9_Law and State_Volume 17

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Underdevelopment, Dcpendencia, and Modernization Theory 61 from involvement in the capitalist world market. However, they do not even discuss - but do implicidy assume to answer - whether following the desired revolution one s association with the socialist states or the establishment of socialism within the Latin American nation-state framework in themselves means the abolition of dependencia. It may be mentioned in passing that socialist states have always tacitly profited from existing dependencia relations; and, more recently, they have increasingly come into competition against the Third World countries by luring capitalist enterprises into their own countries with worthwhile investment opportunities and by attempting to obtain, in the most diverse ways, high credits from the governments of western industrialized states. Another marginal notation is the presumption that Marx, for very good reasons, may be regarded as a precursor of modernization theories27. The key question about which development policy measures to take following a successful socialist revolution is in general passed over by the Marxist dependencistas. The continuation of industrialization, to which at present no alternative is visible, would in any case have to exact exceptional sacrifices from the Latin American population. To characterize economic growth as having great regional disparities or to denounce the working and entrepreneurial as having been the sole beneficiaries of industrialization policies in Latin America (when in fact they have only been one of the most important beneficiaries) is not to provide the historically unprovable evidence that industrialization can ever be possible in a way which offers simultaneous and equal advantages and sacrifices to all citizens and all regions. Let us assume the rightness of the apparently extremely naive notion that, if an unselfish stream of capital and technological aid were to flow from the socialist state, the revolution would have “arrived”. Even then we would have to ask whether new dependency relations would not have to develop. Certain basic laws of the market are not abolished, even in intercourse with fraternal socialist states, because certain structural compulsions are still at work. With the “international socialist division of labour” the principle of comparative advantage has been recognized as being also applicable to the socialist economic bloc as, e. g., Cuba discovered in 1962. Even Marxist observers (e. g., Huberman and Sweezy) have confirmed that the Cuban development has suffered under a forced specialization in raw sugar production within the framework of socialist division of labour-8. If we assume the universality of the principle of comparative advantage and if at the same time we determine that until now the price for violating this principle, which Latin American industrialization has pai , has usually been an extremely great impediment on intra-Latin American
62 Johann Hellwege foreign trade and the possibility of equal economic intercourse with the industrialized states, then it seems admissible to conclude that die underdeveloped countries must see the necessity of concentrating their endeavours in the export sectors in which they can produce most price-efficiently. Every specialization of the export economies simultaneously takes account of the needs of other countries, and the result is what, e. g., Dos Santos has described as dependencia. His observation that private and national interests must be eliminated so that a world economic integration without relations of dependency could be possible, amounts to a proposal to “dissolve” nations’ dependency relations by abolishing the nations. Quite apart from the utopian character of such a proposal, such an approach could hardly be made palatable to Latin American governments and Latin Americans, for the strength of nationalism is unabated-9. The bourgeois-nationalist group within the dependencia school (e. g., Cardoso, Sunkel, Jaguaribe) starts from a continuum of dependencianon-dependencia and thus is increasingly able to discuss degrees of dependencia and differences in the character of dependencia (e. g., trade dependency, capital dependency). Its greater relation to reality results from its rejection of rigorous, schematic mental constructs. One is however struck by the fact that, as this grouping reflects upon the development of alternative strategies for the elimination of dependencia, it still resurrects modernization theorems, albeit in modified form. With its discussion of the framework for organizational policy and its emphasis on the role of the state’s power, with its reference to sustaining groups of development policy (say in the form of a “progressive” military), with the broad area which it accords to Latin American integration policy in the discussion of alternatives of industrialization, and not least of all, with its concession of participation opportunities to foreign enterprises, the originally radical verdicts of the dependencia discussion are increasingly falling into the realm of the forgotten. By contrast, one finds relatively frequent interconnections with modernization theory as set down, for example, by Bendix, Gerschenkron or Eisenstadt30. The dependencia discussion has not provided any economic policy alternatives to the import of “western” capitalism or “western” industrialization in those regions where the preconditions for the development of an autonomous capitalism or autonomous industrialization were not or are not extant. Perhaps this explains why the dependencia theories enunciated from a Marxist viewpoint are being attacked with increasing vehemence. The significance of the dependencia discussion, therefore, should not be sought primarily in the scientific sphere, but apparently has more to do with the fact that it enabled an indigenous self-awareness,
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