ABSTRACT
Any attempt to place third world states in the context of global relationships must start by emphasising their dependence on and their penetration by external interests. It is not simply that on any index of international power and status, third world states come consistently at the bottom of the table; it is more that they were for the most part created by the external world in the first place, in the form of colonialism, and continue to be bound into it by economic, strategic and cultural links which they can break only with great danger and difficulty. Any chart of the flow of economic transactions, or still more sensitively of armaments, demonstrates the umbilical cord through which the third world is bound to the industrial states. Less easily measured, but equally significant, is the way in which these transactions create and sustain domestic political groups whose interests tie them to the outside. In this sense, the traditional dichotomy which separates domestic from external politics and policy simply does not exist.
