Humanism or Hegemony? Development and Empire in a Comparative Perspective
Panel 087, 2010 Annual Meeting
On Friday, November 19 at 04:30 pm
Panel Description
From the French mission civilisatrice to more recent Western policies, foreign intervention in the MENA region has often purported to develop the economic, social, and political capacities of indigenous inhabitants. The imposition of forms of expertise in fields such as education, medicine and economics has often accompanied the exercise of political and economic power. After World War I, this discourse crystallized in the notion of development, which attempted to increase the standard of living for those who allegedly lacked the ability to modernize themselves. While scholars have long focused on development as a benevolent (if unfulfilled) promise, or a thinly veiled program of colonial oppression, this panel investigates development in historically specific ways, thereby avoiding the tendency to speak of development as a monolithic entity.
Instead of approaching development as a program implemented by Western experts and anthropologists on a "dominated" population, this panel offers a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between official rhetoric and practical implementation. By tracing the ways in which colonial administrators, specialized experts and local populations engaged with development in order to articulate various notions of indigenous culture, political legitimacy and economic orthodoxy, this panel shows that development prompted multiple contests, appropriations, and responses.
Secondly, these papers demonstrate that development was not merely a "third world" phenomenon as it was inseparable from international geopolitics, and often had profound implications for the metropole itself. Notions of legitimate rule, racial or cultural difference, and technical expertise formed a truly transnational discourse as they circulated among various actors.
Lastly, by comparing French rule in Algeria to Western and US projects in the Middle East, this panel also addresses the debates that question the notion of empire as an analytic category. Algerian territory was defined as part of France after 1848, while the US has long denied its status as a colonial power. Thus this panel speaks to the following questions: What forms of political and economic intervention qualify as imperial? Does the fact that the Pentagon screened the Battle of Algiers in 2003 point to a political imaginary in which empire, insurgency, and development are somehow linked?
These papers employ a broad scope of methods and sources to investigate the relationship between developmental discourse and the exercise of foreign power. Moreover, this panel will explore timely issues in the debates on empire while also questioning some of the assumptions at work in the study of development more broadly.
In 1923 Albert Sarraut (1872 - 1962) published La mise en valeur des colonies francaises, prompting a heated debate regarding France's responsibility to offer economic assistance and promote social welfare in the colonies. Beginning with Sarraut's watershed publication, this paper focuses on French discussions regarding colonial development in French Algeria from 1923 to 1962. It analyzes the writings of Albert Sarraut, Edmond Giscard d'Estaing (1894 - 1982) and Jacques Soustelle (1912 - 1990) to show that there was no consensus on the link between development and empire. In fact, these colonial administrators framed the risks, benefits, and responsibilities of French investment in Algeria in starkly different ways.
While Sarraut believed that it was imperative to encourage colonial development in order to bolster French national grandeur, d'Estaing questioned the rising costs of development, positing that France's economic lay with the integration of Europe rather than the colonization of Algeria. Alternately, Jacques Soustelle, who would later become a champion of L'Algerie francaise, was an ardent supporter of development, which he thought would foster political integration in the colony while preventing Algerian migration to the metropole.
In analyzing these positions, this paper breaks with previous works that study colonial development in terms of success or failure and instead investigates the ways in which development was used to stage understandings of justice, progress, and sovereignty in the period following WWI. Not only did the question of colonial development reflect various political, economic, and ideological commitments, but it also played an important role in France's own conceptualization of economic orthodoxy and the question of European economic integration. Moreover, debates on development pointed to discrepant understandings of France's historical mission civilisatrice, thereby decisively shaping France's memory of its colonial past. By framing development in terms of contested notions of political legitimacy and economic orthodoxy, this paper offers new perspectives on the significance of development.
In response to the Algerian Revolution, French officials turned to cultural anthropologist (eg. Jacques Soustelle, Germaine Tillon, Vincent Mans?r Monteil, etc.) and to UNESCO-produced documentation on basic education, industrial development, and the fight against racial discrimination to anchor the policy of "integration." Integration was supposed to revise previous assimilationist or associationist efforts to negotiate Algerian "differences" and French rule. In theory, it offered a new explanation for why Algerians themselves would benefit from membership in a redefined French Republic: by admitting that Algerian culture should shape France and that French racism already (and profoundly) affected Algerians, a "modernizing mission" that respected Algerians and that improved their lives would take shape. This paper will focus on how the French used UNESCO and transnational networks of cultural anthropologist to both define their policies and to present them to international audiences as novel, deeply humane, and potential models to address general problems of "under-development" and "ethnic conflict."
One of the largest French wartime initiatives in Algeria during the war for independence was the Sections Administratives Specialis?es (SAS). When the newly appointed Governor General of Algeria, Jacques Soustelle, first traveled to Algeria in February 1955, he made three key observations: one, the country was under-governed; two, both French military successes as well as failures exacerbated tensions between the French and Algerians; and three, the French suffered from an intelligence deficiency. He created the SAS to help combat these problems.
Conceived as a program that would address social, political, and economic deficiencies in Algeria, the SAS sent teams of French officers, physicians, nurses, and teachers to rural areas to implement political rapprochement initiatives and give out material goods. The French intended to integrate Algerians into the colonial state and began to build infrastructure and provide social services in previously neglected areas of the colony. The SAS were to be peaceful pacifiers deployed at a time when France still could not imagine an independent Algeria. Unfortunately for the French, by the 1950s, their massive efforts to compensate for the underdevelopment of Algeria were too little too late.
This paper will focus on one particular aspect of the SAS: the medical initiatives. It will explore the more subversive aims of using medicine as both a tool of conquest and development. I argue that the SAS were not only a means of trying to control the Algerians; they were also part of a campaign to retake and resettle the country as prescribed by revolutionary war theory. Yet, the SAS were an inadequate solution to a systemic long-term colonial problem of mismanagement and underdevelopment and ultimately, they did not lead to their intended outcome of quelling the Algerian war effort.
This paper provides a (re)reading of the projection of U.S. imperial power in the Middle East by examining the internal debates and external policies of the United States towards the region in the period between 1945 and 1958. The typical focus on political alliances and military strategies has overlooked the dynamic workings of U.S. imperialism in the region. This paper seeks to broaden our understanding of U.S. policy through placing it in the multiple contexts of the organization of the global economy, the U.S. strategic position, and the socio-political dynamics of the Middle East. Consequently, the analysis that follows makes two interjections into narratives of U.S. imperialism during the Cold War. First, U.S. imperial power in the Middle East was projected as much on the economic front as it was on the political and military fronts. This economic front extended beyond the petroleum industry and sought to engage with the growth of Middle Eastern economies, the standard of living of the region's population, and the long-term sustainability of economic development that would address both. Second, the 1945-1958 period was a critical juncture in the learning process of U.S. policy-makers of how best to secure U.S. interests in the Middle East. The early stage of the U.S. developmentalist approach had been accompanied by a willingness to work with reformist and revolutionary movements in the region and a corollary ambivalence towards regional status quo forces. By 1958, the limits of what constituted acceptable political and economic reform in the service of development was defined much more restrictively than had previously been the case. It is in the post-1958 period that U.S. policy assumed a zero-sum game strategy towards reformist and revolutionary movements and fully committed itself to an alliance with status quo forces. By exploring broader forms of intervention and tracing the hardening of strategies, this paper questions the static notions of imperialism that dominant narratives of U.S. policy towards the region portray. What emerges is a much more dynamic and flexible nature of the early stages of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East.
