The appeal and impact of development models track broader movements in world politics. For more than half a century the United States and the Soviet Union provided the political economy models of choice for much of the developing world. As the colonial era was brought to a close by rising nationalism and the Cold War intensified, the superpowers became locked into a competition to demonstrate the superiority of their own political economy, and hence its suitability for export. America's democratic capitalist model was packaged as the “First New Nation”, and a wealthy one at that. Having risen in revolt against its British masters, having established the world's first constitutional republic, having welcomed millions of migrants to its shores, having not become a colonial power in quite the same mould as the European Great Powers, and having the world's dominant economy and richest citizens, the United States presented its history and contemporary achievements to make it as appealing as possible to the Third World. So, too, did the Soviet Union, whose communist model of planned, egalitarian development under a vanguard political party enjoyed widespread support at the levels of both state and street in much of the Third World. However, in the end, Washington triumphed and the Soviet model was relegated – remarkably quickly, in fact, – to the dustbins of history.

Although much of the bloom had faded from the American rose during the Cold War, the commencement of a new era of globalisation in the late 1980s rejuvenated America's appeal as a model in much of the Third World.