9_Law and State_Volume 17

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,