9_Law and State_Volume 17

60
Johann Hellwege
aware of the problems of industrialization in Latin America. This is the
great service of the dependencia school. Its frequently one-sided emphasis
upon external impediments to development has created an awarenessof
the problems of unequal, unjust relationships with foreign busmess. The
definition of the developmental process as modernization after the western
model has been righdy called into question. However, the tendency
to attempt to explain all faulty developments by “dependencia has
promoted an uncritical method of analysis. The explanatory schemata, in
the majority of individual cases, have not been adequate. Here, we certainly
do not wish to suggest that direct foreign investments in Latin
America are always and inevitably useful. It is an extremely difficult tas
to determine the effect of foreign investments, and one can hardly do it
justice using an undifferentiated approach. Here the dependencia school
is challenged to re-examine its theories against empirical detailed studies
and, where necessary, to modify them.
In this context, let us specifically point out the work by Kaufmann,
Chernotsky and Geller28. For the first time, seventeen Latin American
countries are compared, on the basis of known statistical materials, according
to hypotheses deduced from dependencia theories. Though here
we cannot discuss the rightness or wrongness of the statistical materials
or of individual hypotheses, let us point out that this “provisional test”
now transfers the burden of proving their hypotheses to the dependencistas
themselves. Precisely in the economic sphere, which is central to the
dependencia theories, the correlations are least convincing in this first
larger attempt at an empirical-statistical study.
In order to conclude the dependencia complex, we shall examine the
problem of alternatives, of alternative development policy strategies, in
so far as they are ascertainable in the various camps of the dependencia
school.
Where dependencia theories conceptualize dependencia - non-dependencia
as dichotomous variables, rather than as a continuum, they imply
that “non-dependencia” is potentially attainable. It is noteworthy, however,
that all variations of this theory avoid, with what amounts to trepidation,
providing a definition of what “non-dependenda” would be
and what a non-dependent economy would look like. To reject dependencia
- non-dependenda as a continuum is at the same time to reject
explicitly, or at least to encumber greatly, alternatives aimed at eliminating
dependencia.
To be sure, some dependencia theorists who espouse Marxism (e. g.,
Dos Santos, Bodenheimer, Cdrdova or Michelena), in accordance with
the logic of the basic dependencia theorem, demand a radical withdrawal