Ciclo termodin´ amico con coherencias: soluci´ on anal´ıtica 74

Directed by French-Algerian Rachid Bouchareb this 2006 award-winning film portrays the story of a group of Algerian soldiers who volunteer to join World War Two as part of the Free French Forces. Algeria was conquered and annexed by France in the nineteenth century but Algerians were not given French citizenship. Nevertheless, approximately 200,000 African sol- diers fought for France, a large proportion of whom came from Algeria. Indigènes tells the story of some of these soldiers as they train and are deployed in the African and then European theatres of war. Running parallel to the stories of combat are personal stories about four Algerian soldiers in particular. Each has his own motivation in joining the army, ranging from escaping poverty in rural Algeria to fighting for equal rights and recognition for Algerians. Ultimately these four soldiers and the other African forces fighting for France are confronted with hardship, discrimination and abandonment. It is interesting to note that large numbers of African soldiers died on behalf of France in World War Two, but neither the fallen nor their countrymen were rewarded with the social, political or economic rights which they had expected for their sacrifices and loyalty to France.

Some have claimed that Indigènes, therefore, while telling a war story also represents a cri- tique of European (or largely French) imperialism and colonialism and the exploitation of the colonised subjects that accompanied them. By highlighting these historical events and pro- cesses the film demonstrates some of the roots of continuing resentment and tension between European- and Algerian-French citizens.

and world-systems theory were becoming influential in areas of the social sciences like Sociology just at the time when International Relations scholars were becoming more keenly interested in the relationship between international economics and international politics. This was, more generally, a time of economic uncertainty and instability. By the early 1970s the international financial com- munity began to entertain doubts about the monetary system underpinned by the US dollar. Oil prices increased drastically and the world economy was subsequently thrown into a deep recession.

At the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) of 1974, the poorer countries of the world stood together to demand a new (meaning fair) international economic order (NIEO). During the same period, the relaxation of tension in relations between the USA and USSR allowed academic attention to switch to more economics-based concerns. We might say that from Marx through Lenin, through to the emergence of the dependency theory and world-systems theory, combined with the waxing and waning of international affairs, structuralism gradually emerged as a distinctive perspective or para- digm within International Relations.

Dependency theory came to prominence in the 1960s. It developed as a critique of liberal mod- ernisation theory (see the Concept Box below). During the 1950s and 1960s developing countries threw off the yoke of colonialism/imperialism; they demanded and achieved independence. However, this was happening in the context of the Cold War (see chapter 2); Western countries were keen to ensure that former colonial (or Third World) states did not fall into the hands of communist regimes, and encouraged newly independent states to develop capitalist economies. Walt Rostow’s influential text on economic growth/modernisation was subtitled ‘a non-communist manifesto’. Developing countries were encouraged to allow free enterprise to flourish and to engage in free trade with the rest of the world to encourage competition, economic dynamism and growth.

Modernisation

The concept of ‘modernisation’ denotes a process characterised by interconnected economic, technological, industrial, social, cultural, and political change. Modern, ‘advanced’ societies as opposed to traditional, ‘backward’ societies, are organised on the basis of secular, individual- istic values. In modern societies people are supposedly judged, rewarded and afforded a particular role and status in society according to individual aptitude, achievement or merit, rather than on the basis of family connections, gender or age. Power in modern societies is seen to be exercised through administrative machinery in accordance with abstract rules. Along with the secular institutions like the modern state and legal institutions, bureaucratic procedures and processes are supposed to ensure that people are treated impartially.

Modernisation is typically associated with capitalist development and industrialisation, technological innovation, consumerism, the market economy and increases in population. Modernisation is also associated with improved levels of education, an expanding role for the state, the emergence of political pluralism, respect for civil liberties and rights and democratic, as opposed to authoritarian, forms of government.

Modernisation theory has been refuted both on the grounds that its empirical and theoretical claims are flawed and on the grounds that it is, at best, patronising and, at worst, a powerful justification for a form of neo-imperialism. First, the major criticism of modernisation theory is that it has not worked, even in societies which have embraced its values and prescriptions. Second, in suggesting that ‘they’ can become like ‘us’, i.e. the poor can become like the rich, at a stroke it dismisses as a mere ‘waiting post’ the culture, traditions and histories of many ‘less developed countries’ and communities.

The Dependencia School emerged from the efforts of Latin American intellectuals to account for their societies’ demonstrable inability to ‘catch up’ with the rich countries of North America and Western Europe, even though they had largely followed the advice of the West and endeavoured to ‘modernise’ their societies and move to free-market economies. Dependency theory attacked mod- ernisation theory, because it was severely misleading in terms of its predictions about the development prospects of the Third World. Indeed, with the notable exception of parts of East Asia, by the mid-1960s much of the developing world found that its relative economic performance was extremely disappointing.

The economic and political climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s was such that developing countries in particular were receptive to critiques of Western-led development models. A key idea of modernisation theorists was that all states would pass through stages of development and that sooner or later all would become advanced, high-consumption countries. However, modernisation theory rejected/ignored the possibility that deep structural factors might prevent economic progress and, more important, that the nature of the international system itself might be an obstacle to development. Accordingly, dependency theory developed a critique of modernisation theory which emphasised the structural constraints to development in Latin America.

Key writers in the Dependencia School, including Andre Gunder Frank, Raul Prebisch, Henrique Fernando Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, undertook a detailed historical analysis of the pattern of growth and development in Latin America and claimed to find that Latin America actually achieved its most impressive levels of growth and development at times when there was a slow-down in world trade and trading links with developed countries were disrupted. Taking this empirical observation as a starting point, dependency theorists suggested this was because the basic structure of the global economy was such that it worked to further the interests of the already rich, developed economies of the West (or North) and to progressively impoverish already poor countries (the South or Third World). The basic structure of the world economy, the trading regimes that existed, the nature of the markets for basic commodities and so on fundamentally determined the development trajectory of individual countries. Therefore, even as large parts of the world emerged from imperialism and col- onialism, the West continued to dominate the Third World – hence the terms neo-imperialism and neo-colonialism. Dependency theory can be considered a variant of structuralist thought because it suggests that we can only understand, in this example, the Latin American part of the world economy in terms of its relation to the world economic system as a whole.