70 SOCIAL SCIENTIST practice and the structural changes in the world economy and domestic as well as international politics during recent decades. Until the 1970s, progressive and left theory and practice with regard to the less developed world was based (consciously or unconsciously) on three essentials. Catching up development in the sense of building up strong and (in one or another sense) complete national economies was perceived as a decisive starting point for any socialist project. This view was shared, in principle, by the left in the developed countries, by those, who fought to overcome real existing, "underdeveloped" capitalism in their own countries and by those, whose political struggles took place under the conditions of "real existing" or state socialism. Explicitly or implicitly, the left—in so far as it was seriously engaged with the "development question" in the South and in the E^st—agreed that one of the major and indispensable preconditions for catching up was some kind of protection of the "underdeveloped" national economies against the dynamics of the world economy. At least a selective "delinking" from the world market, for example the so-called "import substitution" strategies in the South, or the politics of protection in the East, were seen as an important element of progressive and left alternatives to the classical "open door" policies towards the West. (The debate on whether delinking had been forced on or chosen by the state socialist countries did not put a question mark over this axiomatic relationship itself.) The "open door", it was argued in turn, would inevitably result in continued "under-development" or in the breakdown of the "real existing" or state socialism. It was thus only logical that the state appeared as the central instrument in any politics aimed at preventing the suppression of and threat to left experiments by forces of the world market. Without the iron curtain, without the protection of the Eastern European block through a state monopoly on import and export of goods, services, and labour, as well as a state control of exchange rates and international financial transactions, catching-up strategies would have failed even under state socialist conditions. Without import barriers, prevention of capital flight, or, say, specific exchange rate policies, no state in the Third World would have had any chance even of easing the burdens of dependency and ongoing exploitation of resources and the work force by international capital. It was thus not because of abstract commitments to human rights, self-organisation etc., but because of basic acceptance of economic catching-up, mediated by "left" state power, that Eastern and Western left criticism of the state socialist system focused so predominantly on questions of democracy within the real existing socialist states as the decisive step towards resolving the remaining problems on the way to "true socialism". But, in the period between the end of the 1970s and 1989--91, it became clear that progressive and left strategies based on these essentials had failed to reach their aims, within the constraints of the