21 Balandier’s objective was to create a new methodology to analyze what he called “the biggest political problem of our time,” namely the rise of nationalisms in the decolonized world. Two years prior to the publication of his article, an innovative direction in economics set a new theoretical framework to rethink the definition of dependency in view of international political and economic dynamics of the de-colonialized world. It came to be known as Dependency Theory. Three influential studies3 addressed the economic dependency of undeveloped decolonialized countries and revealed the way they became tied into an international economic circle that made them dependent on developed “neo-colonial markets.” Dependency Theory, in general terms, maintains that the economy of certain countries is conditioned by the development and expansion of others.4 In the 1970s and 1980s this was the dominant theory to explain the economic and political dependency of (at the time so-called) third-world countries as an outcome of colonialism. It went hand in hand with another outcome of colonialism: a “dependency complex of the colonized.” According to this concept, coined by Frantz Fanon, the colonized were trapped in an inferiority complex in regard to the colonizer, and in a state of dependency of the In 1952, the French sociologist Georges Balandier wrote, “The notion of dependency, which was frequently used in political economy and psychoanalysis, has become popularized to the point of becoming an explanatory instrument used by journalists.”1 In a fundamental article about the “Sociology of Dependency,” he called for a sociological definition of this concept and explained its importance against the background of the capitalized colonized world of the After War. Attempts to interpret and explain contemporary events, he argued, required an accurate definition of situations of dependency, domination, submission, and their social, economic, political and cultural conditions. Balandier has differentiated between local traditional forms of dependency, integrally embedded in the social structure of a given society, and dependency as a means of subjugation of foreign societies. The caste system in India (fig. 1 a–b) and the British colonialization of India are two characteristic examples of the first and the second forms of dependency. Both forms, the inferiority they imply and the inequality they create, are sustained and legitimized by cultural rationale. Both serve as means to control different parts of the population, which are realized in different ways. In fact, the dependency that the British colonial enterprise introduced in India challenged the local dependency of the caste system. In both cases, however, dependency is an unequal relationship that benefits one group by exploiting the other and is thus framed within power relations of control. Dependency within the context of power relations therefore is understood to have an economic rationale and is asymmetrical by definition, since it entails the appropriation of resources. These could be economic resources such as labor means or other resources or modes of productions that are used in a way that constitutes a social hierarchy around their utilization, exploitation and appropriation. At the same time, whoever exploits the dependent also becomes dependent, on a very different level, on the exploited, who are the source for the exploiter’s position of power. In other words, positions of power depend on relationships of dependency. Such sociopolitical dynamics also have a cultural aspect. The inferiority they imply and the inequality they create are sustained and legitimized by cultural ideology. This could be, for example, the belief in the superiority of a certain group of people which legitimizes their position of power and the dependency it entails, or the definition of their position as an “advanced state of development.”2 In either case such views justify the inequality that dependency creates as a form of power relation.
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