Waiting for the Miracle: Future Histories of Economic Enchantments Free

Abstract

Why do the dreamworlds of the economic miracle persist even when it fails to deliver? What might account for its resilience, its endless capacity to resurrect in ever-new forms in old and new territories? This essay explores the enduring enigma of economic enchantments: the modern belief in the power of capitalist growth to salve the humiliation of defeat in wars and colonial rule, to turn depressed economies torn by ethnic conflicts, external debts, and financial collapse into economic powerhouses. This enduring enchantment of the economic, the authors suggest, lives off an endless replay of the prosperity gospel, especially in postcolonial and postcommunist societies. What sustains the myth of the economic miracle is how each failure is dismissed as a deception, a mirage that awaits the arrival of the true miracle.

Four snapshots of miraculous futures, some past, even eroded, others still awaited.

1972, Brazil

The military dictatorship accelerated the Trans-Amazonian Highway project, an ambitious infrastructure program that would cut through the rainforest lands to the ports near the Atlantic coast. The opening of the Amazon promised to open up “an area half as big as the United States to settlement and exploitation” and “make raw materials far more available to the outside world.” While concerns were raised about the “extremely precarious ecological situation” and the consequences for the Indigenous population, the project billed as economic development of the hinterland had stoked nationalist pride. A newspaper reported: “There are ‘Brazil: Love It or Leave It’ stickers on car bumpers in Rio de Janeiro, while 2,000 miles north, school children sport T-shirts with the yellow and green Trans-Amazon symbol on them.”¹

2004, India

A decade into the opening up of its economy, India launched a global publicity campaign—India Shining—to celebrate the success of its economic reforms. India, dubbed a leading emerging market, was already at the heart of the BRICS nations, exciting new destinations for global capital. The campaign invited potential investors to come and partake in its growth story: “Opportunity has a new geography. When global companies look at India, they see more than the vastness of our markets. They see the power of a nation that can drive a whole new world economy. For the world’s business leaders, investors, marketers, exporters, and tourists, that land of opportunity is India. India is shining, and you’ve never had a better time to shine together.”²Though initially celebrated as a success, the India Shining campaign came to be seen as a sign of the failure of India’s neoliberal growth model. A few months after its launch, the then ruling party lost elections. India was shining, it was said, but only for a few. The rest were still waiting for the profits to trickle down.

2016, Côte d’Ivoire

Global capital rediscovered Côte d’Ivoire in the early twenty-first century, decades after it had been abandoned as a “lost cause.” The crumbling 1960s–70s concrete modernism in Abidjan, a reminder of an earlier economic miracle gone bust, was awash in a fresh coat of optimism. Foreign investors were back, drawn to the second-fastest-growing economy in Africa. The signs of the new unfolding miracle were visible, the Economist wrote:

2021, Saudi Arabia

A new techno-utopia begins taking shape. The glossy video envisions “the startup the size of a country that will change the way we live and work forever. Healthier, happier with more time for the things that really matter. A truly global culture from every place and background you can imagine that can show the rest of the planet how it’s done. With energy that flows from the sun and wind. Neighborhoods that can feed and clean themselves. Technologies that make life everything it can be. This is where we can prepare together for the next era of human progress.”⁴

Economic Enchantments

To witness the world through the many unfolding “economic miracles” is to behold dreamworlds and catastrophes all at once. It is to be confronted with many spectacular visions of capitalist modernity, of hope and wonderment, but also ruins left behind when the promised futures fail to emerge. We began with a few snapshots of the many economic miracles that have emerged, unraveled, or are still waiting to happen across the twentieth- and twenty-first-century worlds: Brazil, India, Ivory Coast, and Saudi Arabia. They capture the manifold frictions at the heart of the phenomenon: the old desire to enter the magical world of prosperity and eternal peace, this time through the path laid out by unfettered capitalism, along with the persistent fear of not “making it” to the enchanted place, of being left behind, plagued by anxieties that what at first seemed to be a miracle is just a mirage. The story of economic miracles appears as a global serial production, a spellbinding play staged around the world, carrying with it the promise of the spectacular reign of capitalism. However, a closer look reveals that the push to generate previously unattainable, high growth rates has left behind zones of abandonment and despair, inequality, displacement, and political repression.

The four snapshots above disclose how the lure of the economic miracle and the specter of a mirage are never too far apart. Nor, for that matter, is the risk of being deceived and getting stuck in a trail of destruction. Consider the “Brazilian miracle”: Brazil was once celebrated as “the new Japan,” a new engine of growth previously considered unattainable. Impressed by the economic miracles of Japan and West Germany, the Brazilian planners believed they not only could replicate them but “do much better, and in a shorter time.”⁵ Their push toward double-digit growth rates coupled with low inflation also coincided with the most repressive era of the twenty-one-year military dictatorship. It allowed the state to create an illusion of its economic triumphs, as Melissa Teixeira shows in her article in this issue. It wasn’t just austerity and severe wage repression for workers that the miracle had wrought, but also massive violation of the rights of the Indigenous people, as well as ecological destruction. The colossal infrastructure campaign by companies or government entities in the rainforest had created what has been called “a Brazilian miracle but an Indigenous disaster.”⁶ In 2024 Brazil formally apologized to the Indigenous people, an acknowledgement that came after more than half a century.

Now move half a world away from Brazil to India to witness another incarnation of the economic miracle. In the early 1990s, faced with a severe financial crisis, India embarked on an economic liberalization program it hoped would not only help avert the immediate “balance of payment” crisis but also realize its old dream of joining the high table of world powers.⁷ India’s subsequent rise as an “attractive investment destination” came to be celebrated as a spectacular growth story in the twenty-first-century world economy. India Shining wasn’t just a publicity campaign name; it signaled a deep transformation of the postcolonial nation’s transition to capitalism, a refuge for global capital with the promise of high returns, rejuvenation of its cultural identity, and prosperity for its citizens.⁸ Yet, over the past three decades, the promised miracle turned out to be hollow for many Indians; India became more unequal than it had been for a century, and it took a familiar turn toward authoritarianism.⁹

On the African continent, the second coming of the “Ivory Coast miracle” traces a similar journey of the rise, fall, and rise again of the capitalist growth story. Once deemed a growth-oriented, prosperous nation, Côte d’Ivoire became an epicenter of speculative booms and busts, shiny infrastructures and their ruins, all shaped by the flows and ebbs of fickle foreign capital, which led to plummeting commodity prices, a stagnant economy, and violent conflicts.¹⁰ The description of these events as a “lost cause” signaled something far worse than an economic downturn: failed prospects for development in Côte d’Ivoire and, by extension, in Africa. As Abou Bamba shows in his contribution, the Ivorian experience exposes how similar economic events are bestowed with different labels as miracles or failures, and how Black Africa has historically been positioned in the global economy. Similarly, Hannah Borenstein shows the constant turbulence and chaotic shifts between hope and despair that marked the instability of the Ethiopian miracle. Contrast this with the telling of the Chilean miracle, which didn’t die even when faced with a series of crises (see Johanna Gautier Morin’s article). Franco Barchiesi, in his roundtable commentary, reminds us how the term economic miracle was imbued, in Africa, with a racialized meaning, a pessimistic view in which the miracle wasn’t growth but Africa’s capacity to avoid failures. Thus the return of global capital to the Ivorian economy was indeed celebrated as a miraculous event. What is telling in this fluctuation of fortunes is the absence of disillusionment; the seduction of the miracle remained intact even in its failure.

The latest and perhaps the most ambitious reincarnation of the economic miracle is the newly launched NEOM city project in Saudi Arabia. It expects not only to boost Saudi Arabia’s modern image but also to get ahead in the race to attract global capital and technology. Envisioned as “a civilizational leap for humanity,” it sets out to create a futuristic smart city “that will be bigger than Dubai and have more robots than humans” by 2030.¹¹ The promotional presentations suggest an artificial intelligence (AI)–driven, energy-efficient $500 billion business zone in the desert along the Red Sea coast that will be home to nine million residents. This vision of a twenty-first-century utopia has raised the specter of surveillance and human rights violations.¹² For now, the project has been scaled back for financial reasons, but what it reveals is the near immortality of the economic miracle.

The idea of the economic miracle has never truly expired, as these still-unfolding utopias show. It continues to be resurrected, brought to life in even more seductive forms. Dressed up in ever-new garbs, it keeps returning to new and old locations, reaffirming the prosperity gospel and the promise of the laissez-faire formula to bring salvation. We might ask: How and why has it endured so long and been embraced widely even when it left behind a trail of destruction? What dreamworlds does it promise or what new forms does it continue to mutate into? What might account for its resilience, its capacity to conjure new dreamworlds even as it remains intricately tied to crises of poverty and repression? These observations raise an even more crucial question: could it be that the enigma of the economic miracle lives off the crises that unrestrained capitalism creates? Might we say that the economic miracle is not just an answer to crisis but also its genesis, a contemporary historical condition that calls for a more rigorous interrogation? This essay, along with many of the contributions to this issue, addresses the possibility of these interconnections, which continue to shape the many lives and afterlives of the economic miracle.

We explore the enigma of economic enchantments: the modern belief in the power of economic growth that keeps the miracle alive even when it fails to deliver, or the neoliberal deification of the market that continues to promise to salve the humiliation of defeat in wars and colonial rule. The hope is that accrued economic worth could be traded to recover the lost mana of national glory and prestige, even rejuvenation of its neotraditional cultural forms (see Rebecca Karl’s essay). Our aim in this issue is to generate further debate on the enduring nature of economic miracles and the implications they may hold for political and economic life in the twenty-first century. To this end, we trace three intertwined critical dimensions of the economic miracle: the connections between the crisis and the miracle; new forms of economic enchantments, or what we might call an economic miracle by another name; and the miracle’s expansion into new geographies, especially in the Global South. In what follows, we lay out a brief history of how the word economic joined with the concept of miracle before we turn to the makings of economic enchantments.

Lineages of the Economic Miracle

When and how did the economic miracle become a dazzling embodiment of capitalism? We begin by returning to the philosophical roots of the concept to trace the bloodlines of the miracle in the field of political economy.

Miracle, derived from the Latin mirari (to wonder, marvel), simply means an event that excites wonder or astonishment, denoting something extraordinary, outside the expected routine.¹³ In the theological sense, a miracle is the work of God or a divine figure akin to God, a sign of intervention of a superior being. The occurrence of these events cannot be explained through human actions or natural causes. A central philosophical discussion emerges around the proposition of miracles as a “violation of the laws of nature,” a proposition that has raised questions about both the nature of violation and what constitutes natural law.¹⁴ The key question is the credibility of claims of a miracle that require an incontrovertible proof, usually the testimony of witnesses, that an improbability has occurred. A violation can only be miraculous if it is nonreplicable, a one-off event that does not occur as a matter of routine. Furthermore, even if such a violation can be established, it can never be proven with certainty that it was the work of a divine being. In short, claims of miracles are never beyond dispute or doubt. But what their existence affirms is the core spirit of religion: the love of wonder and enchantment, the magical state of being spellbound. Note here that the concepts of the miracle and the mirage have always been closely related, deriving from the common etymological roots of mirus (wonderful), mirari (to wonder), and mirare (mirror). If the miracle conjures a world that exceeds the productive power of nature, the mirage signals the optical illusion, the risk of being deceived by shiny images. The miracle is a matter of belief, the mirage an embodiment of doubt. Yet, for all their differences, they work to bolster enchantment as a way of being in the world. After all, an encounter with a mirage does not necessarily lead to disillusionment. It can also induce one to move on, to search harder for the real thing. This aspect is crucial to understanding the enduring lure of miracles.

In the domain of economy, the miracle is popularly associated with the phenomenon of the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) that turned postwar Germany into an economic powerhouse, the desirable “dream-state” shaped by capitalist growth (see Aimée Plukker’s article). Yet this is not where the story begins. The economic miracle had already made its debut in the late nineteenth century, albeit in a different form. Long before miracle became shorthand for capitalist growth, the economic miracle was an ironic telling of tensions between labor and capital, on the one hand, and economic injustice under colonial rule, on the other. Remember, this was the age of imperial capitalism, colonial extraction, mass industrial production, inventions, patents, and international trade wars. The Great Exhibition of 1851 in London showcased marvels of modern industry and raw materials from the colonies in a great spectacle of wealth and enterprise. That age also brought to the surface the underbelly of mass manufacturing: the material conditions of workers. In this turmoil, efforts to organize trade unions and strikes were seen as “formidable weapons of industrial warfare” that would cause injury to the industrial system and yield few returns to the workers. The very goal of social equality was dismissed as an unattainable “economic miracle,” a pipe dream that went against the laws of economics. In a similar vein, in an 1892 report on the “sweating system,” the exploitation of workers was dismissed as inherently improbable as it would entail their “taking part in the economic miracle of voluntarily selling their labor at less than its market price.”¹⁵ The economic miracle, Quinn Slobodian suggests in his roundtable remarks, was derided at this point as an economic absurdity to counter the growing aspirations and demands of contemporary social movements. The theme of economic absurdity resonated in colonial India as well. In 1904, writing on the economic distress that colonialism had brought to India, the economic historian R. C. Dutt noted with despair: “If manufactures are crippled, agriculture overtaxed, and a third of the revenue remitted out of the country, any nation on earth would suffer from permanent poverty and recurring famines. Economic laws are the same in Asia as in Europe. . . . If India were prosperous under these circumstances, it would be an economic miracle. (But) science knows no miracles.”¹⁶ The economic miracle was summoned as a metaphor—for the impossibility of achieving prosperity for the colony under imperial rule—a theme that would become central to anticolonial mobilization throughout the twentieth century. It also represented the nature of the extractive colonial economy, which accrued profits to the empire even as it depleted the colony, a miraculous arrangement where almost nothing was traded for something.

Back in the imperial metropole, the economic miracle was transmuting into more than an expression of impossibility. It now conveyed a sense of wonder but was duly tempered with caution. In 1917 the economist J. A. Hobson marveled at how the British war economy during the First World War had managed to produce a surplus and even raise the standard of living of the civilian population: “What this country [England], in particular, has done amounts to an economic miracle,” he exclaimed.¹⁷ However, as he analyzed patterns of production, the economic miracle began to appear more like a sign of a transient boom before the bust arrived. The postwar economy, he feared, would be faced with the payment of war expenses and greater taxation, a scenario that might lead to a reduction of real wages and an intensification of class conflict.

In this fluid moment, the idea of the economic miracle underwent a further shift. The economic miracle now came to be associated with economic recovery, especially when enforced with resolute authoritarian action. The Nazi regime had started referring to the rise of industrial output and decline in unemployment as an “economic miracle . . . attribute[d] to the daring spirit of Nazi leaders who did not hesitate to violate the principles of orthodox finance.”¹⁸ Germany’s minister of economy, Hjalmar Schacht, had even been given the honorific title “economic miracle man,” for “he has to feed the Reich’s fast rising numbers of babies, born in and out of wedlock,” wrote Life magazine. “He has further to provide, by miracles of economic juggling, the steel, rubber, oil, and nitrates needed to sustain one of the hugest war machines of history.”¹⁹ The wartime economy had turned the economic miracle from a foolish pursuit into a desirable goal, duly incorporated into the to-do list of dictatorships. This alliance between the economic miracle and strong states would later shape Brazil’s “technocratic developmental state” (Paula Vedoveli’s contribution) and the repressive violence that unfolded in the shadow of the Mexican miracle (Christy Thornton’s commentary). Miracles could be manufactured as the handiwork of authoritarian leaders, who meant business in more ways than one.

The Miracle Market

It wasn’t until the postwar era that the economic miracle would emerge as a distinct phenomenon, its currency tied to its capacity to work wonders on crisis-ridden economies. The mid-twentieth-century economic miracle was a nearly magical formula: a package of high growth rates and rapid economic reconstruction that could turn depressed economies torn by wars, colonialism, ethnic conflicts, external debts, and financial downturns into economic powerhouses.

The poster child of this reincarnation of the economic miracle was postwar Germany. Reeling from the cumulative effects of high inflation and economic collapse due to the war, Germany made a spectacular economic recovery in the 1950s–60s. Called the “Miracle on the Rhine,” this restored Germany’s position as a leading European economy. It also became an aspirational formula that would circulate in many incarnations around the world. The Japanese miracle, the miracle on the Han, and Asian tiger economies, or what is broadly called the East Asian miracle, along with Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Côte d’Ivoire, and Ethiopia, among others, would soon be the shining stars in the topography of capitalism, with many more still waiting to witness the miracle.²⁰

By the late twentieth century, another shift had begun to rearrange the economic miracle. Here enters a new language of markets that reimagined the Global South as a new frontier of the world economy. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the attendant triumph of liberalism had opened the postcommunist and postcolonial worlds to the seductions of free-market capitalism. With this, the alternate vision of “Soviet futures”—the socialist edition of economic miracles (discussed in this issue by Ellis Garey) that had once animated anticolonial mobilizations—was cast aside. Though international financial institutions had already in the 1950s started promoting private capital as an agent of development in the Third World, these efforts made little headway until the 1980s. The shift began when many parts of the developing world were redubbed as “emerging markets”—territories with untapped market potential. With abundant, unutilized raw materials and vast consumer markets, emerging markets held out the promise of economic growth that markets in the developed world did not.²¹ Once raw materials turned into a commodity, their market value soared or fell subject to speculative cycles of boom and bust (see fig. 1). At the turn of the millennium, the largest, most populous territories, including China, India, Brazil, post-Soviet Russia, and post-apartheid South Africa, were rebranded as BRICS, the constellation of successful “growth stories” ready to “take off” and expand the territory of capitalism beyond the West.²² The phenomenon of emerging markets, an economic miracle by another name, had once again reenchanted the world. The language of markets subsumed the language of miracles; now the true miracle was the endless production of markets.

What ties economic miracles, new and old, is the promise to undo crises—from wars and colonialism to debts and economic collapse—even to turn “failed states” into wonders to behold. Consider the recent push in Pakistan, a nation beset with serial crises, to turn its coastline into a glittering combination of the “Dubai model” of investments and the “Shenzhen model” of infrastructure (see Hasan Karrar’s essay). Yet this utopic imagination created its own neoliberal dystopias over the past several decades—from military dictatorships or authoritarian rule to the violent capture of natural resources, austerity, and extreme inequality that created zones of abundance and deprivation (as Andre Pagliarini notes in his essay on Brazil and Chile).²³ However, these ruptures did not always weaken the temptation of the economic miracle. They often led to new calls to have faith in the miracle, for deeper reforms to boost economic growth, and to wait just a bit longer to taste the fruits of capitalist progress. This enduring enchantment of the economic lives off an endless replay of the prosperity gospel, a phenomenon we witness in ever-new frontiers of the global economy. Each miracle is a reenchantment, a reconfirmation of the spell of capital. And each failure is a mirage, a deception that tests belief, a call to wait for the true miracle.

Notes

References