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Modernization theory was once the best way to explain social change since the eighteenth century. It claimed that societies could best adapt to the modern age by following the capitalist path pioneered by the West. In the 1970s the theory was pronounced dead by Immanuel Wallerstein who replaced it with a Marxist synthesis called “world system theory.” But the evidence shows that successful East Asian nations have modernized along capitalist paths similar to those predicted by modernization theory. Attempts to modernize differently, especially through socialism and closure to the outside world, have failed. South and North Korea present two extreme examples. The South has been a great success, and the North the world’s most obvious failure of closed, anti-capitalist development.
