ABSTRACT
Like development economists, political scientists and historians also turned their attention to Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America after the Second World War. The Cold War provided the crucial backdrop for the rise and elaboration of modernization theory and closely related theories of political development and nation-building that were centered on direct or indirect US involvement in the formation and consolidation of stable anti-communist national political systems. Important early US efforts at nation-building in Japan and West Germany, which were directed at building anti-communist and democratic polities, foreshadowed later concerns with modernization and nation-building, in South Vietnam and elsewhere in what became known as the Third World, where the emphasis was on a stable anti-communist, although not necessarily democratic, government. 1 Modernization theory and theories of nation-building exercised a profound influence on, and were bound up with the rise and transformation of, Asian Studies and area studies more generally.2 The dominant discourse within Asian Studies between the 1940s and the 1970s emphasized the need for the various nations of Asia to develop gradually towards a relatively universal form of liberal capitalist modernity. In the context of the universalization of the nation-state system, the nation-state became the unquestioned unit of study for proponents of modernization. Modernization theorists sometimes conceived of the new nation-states in ways that at least implicitly acknowledged that they were historically constructed and contingent, but like development economists their work generally treated the new nations as natural units that should and would, or at least ought to, evolve along a single, or at best a limited number of, paths towards modernity. Meanwhile, the use of political models (and lessons) with little or no regard to questions of time and place further undermined modernization theory’s relationship to the spatial and temporal specificity of the formation and consolidation, or failure (in the case of South Vietnam, for example) of nation-states in this period.
