The political culture may include anti-democratic values which endorse
such authoritarian modes of government, especially among classes which
believe their privileges to be threatened by a wider distribution of political
power. There are still plenty of examples to remind us that in the rural areas
of the Third World landlords are in a position to employ armed force and
a corrupt judicial system to ward off land reform.
The extent to which political autonomy is limited by external control of
parts of a country’s economy, and the internal power structure affected by
dependency, remain significant in Third World politics. The ability of
a country to secure substantial aid in return for buying arms from the aid
donor, as evidenced by Malaysia’s Pergau hydro-electric project, is indica-
tive of the changing relationship between metropolitan centres and the
wealthier of their former colonies. When aid is used to finance uneconomic
projects as a ‘sweetener’ to secure arms deals in countries where the need
for development assistance is much less than in many others, an ideal test-
ing ground is provided for some of the contesting hypotheses in the neo-
colonialism debate, especially those pertaining to the autonomy of
governments to negotiate with richer countries and the beneficiaries of the
outcomes of those negotiations within the Third World country concerned.
A key question for the future is how far Third World countries can diver-
sify their economies and so reduce their reliance on the fluctuating values of
a few vulnerable commodities. Indonesia, for example, reduced its export
dependence on oil and gas from 80 per cent in 1981 to 35 per cent in 1989
by diversification into other minerals and timber. Malaysia has reduced its
dependence on rubber and tin by manufacturing steel and motor cars and
becoming the world’s largest producer of electronic equipment. Such devel-
opment requires substantial foreign investment of a kind which will always
render a Third World economy vulnerable to the extraction of valuable sur-
plus, growing disparities of income between the new industrial and business
classes and the rural poor, and increasing international debt (Indonesia’s
foreign debt of over £50 billions is Asia’s largest).
The effect on the domestic social structure of penetration by the global
market of rapidly-growing economies in the Third World continues to pres-
ent a challenge to political analysts. The exploitation of labour for low
wages in unsafe working conditions is on the increase. Governments in both
the developed and developing worlds which play host to multinationals and
domestic industries which cause heavy pollution and threats to the health of
the poor in the Third World, such as the USA, India and China, have
strongly resisted recognizing the rights of communities to take legal action
to restrict environmental destruction (for example, during the United
Conclusion: Democracy and Development 281