5
centralized administrative control over the entire national territory,
mobilizing and redeploying resources within the national space, linking
subjects and regional elites to central rulers, and forging a national
political class. Developmentalism offered central rulers three
ingredients necessary to the “national integration” project: a
justifying ideology, blueprints, and resources. The question is, what
happens to the national integration now that the developmentalist
project has been more or less abandoned, and replaced by neoliberal
agendas?
5
One way to answer this question is to focus on the
spatial/geopolitical aspects of the developmentalist project, for
therein lie clues to understanding process of national disintegration
at work in countries like Côte d’Ivoire. To see how countries fall
apart, it is useful to look at how they were put together in the first
place.
Like nationalism and socialism, developmentalism was a
legitimating ideology for the postcolonial state. To build a national
economy was to realize the material rewards of independence; citizens’
incentive to go along with the statist project was the right to share
in these rewards. Distributive politics was as a key strategy for
postcolonial nation-building, and the key source of legitimation for
the postcolonial state.
Developmentalism also offered blueprints for integrating the
national economy and extending state authority across space. Key
aspects of the developmentalist project were explicitly territorial or
geopolitical in nature. As Colin Leys argued, a sine qua non of
national economic management was delimiting national boundaries,
5
Colin Leys, The Rise and Fall of Development Theory (James Currey, Indiana
University Press, East African Educational Publishers, London, 1996); John S.
Saul and Colin Leys, “Sub-Saharan Africa in Global Capitalism,” Monthly Review,
51/3 (1999): 13-29.
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