Jan 16, 2011

Steven Weber Questions Modernization Theory, in the Chronicle of Higher Education

From The Chronicle of Higher Education

Development and Democracy

By Peter Monaghan

For most of the years since World War II, the dominant framework of international-relations thinking in the West, and particularly in the United States, has been a form of "modernization theory" that holds that developing nations tend toward democracy....

Increasingly, commentators in American international-studies circles are questioning those assumptions and predictions....

"Events have happened in the world that really undermine a set of expectations that were central to the mainstream discipline," says one vocal critic of modernization theory, Steven Weber, a professor of political science [and information] at the University of California at Berkeley. Like other defectors from the theory, he points to a proliferation of authoritarian, illiberal states that are flourishing while snubbing democracy....

Such developments begin to constitute "a world without the West," argued Weber and two colleagues in a 2007 article by that title in The National Interest. They note that illiberal states, although not fighting the West, are decreasingly engaging with it in the ways that classical international-studies theory suggested they would—through trade agreements, human-rights accords, and political liberalization.

Meanwhile, Weber says in an interview with The Chronicle, the West labors with cold-war concepts embedded in the American political psyche. "So," he says, "we talk about transitions to democracy, and in countries that don't undergo that, we speak about stalled transitions to democracy."...

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Last updated:

October 4, 2016