Development Against Democracy

Front matter

DEVELOPMENT AGAINST DEMOCRACY

NEW EDITION

“A LANDMARK”

Contents

Acknowledgments Foreword by Thomas Ferguson Introduction by Robert Vitalis

. The “New Look” in Development Studies . Making Connections

RW NY

Foreword

Thomas Ferguson*

Irene Gendzier and Pluto Press are to be congratulated for many reasons, but the most compelling is probably their exquisite timing. As this updated reissue of her classic appears, the Trump administration is bringing out a new edition of its own: a rerun of U.S. foreign policy’s past heedless embraces of authoritarian regimes, penchant for secrecy, and reckless overconfidence in the power of military force.

The sometimes disorienting mix of muscular rhetoric, deliberate efforts to look “unpredictable,” and almost casual talk of “boots on the ground,” bombings, and the need for new strategic poses is eerily familiar to analysts who lived through the period Dr. Gendzier writes about with such nuance and verve. I certainly remember the department spaces I was enjoined from entering as a young assistant professor at MIT, for want of the requisite security clearances, even as many authors Dr. Gendzier discusses here repaired to them to work, study, or visit. But younger scholars and a new generation of Americans who never experienced the Cold War mostly do not know this history. They are mostly unaware of the close interactions between many major works of Comparative Politics, International Relations, and American foreign policy or the intense coordination among many protagonists with all manner of government and major foundation personnel. They have little or no conception of how thoroughly broad psychological themes pushed out serious discussion of political institutions and economic analysis.

Researchers working on this period report that documents once available have disappeared, even as some new archival materials open up. Irene Gendzier’s splendid book is not the last word on its subject, but it is indispensable for anyone trying to understand how theory and reality related to each other then (and since). One might doubt whether understanding this past will be enough by itself to prevent us from making the famous second move from tragedy to farce—the basis of American economic and political power is so much shallower now than in the age of High Cold War.

*

Thomas Ferguson is Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

vil

Development Against Democracy remains, alas, startlingly contemporary. Many of the doctrines it discusses live on in second or third generation versions whose deep structures are only occasionally apprehended. The ease with which these constructions combine with ideology and poor empirical methods to become instrumentalized is breathtaking; Irene Gendzier’s fine study merits a wide readership from a new generation of readers.

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Introduction Robert Vitalis*

Thirty-five years ago, on June 6, 1982, Israeli forces invaded and occupied southern Lebanon. Its army and air force laid siege to the capital, Beirut, with the objectives of destroying the Palestinian Liberation Organization, then headquartered there, and installing its Maronite Christian clients in power. I had returned to the United States that summer, where I was a PhD candidate in political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, specializing in the “political development” of the Middle East, and had taken a two-year leave of absence in Cairo. Through friends in Cambridge, I made contact with a small group of mostly academic activists that had constituted themselves as the “Ad Hoc Emergency Committee on Lebanon” and as a result found myself handing out leaflets to subway commuters one September evening at the Harvard “T” Station with one of the committee’s founders, Boston University professor Irene Gendzier.

I didn’t know it then, but, Gendzier had been considered a rising star in the relatively small U.S. Middle East studies field, back in the 196os. A historian with a Columbia University PhD, she taught in BU’s history and political science departments. Her first book, a scholarly monograph published in 1966 and based on her dissertation, was a critically acclaimed biography of the exiled nineteenth-century Jewish-Egyptian nationalist writer, Yaqub Sanua. She wrote on Arab-Israeli affairs, on “Palestine- Israel,” in her ahead-of-its-time formulation, and on North Africa for the private, Washington, DC-based Middle East Institute’s house organ, the Middle East Journal, which served as the main professional outlet prior to the founding of the Middle East Studies Association in 1966. Gendzier was elected to MESA’s board of directors in 1974, but by then her profile and research program had changed, like many others affected by the U.S. wars in Southeast Asia, and she soon resigned in protest of the association’s ties to the Central Intelligence Agency and other parts of the national security state."

She published her next two books with trade rather than university presses. 4 Middle East Reader (1969), an edited volume for which Gendzier

*

Robert Vitalis is professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

ix supplied a critical introductory essay, provided non-specialists with an understanding of regional developments following Israel’s defeat of Egypt and Syria in June 1967 and its takeover of the whole of Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. In 1973 Pantheon published her path-breaking Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study, the first such account of the thought of Fanon, the Martinique-born, French-trained psychiatrist and revolutionary philosopher who had joined the Algerian National Liberation Front. At the same time, sharp analyses of Israel’s settlement policies, of the 1975—1976 Lebanese civil war, and of the beginning of U.S. force projection in the Persian Gulf appeared under her byline in the Nation through the last half of the 1970s.

When I met her in 1982, Gendzier was working on revisions of the book you hold in your hands. As she notes in her new opening chapter, it began as a study of the effect of social scientists’ fascination with what they dubbed “modernization” or development theory on her own field of Middle East studies, seemingly, as an outgrowth of the criticisms she had raised behind the scenes at MESA. You'll learn more about the so-called theories in the pages to follow. The project though grew bigger, the targets more numerous, as Gendzier dug deeper into the history of the key figures and their auxiliary roles in the violence that the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations unleashed across Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

She was indicting some of the biggest names in the social sciences, many of whom clustered in the Boston-Cambridge area. I had taken seminars with a couple at MIT, and experienced first-hand their contempt for the critics of their intellectual enterprise and refusal to teach or otherwise engage with them. As Gendzier herself notes, by the 1970s these theories had come under withering attack from various ideological and geographical quadrants. I remember one of her own putative comrades, by then rising in the ranks at MIT, wondering aloud to me why she was still bothering with the topic. Many others told her the same thing.” They all missed the point. The puzzle for Gendzier is why, despite the withering criticisms, the ideas and, more important, the support for authoritarianism and militarization in the name of “democracy” that these ideas rationalized proved so resistant to change? That question is as relevant today, after more than a decade of failed son-of-modernization “nation-building” and “democracy-promotion” theories and policies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, and elsewhere, as it was in 1985, when she published Managing Political Change: Social Scientists and the Third World, the book’s original title, reissued ten years later as Development Against Democracy.

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