Introduction

Abstract

The end of World War II left a globe in which the European powers were no longer able to defer formal independence to parts of the third world. European domination crumbled just long enough for third-world liberation struggles to forge numerous new states. Today one has to constantly keep in mind that the formal recognition of new states did not produce substantive independence— a condition that requires movement toward economic sovereignty or toward a global political economy that actively counters hundred-year-old but still living structures and systems that limit third-world peoples to the hewing of wood and the drawing of water.