ABSTRACT
What actually happened at independence? There was a ceremony and a celebration, a lowering of the old flag and a raising of the new, a formal handover by some representative of the colonial administration of the ‘instruments of government’ to the designated successor. This symbolic action was also extremely exact. What the new rulers actually received was the right, usually conferred by elections before independence and confirmed by the outgoing colonial regime, to control the instruments of government-in the sense of the actual institutionscreated by that regime for its own use. These institutions then constituted ‘the state’, and it is this state which has emerged as the key to the structure of third world politics. The state has gained a similar centrality in those few third world countries which were not subject to formal colonialism through the process of monarchical modernisation which has already been touched on, and this centrality has been maintained in regions such as Latin America in which the experience of colonialism now lies well in the past.
