Entangled Industrialization. The EEC and Industrial Development in Francophone West Africa

Abstract

Industrialization played a significant role as a development strategy in the global, post-colonial development-discourse during the ‘first development decade’ heralded by the United Nations in 1961. Whereas colonial powers such as France and Great Britain had remained rather reluctant with respect to state-led industrialization in their colonies, modernization theorists and development economists considered a planned and comprehensive industrial policy a key factor for staging growth. Clark Kerr’s Industrialism and Industrial Man, published in 1962, was only one of numerous studies that reflected, and at the same time guided, government strategies in the ‘North’, as well as in the ‘South’ in their efforts to overcome ‘backward’ or ‘traditional’ social structures of the developing countries. Thus, in the era of decolonization, industrialization became not only a key concept with which to foster social change, but also a strategy of global convergence: it was assumed that through industrialization, nation-states all over the world would sooner or later converge to one model of society, what Walt Rostow called ‘the age of high mass consumption’.¹