Dependency Theory

The dependency approaches that emerged during the 1960s and 1970s represent an important and complex body of theory with Marxist and structuralist roots. Dependency theory first emerged as a critique of modernization theory toward the end of the 1960s as a growing disillusionment with the laissez-faire and diffusionist approach of modernization theory set in and as it became clear that there had been a failure to deliver the promised material benefits of becoming “modern.” Thus, there evolved a more wide-ranging critique of development theory that was firmly rooted in the Third World and in certain traditions of “Third Worldism.” The dependency school contended that dependency on a metropolitan “core” (e.g., Europe, North America) increases the “underdevelopment”[Page 95] of satellites in the “periphery” (e.g., Latin America, Africa). Third World poverty, it was argued, was not a result of local failures in the periphery but rather a direct consequence of the exploitative relations between First World and Third World—between Metropole and satellite.

According to the dependency scholars (or dependistas), economic dependency came about because these peripheral satellites were encouraged to produce what they did not consume (e.g., primary products) and to consume what they did not produce (e.g., manufactured/industrial goods). Where modernization theorists saw colonialism as part of an “awakening” of modernity, the dependency approach highlighted how colonialism underdeveloped the periphery and continued to do so, neocolonially, after the end of the empire. Unlike modernization approaches, dependency theorists sought to view development in historical context, arguing that colonialism had helped to put in place a set of dependent relations between core and periphery and highlighting the need to think about the forms of colonial and postcolonial incorporation into the world economy.

In Latin America, André Gunder Frank made the relations between “North” and “South” a key point of focus in his study of “The Development of Underdevelopment.” Frank argued that the relations between the Metropole and the satellite countries were exploitative, pointing out that any surplus generated in the satellite countries was siphoned off to the North, breeding conditions of underdevelopment. Dependency theorists set out to oppose the modernization approach point by point to such an extent that, in a way, they ended up “checkmating” each other. Modernization theory had envisaged that Third World countries would gradually progress and evolve toward an urban-based, Western lifestyle of consumption, but the dependency scholars argued that unequal capitalist relations and a history of colonialism denied the Third World a chance of ever being fully industrialized. Unlike the modernization theorists, the dependency scholars focused more at the international and global scales and spaces of development, examining the structural relations of nation-states to the world economy.

Just as the modernization approach was adopted in a variety of ways by international institutes and bilateral donors, the dependency school was made up of all those opposed to U.S. policy and by groups of what were called “Third Worldists.” Theorizing the manipulation of the periphery by the core was an important process given that by this time a variety of state socialisms had begun to appear (e.g., in Cuba, Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Vietnam). The dependency approach had important roots in the United States, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia and later spread out into a variety of regions, including Africa, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. The economic program pursued by Iran during the 1980s, for example, reflected many of the ideas on “delinking” and self-sufficiency propagated by dependency theorists such as Frank and Samir Amin.

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