local shareholding and investment in manufacturing enterprises: ‘all have
been strengthened and their advance accelerated by deliberate policy’
(1980, pp. 172–4).
Warren recognized that for poor countries there are many problems that
are part of the imperialist legacy, such as stagnation in agricultural produc-
tion, excessive urbanization, unemployment and even ‘premature socialism’
before capitalist development had been completed. But the relationship
between new states and their former colonial powers is basically
non-antagonistic and represented for Warren no more than the normal rival-
ries between competing national capitalist economies. There had not
only been considerable progress in Third World industrialization and eco-
nomic development, it had been independentdevelopment. The expansion
of manufacturing had been based on the home market. The industrial sector
had become increasingly diversified; direct foreign investment had been
less significant than the pessimists had claimed; local subsidiaries and
branches of multinationals were largely funded from local sources and
re-invested earnings:
the idea of ‘neo-colonialism’ – that the formal political independence of
almost all the former colonies has not significantly modified the previous
domination and exploitation of the great majority of humanity in Asia,
Africa, and Latin America by the advanced capitalist world – is highly
misleading and affords an assessment of post-war world capitalism that
omits most new developments. (1980, pp. 184–5)
What the concept of ‘neo-colonialism’ had achieved, in Warren’s view,
was to indicate that newly independent governments could not immediately
exert their bargaining power, because of skills shortages and delays in estab-
lishing effective state institutions and representation on international bod-
ies. It had also provided ideological support for, and international
acceptance of, ‘Third World bourgeois nationalism’ – ‘a fundamental ideo-
logical condition for the creation of modern nation-states out of states pre-
viously characterized by feudal particularism, religious and communal
division, and all varieties of patriarchal backwardness’ (1980, p. 185; see
also Twitchett, 1965, p. 319).
Warren’s optimism at the progressive, in Marxist terms, nature of Third
World development did not go unchallenged. The reply of Warren’s critics to
his claim that there had been a rapid expansion of manufactured exports was
that in the late 1970s 81 per cent of Third World exports were still in the form
of raw materials, foodstuffs and fuels, whereas 82 per cent of the imports into
Third World countries from developed countries were manufactured goods,
Neo-colonialism and Dependency 97