The nation-state and underdevelopment

Third World Quarterly

Volumn 16, Issue 4, 1995, Pages 595-618

  Carter, Alan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

DEVELOPMENT THEORY; ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT; HUNTINGTON; NATION STATE; POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT; S.; STATE-PRIMACY THEORY; THEORETICAL APPROACH; THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK; UNDERDEVELOPMENT;

EID: 0029506812     PISSN: 01436597     EISSN: 13602241     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/01436599550035852     Document Type: Article

References (64)

1. G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’ s Theory of History: A Defence, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.
2. See Alan Carter, Marx: A Radical Critique, Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books, 1988, section 6.3; also see Alan Carter, ‘Functional explanation and the state’, in Paul Wetherly (ed), Marx’ s Theory of History: The Contemporary Debate, Aldershot: Avebury, 1992. This theoretical approach has been employed to construct an environmentalist political philosophy in Alan Carter, ‘Towards a green political theory’, in Andrew Dobson & Paul Lucardie (eds), The Politics of Nature: Explorations in Green Political Theory, London: Routledge, 1993.
3. For example, Colin Leys informs us that ‘A survey of US professors in 1974 found that Political Order was the book most often cited as among the amost important in the field ’. Colin Leys, ‘Samuel Huntington and the end of classical modernization theory’, in H Alavi and T Shanin (eds), Introduction to the Sociology of ‘Developing Societies’, London: Macmillan, 1982, p 349 n.
4. As James Manor notes, ‘political development’ and ‘dependency’, which are ‘the two paradigms or schools of thought that have dominated the study of Third World politics over the last quarter-century[,] have encountered serious difficulties’. James Manor, ‘Politics and the neo-liberals’, in Christopher Colclough & James Manor (eds), States or Markets? Neo-liberalism and the Development Policy Debate, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991, p 306.
5. However, ‘Some economists looked to the neo-liberal paradigm for the study of economic systems, which gained infiuence just as the a political development and a dependency schools were encountering difficulties … But analysts of Third World politics have shown scarcely a fiicker of interest in this body of ideas. This is partly because the neo-liberal economists, like the earlier and more optimistic generation of development economists against whom they are reacting, lack a theory of the state.’ James Manor, ‘Introduction’, in Manor (ed), Rethinking Third World Politics, London: Longman, 1991, pp 9-10 n. Yet the nature of state structures will determine the interests of state actorsł for example, the structure of the Third World state explains the need to satisfy certain clients if state actors in the Third World are to remain in power.
6. See for example, Gabriel Almond, ‘Introduction: a functional approach to comparative politics’, in Gabriel Almond & James Coleman (eds), The Politics of the Developing Areas, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960, p 53.
7. Samuel P Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968, p 4.
8. Ibid., p 363.
9. Ibid., p 266.
10. Ibid., p 196
11. Ibid., p 93.
12. Ibid., pp 7-8. The value he places on authority visibly strays into authoritarianism when he writes: ‘Societies, such as Sparta, Rome, and Britain, which have been admired by their contemporaries for the authority and justice of their laws, have also been admired for the coherence and discipline of their armies. Discipline and development go hand in hand.’ Ibid, pp 23-24.
13. See ibid, pp 145-146.
14. As he writes: ‘the more backward a society is, the more progressive the role of its military; the more advanced a society becomes, the more conservative and reactionary becomes the role of the military’. Ibid, p 221.
15. See ibid, p 245. And as he adds: ‘The upshot of democracy is to disperse power among a plurality of more traditional elites. By increasing the power of rural groups democracy also tends to promote policies aimed at rural and agrarian rather than urban and industrial development.’ Ibid. In which case, it is difficult to see why a modernising military would be committed to democracy.
16. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, New York: Academic Press, 1974, especially p 350.
17. AndreâGunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967, p xi.
18. AndreâGunder Frank, ‘The development of underdevelopment’, Monthly Review, 41(2), 1989, p 44.
19. Ibid., pp 44-45.
20. The claim that Latin America has been capitalist since the 16th century has been the subject of much controversy. See especially, Ernesto Laclau, ‘Feudalism and capitalism in Latin America’, New Left Review, 67, May/June 1971. Much of the disagreement concerns the issue of whether exploitation is based solely in production or also in exchange. On this point see John Roemer, ‘New directions in the Marxian theory of exploitation and class’, in Roemer (ed), Analytical Marxism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
21. However, the view (see Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, pp 119-120) that super-exploitation of the Third World will eventually drive its peoples to rebel seems rather optimistic. As Huntington points out: ‘The simple poverty thesis falls down because people who are really poor are too poor for politics and too poor for protest. They are indifferent, apathetic, and lack exposure to the media and other stimuli which would arouse their aspirations in such manner as to galvanize them into political activity.’ Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, p 52. This implies that if underdevelopment is in fact taking place, the prospects for revolution might be even grimmer than they would be otherwise.
22. See Bill Warren, ‘Imperialism and capitalist industrialization’, New Left Review, 81, September/October 1973. Also see Bill Warren, Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism, ed J Sender, London: New Left Books, 1980. For criticisms of Warren, see Arghiri Emmanuel, ‘Myths of development versus myths of underdevelopment’, and Philip McMichael, James Petras & Robert Rhodes, ‘Imperialism and the contradictions of development’, both in New Left Review, 85, May/June 1974. Many of Warren’ s conclusions depend upon misleading aggregations of data. Moreover, his prescription is one of unhindered capitalist expansion as a prelude to socialism. A more environmentally irresponsible strategy is hard to imagine.
23. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, ‘Dependency and development in Latin America’, New Left Review, 74, July/August 1972, p 89.
24. Ibid., p 94.
25. Warren, ‘Imperialism and capitalist industrialization’, p 12.
26. Stephen Krasner, Structural Confiict: The Third World against Global Liberalism, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985, p 181.
27. Teodor Shanin, ‘Class, state, and revolution: substitutes and realities’, in Alavi & Shanin, Introduction to the Sociology of ‘Developing Societies’, p 316. Even a leading dependency theorist notes that, ‘Paradoxically, the military have taken upon themselves the task of modernization’. T Dos Santos, ‘The crisis of development theory and the problem of dependence in Latin America’, in Henry Bernstein (ed), Underdevelopment and Development: The Third World Today, London: Penguin, 1976, p 70. In addition, Ralph Miliband, a major Marxist theorist of the state, when discussing post-colonial countries, admits that ‘the relation between economic and political power has been inverted’. See Ralph Miliband, Marxism and Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, pp 108-109. In other words, the moment one examines the Third World, it becomes clear that Marxist theory has everything upside down.
28. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, p 355.
29. Ibid., p 134.
30. See ibid., p 349.
31. Hamza Alavi, ‘The state in post-colonial societies: Pakistan and Bangladesh’, in Harry Goulbourne (ed), Politics and State in the Third World, London: Macmillan, 1979, pp 40-41.
32. John S Saul, ‘The state in post-colonial societies: Tanzania’, in Ralph Miliband & John Saville (eds), The Socialist Register 1974, London: Merlin, 1974, p 349.
33. See Alavi, ‘The state in post-colonial societies’, pp 41-42.
34. See Christopher Clapham, Third World Politics, London: Croom Helm, 1985, p 48.
35. Marylin Waring, If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics, London: Macmillan, 1989, p 171.
36. Samuel E Finer, 'State- and nation-building in Europe: the role of the military’, in Charles Tilly (ed), The Formation of National States in Western Europe, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975, p 96. This point is also acknowledged in Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, p 356.
37. In this respect, the State-Primacy approach is a theoretical advance on Huntington, for as Leys points out, Marx’ s conception of revolution refers to a transition ‘from an epoch dominated by one mode of production (such as feudalism or capitalism) to a new epoch dominated by a new mode of production. For Huntington, however, a revolution refers … simply to any a rapid, fundamental, and violent change. ’ Leys, 'Samuel Huntington and the end of classical modernization theory’, p 346. Unlike Huntington’ s far less specific approach, the State-Primacy Theory is a theory of revolution in this sense.
38. Sadly: 'Since the early 1960s, military spending in developing countries as a whole has increased fivefold.’ G. H. Brundtland et al, Our Common Future, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, p 298.
39. Robert H Bates, Essays on the Political Economy of Rural Africa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, p 147.
40. Ibid., p 109.
41. Ibid., p 110.
42. Ibid., pp 110-111.
43. Ibid., p 127.
44. Ibid., p 125.
45. Ibid., p 128.
46. Michael P Todaro, Economic Development in the Third World, New York: Longman, 1985, p 414.
47. Brundtland et al, Our Common Future, p 299.
48. In the words of the Brandt Report: ‘It is a terrible irony that the most dynamic and rapid transfer of highly sophisticated equipment and technology from rich to poor countries has been in the machinery of death.’ Willy Brandt et al, North- South: A Programme for Survival, London: Pan, 1980, p 14.
49. Tim O’ Riordan, Environmentalism, London: Pion, 1981, p 22.
50. Ibid. Remarkably, ‘Global military spending in 1985 was well in excess of $900 billion. This was more than the total income of the poorest half of humanity.’ Brundtland et al, Our Common Future, p 297.
51. As Michael Redclift observes: ‘Criticism tends to overlook the essentially rational and systematic way in which TNCs operate, usually with the support or complicity of national governments in less developed countries’ (emphasis added). Michael Redclift, Sustainable Development: Exploring the Contradictions, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987, p 73. ‘Indeed,’ Redclift continues, ‘the state is frequently the guarantor of TNCs, not only by providing a legal basis for their operation, but by underwriting them financially.’ Ibid.
52. See Robin Murray, ‘The internationalization of capital and the nation state’, New Left Review, 67, May/June 1971, pp 91-92.
53. However, advanced states do not act as they do with respect to the Third World simply in order to benefit their own capitalists. As the Brandt Report insists: ‘The major powers sell weapons mainly to suit their own foreign policy or to maintain regional balances, rather than to benefit their economies.’ Brandt et al, North- South, p 120.
54. Krasner, Structural Conflict, p 28.
55. This can be used to help explain international economic crises. States have an interest in developing their own 'strategic industries’, which enable ‘military self-sufficiency and national economic independence’. Gautam Sen, The Military Origins of Industrialisation and International Trade Rivalry, London: Frances Pinter, 1984, p 6. As Sen writes: 'Since the benefits of economies of scale, both static and dynamic, can be reaped by longer production runs the latecomer countries will … need to establish a level of capacity, when they industrialise, that allows them to reach the competitive threshold already prevalent in the firstcomer countries, with the attendant need for adequate export markets as well. Thus, they in turn may establish a level of productive capacity in excess of local consumption levels and hope to carve out a share in the international market. A further element which accentuates the problems of excess capacity is the need to ensure the ability to produce adequate quantities during war-time. Thus, the planned capacity may well exceed strictly national peace-time needs.’ Ibid, p 8. Such an account could be expanded to explain ‘Kondratieff cycles’, which Gilpin insists lack a convincing causal mechanism. See Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987, pp 100-106. In the run-up to major wars, the productive capacity in each country’ s strategic industries would rise to a point where global overproduction ensued. If industry remained intact after the war, there would be a global surplus and a recession would follow until excess capacity was cut back. If, on the other hand, industry was severely damaged during the war, there would be space for growth. This might explain why high growth occurred after the second of the two World Wars, but a depression fell between them.
56. Manor, ‘Politics and the neo-liberals’, p 309.
57. John Toye, quoted in ibid.
58. ‘[I]n the case of Japan, industrialisation was engendered by the State’ s efforts to create a domestic defence industry during the third quarter of the nineteenth century.’ Sen, The Military Origins of Industrialisation and International Trade Rivalry, p 9. Interestingly, the state has also played a major role in the changes taking place in China: ‘Economic liberalization in China has … been attended by the shrinkage of certain party and state agencies and roles, but also by the very substantial growth of the state, both as an arena within which capitalism can operate and as an enabler of private enterprises.’ Manor, ‘Politics and the neo-liberals’, p 309.
59. Manor, ‘Introduction’, in Rethinking Third World Politics, p 2.
60. Gordon White, ‘Revolutionary socialist development in the Third World: an overview’, in Gordon White, Robin Murray & Christine White (eds), Revolutionary Socialist Development in the Third World, Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1983, p 6.
61. Robert Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, p 5.
62. See Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations, pp 72-80 for a summary of the theory of hegemonic stability.
63. Leo Panitch, ‘Globalisation and the state’, in Ralph Miliband & Leo Panitch, Socialist Register 1994: Between Globalism and Nationalism, London: Merlin Press, 1994, p 64.
64. Ibid., p 87.