In the context of Pakistan, the development is dependent on the western hegemon states, especially the United States of America. With the influx of US funding through USAID, its participation in Pakistan’s policy initiatives was brought into sharp focus. This resulted in further American involvement in Pakistani institutions through a variety of channels, including trade, aid, education, and even military aid. Pakistan gained some military and economic aid by aligning with the United States but at the cost of being dependent on the aid. Pakistan was also harmed globally and deprived of its ability to speak freely on subjects related to its national interests. Furthermore, international financial institutions have played a major role in influencing Pakistan’s national policies. The US has always created this environment with certain push & pull factors and provoked Pakistan to an extent that it had no choice but to accept the vicious cycle of getting aid and help from the US and other international organizations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which are both run and controlled by the US. It is the primary cause of the persistent balance of payments problem that has plagued Pakistan’s economy for decades.
Pakistan’s low level of economic growth forced the country to learn and depend on the United States for not only the purpose of overcoming its strategic deficiencies but also for the purpose of keeping its economy afloat. Due to this, Pakistan was forced to join the US bloc to meet its requirements for adequate levels of national security, which led to the massive influence of the United States in the institutions as well as the policies of Pakistan. Moreover, events like the Washington consensus have significantly influenced the policies of developing countries like Pakistan. This influence has become a major hindrance in the formulation and implementation of development policies in their true essence in Pakistan.
Looking into the historical context of Pak-US relations, to prevent communism from spreading further over the region, the United States has long sought to preserve its hegemonic position in Pakistan. The slowdown and shift in focus of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is a classic example in this line. Recently, the IMF has shown concerns over the China – Pakistan meeting on the sidelines of the SCO summit where the leaders from Islamabad and Shanghai hailed their friendship. IMF is concerned over the power purchases of Pakistan from Chinese independent power producers and has anticipated that the Chinese IPPs would demand that the whole loan payment be utilized to pay them. As a result, the IMF extended the present program with the stipulation that money would not go to Chinese IPPs. This is another way of influencing the developmental sector of the country.
Another important influence of the United States in the policies of Pakistan is the growing concept of universality in policy-making. Political representatives or policymakers of Pakistan or any other developing state lack awareness of the state’s cultural background and historical foundations when they make decisions. The absence of local input renders policy proposals useless and unworkable. The areas of development in developing or underdeveloped countries need not mirror the areas of development in the West. Due to the diversity in state requirements, not one policy for state-wide growth is feasible.
Understanding the cultural setting is most important. Pakistan and other developing nations must find their own path to prosperity, and the Western model cannot be the only option. The end goal of a good development policy should be to improve and simplify people’s lives. Any policy for economic growth must put sustainability and relevance first. It is important to consider that any policy that is efficiently working in the US cannot be of the same efficiency in Pakistan. But due to Western influence, western cultural supremacy and the rest of the world’s cultures have fused and the concept of the hybridity of cultures has risen. Culture has an impact on the economy, politics, social cohesion, and the development of new and existing values. These factors are intrinsically linked to the varying methods by which governments craft their policies. Mechanisms that merely copy and paste text are neither productive nor desired. Inverting our established development norms, the concept of universal development goals is a radical proposition. The problem of development in developing nations cannot be solved by following Western ideologies blindly.
Coloniality of knowledge is yet another tool for the US and west to improvise their hegemony over the rest of the world. It is estimated that only 9% of authors and editors are included in the research work from developing countries. The barriers to entry into the authorship and editorial board for authors from developing countries in the field of development studies are because of the hegemony of the west. In the context of Pakistan, the hegemony is growing stronger because Pakistan has not been able to recover from the aftermath of colonization and it has left Pakistan with not being able to formulate its own concrete literature and research. Due to the non-representation in the field of knowledge, scholars from developing countries are unable to put forward their concerns regarding the development and growth of their respective nations. It is quite difficult for them to speak for their people in modern societies which only know a very minor chunk of their pain, the ground realities are never heard nor solved.
As long as underdeveloped countries are based on Eurocentric ideas and their leaders are not ready to start changing the tradition, true development cannot occur. The eurocentric idea says that the Third World, which is seen as backward and underdeveloped, should try to be more like the West. People have mistaken modernization for westernization and because of the cultural fusion, as discussed in the above arguments, underdeveloped nations are on the verge of losing their identities. Each state is different from the others in terms of its social and cultural setups precisely, which needs to be realized by states other than the west as well. Pakistan’s policies are often based on the ideas from the west, the US in particular. Certain liberal ideologies have a significant impact on Pakistan as a whole. All of these things help keep the west in charge of the world.
