Modernization, Development and Migration in a Sceptical Age

Abstract

While we can debate whether or not something called development in the ‘underdeveloped nations’ actually took off in the post-World War Two era, there is no debating the fact that the construction of models of development wedded to the regnant structural functionalist paradigm of that period can trace their origins to precisely that time. Such theories clearly took off. It’s not surprising why this should be the case. Theorizing development began in earnest once the European colonizing nations confronted the imperative of relinquishing their colonies. The end to a century of European colonialism was brought about by the stark realities these powers confronted in the wake of the devastation they experienced on their respective home fronts during the war. The post-colonial world emerged in part as a consequence of the colonial powers’ economic inability to sustain colonial control. A further impetus took shape at the ideological level, for in challenging the racist underpinning of Nazi ideology during the war years, it became difficult to sustain the myth of moral and material uplift of tradition-bound regions of the world to which devotees of the ‘white man’s burden’ view of history subscribed.