peculiar to poor countries and weak economies. The UK economy is
dependent on the American economy in terms of foreign investment, for-
eign ownership of economic resources and the interventions of US-based
multinationals. Increasingly there is a similar dependency on Japan.
Dependency theorists, however, argued that there is an important difference
between that kind of dependency and the dependency experienced in the
Third World (Amin, 1982).
When there are two developed economies with a degree of inter-penetration
of capital between them the advanced nation remains an independent centre
of capital accumulation. This has consequences for the structure of political
forces in that society. When, however, a peripheral society experiences
dependency a distinctive form of capitalism is produced. The poor society’s
economy is conditioned by the expansion of the stronger economies in ways
which are quite different to the relationships between two developed
economies. The conditioning or ‘disarticulation’ of the poor economy discour-
ages internal growth by transferring the benefits of growth abroad (Frank,
1972a, p. 23; Roxborough, 1979, p. 64).
Politically this has an effect on class structure. It produces a dominant
class of merchants not engaged in production, which is primarily in the
hands of foreign enterprises. The emergence of an industrial bourgeoisie is
blocked. So the emergence of the political institutions upon which a domes-
tic bourgeoisie thrives, the institutions of the liberal democratic state, are
blocked too. The nature of dependency has a profound impact on the devel-
opment of the state and political forces within it. The idea of disarticulation
suggests that the capitalist state in its democratic form requires a certain
kind of ruling class, one whose interests will be protected by such a state. If
it does not have such a unified ruling class because of external dependency
the political consequences will be some kind of authoritarian regime.
Changes in class structure reflect changes in centre–periphery relations.
For example, the two World Wars and the Depression of the 1930s created
economic and political conditions making industrialization possible and
therefore ‘the emergence of stronger national bourgeoisies, industrial prole-
tariats ... and of their associated nationalistic and populist ideologies and
policies’ (Frank, 1972a, pp. 39–40).
Disarticulation thus means more than the presence of foreign capital, true
of many advanced economies. It means that the capital-owning classes of
the peripheral society are fragmented particularly into those who are allied
to indigenous capital and those who are allied to foreign interests, prevent-
ing the emergence of a national bourgeoisie. That the internal bourgeoisie
is unable to complete the internal development of capitalist relations of
Neo-colonialism and Dependency 91