The model of development presented to the peoples and the governments of former colonial and similarly placed countries is broadly one of compulsive sequences and closed options – informed by a late twentieth century variant of economism and technologism. The presumption has been that the less industrialised and the less modernised (‘traditional’) countries of the world have to follow the known and proven path of socio-economic change as shown in the march of Europe, America and the Soviet Union towards ‘progress’ and sophistication. There is a further presumption that once the basic social and economic tasks are performed, the necessary political development will follow: societies ought to be modernised before States and nations can be built. And there is one given course of modernisation – a high rate of growth in national GNP, increasing urbanisation, a ‘rational’ bureaucratic establishment, a manipulative technology, and ‘social mobilisation’ in which “major clusters of social, economic and psychological commitments are eroded or broken and people became available for new patterns of socialisation and behaviour.