Dependency Theories In Latin America

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject Politics - Region: Middle and South America, grade: 2,0, University of Münster (Politikwissenschaft), language: English, abstract: “Dependence is dead, long live dependence and the class struggle” thus the title of an article by the dependency theorist André Gunder Frank, published in 1974 in Latin American Perspectives. Indeed, it has often been stated that dependency theory has lost its significance in explaining underdevelopment and has thus been “relegated to footnote status in the field of development studies”. Yet, in recent years, a lot of scholars have attempted to refute this statement, claiming that dependency theory still has its use in development studies, even though they have identified a number of flaws. Emerging in parallel with other development theories in the 1950s, dependency theory mainly focuses on Latin America, the most important authors being Prebisch, Furtado, dos Santos, Frank and finally Cardoso and Faletto, whose theory this paper concentrates on. Most of the different approaches within dependency theory share several Marxist core assumptions, such as the construction of base (means and relations of production) and superstructure (the political, cultural and social consequences of these means and relations of production). On the international level, all politics, whether external or domestic, takes place within the framework of the capitalist world economy which determines the behavior of actors as well as patterns of interaction between them. In this paper, the question of whether dependency theory as presented by Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto is still useful in explaining underdevelopment will be examined considering as example the events occurring in a typical example of an underdeveloped Latin American economy – Bolivia. The election of the left-wing populist Evo Morales potentially represents a paradigm shift for one of the poorest Latin American countries – a shift away from the neoliberal ideology towards a still capitalist regime with a socialist flavor to it (if one is to believe the declarations of Morales’s vice president Alvaro García Linera). Applying Cardoso and Faletto’s approach to the case of Bolivia reveals its strengths, but also some methodological as well as textual weaknesses. In order to show this, the first section will present their theory as exhibited in their publication Dependency and Development in Latin America and in an article published by Cardoso in the New Left Review in 1972. The second section focuses on the events in Bolivia, pointing at strong and weak points of the approach. Section four concludes.