AN ANNOTATED READING OF BETWEEN TWO AGES, BY ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, 1970, PAGES 19-26
Previous Entries: Chapter three, Chapter two, chapter one, introduction
This chapter leads from the argument that the Third World is an inevitable victim of the Technetronic Revolution. It’s an argument that has aged decently in some ways, less so in others. The evolution of globalized markets, particularly after the internet became a common household utility, has led to many market collapses (One Example: In the late 1990s Thailand’s currency crashed and nearly all the finance houses that were in deep in US Dollar debt were closed after the government failed to keep the baht at a fixed rate with the dollar, leading to a loss of confidence in not only the Thai market, but nearly all the emerging Southeast Asian markets, and investment capital fled from the region) that governments and banks alike were unable to foresee. Citizens of such countries have commonly reported a sense of helplessness as global market forces either touch their country and change it out from under them, or leave them behind completely. On the other hand, globalization has brought wealth to places that would have otherwise been left behind. Such places lose their young working population to emigration and fail to entice not only newcomers, but new enterprises. In some regions globalization forces a kind of stability that previously would have relied heavily on the personality of the day’s dictator.
Brzezinski argues that whether less developed countries grow rapidly or slowly during the Technetronic Revolution, most of them will suffer intensifying feelings of psychological deprivation. A loss of purpose, of optimism, of life goals and national self-esteem. With a world increasingly electronically entangled, absolute or relative underdevelopment will feel more intolerable. It will feel even worse as the more advanced countries move beyond the industrial era at a time when many countries have barely begun to enter it. As a reminder, this book was published in 1970, the Iron Curtain was still up and African nations were still getting a handle on post-colonial governing.
“It is thus no longer a matter of the revolution of rising expectations. The Third World today confronts the specter of insatiable aspirations.”
Through the ages preceding the 20th century, the response to insoluble social problems was fatalism. The ills plaguing society were seen as part of the universal condition. Church doctrine backed this; poverty was inevitable, illness was inevitable, disaster and loss were inevitable. In the Modern and Post-Modern eras, the response to such issues is frustration. They are now seen as a particular phenomenon that the materially fortunate classes are not afflicted by. Brzezinski cites urban ghettos in the United States as an example and uses them as a small-scale analogy to the global position of the less developed countries of Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe. The issues in American ghettos and underdeveloped regions is not caused by the absence of change, and in some cases not even insufficiently rapid change. By the time of Brzezinski’s writing, several under-developed countries had achieved sustained rates of growth (South Korea, Taiwan, and Ghana, for example). Rather, the social frustration experienced in these settings arise from a growing feeling of relative deprivation, of which they are made more acutely aware due to the spread of education and communications. This same phenomena was part of what made India so difficult for the British to continue to hold onto. Middle class and wealthy Indian youth would go to Britain for their education and return home with a keen sense of what was lacking in their country but flourishing in the West. Brzezinski predicts that passive resignation in such places will be usurped by active explosions of undirected anger. This transition is one of the reasons the Iron Curtain collapsed so rapidly within some couple of years in the late 1980s to early 90s.
Prospects for Change
Brzezinski admits that it is nearly impossible to predict the economic and political development of underdeveloped nations. He believed Latin America the most likely to make reasonable progress, potentially reaching the economic levels of advanced states by the 1990s. This is somewhat of an overshot, but most of Central and South America is at least doing better than they were in the 1960s, though they don’t come close to the numbers seen in North America. Continuing on, Brzezinski assumes that pockets of development will increasingly dot across Africa and Asia, so long as there is relative peace and political stability in the region as a whole.
That said, the overall prognosis is not optimistic. To illustrate this, Brzezinski lists the projections for per capita annual gross national product (GNP, though now we refer to this as GNI, Gross National Income) in 1985 against the projections for developed nations.
| NATION | Brzezinski’s Projection for 1985 | Actual Numbers in 1985 |
| Nigeria | $107 | $213 |
| Pakistan | $134 | $107 |
| Indonesia | $112 | $167 |
| India | $169 | $100 |
| China | $185 | $97 |
| United Arab Republic* | $295 | $200 |
| Brazil | $372 | $514 |
| United States | $6510 | $5285 |
| Japan | $3080 | $3900 |
| Israel | $2978 | $2279 |
Brzezinski notes that for the years between 1965 and 1985, per capita GNP was likely to double in the advanced countries listed above (they mostly did), while for a single Nigerian this increase will only be $14, for a Pakistani it’s $43, $12 for an Indonesian, $70 for an Indian, $88 for a Chinese, $129 for an Egyptian, and $92 for the common Brazilian.
Brzezinski then shifts to a common concern of the era, the threat of overpopulation caused by economic growth. He argues that this threat involves a crucial social-political dimension. Overpopulation contributes to the breakup of land holdings, which further stratifies and complicates the rural class structure and thus creating widening disparities that intensify class conflicts. Widespread unemployment is also probable in this environment. Citing reports from the International Labour Organization, by 1980 Asia’s labor force was expected to have increased from 663 million to 938 million while the number of new jobs is expected to increase by only 142 million. (I’m not sure of the exact numbers, but there were a lot of papers published about massive labor migrations in and mostly out of Asia in the 1980s, which seems to agree or at least rhyme with the predictions here.)
Widespread acceptance of birth control was not expected to counter this because the economic outlook in terms of per capita GNP would only marginally improve in comparison to the figures anticipated for advanced nations. If the population of Indonesia experienced no growth at all between 1965 and 1985, it may have a per capita GNP of $200 instead of $112; for Pakistan, $250 instead of $112, and so on.
In the 1960s popular theories predicted that by 1985 large pockets of poverty would still exist, but mass starvation, mass homelessness, and the rampant spread of disease will generally be eliminated. It’s acceptable to say that widespread famines have mostly been brought under control. Mass homelessness is another matter that depends greatly on how one defines “mass”. Homelessness rates in poor and wealthy nations have ebbed and flowed, today in the 2020s West we’re seeing a visible increase. The spread of disease has calmed down, though plagues like Covid, Swine Flu, and SARS are proof that global sickness is still a possibility. And though the underdeveloped countries will still be comparatively poor, their people will have greater and more immediate access to worldwide transportation and communications systems. These networks increase access to medical care, food, clothing, and financial aid through international assistance. In all of this, the surplus commodity production of the United States will be increasingly relied on.
Brzezinski accurately predicts the utopian visions of globalism’s most optimistic proponents. That greater international planning in terms of international commodity agreements, transport arrangements, health regulations, finance, and education would make for more orderly approaches to the social problems caused by backwardness, slow growth, and the widening disparities in standards of living. The widening scales of communications would allow instant responses to sudden disasters, where aid could be mobilized and moved across the globe faster than ever before. To demonstrate this sentiment, Brzezinski points to changes brought about in Asia and Middle East by their (at the time semi-recent) agricultural revolutions. Mass educational campaigns and the introduction of new cereal types and fertilizers brought about an upsurge in productivity, with Thailand and Burma already having become grain-exporting states before the time of Brzezinski’s writing. The cumulative effect of such successes, for the optimistic globalist, may bolster the confidence of national leaders in their ability to handle other seemingly insoluble problems and lead them to embrace modern technology for its potential to improve the quality of life in their states.
Even so, the fact remained that material conditions in the Third World could not keep pace with the factors that make for psychic change. The changes that were in evidence by then were being brought about by education and communications, and those changes in psyche were necessary to stimulate greater receptiveness to innovation, such as peasants accepting the use of fertilizers. But these facilitators also prompt an intense awareness of inadequacy and cultural backwardness.
Brzezinski believed that the future potentials of socio-economic transformations in the Third World could be better informed by a comparison to Russia during the turn of the 20th century. There the Industrial Revolution outpaced mass education; literacy followed, rather than preceded, material change. Revolutionary movements of the era strove to close the gap by politically educating (i.e. radicalizing) the masses.
“Today in the Third World a subjective revolution is preceding change in the objective environment and creating a state of unrest, uneasiness, anger, anguish, and outrage. Indeed, it has been observed that the faster the enlightenment of the population, the more frequent the overthrow of the government.”
Brzezinski’s view was that the gap between awakening mass consciousness and material reality was widening. Between 1958 and 1965, the percentage of working population in underdeveloped nations in fields other than agriculture only shifted substantially in one country, Algeria. Housing, physicians per thousand inhabitants, and household consumption did not show significant advances and in some areas a decrease was seen.
The Subjective Transformation
Circling back to advances in communications and education, Brzezinski notes that these elements altered the subjective environment in poor nations while objective conditions changed sluggishly. The number of radios in Indian households went from 1.5 million to 6.4 million between 1958 and 1966. Similar enough figures are seen elsewhere in the Third World. At the time of the book’s writing, the television age was only beginning in those regions but was predicted to become generally available by the 1980s.
Access to higher education also grew rapidly. In India, between 1958 and 1968, the number of students went from 900,000 to 1.9 million students in nearly 3,000 colleges and 80 universities. In Indonesia the rate of student growth was 30%, and it was 50% in the United Arab Republic.
Increased access to education comes with specific problems. Access to advanced technical training is too limited to sustain extensive modernization and the Third World was still very stagnant in intermediate technical education. Further, the capacity of many of the poorer countries to absorb trained personnel is inadequate, and it results in a class of dissatisfied college graduates. These predominantly come from legal and liberal arts facilities, and they are unable to obtain gainful employment that matches with their raised expectations. While this problem is acute in several countries, it could be aggravated by the introduction of automation in the over-employed factories and bureaucracies of the less developed countries.
These problems are made worse by the low quality of most of these higher education facilities.
- In India: “At a generous estimate, perhaps 5 per cent of the mass of Indian students in institutions of higher education are receiving decent training by recognizable world standards. … In most places academic standards have fallen so low that they can hardly be said to have survived.”
- In South Asia: “Teaching in South Asian schools at all levels tends to discourage independent thinking and the growth of that inquisitive and experimental bent of mind that is so essential for development. . . . The South Asian peoples are not merely being insufficiently educated; they are being miseducated on a huge scale.”
- In Latin America: “By now it is fully recognized that education in Latin America has fundamental shortcomings, that there is a high illiteracy rate, and that the educational system bears no relation to the requirements of economic development, quite apart from the serious deficiencies that exist in other basic cultural respects”
Poor quality education of this sort contributes to the emergence of an inadequately trained class of frustrated young people susceptible to radicalism and utopian appeals. This trend has many parallels seen among the 19th century intelligensia of more backward regions of Europe like Russia and the Balkans.
In order to obtain quality education, a small portion of the students — either through especial talent granting them scholarships, or because they come from wealthy families — go abroad for school. Exposed to advanced foreign cultures can encourage them to adapt to foreign styles and ways of life, and even to remain forever abroad. Essentially, they opt out of their own society either internally, or simply by never returning. Brzezinski was right about this, today we call it brain drain. In 1967, almost half of the total number of engineers, scientists, and medical personnel who emigrated to the United States came from underdeveloped nations. In the late 1960s, this number was expected to rise for years to come.
The cumulative effect of these factors allows for a turbulent and amorphous political pattern. In general, the political stack in less developed countries had its peasant masses at the base, still primarily occupied in manual labor and mostly illiterate, but no longer parochially restricted to their immediate environment by landowners or geographical distance. Transistor radios establish immediate contact with the national society and can create awareness of their material or national deprivation. The next level in the stack is a rapidly increasing urban population that is comprised to a large extent of post-peasant city dwellers seeking more economic opportunities. Above that is a pseudo-intelligensia, which makes up a small percent of the overall population and is typically made up of relatively young people who have acquired some form of advanced education. In these poor countries, as mentioned previously, the quality of this education is often middling at best, resulting in many of this class living poorly and developing the feeling that society does not provide them with the opportunities to which their education entitles them. This group is highly susceptible to militant xenophobic movements. At the top of the stack is a relatively well-educated but narrow elite class that struggles to achieve both stability and progress (Iran), or to delay or prevent reforms (some Latin American countries) because their privileges rely too much on the perpetuation of the status quo.
These “global ghettos” have parallels to the racial slums of the United States. Stated previously, the problem in American cities is not the absence of development, but the perception that even rapid change will not bring much benefit among the poor in the near future, and from the growing realization that the wealthier classes are becoming morally uneasy over the material gap. Brzezinski argues that this combination can create a sense of acute deprivation that cultivates intensifying political hostility toward the outside world. Further, he claims that this hostility was made possible by the increase in the number of black Americans receiving higher education, therefore becoming capable of providing the energizing leadership for the expression of previously suppressed grievances. Another factor was the migration of a large number of black Americans moving to cities in the 19th century, removing them from the traditional, white-dominated rural life into direct contact with the spectrum of urban white population. Here, attempts at reform contributed to further tension and friction, and in some cities prompted the dominant community to adopt a reactionary posture against change.
American racial slums have grown in a pattern similar to the huge impoverished urban centers of Asia. There, cities inhabited by impoverished masses have grown rapidly because of rural poverty and resource insecurity.
“The parallel between the ghettos of the global city and the racial slums of the United States can be extended to the problems faced by the intellectual political elite of the Third World. In the United States “integration” has so far tended to mean the selective assimilation of a few individuals who can conform to the prevailing norms of the dominant community; however, their assimilation also means, the loss of talent and expertise to the black community, in which the less educated’ more militant “pseudointelligentsia” increasingly provides charismatic leadership to the masses by exploiting reverse racism. In like manner, the established social elites of the Third World have tended to emulate the life styles of the more advanced world, and to emigrate into it either directly or vicariously.”
The Political Vacuum
The vacuum that results from domestic and international brain drain, Brzezinski claims, is filled by an indigenous pseudo-intelligensia whose views are taped together by doctrines advocated by the likes of Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Ibram X. Kendi, etc. (My examples) 19th century European Marxism, originally addressed to an urban proletariat that had only recently left rural life. Now it gets romantically adopted to the conditions of industrially stunted 20th century global ghettos.
“The revolutionary intellectual is a virtually universal phenomenon in modernizing societies. No one is as inclined to foster violence as a disgruntled intellectual. It is these persons who compose the cadres of the less responsible political parties, who make up the narrower entourage of demagogues and who become leaders of millenarian and messianic movements, all of which may, when the opportunity is ripe, threaten political stability.”
In these contexts, external aid intended to overcome the specific condition of under-education and poverty, becomes an additional point of friction. In the United States, government aid programs are resented by blacks and whites for some similiar and also some very different reasons across economic classes. On the global scale, accusations of “neocolonialism” have been used to stimulate the suspicions of the masses regarding the political motives of the economic aid coming from advanced countries. In turn, accusations of graft, corruption, and inefficiency have been lobbed by donor counties against the recipient nations.
Economic aid poses another danger as well. It can at best be only a partial response to a condition that has profoundly psychological as well as material origins. Assistance can only be effective if the recipient country can cultivate a sense of popular enthusiasm and a greater sense of purpose is created. This requires native leadership that knows both how to energize the masses and how to utilize foreign aid intelligently. Moreover, even if those in authority are capable of balancing these two elements, they have to contend with the fact that their reality can be changed only gradually, while popular mobilization on behalf of progress can be attained quickly by stimulating mass enthusiasm and emotion.
This brings about a dilemma that governments are forced to confront. To admit the reality of the slow speed of progress is to deprive themselves of the support of the masses and to risk yielding the political initiative to radical demagogues. Stirring up the masses on unattainable goals invites an eventual explosion except for in cases where that mobilization becomes a vehicle for subordinating the people to centralized, bureaucratic control of the sort seen in Communist states. The distance between promise and attainment is further widened by the government’s need to obtain the support of the propertied and more educated groups, which requires the rulers to tread lightly so as not to disrupt the traditional social order. They’ll put loopholes into the laws or leave them unenforced for the privileged classes.
Brzezinski believed that feelings of resentment would grow as the disparities between the Third World and developed world widened. He believed that by the year 2000 the spctrum will have expanded from the few most advanced post-industrial technetronic states (the U.S., Japan, Sweden, Canada), to some dozen mature industrial states, to the 10-15 underdeveloped states existent in the late 1960s that will have reached the levels of the early industrial states of the era, to the large group of nations still in a pre-industrial stage, and finally to those still in extremely primitive conditions. In those nations that were in the early industrial and pre-industrial stages in the 1960s, which contained the majority of the world’s population and had been experiencing only partially impactful progress, will by the year 2000 be the likely centers of volatile political activity, resentment, tension, and extremism.
In this prediction, Brzezenski found it difficult to believe that democratic institutions — derived from Western philosophies but functional in only the more stable and wealthy Western nations — will endure in countries like India or develop elsewhere. To him, the most likely outcome was sporadic turbulance in individual countries and a turn toward dictatorships that are based on internally oriented, though socially radical, unifying doctrines that combine xenophobia and charisma in the hopes that it may provide the minimum stability necessary for imposing socio-economic modernization.
Just as in urban ghettos in America, this may create a tenser relationship with the more prosporous nations. Cold War rivalry stimulated the concept of developed nations providing assistance to the backward nations of the world. From the U.S.S.R., to keep American influence out, from the U.S., to keep Soviet influence out. Brzezinski was writing while still in the thick of the Cold War, but worried that when it wanes this East-West rivalry would be replaced by North-South animosity.
The Normal Times 