The Western Bias in Modernisation Theories and Its Global Implications

When development scholars talk about “progress,” the question that rarely gets asked is: whose version of progress? Modernisation theories, which dominated global development thinking from the 1950s onwards, largely assumed the answer was self-evident – Western societies had already arrived, and the rest of the world simply needed to follow the same path. This Western-centric framework has shaped foreign aid programmes, international policy, and development strategies for decades. But it has also been the subject of sharp and sustained critique, with dependency theory offering a fundamentally different account of why less developed countries (LDCs) remain poor – one that points not to cultural backwardness, but to the very structures that modernisation theory helped justify.

The Western blueprint for development 🔗

Modernisation theories emerged in the post-World War II era, partly driven by Cold War geopolitics and partly by a genuine desire to assist newly decolonising nations. Key theorists like Walt Rostow and Talcott Parsons proposed that all societies move through a linear, universal path from “traditional” to “modern” – with Western industrialised democracies sitting at the top of that ladder.

Rostow’s famous “Stages of Economic Growth,” published in 1960, laid out a five-step model culminating in high mass consumption. Scholars have criticised his bias towards a Western model as the only path towards development, noting that Rostow assumes all countries have an equal chance to develop without regard to population size, natural resources, or location. The book carried the telling subtitle “A Non-Communist Manifesto” – a clear signal of its ideological context. Rostow was fiercely anti-communist and modelled his theory after Western capitalist countries, which had industrialised and urbanised.

Talcott Parsons extended this framework into the cultural realm. Parsons argued that traditional values in underdeveloped countries were the “enemy of progress” – he was especially critical of kinship ties and tribal practices which he believed hindered the geographical and social mobility that were essential for development. The assumption running through both thinkers is the same: non-Western cultures are deficient, and development requires replacing them with Western norms.

The Western bias: how it shows up 🔗

The Western bias in modernisation theories is not just a matter of emphasis – it is embedded in their core logic. Several dimensions of this bias stand out.

Treating Western experience as universal 🔗

Modernisation scholars like S.N. Eisenstadt believed that Western modernisation should be used as a model of global applicability, with other societies classified by how closely they approximated the characteristics of Western industrial societies. This means the historical experience of Europe and North America – shaped by specific colonial, geographical, and institutional circumstances – was generalised into a supposed law of social evolution. Proponents of modernisation typically viewed only Western society as being truly modern and argued that others were primitive or unevolved by comparison.

Ignoring colonial legacies 🔗

One of the most damaging blind spots in modernisation theory is its silence on colonialism. Critics claim that modernisation theory glosses over the aspect of Western nations’ development that relied on colonisation and free slave labour. By framing underdevelopment as an internal cultural problem – rooted in “backward” values – these theories conveniently avoid examining how centuries of extraction, forced labour, and economic disruption left many societies structurally disadvantaged long before they were told to “catch up.”

Imposing a singular path of progress 🔗

Critics have cited that all countries do not develop in a linear fashion – some skip steps or take different paths – and that Rostow assumes all countries have a desire to develop in the same way, disregarding the diversity of priorities that each society holds. Japan’s modernisation is an instructive counterexample. Japan is cited as a case where a thoroughly modern way of life exists in a non-Western society, though others argue it has become distinctly more Western as a result of its modernisation – a debate that itself reflects the theory’s conceptual rigidity.

Real-world implications for less developed countries 🔗

The Western bias of modernisation theories is not merely an academic concern. It has had measurable consequences for how LDCs have been governed, funded, and evaluated for decades.

Economic dependency 🔗

Development strategies built on modernisation theory typically required LDCs to open their markets, invite Western investment, and accept foreign aid – often on terms set by Western-dominated institutions. Since core nations, as well as the World Bank, choose which countries are eligible for loans and decide what types of projects those loans may finance, they create highly segmented labour markets built primarily to benefit the dominant market countries. Rather than generating self-sustaining growth, this arrangement often deepened financial reliance on the very powers that defined what “development” meant.

Cultural erosion 🔗

In this model, the modernisation of a society required the destruction of indigenous culture and its replacement by a more Westernised one. Development programmes inspired by modernisation theory actively promoted Western values – individualism, secularism, and liberal democracy – while treating indigenous knowledge systems, communal structures, and spiritual traditions as obstacles. Traditional non-Western societies could only modernise if they abandoned their traditional cultures and assimilated technologically and morally “superior” Western ways. The cost, for millions of people, was not just economic – it was a loss of identity and social coherence.

Policy misalignment 🔗

Cultural equality, history, community, and local traditions are all at risk as modernisation pushes into peripheral countries. Development policies derived from modernisation frameworks frequently failed to address the actual challenges facing LDCs – income inequality, environmental pressures, political instability – because those policies were designed for a different social reality. The Eurocentric bias of mainstream development frameworks makes many of their concepts and models inappropriate to conditions prevailing in particular Third World countries, as parallels are sought in non-Western societies for the historical experience of the West.

Dependency theory: a direct challenge 🔗

It was out of frustration with modernisation theory’s explanatory failures that dependency theory emerged – primarily through thinkers based in Latin America and later extended across the Global South.

The core-periphery framework 🔗

First proposed in the late 1950s by the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch, dependency theory gained prominence in the 1960s and ’70s. Its central argument: underdevelopment is not a starting point that poor countries have failed to move beyond – it is actively produced by the global economic system. Andre Gunder Frank argued that developing nations have failed to develop not because of “internal barriers to development” as modernisation theorists claim, but because the developed West has systematically underdeveloped them, keeping them in a state of dependency.

Frank argued that a world capitalist system emerged in the 16th century which progressively locked Latin America, Asia and Africa into an unequal and exploitative relationship with the more powerful European nations. In this system, underdeveloped countries typically offer cheap labour and raw materials on the world market, which are sold to advanced economies that then transform them into finished goods sold back at high prices – a vicious cycle that perpetuates the division of the world economy between a rich core and a poor periphery.

Neo-colonialism and transnational corporations 🔗

Dependency theorists extended their critique beyond historical colonialism to its contemporary forms. Frank highlights the increasing dominance of transnational corporations in exploiting labour and resources in poor countries – because these companies are globally mobile, they are able to make poor countries compete in a “race to the bottom” in which they offer lower and lower wages to attract the company, which does not promote development.

Western aid money, Frank argues, is another means whereby rich countries continue to exploit poor countries – aid is often in the form of loans which come with conditions attached, such as requiring that poor countries open their markets to Western corporations. In this reading, modernisation theory did not just misdiagnose the problem – it actively helped legitimise the structures that perpetuated it.

Where dependency theory itself falls short 🔗

Dependency theory offered a powerful corrective to modernisation theory’s optimism, but it is not without its own limitations. Scholars like John Goldthorpe argued that colonialism did have some positive benefits, providing LDCs with basic infrastructure in terms of transport and communications. Critics also note that some countries – notably the East Asian “tiger” economies – managed to achieve rapid industrialisation while integrated into global markets, which neither modernisation theory nor dependency theory fully predicted. Additionally, dependency theory has been criticised for paying insufficient attention to internal class structures, governance failures, and cultural factors within LDCs themselves. Dependency theory also struggled to offer a clear alternative development path – Frank himself later acknowledged that separating the periphery from the core does not lead to development, especially in an era of increasing global economic interdependence.

Moving beyond the Western template 🔗

The cumulative weight of these critiques – from dependency theory, postcolonial scholarship, and empirical development studies – has forced a significant rethinking of what “development” means and how it should be pursued. Despite extensive investment and aid, some LDCs have experienced little or no economic growth, suggesting that no single framework, whether modernisation theory or its critics, has all the answers.

What has emerged is a growing recognition that development cannot be reduced to a single blueprint. Societies like Singapore, South Korea, and India have demonstrated that economic growth, democratic governance, and technological adoption can coexist with distinct cultural traditions – none of which followed Rostow’s stages in any tidy sequence. The concept of “multiple modernities” captures this: there is no single end-point that all societies are converging towards, only a range of possible futures shaped by local histories, institutions, and values.

For international institutions and policymakers, this demands a shift – away from prescriptive, top-down frameworks and towards approaches that are grounded in the specific social and political realities of the societies they aim to support. The question is whether the institutions that were built around modernisation-era assumptions are capable of making that shift in a meaningful way.

What do you think? Is it possible to design universal development frameworks without privileging one culture’s experience over another? And given that dependency theory also has its blind spots, what might a genuinely non-biased theory of global development look like?

References

1. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/social-sciences-and-humanities/modernization-theory
2. https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog128/node/719
3. https://revisesociology.com/2017/09/19/modernization-theory/
4. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/modernization-theory
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernization_theory
6. https://pressbooks.pub/anne1/chapter/modernization-theory/
7. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wm-introductiontosociology/chapter/theoretical-perspectives-on-global-stratification-2/
8. https://library.fes.de/libalt/journals/swetsfulltext/14830998.pdf
9. https://www.britannica.com/topic/dependency-theory
10. https://revisesociology.com/2015/10/17/dependency-theory/
11. https://www.e-ir.info/2016/11/23/dependency-theory-a-useful-tool-for-analyzing-global-inequalities-today/