Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T20:51:31.080Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Studying Latin American Politics: Some Implications of A Dependencia Approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2022

Richard R. Fagen
Richard R. Fagen*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

This essay deals with the study of Latin American politics in the United States. The basic question asked is: “Where do we go from here if we take seriously that body of thought loosely and somewhat misleadingly known as dependency theory?” It argues that even though the literature is at times incomplete, confusing, and contradictory, the issues to which it directs us warrant our most serious attention.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , 1977 , pp. 3 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

During the course of writing this essay, I received valuable comments and criticisms from Wayne Cornelius, Patricia Weiss Fagen, Kaiman Silvert, Barbara Stallings, and the editors and unnamed readers from the Latin American Research Review. The Center for Research in International Studies at Stanford University provided financial support.

References

Notes

1. This theme of the differential “need to know” among Latin Americanists, North and South, and the sociology-of-knowledge-and-politics assumptions underlying it, are developed in more detail in the “Introduction” to Julio Cotler and Richard R. Fagen (eds.), Latin America and the United States: The Changing Political Realities (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974).

2. Studies of Latin American studies, overviews of the field, etc., are not lacking. In chronological order, among the more important are: “Latin American Studies in the United States, Proceedings of a Meeting Held in Chicago, 6-9 November 1959,” mimeographed (New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 1960); Charles Wagley (ed.), Social Science Research on Latin America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964); Manuel Diégues Júnior and Bryce Wood (eds.), Social Science in Latin America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967); Stanley R. Ross (ed.), Latin America in Transition: Problems in Training and Research (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1970); Bryce Wood, “Introduction,” in Joint Committee on Latin American Studies and Joint Committee on the Foreign Area Fellowship Program, “Report on Activities, 1959-1970”; Martin C. Needler, “The Current Status of Latin American Studies Programs,” LARR 6, no. 1 (Spring 1971): 119-39; Michael Potashnik and Bryce Wood, “Government Funding for Research in Latin America, 1970-1971,” LARR 8, no. 1 (Spring 1973):135-46. The most massive compendium of data covering all areas, not just Latin America, is Richard D. Lambert, Language and Area Studies Review, Monograph 17 (Philadelphia, Penna.: American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1973). Additionally, see the provocative critique by Gláucio Ary Dillon Soares, “Latin American Studies in the United States,” LARR 11, no. 2 (1976): 51-69.

3. The FAPP “Report on Activities,” p. 26, estimates that more than $40 million of foundation and government funding flowed to Latin American studies in the United States in the 1960-70 period. This estimate excludes contract funding through AID or other governmental agencies (amounting to perhaps 90 percent of all government funding), funds from international agencies, and support generated internally through university budgets. From other sources cited in the previous note, I have estimated (conservatively) that U.S. colleges and universities were spending no less than an average of $40 million annually during the 1960s on the direct costs associated with Latin American studies programs.

4. This relationship between the subfield of comparative politics and trends in the study of Latin American politics is clearly drawn in the descriptions and prescriptions of Merle Kling. See his “The State of Research on Latin America: Political Science,” in Wagley, Social Science Research. Kling argues vigorously that the traditionalism of much North American work on Latin American politics must give way to the mainstream, modernizing trends in comparative politics already fully visible in 1963 when Kling wrote. As a sidelight on the conference for which Kling and the others represented in the Wagley volume prepared their papers, it is interesting to note that the special 11-member political science group assembled to discuss the Kling paper contained two academics working full time in the Department of State, one member of the Foreign Service, and one Lieutenant Colonel from the U.S. Army Special Warfare School, Fort Bragg (Wagley, Social Science Research, p. 334). In no other disciplinary group was the U.S. government so generously represented.

5. The most influential theorist working this newer vein was Samuel Huntington, whose Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968), more than any other book, signaled the shift.

6. For relevant bibliography from the early years (through 1963) see Kling, “The State of Research.” For an updating of Kling through the end of the decade, see John D. Martz, “Political Science and Latin American Studies,” LARR 6, no. 1 (Spring 1971):73-99.

7. José Nun, “Notes on Political Science and Latin America,” in Diégues and Wood, Social Science in Latin America. Although largely an evaluation of different theoretical-methodological approaches to the study of politics in Latin America, the essay also can and should be read as a sophisticated critique of the kind of political science advocated by Kling (and in large measure practiced in the United States during the 1960s). It should be borne in mind, of course, that political science-as-discipline hardly existed in Latin America. Thus, there was little fertile institutional soil in which the political development perspective could take root. Such was not the case in the field of Latin American sociology, however, where a very substantial northern intellectual transplant flourished during the 1960s. For an interesting account of the intellectual biographies of three leading Latin American sociologists, see Joseph A. Kahl, Modernization, Exploitation, and Dependency in Latin America: Germani, González-Casanova, and Cardoso (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1976). Kahl neatly captures the sociological spirit of the age, with all its multiple influences and tensions, in the biographies of these three scholars.

8. An early and influential example of the South-North influence (written in 1969) was Susanne Jonas Bodenheimer, The Ideology of Developmentalism: The American Paradigm-Surrogate for Latin American Studies (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Professional Papers in Comparative Politics 2, no. 15 [1971]). For a more recent example see “Introduction,” in Ronald Chilcote and Joel C. Edelstein (eds.), Latin America: The Struggle with Dependency and Beyond (New York: Schenkman, 1974). See also José Ocampo and Dale L. Johnson, “The Concept of Political Development,” in James Cockcroft et al., Dependence and Underdevelopment (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday-Anchor, 1972); and James Petras, “Latin American Studies in the U.S.: A Critical Assessment,” in James Petras, Politics and Social Structure in Latin America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970). Again, it should be emphasized that paradigmatic critiques of this sort do not occur in Latin American studies independently of what is going on in the parent discipline or subfield. As an example of the kind of criticism being leveled at the developmentalists in comparative politics (interestingly enough, written several years after the Bodenheimer article), see Mark Kesselman, “Order or Movement? The Literature of Political Development as Ideology,” World Politics 26, no. 1 (October 1973):138-54.

9. No debate related to the dependency literature is as heated as that which derives from varying interpretations of the causes and consequences of these unequal relationships. For the majority of Latin Americans working in the tradition it is clear that peripheral capitalism is the historical experience in which they are interested. Thus, the frameworks they use relate definitionally to the historical specificity, development, and dynamics of capitalism in the Americas (and by implication, elsewhere). Even many who would not classify themselves as Marxists share this definitional posture.

On the other hand, critics of this perspective (almost always North American academics rooted in the development literature mentioned earlier) ask “But what about Communist dependence”—by which they almost always mean forms of Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe and possibly Cuba. (Often, of course, they are saying little more than “If you are criticizing the United States for dominating Latin America, then you should also be criticizing the Soviet Union for its sins”.) For one of the few essays taking up this challenge directly, see Guy J. Gilbert, “Socialism and Dependency,” Latin American Perspectives 1, no. 1 (Spring 1974):107-23.

At the most abstract level, it is possible to reach agreement on the partial truth contained in the old adage that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer (or its biblical version “For unto everyman that hath, shall be given, and he shall have abundance. But from him that hath not, shall be taken away—even that which he hath” (Matt., 25:29). But the level of abstraction and ahistoricism implicit in such overarching representations robs them of much of their heuristic utility. Such is the case, for example, with Johan Galtung's structural theory of imperialism (based on ideas of unequal exchange and intended to apply equally to the United States and the Soviet Union) that, for all its formal elegance, does not really advance understandings of the question of underdevelopment in Latin America. See Johan Galtung, “A Structural Theory of Imperialism,” Journal of Peace Research, no. 2 (1971), pp. 81-117.

10. As quoted and elaborated in Richard Fagen, The Transformation of Political Culture in Cuba (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1969), pp. 147ff.

11. See for example the essays and references in Howard J. Wiarda (ed.), Politics and Social Change in Latin America: The Distinct Tradition (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974); and James M. Malloy (ed.), Authoritarianism and Corporatism in Latin America (Pittsburgh, Penna.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977).

12. See, for example, Philippe C. Schmitter (ed.), Military Rule in Latin America: Functions, Consequences, and Perspectives (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1973); Richard C. Rankin, “The Expanding Institutional Concerns of the Latin American Military Establishments: A Review Article,” LARR 9, no. 1 (Spring 1974):81-108; and Abraham F. Lowenthal, “Armies and Politics in Latin America,” World Politics 28, no. 1 (October 1974): 107-30.

13. On Brazil see Fernando Henrique Cardoso, “Associated Dependent Development: Theoretical and Practical Implications,” in Alfred Stepan (ed.), Authoritarian Brazil (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973). On Peru, see Julio Cotler, “The New Mode of Political Domination in Peru,” in Abraham Lowenthal (ed.), The Peruvian Experiment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975). A key English language contribution to the theoretical debate on the new authoritarianisms in Latin America was made by Guillermo A. O'Donnell in his Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism (Berkeley, Calif.: Institute of International Studies, 1973).

14. As is suggested by the examples just cited, the research implications of this approach are quite formidable. One cannot just study “politics” as variously understood in North American political science and political sociology circa the 1960s (which is where much U.S. training in Latin American studies is still located intellectually). Rather, the scholar assumes the double responsibility of extending his or her work in time and space while developing methodologies appropriate to capturing the dialectical (and highly complex) nature of the relationships posited.

15. The first two points made in this section are not unique to dependency thinking. They are, not surprisingly, the common property of most if not all radical and/or socialist perspectives on the question of equity-in-distribution in capitalist societies.

16. For the noneconomist at least, one of the clearest and most humane expositions of this point of view is to be found in Arthur M. Okun, Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1975).

17. Codes of conduct and joint ownership notwithstanding, the antiequity implications of the foreign investment scenario are profound. The scenario affects (negatively as far as improved distribution is concerned in the vast majority of cases) the types of technology that will be used, the kinds of commodities that will be produced, the patterns of consumption that will be encouraged, the way in which labor will be rewarded and allocated (and displaced), and the regions or sectors of the nation that will be advantaged. Many of the same arguments could also be made for development based on domestic private investment as well, although the critique has more bite when applied to the MNCs.

18. The “extensive body of descriptive and theoretical writing” about socialism is not, however, as rich and well constructed as the writing about capitalism and the politics of capitalism. And in the Latin American case, as suggested above, the gap between analyses of the current situation and understandings of alternative futures is not bridged by the dependency literature. At least classical Marxism, although centered on the analysis of capitalism, developed a hypothesized “pathway” into socialism (full development of the productive forces, increasing contradictions, a dialectical resolution, etc.). The fact that the passing of time has not been kind to this hypothesized link between present and future in no way detracts from its audaciousness and theoretical importance. The dependency literature, in part because of its low theoretical as opposed to conceptual-descriptive content, makes no such analysis of change processes and few predictions as to how contemporary problems and contradictions might be resolved in the future.

19. These and related themes are explored at length in Cotler and Fagen, Latin America and the United States. A useful, recent ordering of the literature on inter-American relations can be found in Jorge I. Domínguez, “Consensus and Divergence: The State of the Literature on Inter-American Relationships in the 1970s,” manuscript (Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, 1976).

20. The phrase “increased decisional latitude” may seem tepid in contrast to the bold, antiimperialist language that runs through much of the more polemical dependency literature. But at root the question raised here is compatible with most contemporary dependency thinking about imperialism. Within the general dependency framework, there is widespread agreement that the kind of economic development strategy undertaken makes the peripheral state vulnerable to new forms of political pressure and influence—emanating directly from the center and/or from the local class allies of the center (the “antination within the nation”). These possibilities were most nakedly illustrated by the covert and overt U.S. campaign against the Allende government, a campaign very intelligently linked to domestic Chilean interests and using Chile's historical indebtedness and dependence on private and public credit (a legacy of previous governments) to intensify the economic and thus the political problems of the Popular Unity government. However, although in general dependency perspectives are quite useful for suggesting the new architectonics of vulnerability, they are usually weak to the point of uselessness in suggesting when and in what fashion the assaults will come—now that gunboats are going out of style. A fairly typical hypothesis is that “imperalism will defend itself whenever its basic interests are threatened,” hardly a profound proposition.

21. For an elaboration of this and related themes, see Richard R. Fagen, “The ‘New Dialogue’ on Latin America,” Society 11, no. 6 (September-October 1974): 17, 24-30.

22. No claim is made here that these fairer shares, if won, will necessarily enhance the well-being of the majority of persons living in peripheral countries. To the contrary, the perspective emphasized in the previous section argues that under dependent capitalist forms of economic organization in the periphery, the aggregate enrichment of the economy will not result in significant improvements in equity. I have developed this theme at much greater length in “Equity in the South in the Context of North-South Relations,” forthcoming in a book edited by Roger Hansen and published by McGraw-Hill.

23. The SELA charter describes it as “an organization for consultation, coordination, and joint economic and social promotion.” Information available to date suggests that SELA will initially attempt to be most active in two areas: the promotion of multicountry economic projects and information systems, and the formulation of unified Latin American positions for bargaining in international economic forums. See “The Latin American Economic System,” GIST, Bureau of Public Affairs, Department of State, April 1976.

24. For the key conciliatory speech see Henry Kissinger, “Global Consensus and Economic Development,” delivered by Daniel P. Moynihan to the Seventh Special Session of the U.N. General Assembly, 1 September 1975.

25. See Henry Kissinger, “Brazil and the United States: The Global Challenge,” 19 February 1976, (Washington, D.C.: Department of State, Bureau of Public Affairs).