| РЕЙВ 90х - ФОРЕВА
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Регистрация: 08.01.2002 Откуда: MoscWoW | 
2 июня 2004, 12:23
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#6 (ПС)
| cпасибо большое
я из этого слепил следующий бред
Dependency Theory (DT) was first introduced in 1950s by Raul Prebisch (Director of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America at that time). It was an attempt (mostly due to problems of the sort that were investigated surfacing in Latin America at the time) to establish an explanation encompassing something that existing approaches failed to predict - the correlation, a week perhaps, but non the less existent between the economic growth in the Developed Countries and the growing underdevelopment of the Least Developed Countries. This work was later extended by its followers to expand the range of existing explanations of economic development of the nations in international relations, as well as in 1976 in a paper by Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur generalized to a broader set of disciplines, such as systems theory, communications, and social sciences other than political science.
While it is not just the economic development, that matters in the study of international relations, and it is stressed greatly by the DT, that social factors of mini and meso-level of analisys such as for example literacy of the population do matter, economical would be the primary aspect to focus on in this case of evaluating the plausibility and the strength of DT argument in explaining the disproportional development among the LDC's , compared to the arguments presented by its competitors; the reason being the prevalence of variables dealing with the economical features in these arguments.
The main difference between DT which is more deterministic (being a Neo-Marxist theory) and competing Neo-Liberal and Critical perspectives, lies in identifying the importance of the independent variables - both, internal and external, affecting the development of nations, and as a result - the discrepancies in development among them. In case of DT, the external factors - the stimulating ones such as trade and foreign investments, and the stagnating ones - dependency on a certain export product, that's either agricultural or raw material, combined with terms of trade that are set generally by DCs and are not necessarily the most beneficial ones, - all of these are given preponderance over the internal factors such as exploitation, political instability and government efficacy, even though the latter are still considered to be playing a part in arriving at the explanation. Such an approach tends to be more successful in establishing the reasons for the disparity in international development.
While, it is probably true, that the initial forming of the nation states (those that exist in some form today) and the character of their further development can be explained by realism and constructivism based arguments, and the lack of any sort of wide economical interdependence among them up until circa XVI-XVII century would strengthen such arguments even further, at this age and time, in the emergence of global economy, an economically deterministic argument would most likely do well, and indeed it is the topic of this paper to show that.
Neo-Liberal approaches explain the development in Western countries quite well, however, the discrepancy between them, they mostly follow the idea of linear development models - where everything happens in stages - first, the traditional society reforms to fit a profile of a Western state more properly, then its government becomes more democratic-like, starts inputing the funds into non-profitable parts of local economy (or those with little profit), thus making it more divergent, thus more robust, then slowly, an integration into the global economy comes. Quite a perfect vision of the world for the World Bank and IMF. The problem with is that it does not quite work at this day and age. The LDCs tend to focus strictly on a very small number of products in which they have a comparative advantage, and a one-sided economy is not likely to put them at the same level with DCs anytime soon. This by the way was one of the main points of Imperialist theory (Lenin) that such situation will resolve in further increase of the gap between DCs and LDCs and as a result - unchallengeable dominance of the former over the latter. Allow me to quickly note also that DT and Lenin's Imperialism stem from the same school of thought.
Before I go into discussing the Critical perspective theories compared to Structuralist DT, I would like to show how exactly it is that DT would fit the description of international development into the current state of affairs.
As Neo-Liberal perspectives tend to see the process of development in rather an optimistic light, they also only see the positive external independent variables, and so attribute less attention, or rather pay the attention in the last place, since it is the internal factors that have to be dealt with in the first place in order to make it possible for the external ones to come into play, and ultimately, achieve growth. Dependence Theory approach sees such internal variables as exploitation, consumption, and political instability for what they are, but unlike the previously mentioned, it stresses greatly the added external factors of dependency on raw materials and agriculture, with generally, deteriorating trade terms, the everincreasing debt burden (relatively), combined with the returns on foreign investments taking funds out of the local economy leading to net loss of capital. The state of dual economy created by MNC's and international capital in general allows for creation of elite class which then increases the dependence by following the requirements of MNC's, rather than attempting to show their own economical initiative. Finally, DT argues for evening out of both - local (in the form of rural development) and global (in the form of peripheral development) economy, suggesting also that the trade with the DC's should be controlled if not minimized in order decrease dependence and to stimulate the economical growth according to the specifics of a given region. It is however, unclear, whether such an attempt would work, the import replacement strategies have been known to fail in the past.
The other theory falling in the range of Neo-Marxist perspective - World Systems Theory (Wallerstein) would seem like a more explicit view on the world system as a whole, explaining both - the development of DCs and the underdevelopment of LDCs as a part of the same historical process. It doesn't seem to me that there's a need to go into it since it isn't quite a competitor to the DT in terms of the factors that it identifies as prevalent.
The Critical perspectives critique the two theories above, particularly for being determinist, shifting their focus in determining the variables affecting the development process towards politics and ideology, stressing that economical dependence relays on ideological, cultural and other types of dependence, and as a result, this would allow the periphery to break away from that by realizing that such a situation exists and reverting to the indigenous culture and traditional ideology. Furthermore, R.W. Cox states that while capital is distributed globally, the access to it is fragmented in such a way that does not benefit the majority of the population of LDC's. Thus a need for non-governmental organization exists, as well as the need for a strong social movement among the population of LDC's (the "remnants" of Marx's exploitees, evidently). As good as all of that sounds to me, it would still seem, that to organize in any of the NGO's, the participants would have to use existing communication and transportation channels (due to the lower cost of doing so compared to establishing new ones) which were and are being established and are controlled by the DC's, and so that would only bring this whole thing back to cultural, ideological, communicational etc dependence, which critical theorists so dislike.
And so, while Dependence Theory is by no means a perfect and universal model, it is suited best for establishing an explanation of the current development process in the world, and perhaps may serve for quite some time as a break, preventing the process of economical integration from going awry by challenging the Neo-Modernist over-optimist claims of DC's, as well as providing the LDC's with somewhat realistic means to change the state of affairs, in an attempt to minimize the gap between themselves and DC's. Perhaps, if all goes well, one day DT might evem become WIDT (World InterDependence Theory) with all the states participating equally in each other's and consequently - the world's development. Whether cultural or ideological integration must occur at the same time, would seem to be a completely different question.
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