Abstract
Global power transitions as well as the havoc wreaked by the global financial crisis are thought to contribute to the opening of new thinking and policy spaces. This is all the more true for development ‘beyond neoliberalism’. Both books under review contribute to this debate even though they build their respective cases differently.
Ha-Joon Chang and Irene Grabel’s Reclaiming Development is a re-issue of their book published a decade ago, complemented with an excellent foreword by Robert H Wade and a new preface. As the name of the series in which the book has been included now (‘critique influence change’) suggests, the authors aim at offering a compelling critique of neoliberalism in development. Obviously, they also seek to influence how a wider (not just an expert) audience thinks about development matters. Consequently, they have largely refrained from academic jargon, presenting an accessible account. Finally, what they have in mind is to contribute to further pushing for a change away from failed ideas and policies. Hence, ‘reclaiming development’ is meant to finally deconstruct and scrap neoliberalism now that this seems politically achievable.
Chang and Grabel have chosen an interesting format. Instead of rushing to demonise mainstream neoliberal ideas such as the benevolence of free trade for development or the inevitably of globalisation, they first explore how the inner logic of such arguments has been construed. Only then do they offer conceptual and even more compelling empirical evidence in order to effectively challenge widely held truths and finally to debunk them as myths. In the second part, the ‘heart of the book’ (p. 3), the authors discuss an array of thinking and policy alternatives to neoliberal policy prescriptions.
Whoever has come across Chang’s landmark 2002 book Kicking Away the Ladder knows that much of his thinking rests on a historically informed analysis of catching-up development and cleverly designed as well as locally adapted interventionist policies in particular. Seen from this angle, the way the authors pitch their case against neoliberalism should not come as a surprise. However, this hardly makes the re-issue of Reclaiming Development superfluous. The novelty and unique contribution of the book lies in its handy, clearly structured and focused format which allows the reader to dip into the debate easily yet without losing sight of the complexity and the substantive arguments at hand. If there is one thing to complain about, it is that the authors have opted for a re-issue only. As a result, portions of the text appear a bit dated, for example, the chapters where inequality issues and the supposedly heretic qualities of capital controls are discussed.
Gerard Strange, in his book Towards a New Political Economy of Development, takes a different route. He analyses new spaces for development within the context of an ongoing transition towards a supposedly post-neoliberal and post-(US) hegemonic world. He argues that a new developmentalism which is ‘post-Listian’ in nature has emerged. Unfortunately, it is only on page 65 that he actually comes up with a more precise definition of what that concept refers to. In the introduction, Strange simply posits that a ‘post-Listian’ developmental actor would be one which ‘actively project[s] power into the external domain, thereby consciously shaping it in accordance with the internal imperatives’ (p. 7). If that is to be the main innovation, one could argue that the author might have slightly overplayed the novelty of his contribution. When the case of China is discussed later on, however, the idea attains more depth.
What Strange has in mind is that more recently states like China might have come to stabilise their internal long-term modernisation strategy by way of shaping and altering their macroeconomic environment. That is an interesting thought which nicely links to the debate on whether China is really changing US structural dominance. To be frank though, Strange’s book does not provide much evidence of the tables being turned for those who remain sceptical. Have China’s dollar holdings really allowed it to manage its relationship with the US from a ‘position of strength’? (p. 77). Do the current quota changes within the International Monetary Fund (IMF) allow China to better shape and eventually alter the global macroeconomic order? Certainly, the assessment of a largely benign, post-hegemonic rise and the alleged Chinese restraint in pushing regional claims (p. 83) is somewhat in need of revision given more recent developments.
If the case for a ‘post-Listian’ developmental state is centred around the ability to actually shape and change the rules of the game, one only wonders why South America is invoked in the following chapters. Nobody would dispute that as regards rhetorical framing and political ambition, institutions like UNASUR (the Union of South American Nations) and ALBA (the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America) aim at contesting the United States’ predominance. But where actually does the ‘new developmentalism’ materialise? As the author himself discusses at length, this is about patronage, buying of influence, mainly the attempted seizure of leadership. Strange invites us to take the new developmental regionalism in South America seriously (pp. 115–123), but why would that be justified? Certainly, the book offers many debating points and gives some interesting ideas a slightly novel spin, yet it falls short in terms of empirically beefing up many of its bold claims.