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The Ends of Modernization: Nicaragua and the United States in the Cold War Era

Online ISBN:
9781501756221
Print ISBN:
9781501756214
Publisher:
Cornell University Press
Book

The Ends of Modernization: Nicaragua and the United States in the Cold War Era

Published online:
20 January 2022
Published in print:
15 August 2021
Online ISBN:
9781501756221
Print ISBN:
9781501756214
Publisher:
Cornell University Press

Abstract

This book studies the relations between Nicaragua and the United States in the crucial years during and after the Cold War. The book charts the transformation of the ideals of modernization, national autonomy, and planned development as they gave way to human rights protection, neoliberalism, and sustainability. The book demonstrates how conflict between the United States and Nicaragua shaped larger international development policy and transformed the Cold War. In Nicaragua, the backlash to modernization took the form of the Sandinista Revolution which ousted President Anastasio Somoza Debayle in July 1979. In the wake of the earlier reconstruction of Managua after the devastating 1972 earthquake and instigated by the revolutionary shift of power in the city, the Sandinista Revolution incited radical changes that challenged the frankly ideological and economic motivations of modernization. In response to threats to its ideological dominance regionally and globally, the United States began to promote new paradigms of development built around human rights, entrepreneurial internationalism, indigenous rights, and sustainable development. The book traces the ways Nicaraguans made their country central to the contest over development ideals beginning in the 1960s, transforming how political and economic development were imagined worldwide. By illustrating how ideas about ecology and sustainable development became linked to geopolitical conflict during and after the Cold War, the book provides a history of the late Cold War that connects the contest between the two then-prevailing superpowers to trends that shape our present, globalized, multipolar world.

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