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: mt.berger@unsw.edu.au. 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. G Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith, London: Zed Press, 2002, p 140. For example, see RE Bissell, ‘Who killed the Third World?’, Washington Quarterly, 13 (4), 1990; J Manor, ‘Introduction’, in Manor (ed), Rethinking Third World Politics, London: Longman, 1991; G Hawthorn, ‘“Waiting for a text?” Comparing Third World politics’ in Manor, Rethinking Third World Politics; V Randall, ‘Third World: rejected or rediscovered?’, Third World Quarterly, 13 (4), 1992; M Williams, ‘Re-articulating the Third World coalition: the role of the environmental agenda’, Third World Quarterly,14 (1), 1993; RO Slater, BM Schutz Slater, Schutz M Williams, International Economic Organisations and the Third World, New York: Harverster Wheatsheaf, 1994; M Kamrava, ‘Political culture and a new definition of the Third World’, Third World Quarterly, 16 (4), 1995; A Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997; V Randall P Darby, The Fiction of Imperialism: Reading Between International Relations and Postcolonialism, London: Cassell, 1998; M Kamrava, Cultural Politics in the Third World, London: University College London Press, 1999; AN Roy, The Third World in the Age of Globalisation: Requiem or New Agenda?, London: Zed Press, 2000; and R Pinkney, Democracy in the Third World, Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 2003. For example, see J-F Bayart, ‘Finishing with the idea of the Third World: the concept of political trajectory’, in Manor, Rethinking Third World Politics; A Loomba, ‘Overworking the “Third World” ’, Oxford Literary Review, 12, 1991; MT Berger, ‘The end of the “Third World”?’, Third World Quarterly, 15 (2), 1994; F Buell, National Culture and the New Global System, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, pp 101–37; A Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995; R Kiely, ‘Third Worldist relativism: a new form of imperialism’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 25 (2), 1995; G Crow, Comparative Sociology and Social Theory: Beyond the Three Worlds, London: Macmillan, 1997; MW Lewis MW Lewis, ‘Is there a Third World?’, Current History, 98 (631), 1999; R Malley, ‘The Third Worldist moment’, Current History, 98 (631), 1999; C Thomas, ‘Where is the Third World now?’, Review of International Studies, 25 (4), 1999; M Hardt A Payne, ‘The global politics of development: towards a new research agenda’, Progress in Development Studies, 1 (1), 2001; A Hoogvelt, Globalization and the Postcolonial World: The New Political Economy of Development, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001; and M Hardt, ‘Today’s Bandung?', New Left Review II, 14, 2002. 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. MT Berger, ‘The rise and demise of national development and the origins of post-cold war capitalism’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 30 (2), 2001. 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. The notion of the Third World is often traced to the writing in the early 1950s of the French economist, Alfred Sauvy. See Sauvy, ‘Trois Mondes, Une Planete’, L'Observateur, 14 Aout 1952, no. 118, p. 14. See also TC Lewellen, Dependency and Development: An Introduction to the Third World, London: Bergin L Wolf-Phillips, ‘Why “Third World”? Origin, definition and usage’, Third World Quarterly, 9 (4), 1987. Other observers have suggested that its origins also lie in the somewhat earlier promotion of a ‘Third Force’ in international politics by Labour Party MPs in Britain following the onset of the Cold War in 1947. Furthermore, this coincided with the call for a ‘Third Force’ on the part of Fenner Brockway (a British socialist) to unite people and movements in Africa, Asia and Europe in the pursuit of peace, democracy and socialism. JE Goldthorpe, The Sociology of Post-Colonial Societies: Economic Disparity, Cultural Diversity and Development, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp 15–16. Stephen Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics: The Left and the End of Empire, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, pp 168–179. P Lyon, ‘The emergence of the Third World’, in H Bull HW Brands, The Specter of Neutralism: The United States and the Emergence of the Third World, 1947–1960, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. 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Although the Great Leap Forward departed from the Soviet model, it not only retained links to Stalinist conceptions of economic development, but it also resonated with Stalinist approaches to agriculture in the 1930s in its human costs. The Great Leap Forward affected the peasantry badly as the diversion of resources to industry led to starvation in the countryside. The loss of life from famine between 1958 and 1961 is now calculated to run to upwards of 30 million people. M Goldman and FC Teiwes, ‘The Chinese state during the Maoist era’, in D Shambaugh (ed), The Modern Chinese State, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp 139–148. M Stuart-Fox, A Short History of China and Southeast Asia: Tribute, Trade and Influence, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2003, pp 169–176. See A Hutchison, China's Africa Revolution, London: Hutchinson, 1975, pp72–79. JW Garver, Protracted Conflict: Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Twentieth Century, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2002. 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