Robin Theobald

Globalisation and the Study of Political Change

We began this book by looking at the first attempts of political scientists to conceptualise the changes that were taking place in what had become known in the postwar years as the Third World. We saw that early attempts to formulate theories of political modernisation and development borrowed liberally from the discipline of sociology, especially from functionalism. The two principal defects of this modernisation approach were first, that they were informed by evolutionary notions of change. They were founded upon a naive faith in a smooth transition to ‘modernity’, modernity being the happy condition in which the developed nations of the 1950s and 1960s found themselves. The second principal defect was that modernisation theorists made no attempt to relate their formulations to what would now be regarded as the heart of the condition of underdevelopment, the character of Third World economies. Indeed the economic dimension was simply seen as irrelevant to the study of ‘politics’, a stance that was to a considerable degree informed by the academic division of labour between political science and economics.

A Politics of Class and State

The approaches we have been considering so far arose directly as a reaction to early modernisation perspectives. In the present chapter we turn to a more recent literature, written from a Marxist standpoint. While implicitly critical of the assumptions of modernisation theory, this literature is more specifically a response to the dependency debate. Such ‘neo-Marxist’ writers generally accept the main thrust of dependency theory’s critique of ‘classical’ Marxism: that the possibilities of autonomous capitalist development in peripheral societies are severely limited by relations of economic dependency. But they also incorporate, to a greater or lesser extent, arguments of what could be called dependency ‘revisionism’, whether based on the feasibility of dependent capitalist development or asserting the survival of pre-capitalist modes of production, which imply a degree of freedom for Third World politics. They emphasise, therefore, the need to examine indigenous social structures: the nature and extent of social class formations, the ‘projects’ of different social classes, their conflicts and alliances.

Towards a Politics of Modernisation and Development

We must begin by going back to those earliest attempts to understand the politics of the newly emerging Third World countries which form the point of theoretical departure for this book. We need to examine the concepts of political modernisation and political development, and the approaches associated with them, which dominated these attempts. But first, in order to understand why such a perspective found favour at all, it must be placed in context. The startling changes in the world that political science sought to describe coincided with changing methodological assumptions within the discipline. Above all must be stressed the extent to which these concepts and approaches did not simply evolve within the parameters of political science but were part of the attempt to make sense of the changing world scene throughout western social science, and particularly amongst sociologists and economists. Political science took up the challenge relatively late and drew much of its intellectual arsenal, including the central concept of modernisation, from its sister disciplines.

The State and Civil Society

The approaches we have been considering so far arose directly as a reaction to early modernisation perspectives. In this chapter we turn to examine what could be seen as the reaction to the reaction, a heterogeneous body of work which has, however, shared a common ‘structural’ approach — that is, a focus on what are perceived as the basic framing structures of politics, whether understood in terms of class, the state or latterly state-civil society relations. We begin by considering neo-Marxist responses or amendments to dependency theory, which stressed the role of indigenous class structures. That strand of analysis came increasingly to focus on the state as a potential site of class formation and as possessed of its own relative autonomy. At the same time, writers from a less exclusively Marxist background were also beginning to recognise the analytic importance of the state, and specifically to explore authoritarian state forms such as corporatism and bureaucratic authoritarianism. In doing so, however, we suggest they may have exaggerated or taken on trust the effectiveness of the Third World state. Other writers have emphasised its characteristic fragility and permeability, while also acknowledging exceptions, notably amongst the East Asian NICs.

Dependency Theory and the Study of Politics

Our chief concern in this chapter is with the third major critique of the political modernisation approach, that which arises out of dependency theory. We shall see that the primary focus of dependency theory is the international economic order. It holds that no society can be understood in isolation from this order and in fact the condition of underdevelopment is precisely the result of the incorporation of Third World economies into the world capitalist system which is dominated by the developed North. Accordingly the principal weakness of the modernisation approach from a dependency perspective is its total neglect of the economic dimension and its practice of explaining social and political change in the Third World entirely in terms of factors which are internal to the countries in question. In examining dependency theory we make no claim to a comprehensive survey of the wide range of dependency theories that emerged from the late 1960s (see O’Brien, 1975; Hoogvelt, 1982; Larrain, 1989). We shall start by reviewing the earlier writings of one of the most prominent dependency theorists, Andre Gunder Frank, their implications for the study of politics and certain critical reactions to these writings. We shall then look at briefly at other writers in the dependency school and derivatives of it before making an assessment of the approach from the point of view of our interest in political change.

The Emergence of a Politics of Order

A basic and usually explicit assumption of the modernisation theories we have been considering was that the ‘developing’ societies of Asia, Africa and Latin America were in the process of being transformed into stable democracies of the western pluralist type. There can be little doubt that the already industrialised world, especially the US, provided the model for political modernity just as for modernity in general. The democratic ideal, it seemed, had reached its zenith in the West and this was the condition towards which the societies of the Third World were evolving. The traumas and strains of this transformation are frequently intense but they are worth enduring for the goal, once arrived at — and arrival was thought to be inevitable — will be more than adequate compensation. As Huntington has pointed out, these modernisation theories exhibited the kind of evolutionary optimism of early sociologists such as Comte and Spencer (Huntington, 1971).

The Study of Political Change

We began this book by looking at the first attempts of political scientists to conceptualise the changes that were taking place in what had become known in the post-war years as the Third World. We saw that early attempts to formulate theories of political modernisation and development borrowed liberally from the discipline of sociology, especially from functionalism. The two principal defects of this modernisation approach were first, that they were informed by evolutionary notions of change, being founded upon a naive faith in a smooth transition to ‘modernity’, modernity being the happy condition in which the developed nations of the 1950s and 1960s found themselves. The second principal defect was that modernisation theorists made no attempt to relate their formulations to what would now be regarded as the heart of the condition of underdevelopment, the character of Third World economies. Indeed the economic dimension was simply seen as irrelevant to the study of ‘politics’, a stance that was to a considerable degree informed by the academic division of labour between political science and economics.