Africa–Asia development divergence

Why did countries such as Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam industrialise with remarkable speed while much of sub-Saharan Africa struggles to achieve comparable transformation? Standard explanations often point to culture, geography, colonialism or governance. Yet these explanations frequently overlook a more fundamental issue: the difference between adopting the symbols of modernity and building the capabilities that sustain it. The source of the development divergence between Africa and Asia lies in the distinction between what may be called hard modernisation and soft Westernisation. Hard modernisation is the acquisition of productive capability. It involves mastering science, engineering and industry. It is primarily the capacity to produce, maintain, adapt and even improve modern products and institutions. Soft Westernisation, by contrast, emphasises appearances: Western lifestyles, Western consumption patterns and Western cultural imitation more generally, without the corresponding productive transformation. We should note here that African historiography identifies two schools of thought on the impact of the West on Africa. The epic school argues that the West’s impact has been of epic proportions: deep and wide-ranging, as measured by religious, linguistic and educational indicators. Those colonial years, despite their brevity, were truly exceptional. The episodic school argues that the postcolonial period illustrates how shallow the impact of European colonialism was. The colonial period was just an episode in relation to the millennia of African history. That is why Western ideas and institutions failed to take root in Africa. I hasten to argue that there should be a third, hybrid school that simply posits that the West’s impact on Africa is deep culturally (soft Westernisation) and shallow technologically (hard modernisation). This distinction helps us to understand how societies exposed to similar global forces produce radically different developmen