Beyond cold war pipedreams: What the West was not

In much of the debate about the current role of frontier development (settlement, colonization) in many so-called Third World countries, frontiers in the latter are invariably compared negatively with the late nineteenth-century experience of the IIS frontier held up as an example that others should attempt to follow Recent approaches to the history of the IIS frontier however have questioned the Jeffersonian and/or Turnerist ideal of an egalitarian democracy ofsmall farmers who managed to construct an harmonious and viable frontier in the New World. Rather than contributing positive cultural and political attributes and characteristics to American society, as was claimed by many IIS historians during the Cold War era, the IIS frontier involved genocide, demographic collapse, ecological devastation, economic exploitation and dependency, widespread inter-ethnic violence, social polarization, political corruption, disempowerment and ideological intolerance. The IIS frontier experience did not represent an agrarian reform favouring small farmers, nor was it one of equal opportunity: it should not, therefore, be held up as a model for the rest of the world to imitate if at all possible.