Peace Corps officials had to suggest that such activities, heretofore largely unheard of in Latin America, were not what they had in mind by "community development." After considerable comings and goings, many volunteers ended up teaching English at the local level-a useful contribution, but one far removed from the more grandiose designs of community development theory.

I do not mean to imply that either the Peace Corps or community development are bad ideas. Their accomplishments have been many and significant. I do maintain that the model was flawed, perhaps mortally so, from its inception. It was: (1) based upon a set of liberal-Lockean United States political perceptions and understandings about participatory government that had little basis in Latin America; (2) grounded on the model of a decentralized political system that was different from that of Latin America's centralist tradition, and (3) responsible for producing the opposite effect from that intended- greater centralization, often at the expense of local units. By the end of the 1960s, the community development panacea had also run its course.

Law and Development

Compared with the others, the American-sponsored program on law and development in Latin America was modest. Nevertheless, it was cut from the same cloth as the ones I have discussed, and it exhibited all the familiar biases. For this program, we already have James A. Gardner's thorough, well-researched, scholarly study, Legal Imperialism, that recounts its social and political history.

In a manner remarkably parallel to that of a myriad of other United States-conceived programs fashioned in the early to mid-1960s, the law and development program was an effort to bring to bear American legal expertise and ways of doing things for the benefit of Third World development. In part it reflected the aspiration of American lawyers to get in on the same travel and consulting opportunities as economists, sociologists, and political scientists; more fundamentally it reflected the belief among lawyers that they too had major contributions to make to Third World development.

Unfortunately, American concepts and models underpinned and defined the program. The model used was an idealized vision of law and the lawyer-pragmatic, omnicompetent, problem_ solving-in United States society. No attention was paid to Latin American law or legal precepts. These were swept aside as "traditional" in favor of the new American conception. The program was also strongly conditioned by cold war considerations and a strident anticommunism. It was bolstered, as were the other programs I have discussed, by a Marshall Plan-like vision, as well as the confidence that we could do it. As Gardner, the foremost student of this program, has written, it was inept and fatally flawed from the beginning.

The program relied exclusively on an American conception of legal culture: It was based on and tried to implant an American system of legal education; it used the case method; it was grounded in American legal thought; it employed the Socratic dialogue of United States law schools; it taught the adversarial approach of American law; it was pragmatic, issues-oriented, and problem-solving. The United States model that these legal advisers sought to export contained a benign view of the state- that it was or would be liberal, pluralist, developmental, impartial, and progressive-which soon ran head-on into the authoritarian statism of Latin America.

The program was initiated on the basis of American notions of political democracy, liberal capitalism, and non- or anticommunism. There is nothing wrong with these values; the question is one of their relevance to Latin America. United States lawyers would presumably help engineer freer and more democratic societies in Latin America, as-in their own eyes, at least-they had done in the United States. They viewed Latin America as not having viable institutions of its own and hence as a social laboratory for a United States-based program of law-and-development assistance. As in other programs, it was a missionary call that went out, a particularly American one. The program, having as its goal the advancement and implanting of a particularly American legal model, was, as Gardner put it, a "tropical New Deal." According to Gardner, the American lawyers and law schools who were part of the law and development program in Latin America were poorly equipped by training or background for their assignments. Typically they had no understanding of the local language, customs, or law. They were culturally unaware, sociologically uninformed, and ethnocentric-consistently viewing Latin America in the self_image of the United States. They found, apparently to their surprise, that the goals and methods they brought with them from the United States, and which they assumed to be universal, were not necessarily shared in the Third World. They found the local legal cultures to be resilient and resistant to change. Many apparently lacked the tact to deal with their local counterparts. Relying on an American legal system and methods which they carried abroad with almost crusading zeal, and often inept and insensitive in dealing with local practices they- or at least the program's administrators-soon discovered that the model used was wrong and inappropriate. The overall result, by common consensus of both the host countries and the program's United States administrators, was failure.

The Latin American legal tradition was entirely different from that of the United States, being based on a code or civil law tradition, not on a common law tradition as in the United States. Most of the United States lawyers involved in the program knew that, but they were not aware of the full implications, of the wide-ranging ramifications of this distinct jurisprudential tradition. At a most basic level, it is doubtful whether this tradition in Latin America is even compatible with a law-and-development orientation. The Socratic method is of doubtful utility in a system based on rote memorization. The use of cases is not appropriate in a context in which the role of the judge is to find the applicable provision of the code, not to induce a general principle from a series of cases. The system of law school training in Latin America and even the role of the law school teacher is entirely different than in the United States. In Latin America there is little judicial review. Rather, as in the French system, these are administrative states, bureaucratic states that are grounded on a system of state positivism, not American-style separation of powers and interest-group pluralism. Prior to plunging headlong into the field, there were almost no preparations, no grounding in Latin American law, no studies of the implications of bringing an American legal system in contact with an undeveloped Roman-Iberian one. As a result, the program had what one author calls "unexpected vulnerabilities" even in those countries of Latin America (for example, Colombia) that were most democratic and therefore closer to the American system.

Three aspects of the law and development program especially command our attention. First, although neither the Latin American governments nor their lawyers or law schools especially wanted the program, the American government brought it anyway. Law and development was like many United States programs then and now: it was grounded on the notion that "we [North Americans] know best," not "they [Latin Americans] know best." Latin Americans not only had different expectations of the program, but they knew from the beginning that it would not work in their context. Bringing in a program anyway that was considered folly, and was known in advance not to work-by the locals if not by the Americans-seems the height of insensitivity

Second, this program closely complemented and reinforced other United States ideas about foreign aid. It was entirely grounded in the American experience, with little reference to Latin American realities. It viewed Latin American realities with considerable disdain, its legal institutions as a "problem to be overcome." Since Latin America's history had been, by common consent, a "failure" and its institutions unresponsive and "dysfunctional," these could be cavalierly and precipitously discarded in favor of a presumably better model. Attempting naively and ethnocentrically to recast Latin America in the United States mold, and without any consideration for the possible viability of indigenous institutions, the program was bound to be a failure, as proved to be the case. The strong criticisms, even the language, leveled by critics seems equally applicable to the other programs I am describing.

Third, the program had a not very thinly disguised political agenda. Although small in comparison with other programs, it was neither harmless nor "benignly neutral." The program was to be, along with a number of others promulgated in this period, an agency of advanced, even radical change. It was designed to break down the existing legal system of Latin America and to substitute another, more "progressive" one for it. The notion that we and our assistance programs, however well-intentioned, should sweep away another country's (actually a whole set of countries') legal system and replace it with our own presumably better one would seem to be arrogant, misguided, and shortsighted.

Family Planning

Family planning was to the late 1960s and early 1970s what agrarian reform and community development had been in the earlier 1960s; the great panacea that would solve all of Latin America's problems. Impressionistically, I believe there were, and are, more true believers in family planning than in agrarian reform. Among certain cadres, family planning and population control are believed in with fervor and quasi-religiosity. Such attitudes may be useful when recruiting new supporters for the programs envisioned, but in foreign policy that can easily become a formula for disaster.

The language I use here in describing family planning and population control activities is sometimes biting and caustic, but I am sympathetic to family planning. To the extent that these are effective and well-run programs reflecting the desires of the local population, I am supportive of them. The problem here as elsewhere is not family planning or the activity per se but the particular model used by the United States to export it.

We do not as yet have a social and political history of family planning programs comparable to the one available on law and development. We need an insider account by someone in the Ford Foundation, the Population Council, the Population Crisis Committee, or the U.S. Agency for International Development, by one of those dozen or so key persons who has been influential in designing and implementing population policy over the last quarter_ century.

The most successful early family planning programs in which the social engineering of the population control experts was put to work may have been those in Taiwan. A significant decline in birth rates began there in 1951 and, after a brief interruption, continued from 1955. Many of the giants in the family planning/population control community first earned their spurs by studying the Taiwanese model. Other places where efforts to reduce fertility have attained at least the appearance of success include Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Singapore, South Korea, and Thailand. The model of these programs has been carried over to the rest of Latin America.

I say the "appearance of success" because it is not clear whether the decline in the birth rate in these societies was due to the actual program to induce smaller families or to broad, "natural" changes in the society itself. It is clear that the societies from which the "population model" (like the agrarian reform and other "models") derives may not be representative of the Third World. Taiwan, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Singapore, South Korea, and Thailand have a number of characteristics in common that may make them atypical of much of the developing world. All are relatively small, homogeneous, stable, and generally well administered, so that the substantial financial assistance from the United States government and the population agencies could be put to good use. These countries are also among the most advanced of the developing nations, typically already transitional to a developed economy rather than truly underdeveloped. Nor could it be said that Jamaica with its high literacy rate and West-minister political institutions, or Puerto Rico with its special relationship (and outlet for surplus population) to the United States, are at all typical of Latin America. As demographer and population expert William Peterson has written in Population, Taiwan is not India and Puerto Rico is not Mexico or Brazil. Nevertheless, despite its ill fit, this is the model that served as the basis for the family planning programs in Latin America.

These programs have been designed, launched, inspired, funded, and in large part administered from the United States; but considerable pains have been taken to disguise that fact. Much of the funding has been channeled through third-rate agencies to disguise the extent of United States involvement. Various fronts have been set up to make it appear, particularly in the early stages, as though it is a private association that is supporting the program, not the United States government. But when an agency receives, directly or indirectly, 90 percent to 95 percent of its funds from AID, we are probably safe in considering it a front agency. Care has also been taken to find local doctors and concerned citizens in the countries affected so as to provide the appearance of local control, even though the funding and much of the direction may come from outside.

An elaborate scenario has been worked out to bring family planning and population control to the Third World through a somewhat secretive, furtive, and backdoor route. First, a group of doctors are found, usually gynecologists and health care specialists, who receive specialized training in the United States and begin to talk about and publicize population-related topics: abandoned children, illegal and dangerous abortions, crowding, population growth rates that exceed economic growth, and so on. They provide a climate conducive to family planning activities. Then, typically, a private family planning association is formed consisting of these same doctors, demographers, and interested persons. United States aid is provided, usually funneled initially through private agencies. A pilot program of family planning clinics is begun; more publicity is generated; and a lobbying effort is begun with the government. In the third stage, the government, through its health or social assistance ministry, is persuaded to take over a program of family planning that is already in existence and to incorporate it into its nationwide system of maternity and child health care. This third and final step makes the program also eligible for large_scale foreign assistance, from AID, the United Nations, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), and other donors. At that stage the program is, presumably, well established, on its way, and on its own. These furtive and often secretive strategies have often generated resentments in the Third World and made the population programs objects of suspicion or hostility.

While these maneuverings were under way to establish a population program, in accord with a model imported from the outside, no one had bothered to check with Latin American countries to see if they wanted family planning, or wanted it all that much. My argument is complicated by the fact that survey data indicate Latin Americans do, overwhelmingly, want to limit family size, to have fewer children. Moreover, most influential groups in society-the army, the elites, even the church or some sectors of it-now see the need for some form of family planning. The problem is that they often see the issue in different terms than the population control donor agencies. The "population problem" in Latin America is variously defined from country to country, but it is usually put in terms of dealing with the problem of abandoned children, of illegal and often dangerous abortions, of resettlement of population and colonization, of squaring population growth with social and economic growth and ensuring that the former does not outstrip the latter. These Latin American concerns most often are barely given lip service by the donor agencies, whose overriding concern has been to limit population growth. It is not family planning per se that is at issue; rather, it is the particular model used and the insensitivity of the major population agencies to the wishes of Latin Americans.

Unless population programs are carried out in accord with the wishes of the host countries, they are unlikely to produce successful results.

At this stage there are so many problems with the population programs that I can only list some of them here. First, the model may not be appropriate: what worked in Taiwan or even Puerto Rico is unlikely to work in Peru or Colombia. Second, the three-stage plan for population policy development can be and has been, in various countries, short_circuited and stalled at any one of several points; there is nothing inevitable or unilinear about the model. Third, while population growth rates are falling in Latin America, we are still not sure-as we are still not sure for Taiwan itself-whether this is due to natural causes (rising literacy, better education, urbanization, greater numbers of women in the work force) or to the efforts of the family planning agencies. Resolving that issue before plunging further ahead would seem to be an important task.

Fourth, there are major problems with the population agencies responsible for carrying out these programs. Their accounting method often leaves much to be desired; some have been guilty of doctoring population statistics to suit their own purposes; they have sometimes presented misleading information to the United States Congress and to AID; and some have been guilty of violating if not the letter then probably the spirit of United States law. Whatever one thinks of the legislation, there are now clear legal guidelines prohibiting the use of United States government funds in support of abortion services; yet some of the population agencies have continued to provide abortion information and equipment-although under pressure from Washington they have been discouraged from direct involvement in actual abortion services. In addition, a key problem has been that the population agencies are full of globalists and generalists, and their knowledge of particular regions such as Latin America has often been minuscule. Indeed, since the population problem is global and the solutions universally applicable, in their view, they see no need to acquire specialists or expertise in specific cultural or geographic areas.

Fifth, and most importantly, there is the true believer syndrome. The population issue is defined differently in Latin America, but it is difficult to convince the population control advocates that such differences are important and should be given serious consideration. They see the population problem as a world problem demanding immediate and emergency measures, and they see it as unidimensional: too many people. Since it is an emergency problem, they feel that time and energy should not be wasted paying serious attention to cultural differences across continents or to the nuances of individual nationalistic preferences. It is hard for these population true believers to comprehend that once the demographic facts are presented all right_thinking people would not see the solution in the same terms. They in short, already know all the answers. They may give some limited attention to the broader and more intricate Latin American views of the problem, but first and foremost their conception is with global population control. They may even be right, but it is unlikely that they will ultimately win the war in Latin America without seriously taking into account Latin Americans' own perceptions and definitions of the problem. These are increasingly nationalistic, assertive, and resentful of outsiders who tell them what to do.

In the case of population policy it is not so much an American model that is being exported, although Americans have been the chief agents involved. Ironically, although Americans have served as the architects of the program, the United States itself has no national population policy-and could not conceivably pass such a program through Congress-yet we insist that Latin American countries adopt one as a condition of foreign aid largess or, it is strongly suspected, World Bank subsidies. Inspired by the United States, it is nevertheless a global model that is being exported, a perception of spiraling population growth that must be checked at all costs worldwide through the use of a plan of action universally meet, of a particular time and period, whose economic, sociological, and political laws may not apply to the Third World-or may apply only partially and incompletely.

Whether we are discussing agrarian reform, community development, law and development, or family planning/population control, or referring to other contexts of economic development strategy, military modernization, the democracy agenda, human rights concerns, trade unionism, or any one of countless other programs, the problems have been remarkably parallel. They were all born of a particularly Western experience with development, were based on Western assumptions about the modernization process which were then overgeneralized to the rest of the world, and have not adequately taken into account local and indigenous institutions and ways of doing things.

We may understand why this is so, why we use our own models to understand other areas of the world, why our ethnocentrism is so pronounced; but we must also be aware of the consequences of such ethnocentrism. By this time the policy failures have been so numerous and the Third World resentments engendered so strong that the notion of "let us do it our way" is becoming widespread. The Third World is increasingly inclined to reject the models and recommendations imposed as suggested by the West and is more and more searching for and asserting indigenous models and institutional arrangements more attuned to their own preferences, histories, and ways of doing things.

A long time must pass before policies based on the developmental assumptions of the past will change. These assumptions are strongly entrenched in the foreign assistance bureaucracies; and we know that a policy consensus on these or any other issues once arrived at is difficult to alter. Change will be difficult because these assumptions about agrarian reform, community development, the role of the middle class, and so on are closely associated with the history, culture, and ethos of the Western countries. They are embedded deeply in our educational system, our values, and our civic consciousness and ideology; and these will not be changed quickly or easily. They are part of a powerful social science tradition which sees the Western nations as most "developed" and leading the way and providing the example for the "less developed countries" to follow.

Change will be difficult to achieve because the more nuanced and less ethnocentric ideas I have suggested may be too complex for nonspecialist policymakers and the general public to grasp. I do not say this in a condescending or patronizing fashion but with the frank realization that in political Washington it is the image, the brief phrase, the lowest common denominator that usually counts in policymaking; the substance of the whole argument is often too complicated to get across. It is hard enough to get a consensus in Washington on such programs as agrarian reform and family planning; to say now that these programs will require far greater refinement and diverse adaptations to distinct local conditions is too applicable and emanating from the United States. It cannot possibly work. As sociologist William Peterson concludes in Population:

Those [population] analysts in each social discipline who have attempted to transcend the bounds of a single case have very often erred on the side of too facile generalization, and repeatedly we have been put to the task of freeing our thoughts from one or another monistic bond-in earlier generations racial or geographic determinism and, more recently, their economic or demographic analogues. How much of a guide is the past development of advanced countries for mapping the future modernization of presently backward areas? In some overall sense, obviously; the world is becoming more homogenous, and it is just this metamorphosis that we mean by modernization. But to assume the details of the process must follow a known course, or that the homogenization must eventually eliminate all fundamental differences, is to commit the most egregious error of comparative analysis.

In general, ethnocentrism is strong in virtually all aspects of United States foreign policy toward the Third World. All these programs are based on and derive from the peculiarly Western experience with development and are of limited relevance to the Third World. They are based on particular and special experience with develop difficult to convey to lawmakers or the public-and it may have the political side effect of scuttling the whole program or making it impossible to pass through Congress. For these and other reasons, it will likely take considerable time, perhaps a generation, for the changes I have suggested to reach fruition, for us to become less convinced that our own particular model is universal, and for us to take seriously the efforts of various Third World peoples to chart and institutionalize their own developmental routes.

The implications of the trends I have discussed are that the already developed donor nations will have to considerably reorient their assistance programs if they are to succeed in the Third World of the future. They will have to genuinely, not just with lip service, pay attention to local wants and aspirations. They will have to come to grips with models of development different from their own Western one. Far better and more thoroughly than in the past, they will have to learn the language, culture, and institutional procedures of various Third World areas.

They will have to accept the notion now widespread in the Third World that "they know best" instead of the older one that "we know best for them." They will have to empathize and listen seriously for the first time and be prepared to support some of the Third World notions of development as distinct from the Western one. In the Islamic world, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America the sense is now well_nigh universal that the Western models, in their several varieties, have not worked very well, and therefore a social science model of development more attuned to local ways will have to be created. Strenuous efforts are now under way in various areas of the Third World to fashion such indigenous models or to achieve a better blend and fusion between imported and indigenous ones.

It is likely that this will be the next great innovative frontier in the social sciences and in development and foreign assistance research and theory. The foundations, various think tanks, and some within the academy-to say nothing of the Third World itself-are all moving in this direction. It is time for political development theory also to rethink its earlier premises and assumptions, all based strongly on the Western experience, and to move toward greater cultural relativism and an understanding of the Third World and the various parts thereof, on its own terms rather than through the prism of the earlier Western experience which fits the Third World only partially and incompletely Once this new revolution in the social sciences and in development theory has taken place, it may be that the foreign assistance programs emanating from the Western nations can also be reoriented.

Four major questions come immediately to mind: (1) Are there still universals in the development process and, if so, what are they and how do we go about implementing and bringing about their more positive ends and features? (2) How do we make wise decisions in our foreign policy if not from the matrix of our own being and experience of what we understand to have been good in that experience? (3) Where do we draw lines in terms of the limits of the cultural relativism implied here-that is, once we are agreed that Hitler and Bokassa are unacceptable, what do we do about the tougher cases: Pinochet, South Africa, Zia, the Ayatollah, and Central America? (4) Suppose we heed the admonitions I offer, and then find that there are no Third World models of development worth hanging our hats on; what then do we do- not just intellectually but also from the point of view of policymakers who must make the decisions and carry our policies for these countries?

If past experience is any guide, it will likely take at least ten years (we are already half way through the generation change I referred to, marking a move away from the earlier development literature) before these newer models of development are reflected in more realistic assistance programs, reflecting a more accurate portrayal (as distinct from a wishful one, which far too often constituted the older approach) of Third World realities and institutions. It is, nevertheless, important to begin making the case now, both for educational purposes and because we may still hope to convince policymakers-hard though that is-that the success of their development programs must finally depend on their being adapted to the realities of distinct Third World areas. Success, after all, ultimately reflects the bottom line of American commitment to such programs.