a result of political independence, particularly after the Second World War
(the phase of liberation from colonialism with which this school of thought
was most concerned), were replicating the European experience from the
sixteenth to the nineteenth century (Huntington, 1971, p. 292).
This formulation understates a very fundamental difference: that the
history of the advanced societies does not include colonization by more
powerful countries. This makes it impossible to think of a unilinear devel-
opmental process. The new states of the world were structured by the old in
a way which does not apply to the histories of countries whose own devel-
opment was made possible by their exploitation of pre-industrial and pre-
capitalist societies (Pratt, 1973, p. 95). The West’s development was built,
some would say, on the active underdevelopmentof weaker societies and
economies (see Chapter 4).
The German economist Andre Gunder Frank produced one of the most
penetrating critiques of the unilinear implications of modernization theory.
He criticizes the faulty historical assumptions of denying underdeveloped
countries their own histories, ignoring the connections between these
histories and the histories of developed countries, overlooking the fact that
penetration by foreign influences had not produced development or led to
‘take off’, and misrepresenting the histories of today’s developed countries
as not having benefited from the exploitation of today’s underdeveloped
societies (Frank, 1972c). Western imperialism had been part of the process
of ‘modernization’ for developing countries in a way that distinguished their
path to modernity very clearly from that of contemporary modern societies.
Underestimating the significance of such historical factors was com-
pounded by a lack of consideration of continuing relationships with the
powerful economies of the West. Developmentalists were concerned with
internal factors, ‘ignoring the more important continuities that persist in the
social and economic structure of new nations’ and that call the significance
of their political independence into question, especially economic and mil-
itary aid programmes, interventions by international financial organizations
such as the World Bank, and investments by multinational corporations
(Pratt, 1973, pp. 88–92).
In 1987 Almond attempted to rebut the charge that developmentalism
was ethnocentric and its theory of change unilinear, arguing that develop-
mentalist comparative politics always recognized that new states might
develop authoritarian rather than democratic, pluralist tendencies. He also
claimed that the school never neglected international influences on domes-
tic politics. However, it is noticeable that he restricts his refutation of the
uniliniarity charge to an awareness of authoritarianism, citing approvingly
Modernization and Political Development 67