Kofi Annan

1. “Gender equality is more than a goal in itself. It is a precondition for meeting the challenge of reducing poverty, promoting sustainable development and building good governance.” E. Napp Kofi Annan

2. Once independence was achieved for the former Asian and African colonies, new challenges emerged • The former colonies were joined by already independent and nonindustrialized countries and regions • Together they formed the bloc of nations known previously as the third world, the developing countries, or the Global South • In the second half of the twentieth century, these countries represented perhaps 75 percent of the world’s population • They also accounted for almost all of the fourfold increase in human numbers during the twentieth century E. Napp

3. All across the developing world, efforts to create political order had to contend with a set of common conditions - populations were exploding, expectations after independence were very high, newly independent nations were often culturally diverse, and in many places one kind of political system followed another. E. Napp

4. The political evolution of postindependence Africa illustrates the complexity and the difficulty of creating a stable political order in developing countries • Although colonial rule had been highly authoritarian and bureaucratic with little interest in African participation, during the 1950s the British, the French, and the Belgians attempted, rather belatedly, to transplant democratic institutions to their colonies • It was with such institutions that most African states greeted independence • And by the early 1970s, many of the popular political parties that led the struggle for independence lost mass support and were swept away by military coups E. Napp

5. When the army took power in Ghana in 1966, no one lifted a finger to defend the party that had led the country to independence only nine years earlier. Other states evolved into one-party systems, sometimes highly authoritarian and bureaucratic and sometimes more open and democratic. Still others degenerated into personal tyrannies or dictatorships. Freedom from colonial rule certainly did not automatically generate the internal political freedoms associated with democracy. E. Napp

6. Yet in India, Western-style democracy, including regular elections, multiple parties, civil liberties, and peaceful changes in government, has been practiced almost continuously since independence • But the struggle for independence in India had been a far more prolonged affair, thus providing time for an Indian political leadership to sort itself out • And the British began to hand over power in a gradual way well before complete independence was granted in 1947 • Thus a far larger number of Indians had useful administrative or technical skills than was the case in Africa E. Napp

7. But creating national unity was certainly more difficult in Africa where competing political parties identified primarily with particular ethnic or “tribal” groups. Similarly, the immense problems that inevitably accompany the early stages of economic development may be compounded by the heavy demands of a political system based on universal suffrage. Certainly Europe did not begin its modernizing process with such a system. E. Napp

8. Beyond these general considerations, more immediate conditions likewise undermined the popular support of many postindependence governments in Africa and discredited their initial democracies • One was widespread economic disappointment • By almost any measure, African economic performance since independence has been the poorest in the developing world • Independence leaders were often unable to fulfill even the most minimal expectations, let alone the visions of a better life • Yet for some, independence offered great opportunities for acquiring status, position, and wealth E. Napp

9. Unlike in Latin America and parts of Asia, those who benefited the most from independence were not large landowners, for most African societies did not have an established class whose wealth was based in landed estates. Rather they were members of the relatively well-educated elite who had found high-paying jobs in the growing bureaucracies of the newly independent states. E. Napp

10. Frequently, resentments born of inequality found expression in ethnic conflict, as Africa’s immense cultural diversity became intensely politicized • An ethnically based civil war in Nigeria during the late 1960s cost the lives of millions, while in the mid-1990s ethnic hatred led Rwanda into the realm of genocide • Thus economic disappointment, class resentments, and ethnic conflict eroded support for the transplanted democracies of the early independence era • The most common alternative involved governments by soldiers, a familiar pattern in Latin America as well E. Napp

11. By the early 1980s, the military had intervened in at least thirty of Africa’s forty-six independent states and actively governed more than half of them. Usually, the military took power in a crisis, after the civilian government had lost most of its popular support. The soldiers often claimed that the nation was in grave danger, that corrupt civilian politicians had led the country to the brink of chaos, and that only the military had the discipline and strength to put things right. E. Napp

12. But since the early 1980s, a remarkable resurgence of Western-style democracy has brought popular movements, multiparty elections, and new constitutions to a number of African states, including Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Senegal, and Zambia • It was part of a late-twentieth-century democratic revival of global dimensions that included Southern and Eastern Europe, most of Latin America, and parts of Asia and the Middle East • Perhaps the most important factor in increasing the appeal of democracy was the evident failure of authoritarian governments to remedy the disastrous economic situation E. Napp

13. Also the end of the cold war reduced the willingness of the major industrial powers to underwrite their authoritarian client states. But at the top of the agenda everywhere in the Global South was economic development. Yet achieving economic development proved immensely difficult. Colonial rule had provided only the most slender foundations for modern development and at independence, low rates of literacy, few people with managerial experience, a weak private economy, and transportation systems that were oriented to export rather than national integration plagued many newly independent nations. E. Napp

14. It was also hard for leaders of developing countries to know what strategies to pursue • All of this resulted in considerable controversy, changing policies, and much experimentation • One fundamental issue lay in the role of the state • Most people expected that state authorities would take major responsibility for spurring the economic development of their countries • Some state-directed economies had real successes • China launched a major industrialization effort and massive land reform under the leadership of the Communist Party • A communist Cuba, even while remaining dependent on its sugar production, wiped out illiteracy and provided basic health care to its entire population E. Napp

15. Yet in the last several decades of the twentieth century, an earlier consensus in favor of state direction largely collapsed, replaced by a growing dependence on the market to generate economic development. This was most apparent in the abandonment of much communist planning in China and a return to private farming. Western pressures, exercised through international organizations such as the World Bank, likewise pushed developing countries in a capitalist direction. But as the new millennium dawned, a number of Latin American countries – Venezuela, Brazil, and Bolivia – once again asserted a more prominent role for the state in their quests for economic development and social justice. E. Napp

16. Other issues as well inspired debate. In many places, an early emphasis on city-based industrial development led to a neglect or exploitation of rural areas and agriculture. Also a growing recognition of the role of women in agriculture led to charges of “male bias” in development planning and to mounting efforts to assist women farmers directly. E. Napp

17. Women also were central to many government’s interest in curtailing population growth • Women’s access to birth control, education, and employment provided powerful incentives to limit family size • But economic development was never simply a matter of technical expertise or deciding among competing theories • Every decision was political, involving winners and losers in terms of power, advantage and wealth • In general, East Asian countries have had the strongest record of economic growth • China boasted the most rapid economic growth in the world by the end of the twentieth century E. Napp

18. By the 1990s, Asia’s other giant, India, opened itself more fully to the world market and launched rapid economic growth with a powerful high-tech sector and an expanding middle class. And oil-producing countries reaped a bonanza when they were able to demand much higher prices for that essential commodity in the 1970s and after. Elsewhere, the story was different. E. Napp

19. In most of Africa, much of the Arab world, and parts of Asia – regions representing about one-third of the world’s population – there was little sign of catching up and frequent examples of declining standards of living • Variables such as geography and natural resources, differing colonial experiences, variations in regional cultures, the degree of political stability and social equality, state economic polices, population growth rates, and varying forms of involvement with the world economy have been invoked to explain the widely diverging trajectories among developing countries E. Napp

20. The quest for economic development represented an embrace of an emerging global culture of modernity but the peoples of the Global South also had inherited cultural patterns from the more distant past. A common issue all across the Global South involved the uneasy relationship between these older traditions and the more recent outlooks associated with modernity and the West. Nowhere was the consequences of cultural experiments with modernity more consequential than in the Islamic world. The experience of Turkey and Iran illustrate two quite different approaches to this issue. E. Napp

21. In the aftermath of World War I, modern Turkey emerged from the ashes of the Ottoman empire as a republic, led by a determined general, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938) • During the 1920s and 1930s, he presided over a dramatic national cultural revolution • Seeking far more than national independence, he wanted to create a thoroughly modern and Western Turkish society and viewed many traditional Islamic institutions, beliefs, and practices as obstacles to that goal • Within a few years, the caliphate had been officially ended, Sufi orders disbanded, religious courts abolished, and the sharia replaced by Swiss legal codes E. Napp

22. Public education was completely secularized, and the Latin alphabet replaced the Arabic script for writing the Turkish language. Religious leaders (the ulama) were brought more firmly under state control. But the most visible symbols of Atatürk’s revolutionary program occurred in the realm of dress. Turkish men were ordered to abandon the traditional headdress known as the fez and to wear brimmed hats. E. Napp

23. Although women were not forbidden to wear the veil, many elite women abandoned it and set the tone for feminine fashion in Turkey • In other ways as well, women gained new legal rights • Polygamy was abolished, as was a husband’s right to repudiate his wife or wives • Under the European-style legal codes, women achieved equal rights to divorce, child custody, inheritance, and education • By the mid-1930s, they had been granted the right to vote in national elections, a full decade before French women gained that right E. Napp

24. These reforms represented the most ambitious attempts at cultural transformation in the Middle East. Like Japan in the late nineteenth century, it was a “revolution from above” led by military and civilian officials unburdened by close ties to traditional landholding groups. Yet despite the imitation of Western European parliamentary politics, the Turkish government remained authoritarian. Despite the attacks on Islamic symbols, Turkish society at the local level remained firmly attached to Islamic traditions. Turkey underwent a cultural revolution in public life not a social or economic revolution. E. Napp

25. After Atatürk’s death in 1938, some of his more radical decrees were moderated, and a multiparty parliamentary system was allowed to develop • And in early 2008, the Turkish parliament voted to end the earlier prohibition of women wearing headscarves in universities • Nevertheless, the essential secularism of the Turkish state remained an enduring legacy of the Atatürk revolution • In answer to what it meant to be modern in an Islamic setting, Atatürk’s answer was to fully embrace modern culture and Western ways in public life and to relegate Islam to the sphere of private life E. Napp

26. A very different answer emerged in Iran in the final quarter of the twentieth century. Iran became the epicenter of Islamic revival in the 1970s as opposition mounted to the modernizing, secularizing, American-supported government of the shah, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi (reigned 1941-1979). Some resented his close relationship with the Americans and the British as well as the heavy-handed brutality of his secret police. His land reform program had alienated landowners and upset traditional village life. Furthermore, the shah had provoked the Shia religious establishment by attempting to redistribute religious lands; by initiating reforms that offered women greater rights and a literacy program that threatened to replace religious schools; and by permitting the growth of Western influences in the country. E. Napp

27. His decision to replace the Islamic calendar with one derived from Persian imperial history further alienated his subjects, as did the building of a Hyatt Hotel, which served foreign wines and liquors, near a religious sanctuary in the city of Meshed • In a politically repressive Iran, opposition to the shah’s regime came to focus on the mosque • Unlike their counterparts in Turkey, the Shia ulama in Iran had maintained their independence from the state and had often criticized both the shah’s government and Western intervention in Iranian affairs • Thus the Shia leaders increasingly became the voice of opposition E. Napp

28. One elderly cleric in particular, the Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, organized opposition from exile in Paris and became the center of a growing movement demanding the shah’s removal. In the late 1970s, his taped messages, which were distributed through a network of local religious leaders, triggered massive urban demonstrations that paralyzed the government and strikes that shut down oil production. As the nation revolted and slipped into anarchy, the shah abdicated, and in early 1979 he and his family fled the country. The Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran and appointed his own government. E. Napp

29. Khomeini believed that the purpose of government was to apply the law of Allah • Thus the sharia became the law of the land, and religious leaders themselves assumed the reins of government • Widespread purges ousted secular officials, who were replaced by Islamic activists • Actions of parliament had to be approved by a clerical Council of Guardians • Culturally, the new regime sought the moral purification of the country under state control • Discos and bars were closed, and alcoholic drinks were forbidden • Boys and girls could no longer attend school together E. Napp

30. An Islamic dress law required women to wear a veil and loose-fitting clothing to conceal their figures. In the early years, revolutionary guards patrolled the streets, while Islamic societies were established in many organizations. But in other respects, the new regime was less than revolutionary. No class upheaval or radical redistribution of wealth followed; private property was maintained, and a new privileged elite emerged. Nor did an Islamic revolution mean the abandonment of economic modernity. The country’s oil revenues continued to fund its development, and by the early twenty-first century, Iran was actively pursuing nuclear power and perhaps nuclear weapons, much to the consternation of the West. E. Napp

31. Strayer Questions • Why was Africa's experience with political democracy so different from that of India? • What accounts for the ups and downs of political democracy in postcolonial Africa? • What obstacles impeded the economic development of third world countries? • In what ways did thinking about the role of the state in the economic life of developing countries change? Why did it change? • In what ways did cultural revolutions in Turkey and Iran reflect different understandings of the role of Islam in modern societies? E. Napp