Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and "Nation Building" in the Kennedy Era

Abstract

Much current work on the Cold War focuses on the role of ideology in American foreign policy. Mi cha el E. La tha m has produced a particularly interesting study. Although not free from some repetitions of his main hypotheses, Latham's book significantly contributes to our knowledge about the ideological driving forces behind American Cold War policy in the late 1950s and the 1960s. With the help of three case studies dealing with Washington's Alliance for Progress in Latin America, John F. Kennedy's Peace Corps initiative, and the Strategic Hamlet program in Vietnam, Latham demonstrates the vital role American social scientists and their belief in the prevalent theories of modernization played in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy. According to the optimistic and activist view of policy makers in the Kennedy administration, “modernization” was meant to provide American economic and ideological support for accelerating the prog ress of the “undeveloped” world toward achieving prosperity and a liberal political order that would make these nations immune to communism. Kennedy's “best and brightest” believed that all societies—both western democracies and much poorer and culturally very different traditional societies—were essentially “integrated systems” that tended to develop in more or less identical stages, which modern social science had been able to identify. Active community support by American volunteers and government employees would lead to economic growth and democratic reforms, which in turn would transform a society of poor, exploited, and semiliterate peasants in Latin America, Vietnam, and elsewhere into active and democratically minded citizens. Consequently, it was expected that they would gratefully develop political loyalty to their own country and to its American protector. Yet this naïvely exaggerated Washington's ability to embark on “nation building” and greatly underestimated the forces of nationalism, tradition, and cultural diversity that made these tasks impossible to achieve. Moreover, severe problems with the honest and efficient administration of such an ambitious program further undermined the American efforts.

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