Technological Dependence

Abstract

The dependency theorists¹ are concerned with the whole relationship between advanced countries and third world countries: the dependent relationship is exhibited in cultural as well as economic features of third world countries. From this point of view the negritude movement in French Africa was as much a struggle against dependence as the (rather more prosaic) bargaining strategy of the Andean Pact countries. The dependent relationship pervades political institutions and political decision making as well. As a result many countries are incapable of following an alternative path, not only because the world economic facts of life make it impossible, but because the cultural, psychological and economic pressures of the dependent relationship have conditioned decision makers in third world countries so that they do not wish to follow an alternative strategy. Many conflicts which appear to be conflicts of interest between advanced countries and under-developed countries become internalised within third world countries, with powerful sections of the community representing the advanced-country interests within third world countries.