the country’s model of exceptional economic expansion.39
It seems, though, that the scholarly confrontation over Ivory Coast reached a stalemate a long time ago, mostly because the ultimate fate of the Ivorian model of development is like a moving target whose end appears always projected into a never-ending future. So, while I partake in the discussions on the origins and destiny of the Ivorian experiment in modernization in the aftermath of the Second World War, I do so in order to bring a historian’s perspective into a largely economics-centered debate. Engaging with the economists but also using them as historical subjects who performatively participated in the (re)making of the Ivorian model, I deploy a historical sociology of knowledge and insights from (post)colonial studies to shed light not only on policy making and its consequences, but also on the discursive postures that social scientists adopted to name and challenge what ultimately is best labeled as Ivory Coast’s “Thirty Glorious Years.” Such epistemology and interdisciplinary historical approach have the advantage of bringing to the fore the idea that not only did local actors shape the politics of development in Ivory Coast, but transnational agents such as France’s Ivorianist social scientists and American financial institutions were key forces in the rise and eventual crisis of the Ivorian miracle.
A TANGLE OF PLAYERS: TRANSNATIONALISM AND STATE-LED DEVELOPMENT
The protagonists of the story of Ivorian development were many: peasant farmers and cash-crop planters, colonial bureaucrats, diplomats, corporations, experts, radical students/intellectuals, and more. Ideals regarding the good life and their translations into policy actions could also be seen as part of the cast of characters. In emphasizing their entangled geographies across nation-states, I place the history of Ivory Coast’s modernization in a transnational perspective. That is, in a vista that looks at “processes which can no longer be clearly assigned either to states or—as suggested by the model of ‘inter-national politics’—to the area between states.”40 Unlike the assumption of certain authors, this recognition of the power of transnationalism need not imply that state actors were no longer important. It does mean, however, that in explaining national histories, one has to take into account the “direct horizontal transactions between societal actors of different nation-states, transactions which bypass the institutions of government but strongly affect their margin of maneuver; the various forms of mutual penetration of formally separate entities; and the growing activities of a number of nonstate actors.”41
Revisiting the era of the 1970s and 1980s, when there emerged a debate on the significance of multinational corporations (MNCs) in the development process of Third World countries, sheds a new light on this point. In the academic dispute that pitted dependency theorists against neoclassical economists, liberal economists had claimed that MNCs were great conduits for development since they not only provided needed foreign investment, but also because their presence in a country resulted in intended and unintended knowledge spillovers that usually accrue to the host countries.42 In contrast, neo-Marxists argued that the activities of foreign large corporations in the developing world led to a mix of economic retardation, unequal development, and the furthering of underdevelopment. Ultimately, MNCs only extended the reach of global capitalism while it perpetuated the peripheral status of host countries.43
This is not the space in which to review the voluminous literature on the debate between the two schools—such task having been undertaken by other scholars. Suffice it to suggest, however, that in spite of their ideological opposition, both sides seemed to agree on the fact of the transnationalism of MNCs as a historical force in the political economy of postcolonial countries. By the same token, one can argue, the movement of multinational corporations across the borders of nation-states in the Global South emerged as a historiographical category.44
Unfortunately, empirical studies that historicized the operation of the MNCs were scarce, and the focus on their activities did not usually go beyond financial or industrial organization theories. This was particularly true for MNC studies that brought attention onto Ivory Coast.45 It is insightful, then, that many of the academic participants in the debate on multinational firms missed the opportunity to assess the performative acts of their peers and colleagues as agents of transnationalism in the saga of development and modernity in the Global South. Yet academic knowledge production was never an end in itself. In fact, scholars, their research, and the eventual circulation of the knowledge that they manufactured in the form of expertise usually acted as a transnational force whose power was mobilized by various constituents of the Ivorian postcolonial state. This was not unlike the relationship between knowledge producers and the colonial state or international institutions that aspired to act as purveyors of global governance. For instance, in the postwar period, as Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard have suggested,
the problem of development gave rise to a veritable industry in the social sciences, with a complex and often ambiguous relationship to governmental, international, and private agencies actively engaged in promoting economic growth, alleviating poverty, and fostering beneficial social change in “developing” regions of the world. From Oxfam to the United States Agency for International Development to the World Bank to rice research institutes in India to the World Health Organization, a diverse and complex set of institutions—funded with billions of dollars—has focused on research and action directed toward development.46
As will become clear in subsequent chapters, the activities of France’s Société d’Etudes pour le Développement Economique et Social (SEDES) and, especially, the work of the Office de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique Outre-Mer (ORSTOM) admirably illustrate this entangled process in Ivory Coast. Set up in the early 1940s to help coordinate the activities of French applied scientists working in the overseas territories in the midst of a changing world, the latter quickly evolved to become an indispensable institution whose power helped France to maintain its dominance over various parts of the Francophone world.47
In Ivory Coast, it was partly the maneuvers of the French state that resulted in ORSTOM’s eventual hegemonic presence in the West African country. But the transnationalization of knowledge production and circulation need not always flow through state officials. This is particularly poignant in recent historical studies on the circulation of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s notion of regional planning, which show the significance of nonstate actors like philanthropic foundations in spreading the TVA model of modernization in Asia and beyond.48 We shall further elaborate on the Ivorian ramifications of this circulation of the TVA idea in chapter 4 and show how it illustrates the pertinence of a transnational history approach to understand Ivory Coast’s bid for a US-inflected postwar modernity. In other instances, as we shall discuss in chapters 5 and 6, the circulation of developmentalist ideas was realized because of an intricate interaction among experts, diplomats, bureaucrats, and scholars who ultimately acted as brokers of modernization.
The players in the saga of state-led development in Ivory Coast were therefore numerous, and their actions were not always in the headlines. This is partly so because the implementation of modernization ideas did not necessarily produce titanic encounters. In this sense, French socio-anthropologist Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan’s insight that “interactions between the developmentalist configuration and African populations do not occur as dramatic confrontation” could not be more on target. In fact, the developmentalist encounters operated through “discreet passageways, relays, extended or restricted networks of transmission, interfaces.” To be sure, this means that modernization was, “fundamentally, a process that relies on mediation, which proceeds through a wide range of multiple, embedded, overlapping, intertwined mediations.”49 The story of ORSTOM’s Ivorianists, between 1947 when the institution’s Ivory Coast branch was inaugurated and the 1980s when part of the institution’s asset was Ivorianized, sheds an intriguing light on one aspect of this mediation. Even more, as will be developed later in the book, the ORSTOM developmentalist
