Among their decisions, in the words of the historian Michael Hunt, was to “diminish other people by exaggerating the seemingly negative aspects of their lives and by constricting the perceived range of their skills, accomplishments, and emotions.” Once such backwardness was established in places such as Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan, then the Americans could justify any kind of intervention, whether economic, cultural, or military. This “modernization theory” meant imposing the West’s system of governance (“democracy”), its system of economy (“capitalism”), and its lifestyle practices (“freedom”) on foreign countries in order to lead them down, according to Hemant Shah, the “irresistible and obviously superior path” to modernity. The Americans decided not to use the word “Westernization” to describe their theory, so as to appear neutral. As Gilman writes, the difference between the Europeans and the Americans was that the Europeans never even imagined that colonized peoples were capable of being as modern as Europeans. The Americans wholeheartedly believed they could make anyone into an American.
That is why, Shah explains, when Americans speak about foreign countries, they use a rhetoric of “development,” words like “resistant to reform,” “left behind,” “spread of democracy and free markets,” “a place of despair,” and “strengthening civil society.” Much of that language was language I myself used all the time. Even when I asked Turks the seemingly basic and obvious question “Will this country ever become a democracy?” I was not, as I thought, being a tough journalist. I was parroting the assumptions of modernization theory, the only paradigm I had for understanding the rest of the world.
The theorists of that time, however, had a problem: Americans did not want to think of themselves as imperialists, or occupiers. Someone else would have to force foreigners to embrace modernity. Who would it be? Modernization theorists feared that democratic leaders vulnerable to communism, Islamism, or any other enemyism of the United States would fail to carry through American industrialization programs and create a capitalist system. Instead, the types of leaders the Americans preferred to accomplish these tasks were military dictators. The popular argument that America had erred in the twentieth century by “tolerating” military dictatorships—Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, Egypt, half of Latin America—missed the point completely. The United States didn’t tolerate military dictatorships; it fostered them.
In 1961, the CIS grandee Walt Rostow, whose book The Stages of Economic Growth was a bestseller in the 1960s, became President John F. Kennedy’s national security advisor. To Rostow, modernization was “unidirectional,” as if it were a path set by God. As Kennedy’s advisor, Rostow’s academic faith in America’s missionary role in the modernization of other countries led to the invasion, occupation, and destruction of Vietnam. At the same time that Walt Rostow was “sincerely interested in improving the welfare of postcolonial peoples,” Gilman writes, “he was directing the killing of Vietnamese peasants.” Again, that word “sincere.” William Appleman Williams and Nils Gilman seemed to be saying that Cold War Americans were sincere when they oppressed and killed people in order to transform their countries into one similar to America, which makes these American intellectuals seem sociopathic, or delusional, or both.
The Pakistani economist known as Inayatullah said at a conference in the late 1950s that the Americans were measuring the world “like the person who measures the competence of everybody on terms of his own special competence.” Just as American settlers had defined their idealized selves against the prejudiced image they had of African Americans, our Cold War, empire-building intellectuals and politicians had very consciously pitted the modern American self against backward foreigners, this time with the same mistaken sense of its superiority. And like African Americans, the foreigners on the receiving end of these desperate demands would come to know the Americans far better than Americans would ever know them: as people with a myth about themselves they would do anything to prove.
In the twentieth century, the United States embraced autocrats willing to impose American ideas of modernization on Iran, Afghanistan, South Korea, South Vietnam, Taiwan, much of Latin America, and, indeed, my new home, Turkey. One of the most influential books on American foreign policy and modernization theory, one funded by the State Department, was Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society, which was published in 1958. Most of Lerner’s research was collected in a tiny village in Anatolia. In Turkey.
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IN THE 1950S, Lerner had spent months in the Turkish Anatolian town of Balgat in order to study how new methods of media and propaganda could induce Turkish villagers—and uneducated peoples all over the Middle East—to embrace the United States as the quintessence of modernity. An epigraph from André Siegfried appears early in the book: “The United States is presiding at a general reorganization of the ways of living throughout the entire world.”
My adopted home of Turkey, as it turned out, had been the Americans’ original model modern country. They admired that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was one of the first non-Western leaders to popularize the word “modernization.” Turkey’s and America’s conception of themselves indeed evolved in tandem; in 1954, Senator J. William Fulbright would say that the Vietnam they were intent on transforming needed a leader “after the fashion of Kemal Atatürk, who made Turkey over” because it was “the best example of what should be done in an undeveloped country that I can think of in the last 30 years.” No wonder so many Americans admired Atatürk; Atatürk was us.