Development and Underdevelopment

Recently in a discussion with students (MA) in a Social Development course, I got a chance to inform them that this so called (i.e. contrived) "fuel/energy shortage" is quite good for the profits of the major oil companies, whose elite formulate US energy policy, and thus are very happy by the current state of affairs even though they scare all by shortage as a "cover" for their crimes. They create this artificial shortage:

1. By purchasing patents of major alternatives and keeping them non-developed,

2. By starting wars to create artificial shortages,

3. By promoting useless "use" in countries like India and China, whose increased energy demands are not progressing in isolation with or contrary to the desires of the US elite, and within their own countries (large SUVs etc), use that is quite inefficient,

4. As well as non development of known oil reserves, and

5. The maintenance of "strategic reserves" that serve no strategic purpose other than price manipulation, and

6. By politically dominating those that control the developed oil fields,

They create a contrived shortage that gives the impression of a real struggle for domination of oil resources taking place in our world, giving an impression that this uni-polar, U.S. dominated world, is actually composed of multiple players that possess equal power and resources.

On the development discussion, I asked them to look at the empirical evidence and the patterns that emerge from it. In the Middle-Ages, all regions of the world were almost equally developed, then we come to the modern age when except for the previous European colonizers or European settler societies others were all "underdeveloped". The causation factor in between that altered the condition of "almost equally developed" to "developed and underdeveloped" is the long history of colonization. The "developed" category in the modern age belonged as a result to the previous colonizers or their clones in "settler" areas.

In the current world order empirical evidence points to commonalities among "developed nations". Common patterns emerge:

1. Race: most are European or European settlers (even true of countries that were devastated by World War 2 but were later allowed development unlike the "Third World")

2. Exceptions to the above are U.S. occupied (and restructured) Japan and S. Korea which serve as significant strategic leverage against potential foes (against China for example).

3. If not 2 then those not belonging to 1 who are also developed or have had success in development have a very small/insignificant population.

The rest of the world is underdeveloped. Since the rest of the world regardless of religion, culture, ethnicity etc is underdeveloped then "development" is not a "personal trouble" of individual characteristics of a particular country but a "global issue" that transcends individual countries whose cause therefore lies in the institutions that dominate the global order and not personal peculiarities. Looking inside for the solution, in this scenario, will produce no results, we have to look outside the country and how its "personal troubles" are related to the global structure in which it operates.

Those who say that blame lies internally and not externally ( and there are many development "specialists" who do that), do not understand these dynamics of social and global structure and suggest solutions that always fail and we have a full record of such failures: the history of all underdeveloped nation states bears witness to this fact.

Now, while remaining within the current World System, is development for the underdeveloped country possible?

Based on the empirical evidence we saw above, in order for countries to develop,

1. They have to change the race of their population to European or the current global order will not let them develop. This is not possible biologically.

2. They have to be US occupied (like Japan and S. Korea etc) and provide significant strategic leverage to the US elite vis-à-vis its potential foe. Potential foes, often invented by the US elite, are few and so long term development in this way is quite impossible. Short term benefits might be gained as Pakistan has gained since 9/11 but no long term development is ever achieved.

3. Become tiny and insignificant like Singapore. This is also impossible to achieve for the majority world without mass slaughter of their populations, and giving away of their strategic resources.

Therefore, given patterns of development and underdevelopment in today’s world, the only way for the underdeveloped world to achieve some form of development to humanely fulfill the needs of their populations is to completely break away from the current U.S. dominated world system. This would be impossible to achieve for any country with a significant population, without some form of alliance with the rest of the developing countries or they will be punished lethally by the current World System. History has shown that when this ONLY solution for development has been tried in the Middle East, South America and other regions the U.S. power-elite have opposed it with all their might, and any country that tried individually to break free of this domination was punished economically if not militarily in order to pull it back into the system.

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Muhammed Asadi can be reached at masadi@aol.com.