Lee’s book certainly has succeeded at that task.ĭavid J. One of the markers of a good book is how it prompts its readers toward greater curiosity by asking more searching questions. “Does development, revolution, and counterrevolution begin and end with land?” “How does the changing nature of development ideologies shape our understanding of the insurrection years, and the trajectory of the Sandinista revolution and attendant counterrevolution?” she further asks. “How did AID shape everyday people’s lives,” she asks, “and how did they contest or leverage the role of AID money in their organizations?” Perhaps the most fertile ground for further research, as her critique indicates, is the field of development studies. Equally, more could be done on peasants, workers, and the Miskito. For instance, Lee could have offered more on the Sandinistas’ internal development policy besides the group’s application to the Miskito and more on Sandinista relations with the Socialist International. Snyder, meanwhile, devotes the most time to discussing how Lee or other scholars might further develop the questions he is asking. He does identify some areas where questions remain, for instance “whether the US experiences with development in Nicaragua drove changes elsewhere, or whether they were essentially independent discoveries that were repeated across the globe.” He suggests that events in Nicaragua seem “totally consonant with changes occurring elsewhere.”
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He admires Lee’s “attending to the multiple actors that had a stake in how development was implemented and understood.” He also notes that Lee breaks free of bilateralism, including as he does the role of other Central American nations, Canadians and Europeans, the Catholic Church, and the Socialist International. Iber compares The Ends of Modernization to Michel Gobat’s earlier work on an earlier era of US empire in Nicaragua and Nicaraguan elites’ response to it. Iber and Snyder delve most deeply into the implications of Lee’s work for modernization studies and the many paths he could have pursued. These “ends of modernization” all had political consequences, which often ran counter to Washington’s proclamations of democracy promotion. Like others, he appreciates Lee’s focus on “changing international development paradigms”: from infrastructure development to anti-poverty programs to the promotion of entrepreneurship, from the 1960s to the 1990s. Lee explores, for instance, Nicaragua’s own intellectual traditions and how they informed the struggles for power among Conservatives. William Michael Schmidli joins Rabe in seeing Lee’s Central American research as “a corrective to the US-centric perspective,” especially on a topic such as Nicaragua, which often remains mired in Cold War dichotomies. Finally, Rabe and Lee disagree on whether Lee should have more directly condemned the presidency of Daniel Ortega. He does point to some inaccuracies in the book and faults Lee for portraying US policy as “more unified and straightforward than it actually was.” Rabe, like most of the other reviewers, most admires Lee’s chapter on the post-earthquake reconstruction of Managua, whose US-designed decentralization, which was meant to spur democratization, led to dictator Anastasio Somoza’s enrichment and to the defeat of his political rivals.
Stephen Rabe praises Lee’s research in Nicaraguan sources and the resulting analysis of economic and social consequences that he gleans of US-led modernization schemes. Patrick Iber praises the book as “an erudite and insightful work of history that should rank among the year’s best” while Emily Snyder calls it “a welcome addition to a growing historiographical interest in late twentieth-century Nicaragua and revisions of former interpretations of the Sandinista Revolution.” The criticisms in this roundtable largely regret that the book is too brief, or that the author could have pushed his analysis further in several directions, thus demonstrating the complexity and subtlety of any study looking at development in the context of empire. I am also delighted to introduce a roundtable of reviews that largely agree that Lee’s book makes a valuable contribution to several literatures-on US-Nicaraguan relations most narrowly, but also on the study of modernization, development, the Cold War, and US foreign policy. Lee wrote it before I joined, so I cannot take credit, but I will claim it for my colleagues. I am proud to say that David Johnson Lee’s The Ends of Modernization: Nicaragua and the United States in the Cold War Era began as a dissertation in my department at Temple University. Introduction by Alan McPherson, Temple University
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