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Dependent development? De-centring Europe’s transitions (SPS-HEC-SCH-25)

SPS-HEC-SCH-25

Purpose

There is renewed interest in dependency theory among scholars who study Europe. Policymakers, especially in the EU, are responding to a variety of pressures by calling for far-reaching transitions, from eco-social to digital and geopolitical. Taken together, these calls amount to a developmentalist agenda for Europe. 

Dependency theory, once written to analyse the power inequalities in the international system, can provide a particularly enlightening perspective on Europe’s current peripheralisation. It allows us to de-centre the study of Europe by ‘exposing it to the gaze of its allegedly subordinated others’ (Bohle, Hozic and Schwartz 2025). Such an exercise challenges those who call for Europe to take on a new global role as if this were just a matter of political will.

In this course, we will read some of the classic contributions that came to define dependency theory in the twentieth century. We will then analyse how dependency approaches were applied to development challenges, ranging from trade, industrialisation, agricultural reform to financial repression in Latin America, South Asia, and different African countries. They have pendants in Europe, such as ‘smart’ protection, green industrial and agricultural policies, financial re-regulation and prudential capital controls. Against this background, we will apply key concepts of dependency theory such as hegemony, immiserising growth, and infant industry protection to Europe’s recent acknowledgement of its peripheral status. In doing so, we try to develop fresh perspectives on Europe in the world that are both historically informed and sensitive to contemporary problems. A guiding question is whether and how regional cooperation that acknowledges interdependence can provide power resources that mitigate dependency.
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