elizabeth cobbs hoffman

BOOK REVIEW Social Engineers Run Amok: The International Politics of Population Control
Matthew Connelly. Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008. xiv + 521 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $35.00.

It is a truism that people are unpredictable. Even the most oppressed exert agency, as historians have emphasized in recent decades. This observation also goes to the heart of democracy. Allowing people to make their own decisions means that outcomes are not predetermined. Matthew Connellys brilliant new book explores choice at its most primordial and underscores the old feminist proverb that the personal is political. He shows that in the name of giving people the power to limit their fertility, transnational agencies climbed into bed with government, as it were, to control individual reproductive behavior. Reformers gave women more say over their lives, but subverted liberty at the same time, making states immeasurably more intrusive. In many ways, this is an old story with stock characters. There are the usual ham-handed government ofcials who implement draconian measures in the name of social engineering. (Think of Peter the Great personally shaving the long beards off Old Believers.) They are egged on by upper-class reformers who think they know best how the poor should live and who blithely impose limits on others they would never tolerate for themselves. But what makes this book deeply humane and an exemplar of intellectual integrity is its recognition that bureaucrats are also unpredictable and that even social engineers want to learn from their mistakes. Connelly is as unwilling to stereotype elites as he is to create a caricature of the poor. They are all aggravatingly human. Fatal Misconception uses archives in seven countries to show how collaboration in the eld of population control brought private agencies together with governments in unprecedented ways. Groups like Planned Parenthood exhorted states worldwide to make birth control available to all potential parents. This harmonized with the dreams of eugenicists, who wanted governments to limit reproduction of the unt and thereby improve the human stock. This dovetailed further with the personal interests of inquisitive scientists, UN
Diplomatic History, Vol. 33, No. 2 (April 2009). 2009 The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK.

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bureaucrats, foundation executives, and charismatic activists who took the world as their oyster. Connelly admits that the international politics of population control did not t into Cold War categories (p. 152), but he convincingly demonstrates that people in the twentieth century began to reimagine international relations in terms of the relations between different populations (p. 75). The story begins in the late nineteenth century with Annie Besant in England and moves into the twentieth with Margaret Sanger in the United States. Both saw uncontrolled reproduction as the greatest tyranny affecting the lives of women. Sanger, particularly, recognized the cost. The daughter of Irish Catholic parents, she was the sixth of eleven children her mother bore (from eighteen pregnancies) before dying of cervical cancer and tuberculosis. Sanger became the most important international activist for birth control, seeing it as a universal human value that linked women worldwide (p. 51). Travels to India, Japan, and China convinced her that reformers should use state mechanisms to advance the cause, but that the cause itself transcended borders. Sangers efforts complemented those of other movements less benevolent in their goals. Nativists denounced the Yellow Peril and advocated exclusionary immigration laws. If the Chinese and Japanese (and Jews, Catholics, and other unt immigrants) practiced birth control instead of breeding like rodents, so nativists said, fewer of them would crowd American shores. Eugenicist Madison Grant, author of The Passing of the Great Race in 1916, advocated outright sterilization as the practical, merciful, and inevitable solution for such worthless race types (p. 44). At the same time, he and others of a similar mind feared the indiscriminate promotion of birth control since it might inadvertently liberate the educated and t to breed less frequently (p. 53). What would happen if genteel women took it into their heads to limit fertility? The moral dilemma for Sanger and her followers was how to make use of the political and nancial support eugenicists provided, without being tainted by their parochial and oppressive motives. At a 1925 international conference on population control, Sanger quashed a resolution to encourage reproduction by parents whose progeny had promise, arguing that the the progeny of all parents will give unsuspected promise if planned rationally (p. 65). But she never entirely eluded the taint of association with unsavory types who itched to treat whole populations like laboratory subjects. Eugenicists were nally discredited by the most evil mad scientist of them all, Adolf Hitler, notorious for his efforts to eradicate Jews while enticing blond Aryan women to have litters like rabbits. Meanwhile, population growth soared. Connelly notes the remarkable fact that during World War II, which killed roughly 70 million, the planet grew by 15 million inhabitants annually because of steep declines in infant mortality achieved during the 1930s and 1940s. In the twentieth century, world population doubled and then doubled again.

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The birth control movement expanded, too. After World War II, the dialogue went beyond feminists and eugenicists when it became apparent that the planet might surpass its carrying capacity. Connelly calls these the Malthusians: scientists who warned of famine and ecological degradation if the exponential growth rate did not abate. These worriers had much in common with yet another postwar constituency: development economists and postcolonial governments eager to boost Third World living standards. They pointed to the dangerous disparity between rates of economic growth and population growth. If economies grew at 2 percent per annum and populations grew at 3 percent, countries would become poorer and poorer. Connellys book is at its most original in its exploration of this phase. He delves deeply into archives that reveal the intense pressure that institutions like the World Bank, and donor countries like Sweden and the United States, placed on developing countries to control population growth. Loans and other forms of aid were sometimes tied explicitly to progress. Foreign experts often looked the other way when local governments twisted arms (and cut fallopian tubes) to make it happen. At the same time, Connelly explodes the notion that there was any conspiracy by lighter-skinned people to diminish the number of darker-skinned ones, as propagandists have alleged. Indeed, he shows that the keenest anxiety about accelerating birth rates was internal. The Chinese and Indian governments, for example, both used incentives to induce better reproductive choices, and these included nearly every form of welfare benet the state could offer, from clean water and food rations to pay raises and rickshaw licenses. And if this seems beyond the pale, there was worse: forcible sterilizations and abortions. At the height, in the 1970s and 1980s, the Indian government performed eight million sterilizations in one year, and the Chinese performed twenty million. Connelly reports, but does not comment on, an interesting difference in the choices they made. The Indians sterilized mostly males (75 percent of the total), while the Chinese sterilized mostly females (80 percent of the total). In India these operations were often performed en masse, with few concessions to hygiene and none to privacy. Still, the population bomb was defused. The author notes one might be tempted to think the result was worth the price, except for the fact that the sacrices may have been unnecessary (p. 371). Sanger intuitively knew what the experts conceded only recently. Given choices, most people will make sensible ones. Over the past century, the most reliable predictor of a decline in fertility is a rise in female literacy. Women who can read almost invariably have fewer children than those who cannot. It is therefore the emancipation of women, not population control, that has remade humanity (p. 375). Here and elsewhere, the author emphasizes the encroachments upon liberty made by experts. They could have adopted less coercive measures, but they chose not to. The fertility rate declined just as sharply in countries where almost

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no effort was made (but women became literate) as in those countries where every effort was made. Ultimately, Connellys heroes are the common people. In India in 1977, they routed Prime Minister Indira Gandhi from ofce and her party from parliament. Something even more powerful, even more implacable, had nally defeated the ideology of population control: People voting one by one (p. 326). Connellys conclusion lifts the discussion to the highest realms of international relations. He asserts that the most egregious errors of international and nongovernmental organizations should remind us that, for all their faults, nation-states may provide the best guarantee of personal liberty. In recent years, the institution of sovereignty has seemed increasingly shaky, he notes. Yet outsiders who are unaccountable to any electorate may create an Empire Lite if not restrained (p. 379). Connelly gives us a beautifully written, fast-paced book. The author admits to the passion of a convert, and there are times when the grudge becomes personal. He thanks his Catholic parents for having so many children, including him, the eighth. One wishes he had drawn back a little. By the end, the prose reads more like a manifesto than an investigation. This blurs the commonly underrated, but nonetheless important, distinction between a scholars job and a citizens responsibility. Yet this is not a fatal misconception. Connelly has written an important, caring book. Readers may wish to thank his parents, too.