Dependency Theory and Gunder Frank's Emphasis on the External Factor
Robin Collins

André Gunder Frank helped break important ground in the shift of emphasis away from modernization theory as the mainstream development perspective for the "South". His was part of a pioneering critique of the role imperialism played in defining development, and of understanding the source of underdevelopment in the periphery. He became a leading proponent of dependency theory in the "North", even if he was not recognized as its key advocate in the "South"¹.

There were contemporaries of Frank who chose not to praise him, but rather to critique his popularization of a reductionist interpretation of history. In their view, his was a simplistic (mis)understanding of the dynamics of dependency. Conversely, it might also be argued that theirs was a misinterpretation of his emphasis on external factors and their fundamental role in imperialism.

This brief paper will look at this key critique of Frank's 1966 presentation of dependency theory, "The Development of Underdevelopment", to assess whether disagreements on this front of "external factors" were primarily over emphasis or substance.

Dependency theory was a reaction to mainstream theory (and its consequences) but was also a perspective for explaining the direction of unequal exchanges between developed capitalist countries and marginalized countries within the world system. Some critics of, as well as other converts to dependency theory shared Frank's abandonment of the modernization approach to development. Like him, they rejected the idea that Western European economic stages can be assumed to be universal, inevitable or appropriate for the South (or elsewhere). The type of historical development was particular to every country's own circumstances, they argued, and was not necessarily a contingent stage fitting into a predictable pattern.

The communist Marx and the anti-communist Rostow were found wanting and came in for explicit or inferential rebuke from all of the commentaries reviewed for this paper. The disenchantment arises from Marx and Rostow's embrace of universal stages of economic development -- with industrial capitalism at the progressive apex for Rostow, and socialism (or communism), for Marx. Yet, to the extent that "socialism" was an escape from or resolution of capitalist contradictions of social relations, it can be said that all of the critiques under analysis here show some affinity with or openly advocate some kind of independent socialist future (including Frank, 1966; Cordoso and Faletto (explicitly)1979; Valenzuela and Valenzeula, 1978; Griffin, 1969; Burns, 1984; and Wallerstein, 1979.) All can also be said to be inspired by Marxian concepts, while rejecting "orthodox" Marxism in the area of inevitable stages of development.

They all also reject the "Western" development model, and consider it to be a generally destructive form of dependency imposed by external economic, political, and social, if not military intervention. Griffin (1969, p. 81) wrote that "nearly all of the people encountered in today's underdeveloped areas were members of viable societies which could satisfy the economic needs of the community. Yet these societies were shattered when they came into contact with an expanding Europe."

There is less agreement among the critics over the weight that should be given to this "external factor" in fomenting the dependency. Gunder Frank's emphasis was clearly that "satellite" countries are acted upon, exploited and underdeveloped by external forces, conjoined by a system that "entirely penetrated even the apparently most isolated sectors of the underdeveloped world" (1969,108-9). But did he deny the important role of internal factors, the internal "momentum" of dominated societies and the responsibility of indigenous exploiting classes? Were they not also critical to the dependency equation and dialectic, in welcoming and then brandishing the development model?

Retrospectively, Frank has written that the crucial elements in the underdevelopment of Latin America and elsewhere in the Third World "were not so much 'internal' to any of its regions, let alone due to its peoples, but were generated by the structure and function of the 'world system' itself, of which all were integral parts." [Frank, 1998, 2.] The world system presumably was therefore an integrated entity in Frank's view and not just an external, nor just an internal, factor. Three decades after the release of his original position papers, it is difficult to believe that Frank, when highlighting the external factor, was intending to deny the role played by indigenous (Southern) elites in the consolidation of capitalism or at least in the development/underdevelopment of Latin America.

That is, however, the contention of many critics, including, allegedly, Cardoso and Faletto (who do not name him in their "Dependency and Development in Latin America" (1979)². They do agree with Frank that external influences were instruments in the penetration by imperialism, but they contend also that what is missed through "mechanistic conceptions of history" [1979, xiv -xvi] is that the system of domination "reappears as an 'internal' force through the social practices of local groups and classes" trying to establish and extend their own economic and social-political interests. Would Gunder Frank have disagreed with this analysis?

Dos Santos is quoted by Valenzuela and Valenzuela (1978, 544) as defining dependency as a relationship where conditioning of a country's economy is by way of the development and expansion of another country's. That process, they note, can be understood "by focusing on the total network of social relations as they evolve in different contexts over time." The Valenzuelas recognized the significant "linkages between external phenomena and internal class and power relations" which they said were unclear and in need of more precise study.

Some of that study of linkage has been offered by Cardoso and Faletto. While admitting that "Latin American societies have been built as a consequence of expansion" by international capitalist and colonial powers, their paper "does away" with the idea that class relations in dependent countries will mimic those of the center in their own evolution towards development. Early development of central capitalist states was different from what has occurred in Latin America³. Cardoso amd Faletto also recognize that there are features of capitalism "common to developed and dependent countries". But significantly, while capitalism may lie "behind the local economies",

"this is not sufficient to explain the concrete differences between, let us say, Brazilian slave plantations and the Argentinian economy in the nineteenth century. Both were 'capitalist' economies, but they were organized around different relations of production". (1979, xv)

Frank wrote that economic development in the underdeveloped countries will happen only in avoidance of capitalist diffusion from the outside inwards, an unlikely event in a world system dominated by imperialism. This might also be interpreted to mean that indigenous elites would not have harboured the same problems if given to their own devices. Frank does not say that, however, but in opposition to the "dual society thesis" he notes that "[h]istory shows that underdevelopment is not original or traditional" (that is, it is not internally-driven) and that "contemporary underdevelopment is in large part the historical product of past and continuing economic and other relations" between the satellite and metropoles.

Frank did acknowledge that within the "satellites" themselves, the exploitative relations "suck capital or economic surplus out of its own satellites and [..] channel part of this surplus to the world metropolis of which all are satellites." This process continues in service of the metropoles "which take advantage of this global, national, and local structure to promote their own development and the enrichment of their ruling classes." These relations, Frank argues, are the "principal and still surviving structural characteristics which were implanted in Latin America by the Conquest."

External factors dominate, yet Frank did not seem to assume that external factors prohibit entirely the playing out of internal efforts at development. He dod not believe that Brazil can "break out of the cycle of satellite development" because of its dependence upon externalities, but he recognizes that for Sao Paulo and other satellite industrial areas, development was initially "relatively autonomous" (1966, 111), mainly as a consequence of economic downturns in the colonial and imperialist centers. However, his intention here was to show that limited autonomy was conditional upon externalities, not that internal factors could triumph.

Immanuel Wallerstein suggested that there was also upward and downward mobility between the peripheral and core countries -- "chances" could be "seized" by semi-peripheral intermediary economies (1996, 184). There were "limited possibilities for transformation within the capitalist world-economy" and while his concept of a world system was similar to others in the sense of its complete integration, unlike Frank, Wallerstein did not see the placement of any particular state as static or unidirectional, or always dependent.

Frank argued that "metropoles tend to develop and the satellites to underdevelop", but also that isolated regions "initiated and experienced the most promising self-generating economic development of the classical industrial capitalist type" only in the absence of structurally-limiting ties to the centres. Frank offers Japan as the "classic case". Finally, Frank argues that "the most underdeveloped and feudal-seeming [regions] today are the ones which had the closest ties to the metropolis in the past" (1966,115).

Most critics seem to think this emphasis on the "external factor" is based upon an idealized, isolated South, somehow free of class or social contentions and deprivation, until the Colonial era. It follows from that logic that ever since colonialism, and throughout its continuum to modern imperialism, underdevelopment has ruled the roost. The Valenzuelas offer some guarded support for that position too:

"The domestic cultural and institutional features of Latin America are in themselves simply not the key variable accounting for the relative backwardness of the area, [although] domestic structures are certainly critical intervening factors." (1978, p. 544)

Frank writes that his research shows in the case of Chile, for example, that the introduction of the "monopolistic metropolis-satellite structure and development of capitalism into the Chilean domestic economy and society itself" had its origins in the Conquest. Therefore the structures were not indigenous. If underdevelopment is to be defined as a consequence of primarily external (colonial or imperialist) influences (as both Frank and the Valenzuelas seems to do), then it would follow also that, by definition, the pre-Conquest period could not have been "underdeveloped". However, the post-Conquest era extends from the early sixteenth century after Columbus to the present and Frank does not offer a historical comparison of social relations for the earlier pre-Conquest period. It is therefore difficult to test his hypothesis without access to better historical data.

Frank does find a correlation between "the contemporary underdeveloped institutions of the so-called backward or feudal domestic areas of an underdeveloped country" and the "so-called capitalist institutions of the supposedly more progressive areas" (1966, 109), which he says are no less the product of capitalism. Still, he fails to find (as Burns does) a relatively self-sufficient, developing society in the "satellite" regions during the colonial era.

Bradford Burns suggests in his study, "The Modernization of Underdevelopment: El Salvador, 1858-1931", that not only had Spanish institutions "imperfectly penetrated El Salvador" (1984, 165) but throughout the colonial period, El Salvador "bore a closer resemblance to its Indian past than to any of the bustling centers of colonial Spanish America. Like the other Central Americans, the Salvadoreans remained geographically isolated and largely self-sufficient" and "even if life did not mirror the ideal, a socioeconomic pattern that benefited many had emerged in the long colonial period and much briefer national period". In the mid-1850s, the economy was "largely" subsistent, with "leisurely" trade based on the export of indigo. But between 1860 and 1890, the country "acquired the economic, political and social institutions characterizing the rest of Latin America."

Unlike Gunder Frank, Burns explicitly points to the indigenous elites as largely responsible for wanting to "regenerate" their economic structures based upon models originating in the Northern industrial centers. Progress meant embracing the modernization framework. It was the El Salvadorean president, Gerardo Barrios, who purposefully engineered the accelerated "rural shift from neofeudalism to neocapitalism" that ultimately resulted in the development of a coffee export economy based on ownership of large estate coffee farms, and tragically, also the import of basic commodities, including food. Burns notes that "while the shift to coffee culture may have created an aura of progress around the plantation homes and the privileged areas of the capital, it proved increasingly detrimental to the quality of life of the majority" (1984, 178).

While Frank and Burns may disagree over the degree (or fact) of relative independence held by the indigenous elites within El Salvador (or Latin America, or the South, generally), they probably would agree on the eventual primacy of "external" factors (foreign ideology affecting the orientation of Barrios, foreign markets for the export of coffee and ultimately for the import of staples). Burns noted that relative autonomy was quickly reversed in favour of greater dependence (from the 1860s onwards for El Salvador) but through the collusion and complicity of internal elites. Frank points not to the punctuations of autonomy, but to the "continuum" that extended from Columbus through Barrios. It is perhaps still disingenuous to condemn Frank for single-minded reductionism if he was only arguing that external factors were the "primary" determinants and not the "sole" determinants of the decline into dependency. Certainly Burns sees a limited independent role for indigenous elites, and Frank sees less of this, except in times of economic depression, crisis and war in the metropoles.

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Gunder Frank's corrective to the domination of modernization theory is criticized for its mechanistic and static interpretation of history. Some argue convincingly, that an emphasis on external features in isolation, reflected idealized assumptions about indigeneous Southern economies. Frank did not, and perhaps could not prove a case for the primacy of external factors in the creation and sustaining of underdevelopment without minimizing or ignoring the role of internal social processes. Historical evidence of relative autonomy, opportunity for upward (or downward) mobility between satellite and centre did exist. More importantly the dialectic and struggle of classes within Southern economies seem diminished in Frank's 1966 model.

In 1972, Gunder Frank attended an UNCTAD meeting in Santiago, Chile, (one year before the coup by Augusto Pinochet). There he heard his "development of underdevelopment' slogan issued "by establishment Third World delegates from afar...the usefulness of dependence theory for political action had come and gone...More and better class struggle was supposed to be on the agenda..." (1996, 8). Six years after "The Development of Underdevelopment" was published, Gunder Frank had himself determined that his theory was dead, poisoned by "establishment" Southerners chanting mantras to what had once been for him a critique of establishment development policy.

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Notes:

¹In his biographical essay, "The Underdevelopment of Development", Frank reacted to claims that his work was derivative, noting that as far back as 1963, he had criticized "views on dual society [...] and development and argued for an analysis of the relations among these socio-economic sectors and for their dependence on the outside." Valenzuela laments that while the Dependency "perspective" became popular in Latin American academic circles in the mid to late 1960s, it became known in the United States and Europe "through interpreters such as André Gunder Frank whose work differs substantially from that of important authors" such as Cardoso, Sunkel and dos Santos. (Valenzuelas, 1978, p. 536) Frank has responded that "some 'historians' and commentators outside Latin America would jump to the unwarranted conclusion that my writings were inspired by [Cardosa and Faletto, or that] their book was written in answer to mine. Neither was true, although Enzo Faletto had read my chapter on Chile in 1964. Dos Santos wrote various articles on dependence. However, Theotonio always maintained rather reformist leanings." (Frank, 1996, p.6-7 WWW version)

²Frank argues that their work was not a response to his own which was published in 1966, and therefore their comments were not intended as a critique of his own essay. (Frank, 1996 WWW version.)

³Griffin, (1969, 77) refers to Kuznets' work that found per capita production in the "underdeveloped countries" to be much lower than in the "developed countries in their pre-industrialization phase".

Bibliography:

Burns, E. Bradford. "The Modernization of Underdevelopment: El Salvador, 1858-1931."
The Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment, 4th edition, 174-202.
Cardoso, Fernando Henrique and Faletto, Enzo. Dependency and Development in Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979, Preface and Chapter 2, i-xxv, 8-28.
Frank, André Gunder. "The Development of Underdevelopment." The Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment, 4th edition, 109-120.
Frank, André Gunder. "Preface to Reorient." http://csf.colorado.edu/wsystems/archive/papers/gunder/prefreor.htm, 1-8.
Frank, André Gunder. "The Underdevelopment of Development." http://csf.colorado.edu/wsystems/archive/agfrank/underdev.html, 1-20.
Grifin, Keith. "Underdevelopment in History." The Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment, 2nd edition, 77-90.
Valenzuela J. Samuel and Valenzeula, Arturo. "Modernization and Dependency - ALternative Perspectives in the Study of Latin American Underdevelopment." Comparative Politics, X, 4 (July 1978), 535-557.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. "Dependence in an Interdependent World." International Political Economy: State-Market Relations in the Changing Global Order, eds. C.Roe Goddard et al, 1996, chapter 12, 176-190.