peaceful diplomacy and negotiation rather than wars of liberation.
Thereafter, politics was seen as the concern of an internally and externally
sovereign state. Conflicts with other sovereign states, including the former
colonial powers, were interpreted as matters of international law and diplo-
macy and left to the specialists in those fields. The political aspects of inter-
national economic relations were overlooked.
Yet even the political scientists and political economists who recognized the
continuing economic dependency of post-colonial states rarely demonstrated
how the mechanisms of the internal political consequences operated. The
nature of the economic linkages could easily be described and disputed over,
but the domestic political effects were left to be inferred from them. The
uneven distribution of primary resources among new states was said to have a
greater effect on governmental orientations than internal interests. The power
of foreign interests could even be measured by ‘the ratio of export–import
trade to overall GDP of the host country’. Mining concerns were said to con-
stitute ‘rival governments’ (Bretton, 1973, pp. 25–6, 205). General policy con-
straints on post-colonial governments were noted, such as limitations on
monetary policy by the high propensity to import (Hymer, 1982). Bretton con-
cluded that ‘The international power and influence flow is indeed so massive,
concerning as it does the major share of the national resources available to the
new rulers, that in many instances it is not possible to determine where national
prerogatives end and foreign ones begin’ (p. 22). Integration into colonial eco-
nomic blocks further strengthened external influences on the room to manoeu-
vre of domestic governments and indeed domestic economic interests.
The political power of external interests
It was, however, possible to identify neo-colonialists as an organized inter-
est, an interest having political significance internally but mainly externally
oriented economically and carrying more political weight than economi-
cally marginal local groups. Foreign corporations, banks and trading houses
were ‘positioned at the control points of the power and influence flow’,
resisting and countering nationalistic economic pressures. Within the con-
text of an undeveloped economy the commanding heights were largely in
the hands of foreign firms. In the immediate post-independence years
indigenous small-scale capital entrepreneurs had nothing like the same
influence as the multinationals. Companies such as Unilever, the Firestone
Corporation or United Fruit dominated the economies and political
processes of the new states.
Neo-colonialism and Dependency 79