Mateo Pimentel
The international political system changes. Sometimes it changes in accord with hegemonic design. The dynamic history of America’s global development project, and its necessary relationship with sweeping international change, has marked changing global order since the end of World War II. Today, however, there exists the increased reach of multinational corporations, and many transnational actors; they also alter the international political landscape.
These entities operate with great autonomy. They work within a largely unregulated, anarchic international space. Their supranational agency (and inter-state context) also lends itself to elements some perceive as threats to “general security.” International economic gangster-ism, and the choppy waters of cyberterrorism, are two relevant areas. Some further argue that wherever power shifts, global governance must follow. But do these global governance exponents mean to maintain the status quo? Do they want to propel the current liberal world order for any specific reason? Curiously, they do not ask whose security is threatened, or who qualifies to construct global governance. Given such drastic changes to the international political system within just the last few decades, it is important to know how power has become what it is today. Moreover, it is important to ask why this power now enters twilight.
Pakistani social scientist, Hamza Alavi, shared his thoughts on “overdevelopment” in the early 1970s. His observations escorted one simple conclusion in particular: Colonial powers engineered governmental structures of their proxies to serve (and preserve) their imperial interests. Two key components were the colonial state’s sophisticated civil and military administrations, and their Westernized legal systems. Specifically, colonial powers and empires overdeveloped these two areas so as to create a lack of symmetry and to also skew development within the colony state. They structured their rule accordingly.
Alavi’s observations relate to Samuel P. Huntington’s philosophy regarding modernization. The American political scientist, Huntington, argued that without the constructs Alavi described, popular participation would result in perhaps total political collapse, and would give way to uprisings and general insurrection. Huntington further prescribes the constructs of Alavi’s “overdevelopment” as the remedy for such turmoil. Initiating any kind of economic or social development processes, suggested Huntington, come after political process were thoroughly institutionalized, and state apparatuses, thoroughly extended.
Alavi and Huntington, however paradigmatically different, both witnessed the end of empire as a politically legitimate organization of power on an international level after WWII. This transition colored the thoughts of many social scientists as the world indeed saw the nation-state, with its self-determination, triumph legitimate. A policy of non-intervention by foreign powers in the domestic/internal affairs of sovereign nation-states, along with striving for development, became the international political norm to emerge with the many unfolding post-colonial states.