ABSTRACT
This classic article by Andre Gunder Frank launched the Euro-American version of the approach to economic underdevelopment known as “dependency theory.” Modernization theory was the reigning approach to the problem of underdevelopment throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. As we saw in the last article, this approach assumes that economic development is a path that all nations will someday follow. Countries that have had difficulty acquiring the preconditions for development on their own will be able to borrow extensively from the advanced industrial countries, and thus will be able to set themselves in motion. Dependency theory rejects this view; it maintains that economic underdevelopment is not so much an original condition shared by all societies as it is something created from the outside by more advanced societies. Underdevelopment results when more-advanced societies use less-advanced ones as highly exploited segments of their own economy. Development for some is underdevelopment for others—it is “the development of underdevelopment.” The term “dependency” refers to the fact that one economic system has come to be inserted into the functioning of another, and in ways that work to the continued and perhaps increasing detriment of the less-developed partner. The initial form of economic dependency was colonialism. First Spain and Portugal, and then later England, France, the Netherlands, and other European societies, invaded less-developed regions in search of cheap labor and valued resources. They set up economic operations that impoverished those regions but progressively enriched the European powers. Later, after formal colonial ties were abolished, economic investment of the developed in the less-developed countries continued the tie of dependency in a new way. So long as economic dependency persists—so long as a less-developed country is tied by an economic umbilical cord to a more-developed one—the lesser partner lacks economic autonomy and is not free to pursue policies that would lead it into sustained development. It continues to stagnate or even deteriorates. For dependency theorists, the solution lies not in greater contact between advanced and less-developed countries—indeed, for them that is the source of the problem—but for the underdeveloped countries to cut the economic umbilical cord and strike out on their own, usually by way of a socialist revolution.
