After the Third World? History, destiny and the fate of Third Worldism

Abstract

The idea of the Third World, which is usually traced to the late 1940s or early 1950s, was increasingly used to try and generate unity and support among an emergent group of nation-states whose governments were reluctant to take sides in the Cold War. These leaders and governments sought to displace the ‘East–West’ conflict with the ‘North–South’ conflict. The rise of Third Worldism in the 1950s and 1960s was closely connected to a range of national liberation projects and specific forms of regionalism in the erstwhile colonies of Asia and Africa, as well as the former mandates and new nation-states of the Middle East, and the ‘older’ nation-states of Latin America. Exponents of Third Worldism in this period linked it to national liberation and various forms of Pan-Asianism, Pan-Arabism, Pan-Africanism and Pan-Americanism. The weakening or demise of the first generation of Third Worldist regimes in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with or was followed by the emergence of a second generation of Third Worldist regimes that articulated a more radical, explicitly socialist, vision. A moderate form of Third Worldism also became significant at the United Nations in the 1970s: it was centred on the call for a New International Economic Order (nieo). By the 1980s, however, Third Worldism had entered into a period of dramatic decline. With the end of the Cold War, some movements, governments and commentators have sought to reorient and revitalise the idea of a Third World, while others have argued that it has lost its relevance. This introductory article provides a critical overview of the history of Third Worldism, while clarifying both its constraints and its appeal. As a world-historical movement, Third Worldism (in both its first and second generation modalities) emerged out of the activities and ideas of anti-colonial nationalists and their efforts to mesh highly romanticised interpretations of pre-colonial traditions and cultures with the utopianism embodied by Marxism and socialism specifically, and ‘Western’ visions of modernisation and development more generally. Apart from the problems associated with combining these different strands, Third Worldism also went into decline because of the contradictions inherent in the process of decolonisation and in the new international politico-economic order, in the context of the changing character, and eventual end, of the global political economy of the Cold War.

Notes

Mark T Berger is in the International Studies Program of the University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia. E-mail: [email protected].

I would like to thank Tim Shaw and all the other participants in the ‘Workshop on Globalization/New Regionalisms/Development’, which was held at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies (University of London, 15 December 2002) at which a much earlier version of this chapter was presented. I would like to thank Sally Morphet for her particularly detailed comments.

R Malley, The Call From Algeria: Third Worldism, Revolution and the Turn to Islam, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996.

For example, Edward Said enthusiastically overstated the situation when he said that: ‘By the time of the Bandung Conference in 1955 the entire Orient had gained its political independence from the Western empires and confronted a new configuration of imperial powers, the United States and the Soviet Union’. E Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, London: Penguin Books, 1995, p 104.

R Abdulgani, Bandung Spirit: Moving on the Tide of History, Djakarta: Prapantja, 1964. See also CP Romulo, The Meaning of Bandung, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1956. For the notion of the ‘Bandung era’ (1955–75) see S Amin, Eurocentrism, London: Zed Press, 1989, p 143.

The key elements of Third Worldism, as I am using the term here, are the assumptions that: 1) the ‘popular masses’ in the Third World had ‘revolutionary aspirations’; 2) the fulfilment of these aspirations was an inevitable working out of history that linked pre-colonial forms of egalitarianism to the realisation of a future utopia; 3) the vehicle for the achievement of this transformation was a strong and centralised nation-state; and 4) in foreign policy terms these nation-states should form an alliance that would act collectively under the umbrella of various regional and international forms of political and economic co-operation, such as the non-alignment movement and the United Nations. This definition is similar to, but also departs in key respects from, the conception of Third Worldism provided in Malley, The Call From Algeria, pp 2, 72, 94–114.

G Lundestad, East, West, North, South: Major Developments in International Politics Since 1945, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. The notion of a Third World also became central to academic and policy-orientated work on development and underdevelopment. P Worsley, The Third World, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964; IL Horowitz, Three Worlds of Development, New York: Oxford University Press, 1966; RA Packenham, Liberal America and the Third World: Political Development Ideas in Foreign Aid and Social Science, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973; IL Gendzier, Managing Political Change: Social Scientists and the Third World, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985; C Ramirez-Faria, The Origins of Economic Inequality Between Nations: A Critique of Western Theories of Development and Underdevelopment, London: Unwin Hyman, 1991; and B Hettne, Development Theory and the Three Worlds: Toward an International Political Economy of Development, New York: Wiley, 1995.

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I am following on, but departing, from David Scott's notion of three Bandung generations. See D Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999, pp 197–198, 221–222. Other writers, by contrast, talk in terms of a single Bandung generation. See, for example, P Gilroy, Between Camps: Race, Identity and Nationalism at the End of the Colour Line, London: Allen Lane, 2000, pp 288, 345.

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For a good discussion of the origins of Third Worldism, see Malley, The Call From Algeria, pp 17–33. Although Robert Young does not use the term ‘Third Worldism’, his encyclopaedic history of postcolonialism is also a detailed history of Third Worldism. Young restates the importance of Marxism to anti-colonial nationalism and also reinstates Marxism in the wider history of postcolonial theory. See RJC Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. The one region not well covered by Young is Southeast Asia. This gap is nicely filled by CJ Christie, Ideology and Revolution in Southeast Asia 1900–1980: Political Ideas of the Anti-Colonial Era, Richmond: Curzon Press, 2001.

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Between the 1961 conference in Belgrade and the end of the 1990s there was a total of 12 non-aligned conferences. Following Cairo (Egypt) in 1964, Lusaka (Zambia) in 1970 and Algiers (Algeria) in 1973, there was a conference in Colombo (Sri Lanka) in 1976. The venue in 1979 was Havana (Cuba), followed by New Delhi (India) in 1983, Harare (Zimbabwe) in 1986, with a return to Belgrade in 1989. A meeting in Jakarta (Indonesia) in 1992 was followed by Cartagena (Colombia) in 1995 and Durban (South Africa) in 1998, with 113 different national governments represented at the last two meeting in the 1990s. Lundestad, East, West, North, South, pp 296–298. For good overviews and relatively hopeful assessments of the non-aligned movement, see S Morphet, ‘The non-aligned in “the New World Order”: the Jakarta Summit, September 1992’, International Relations, 11 (4), 1993; Morphet, ‘Three non-aligned summits—Harare 1986; Belgrade 1989 and Jakarta 1992’, in DH Dunn (ed), Diplomacy at the Highest Level: The Evolution of International Summitry, London: Macmillan, 1996.

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In fact, by the beginning of the 21st century there was a steady and significant increase in oil output in Russia. EL Morse & J Richard, ‘The battle for energy dominance’, Foreign Affairs, 81 (2), 2002, pp 16–17. Between 1992 and 1997 more than US$2.2 billion of foreign aid was disbursed to Russia by Washington under the Freedom Support Act (fsa). Over the same period over $2.6 billion was also disbursed to Russia via programmes not covered by the fsa. The figures for the Ukraine were over $1 billion fsa funds and $652 million worth of non-fsa funds, while the former Soviet republics in the Caucasus and Central Asia together received over $1.9 billion in fsa funds and $2.4 billion in non-fsa funds between 1992 and 1997 inclusive. See JR Wedel, Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe 1989–1998, New York: St Martin's Press, 1998, pp 199–203.

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