Democracy without Progress, Nationalism without Democracy

Interview with Samir Amin, conducted by Ibrahim Al-Ariss

Democracy and Development, the two professed solutions for the problems of the Third World in general, and the Arab World in particular, have notoriously been at odds. Theories of modernization and world-market integration consider democracy at best a collateral benefit of successful development, but more often as a serious obstacle to the implementation of “rational” economic policies. Proponents of auto-centered development typically put a high premium on social and political cohesion. Wrong approaches, says the Egyptian-French economist Samir Amin, one of the most prominent theoreticians of imperialism and dependency: Development and democracy, in the wider meaning of social mobilization and democratization of social relations, are inseparable and depend on each other to be sustainable.  Read...

Samir Amin, born 1931 in Cairo to an Egyptian father and a French mother, is one of the most prominent writers on development theory and the economic logic of imperialism. He acquired academic degrees in political science, economy and statistics and worked for several years as an economic advisor to the governments of Egypt and Mali, before joining the Institut Africain de Développement Économique et de Planification (IDEP) in Dakar/Senegal, where he was the director between 1970 and 1980. Since 1980, he is the director of the Dakar-based Third World Forum (http://forumtiersmonde.net/fren/index.htm).  Amin is the author of influential studies such as Imperialism and Unequal Development (1976), Eurocentrism (1988), Empire of Chaos (1991), Specters of capitalism: a critique of current intellectual fashions (1999), and most recently, Beyond US Hegemony: Assessing the Prospects for a Multi-polar World (2006).