Delinking
Discussion
As the world grows more interconnected, possibilities for delinking become more challenging
Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven:
"Amin was among the first to attempt to measure unequal exchange empirically. Many have followed in his footsteps since, such as Jason Hickel, Dylan Sullivan and Huzaifa Zoomkawala, whose research in 2021 found that the Global North appropriated around $62 trillion from the Global South between 1960 and 2018 (constant 2011 US dollars). Exploring a range of different methods for calculating unequal exchange, Hickel et al find that, regardless of the method, the intensity of exploitation and the scale of unequal exchange has been increasing significantly since the 1980s and ’90s.
Amin also devoted a significant amount of time to thinking about ways to change an unjust system. He was heavily involved in activism, and developed some theoretical concepts to effect political change. The most well known is Amin’s idea of ‘delinking’ – on which he published a book. Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World (1990) provides an assessment of possible ways forward for a sovereign state in the periphery. In Delinking, Amin argues that the specific conditions that allowed for the advancement of capitalism in Western Europe in the 19th century are not possible to reproduce elsewhere. So, he proposed a new model of industrialisation shaped by the renewal of non-capitalist forms of peasant agriculture, which he thought would imply delinking from the imperatives of globalised capitalism.
It is important to note that delinking is often widely misunderstood to mean autarky, or a system of self-sufficiency and limited trade. But this is a misrepresentation. Delinking does not require cutting all ties to the rest of the global economy, but rather the refusal to submit national-development strategies to the imperatives of globalisation. It aims to compel a political economy suited to its needs, rather than simply going along with having to unilaterally adjust to the needs of the global system. To this goal of greater sovereignty, a county would develop its own productive systems and prioritise the needs of the people rather than the demands on international capital.
In my interview with him before he died, Amin emphasised the importance of the specific political economic reality of any given country to understand and situate the possibilities for delinking. At that time, with an odd amount of precision, Amin estimated that ‘if you can reach 70 per cent delinking, you’ll have done a great job’. He pointed out that a strong country that is, for historical reasons, relatively stable and with a certain amount of military and economic power will have more leverage to delink. So, while China may be able to achieve 70 per cent delinking, a small country such as Senegal will struggle to achieve the same amount of independence.
Delinking entails rejecting calls to adjust to a country’s comparative advantage and other forms of catering to foreign interests. This is, of course, easier said than done. Amin noted that it would both require strong domestic support for such a national project and strong South-South cooperation as an alternative to the exploitative economic relations between the core and the periphery. Other aspects of delinking would involve investments in long-term projects, such as infrastructure, with the goal of improving the quality of living for most people in the country, rather than maximising short-term consumption or profit.
Several scholars have more recently studied historical development trajectories in relation to the question of delinking. For example, in 2020 Francesco Macheda and Roberto Nadalini applied the considerations to try to understand China’s development trajectory, while in 2021 Francisco Pérez applied it to understand economic development in East Asia. However, as the world grows more interconnected, possibilities for delinking become more challenging."
(https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-want-decolonisation-go-to-the-economics-of-samir-amin)