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YOUTH PARTICIPATION IN GLOBAL DECISION-MAKING PROCESSES
Global Politics: Decolonization?
The Development Dictionary sets the "age of development" as beginning on 20 January 1949, when President Truman in his inauguration speech declared the Southern Hemisphere as "underdeveloped". In doing so, he continued the eurocentric perspective that any form of society other than that which mirrored the West, was somehow "backward" in nature and not worthy of anything in itself. These societies were merely raw material, to be transformed into something useful. In the Development Dictionary, Gustavo Esteva comments,
" On that day, two billion people became underdeveloped. In a real sense, from that time on, they ceased being what they were, in all their diversity, and were transformed into an inverted mirror of others' reality: a mirror that belittles them and sends them off to the end of the queue, a mirror that defines their identity, which is really that of a heterogeneous and diverse majority, simply in terms of a homogenizing and narrow minority."
"Underdevelopment" converted history merely into a necessary and inevitable program. A society starting at its "backward" stage would evolve "naturally" to the stage of industrial society. The West presupposed that the entire diverse world had to follow the Western path though the industrial mode of production was no more than one among many forms of social life. Thus history was reformulated in Western terms.
Development not only allowed the West to continue their domination, but it also appealed to the leaders of the new countries. These leaders had previously gained their power by uniting the people in the struggle against the colonial powers. Now that the battle was won, they had to find new cause to keep the people united and dependent on the nationalistic leaders.
"National development" became the central goal of the newly independent states. The population, now free from the colonial chains, were asked to sacrifice, to build a nation whose glorious future would be enjoyed by their children. Coming from their heroic leaders, this plea could hardly be resisted. "Development" destroyed indigenous systems, continuing where colonization left off. This time, Western economic, social and political models were imposed. Thus began a native version of the civilizing mission, as governments pushed modernization on to an even larger segment of their population in order to fulfill the pre- conception of a singular history leading to the ideal of a "developed" nation. Society would never be the same!
Hence the process of decolonization generally institutionalized the scars of colonialism. Global politics turned from physical control of the colonial rulers over the colonies to the more subtle, manipulative and diplomatic domination of "North" over "South".