Name: Zarin Rafiuddin
ID: 08103002
DEPENDENCY THEORY: IN BANGLADESH PERSPECTIVE
dependency n. (pl. -ies) country or province controlled by another.
colonialism n. 1 policy of acquiring or maintaining colonies. 2 derog. exploitation of colonies. colonialist n. & adj.
modernize v. (also -ise) (-zing or -sing) 1 make modern; adapt to modern needs or habits. 2 adopt modern ways or views. modernization n.
hegemony n. leadership, esp. by one State of a confederacy. [Greek hegemon leader]
exploit —n. daring feat. —v. 1 make use of (a resource etc.). 2 usu. derog. utilize or take advantage of (esp. a person) for one's own ends. exploitation n. exploitative adj. exploiter n. [Latin: related to *explicate]
- Oxford Pocket Dictionary
The colonial world is a world cut in two. The dividing line, the frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations. In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who are the official, instituted go-betweens, the spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression. In capitalist societies the educational system, whether lay or clerical, the stricture of moral reflexes handed down from father to son, the exemplary honesty of workers who are given a medal after fifty years of good and loyal service, and the affection which springs from harmonious relations and good behaviour – all these aesthetic expressions of respect for the established order serve to create around the exploited person an atmosphere of submission and of inhibition which lightens the task of policing considerably.
- Franz Fanon Wretched of the Earth
Domination and inequities of power and wealth are perennial facts of human society. But in today’s global setting they are also interpretable as having something to do with imperialism, its history, its new forms. The nations of contemporary Asia, Latin America, and Africa are politically independent but in many ways are as dominated and dependent as they were when ruled directly by European powers.
- Edward Said Culture and Imperialism
The world is not a simple structure. It is not merely a map that displays countries and continents. It is a globe of hierarchies; an atlas of power-struggles and exploitations could be more easily drawn than one with merely some basic facts on land masses. Human resources and geographical dimensions have always had a complex relationship - at times beneficiary and at times parasitic: mostly one would say that the relationship has been parasitic.
Sociology aims to study these social establishments. It is a social science, alongside psychology and anthropology, that studies the moulds of societies. What are the makings of a society? What do social systems comprise of? What is individualism and what are the benefits of social institutions? Are the fabrics of society easy to figure and dissect or are there more to that than what meet’s one’s eyes? Is society is merely a construct of civilized man or is it more? The term civilized too is a multi-faceted. Terminologies have been there to define it, but whose terminologies are they? Who gets to define the word? What is the purpose of such classifications? Whose aims do they help to establish?
The world’s generic views on history, economics and cultures have always been static – in the sense that they have never ceased to be one-dimensional. Economics is the arrangement of wealth (capital and finances), cultures are the assortment of variance (who are we and who are they) and history is the most underestimated and underdeveloped field focusing only on a chronological chain of events on how and when and what took place. They do not dissect deeper into the other influences that could cause these chains, these classifications and these masses or shortages of wealth.
Sociology of Development, a branch in sociology, has come out with an aim to study the terminology – third world. What is a third world? It is usually a nation that was formerly colonized by another nation and in modern times has not been able to keep up with the world – in cases of industrialization, urbanization and digitalization (ours is a technological era). The Third world usually lacks basic necessities for livelihood, proper implementation of health care and education as well. In short, a third world is considered indisputably an impoverished world – compared to the modern superpower America (specifically The United States of America).
Development is the main criterion in which the sociology of development, as a discipline, looks at the Third World and attempts to understand how to reconstruct these poverty-stricken systems. It is, however, not a simple task to do. The term development is multi-layered and as controversial as the term civilized. To better understand a Third World Nation one must actually look through the common definitions of such words and why they are counteracted intensely by others.
Modernisation theory is the theory used to summarize modern transformations of social life. The theory looks at the internal factors of the country. It is an evolutionary theory that assumes that with help, "traditional" countries can develop in the same ways "modern" countries did. Throughout certain periods of time, modernization theories attempt to identify the social variables which contribute to the social progress and development of certain societies and seek to explain the details of social evolution. Not surprisingly, modernisation theories are subject to much criticism stemming from the views of the communist and capitalist parties, world systems theorists, and globalization theory and Dependency theory. Modernization theory not only stresses the process of change, but also the response to that change. It also looks at internal dynamics referring to social and cultural structure and the adaptation of new technologies.
(Wikipedia)
This is the basic ideology of the word modernize. However, as quoted above, we see the difficulty of the word modernize – the Oxford Pocket Dictionary has not really specified the effects and trends that surround the term modern thus modernize becomes a vague transformation. It does not give a substantial solution to the discrepancies of the Third World nations. Thus, it is expected, that the Modernization Theory would be heavily put under criticism.
The complaint is very basic: isn’t it very Western to state that developed is only western concepts of urbanization and commercialism? And why is it that socio-homogeneity is so thoroughly coveted by lands that advertise the freedom of one’s rights and the independence of one’s own individualism? The answer to such questions can be analyzed by taking a model of a considered Third World nation, Bangladesh.
Bangladesh is a nascent nation – once upon a time it was within India as a part of the subcontinent. With the great divide and the formation of Pakistan, East Pakistan was under constant surveillance and order of the main body of the new nation (West Pakistan). So Bangladesh is quite a crippled nation. It had liberated from over 200 years of British Raj (the British Crown took over after the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857 it was taken over from the East India Company, so formerly the whole sub-continent was ruled over by a company).
Bangladesh which was a large part of Bengal was rich in resources thus always exploited during times of colonialism. To quote from what I have written before:
...Bengal was used especially for its high amount of useful resources. The regime extracted most of the agricultural wealth of the country during this period; Bengal was known for its high fertile soil. The citizens of Bengal were worked against most of their wishes quite some time later as intermediaries for the British Empire. After the Permanent Settlement act issued in 1793 it became more intense for the native people as now their Bengal was directly under the power of the foreign force.
Thus Bangladesh with its land fertility became a centre where the British stripped and took all the minerals for the benefits for their own motherland. Thus Bengal was not spared from having its assets taken away by the British and afterwards Pakistan reinforced the treatment via many levels. To say Bangladesh is a stable nation would be false – ever since its birth it has gone through much turmoil; social, political and economic dissatisfactions plagued it.
Dependency theory or dependencia theory is essentially a body of social science theories predicated on the notion that resources flow from a "periphery" of poor and underdeveloped states to a "core" of wealthy states, enriching the latter at the expense of the former. It is a central contention of dependency theory that poor states are impoverished and rich ones enriched by the way poor states are integrated into the "world system".
The theory arose around 1950 as a reaction to some earlier theories of development which held that all societies progress through similar stages of development, that today's underdeveloped areas are thus in a similar situation to that of today's developed areas at some time in the past, and that therefore the task in helping the underdeveloped areas out of poverty is to accelerate them along this supposed common path of development, by various means such as investment, technology transfers, and closer integration into the world market. Dependency theory rejected this theory, arguing that underdeveloped countries are not merely primitive versions of developed countries, but have unique features and structures of their own; and, importantly, are in the situation of being the weaker members in a world market economy, whereas the developed nations were never in an analogous position; they never had to exist in relation to a bloc of more powerful countries than themselves. Dependency theorists argued, in opposition to free market economists, that underdeveloped countries needed to reduce their connectedness with the world market so that they could pursue a path more in keeping with their own needs, less dictated by external pressures.
Globalization (or globalization) describes an ongoing process by which regional economies, societies, and cultures have become integrated through a globe-spanning network of communication and execution. The term is sometimes used to refer specifically to economic globalization: the integration of national economies into the international economy through trade, foreign direct investment, capital flows, migration, and the spread of technology.[1] However, globalization is usually recognized as being driven by a combination of economic, technological, sociocultural, political, and biological factors. The term can also refer to the transnational circulation of ideas, languages, or popular culture through acculturation.
Neocolonialism is a term used by post-colonial critics of developed countries involvement in the developing world. Writings within the theoretical framework of neocolonialism argue that existing or past international economic arrangements created by former colonial were or are used to maintain control of their former colonies and dependencies after the colonial independence movements of the post World War II period. The term neocolonialism can combine a critique of current actual colonialism (where some states continue administrating foreign territories and their populations in violation of United Nations resolutions) and a critique of the involvement of modern capitalist businesses in nations which were former colonies. Critics adherent to neocolonialism contend that private, foreign business companies continue to exploit the resources of post-colonial states, and that this economic control inherent to neocolonialism is akin to the classical, European colonialism practiced from the 16th to the 20th centuries. In broader usage, neocolonialism may simply refer to the involvement of powerful countries in the affairs of less powerful countries; this is especially relevant in modern Latin America. In this sense, neocolonialism implies a form of contemporary, economic imperialism: that powerful nations behave like colonial powers of imperialism, and that this behavior is likened to colonialism in a post-colonial world.
(Wikipedia)
It is quite simple – the more advanced nations or the considered First World want the developing nations to forgo their cultures and traditions and undergo the metamorphosis for a brighter future by adopting all their valuable and successful traits and aspects. For a successful future the Third World must look into the civilized western world and attempt to imitate them. This is very basic aspect of the Modernization Theory.
This is where the Dependency Theory comes and criticize The Modernization Theory – are there countries as rich in culture going to forgo all their richness for the sake of pleasing international relations?
In this light there is too ways of looking at dependency theory: one is the external factor and the other internal – the external factor deals with the foreign powers of colonialism and the internal factor deals with how the government, without the power to stabilize itself, becomes dependent due to those reasons.
External Factors:
Simply put (as mentioned above) colonialism has devastated much of Bangladesh’s chances to rise up as a world power. In medieval times, due to Bengal’s fertile soil, it was a superpower. Now due to colonialism Bengal has lost a lot of its former edge. Neo-Marxists say that developing countries cannot grow as developing countries due to the fact that their materials have been taken away from them. They say that capitalism – especially merchant capitalism – whose only purpose was to raise profits – began colonialism as a way to increase their wealth. This is why many former colonies were used to specify on certain raw products – for Bengal during this period it was Muslin and Jute.
Now, Andre Gunder Frank has claimed that many of the Third World manifestations of lacking (like how they cannot diversify their profits) come from this state of mind in which colonial order has set up something that the now independent states cannot come out from. Bangladesh now is mostly dependent in foreign aid in the form of garments factories. It cannot diversify its resources or know the methodologies to do so.
The term neo-colonization, made into a term by Nkrumah, the Ghanaian President, seemed to have seeped into Bangladeshi soil obstructing its fertility. We want to please our outside rulers so badly that we take in technology that might harm us more than aid us. The so called green-revolution did not benefit Bangladesh – because the cost of the machinery for such products was too much to afford thus the result the wealthy peasants got wealthier and the poor poorer.
Another aspect of neo-colonialism is the introduction of Multi-national companies and Global markets. In many countries, as in Taiwan, other countries such as America, have given quota systems to their trade. To bypass this quota system these countries make their surplus in Bangladesh garment factories. The problem precarious employment: sure due to these Multi-nationals the poor labour force of Bangladesh gets wages, however, when there are shifts in the global market and these companies must change their plans and leave who will suffer?
Thus the homeless and jobless remain the homeless and the jobless. Also the Multi Nationals (such as Wal-Mart) want the highest rates of production in the lowest price possible. They will give the workers the worst form of conditions to work in – they will work them non-stop and give them the most horrendous amount of pay. The workers cannot go away from their jobs because they have no job-alternatives and also they know they can be easily replaced (Bangladesh is full of poor, unemployed people).
Internal Factors:
Bangladesh cannot proudly state that it has had a strong government. In fact, it is best to quote something from a previous paper written on colonialism to illustrate the helplessness of Bangladesh:
After the [1971] war there was famine, destruction of families and homes – how can people expect to be provided sustenance with these conditions? Also, during the war of independence from Pakistan people were raped, tortured and killed in front of their fellow countrymen, in front of their families, how can they find their self-esteem via these incidences? Nowadays, the myriad of English Medium schools and the effacing of Bangla Medium schools and Bangla education opted for a English Speaking Bangladesh describes a shame to the war and the beginnings of neo-colonization, so, are we, as Bangladeshis, truly free? Are we making our own choices?
Hegemonic rule in Bangladesh still prevails and via globalization (which merges with neo-colonization in these aspects) Bangladeshi’s original culture and lifestyle are rapidly fading away.
Ever since the war of independence; Bangladesh has been filled with political uncertainties in the forms of coups and counter-coups: the political parties are considered too engulfed in their personal affairs to actually fulfill the roles of democracy and aid their people – the situation is getting worse now due to globalization in the form of neo-colonization.
English has become pseudo-mother tongue it seems. English Medium schools are in high demand and Lipton’s theory of urban elite scourging the chances of a developing country to stand tall is actually in progress. “Over-urbanization” and “Over-Population” are products of the elite squandering much for their own benefits. Instead of helping the rural areas progress into a higher form of settlement the government only focuses on the cities –in this case Dhaka, Chittagong and Sylhet. Other places are quite ignored.
Also people opt for westernization rather than celebrating their own culture. They prefer western clothes and adopt a western free thinking attitude. The government also encourages this process and so a bias between Bengali Medium and English Medium students is created and for this the English Medium students have a superiority complex.
In Conclusion, as in the beginning of the paper, the terms modernize, dependency and development are not so easy to grasp especially when they link with other complex definitions such as colonialism, neo-colonialism and globalization. Can Bangladesh be free from the traps of so called modernization? Maybe so in the future – the nation must realize it is being used before it can start pulling its own strings.
References:
- Note: All the extracts here are taken from the respective books and information have been added from the texts the course has provided.
