Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

Structuralism
The notion that there is a ‘South’ or ‘Third World’ is, today, quite hotly
contested by those who point out that the states which make up the puta-
tive South are many and various, with very little in common – thus, say,
Brazil and India are both large industrializing countries, but differ in every
other respect; the Maldives and Brunei are both small, but one is oil-rich
and Muslim while the other is not, and the other 130 or so states which
might be thought of as Southern are equally ill-matched. All these states
have in common is not being members of the OECD, the rich-states club –
but even there, some OECD members (Singapore and South Korea) were
once thought of as Southern. And where China fits into ‘the South’ is
anyone’s guess. However, 40 or so years ago, it was possible to identify
a fairly coherent group of states – mostly poor, mostly non-European in
population, mostly recently de-colonized, mostly non-aligned – who did
identify themselves as the ‘Third World’ (the other two ‘worlds’ being
Western capitalism and the Soviet bloc) and who did develop a distinctive
approach to international economics. Although the term itself has many
meanings in social theory, in International Relations structuralism is a
convenient term to refer to this distinctive approach, a cluster of theories
which emerged in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s whose aim was to give an
account of the political and economic subordination of the South to the
North. These theories – dependency theory, centre–periphery/core–periphery
analysis, world-systems analysis – share the idea that North and South are
in a structural relationship one to another; that is, both areas are part of a
structure which determines the pattern of relationships that emerges.
Structuralism is a general theory of international relations in the sense that
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it purports to explain how the world as a whole works, but it is also a
‘Southern’ theory in two senses; uniquely among modern theories of
International Relations it actually originated in the South, and it is explicitly
oriented towards the problems and interests of the South, designed to solve
those problems and serve those interests. It is because of this ‘Southern-ness’
that structuralism maintained its appeal for so long, in spite of serious intel-
lectual shortcomings.
A key figure in the development of structuralist ideas was the Argentinian
economist Raúl Prebisch, a guiding light of the UN’s Economic Commission
for Latin America (ECLA) in the 1950s, even though his own position
was rather less radical than that of later structuralists. Prebisch was influ-
enced by Marxist–Leninist ideas on political economy, but rejected the
assumption, common to Marx, Lenin and orthodox communist parties in
Latin America, that the effects of imperialism would be to produce capital-
ist industrialization in the South; in this he was influenced by the revisionist
Marxist political economist Paul Baran, who argued, in The Political
Economy of Growth, that monopoly capitalism in the mid-twentieth cen-
tury was no longer performing a progressive role – instead, the industrial-
ization of the rest of the world was being held back in the interest of
maintaining monopoly profits in the centres of capitalism (Baran 1957).
Prebisch’s innovation was to identify the mechanism by which the capitalist
centres held back the periphery. On his account, it was via the pattern of
specialization that so-called ‘free trade’ established in the world economy.
This pattern involved the South in the production of primary products
(food, raw materials) which are exchanged for the manufactured goods of
the North. Why is this pattern undesirable? Because, Prebisch argues, there
is a long-term, secular trend for the terms of trade to move against primary
products – to put the point non-technically, over time, a given ‘basket’ of a
typical primary product will buy fewer and fewer baskets of manufactured
products. Where x bushels of grain bought a tractor in 1950, in 2004 it will
take x
⫹ y bushels to buy a tractor.
This is a fundamental challenge to liberal economic thinking, which, as
we have seen, assumes that all economies have a comparative advantage in
the production of some product(s) and that for purposes of trade and the
general welfare it does not matter what the product in question is – hence,
in the example given above concerning bananas and manufacturing goods,
Prebisch’s point is that in order to continue to import the same value of
manufactured goods the Windward Islands will have to continually increase
the value of banana exports, which will be difficult because of competition
from other banana-producing countries, and because the demand for
bananas is limited in a way that the demand for manufactured goods is not.
In manufacturing, new products are being developed all the time, new
‘needs’ are being produced via technological innovation and the power of
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