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Aid or Imperialism? West Germany in Sub-Saharan Africa
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2008
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What is the precise nature of the relationship between the so-called Third World and the industrialised West? While a question of this sort was much more easily answered in the era of direct colonial control over vast non-European regions, there is much debate concerning the symmetry of economic and political relationships in the postindependence period. In fact, to a considerable number of observers, it is asymmetry which characterises the ties between the industrialised and ‘underdeveloped’ countries, based on a long historical process of incorporation into the western capitalist system. Political independence, these critics argue, has merely shifted a ‘colonial’ to a ‘neo-colonial’ relationship, leaving the unevenness basically intact.
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References
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