9_Law and State_Volume 17

Underdevelopment, Dcpcndcncia, and Modernization Theory 51
capitalist power par excellence, so too they have little to say about, e. g.,
Spain’s or Portugal’s course of development from a “late feudal-early
capitalist” - however one might agree to classify each individual case -
imperial colonial power into a developing country. Of interest precisely
in this context is the observation that A. G. Frank, one of the founding
fathers of the dependencia theories, in a controversy with the Weberians
and with almost total disregard of dependencia schema, succeeded in
providing an extremely important contribution to the explanation of the
developmental divergence between the U.S. and Latin America8.
The dependencistas have until now not presented any stringent, empirical
investigations to support the theory that the development of the
formally independent Latin American states in the 19th century would
necessarily have had to take place in the way in which it actually did. In
the name of the purity of the dogma, too often the complexity of historical
truth has been concealed10. The inadequacies of the dependencia
approach as a historical-analytical category cannot be entered into in
further detail here. As its essential weakness, we can emphasize that the
multilayered quality of historical complexes of events and structures, such
as colonialism, imperialism or even dependencia, cannot be comprehended
using the dichotomous approach development v. underdevelopment.
An analysis of contemporary Latin American problems reveals some
particularly important incriminating logical and empirical weaknesses in
existing dependencia theories. In the following, these shall be looked into
in more detail.
All dependencia theories start from the assumption that dependencia
is caused by the uneven world economic development of capitalism which
unilaterally benefits the industrial metropolises. This claim intentionally
ignores similarly plausible, e. g., more complex possible explanations; this
it does on the basis of an illogical statement. It surely cannot be denied,
for example, that the United States of America is a capitalist country,
and that Latin America is in manifold ways economically, culturally, etc.
dependent upon the U.S.A. However, this sequence of statements by no
means implies that the first statement caused the situation described in
the second statement. Great powers in all ages have forced dependency
upon weaker neighbours. Soviet imperialism is no less a reality than the
capitalist version. Moreover, there are startling parallels between the kind
of economic dependency which the U.S.A. imposes on Latin America and
that which the Soviet Union has attempted to implement in, e. g., postwar
Europe. Even the agents and clientele classes belonging to the infrastructure
of dependencia are not difficult to ascertain in the socialist states of
eastern Europe. Though there may be differences in the degree of penetra­