After the Third World?

Mark T. Berger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138874794
• eBook ISBN: 9781317968290
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The emergence of the 'Third World' is generally traced to onset of the Cold War and decolonization in the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1960s and 1970s the "three worlds of development" were central to the wider dynamics of the changing international order. By the 1980s, Third Worldism had peaked entering a period of dramatic decline that paralleled the end of the Cold War. Into the 21st century, the idea of a Third World and even the pursuit of some form of Third Worldism has continued to be advocated and debated. For some it has passed into history, and may never have had as much substance as it was credited with, while others seek to retain or recuperate the Third World and give Third Worldism contemporary relevance. Beginning with a comprehensive introduction this edited volume brings together a wide range of important contributions. Collectively they offer a powerful overview from a variety of angles of the history and contemporary significance of Third Worldism in international affairs. The question remains; did the Third World exist, what was it, does it still have intellectual and political purchase or do we live in a global era that can be described as After the Third World?

This book was previously published as a special issue of Third world Quarterly.

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

MARK T BERGER

In its pure, unadulterated form, Third Worldism did not suffer approximation or partial results. It had chosen Utopia as its standard, history as its demanding judge. It would have to live with history's hard and unappealable verdict.¹

From the bustling Gambir Railway Station, located on the eastern side of Lapangan Merdeka (Freedom Square) in central Jakarta, one can take a train south and east through the seemingly endless slums, plazas and suburbs of Indonesia's capital. The urban sprawl of Jakarta gradually gives way to rice paddies, and eventually the train ascends into the hills. If the train is an express train, it will take about three hours to arrive at another of the largest cities in Indonesia and the capital of the province of West Java. High in the hills the provincial capital is cool compared with the sweltering humidity of the coast. Leaving the train, the traveller can make his/her way to Jalan Asia-Afrika (Asia-Africa Avenue) and Gedung Merdeka (Freedom Building) near the centre of town. Inside this building is a museum commemorating a famous meeting that involved, among others, Sukarno, Jawaharlal Nehru, Ho Chi Minh, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Zhou Enlai. The city, of course, is Bandung, and the conference, held from 17 to 24 April 1955 was the Asian-African Conference. More than any other single event, this conference in a hitherto obscure city (in an Indonesia that had only emerged as a sovereign nation-state in the 1940s) symbolised the moment of arrival for the Third World.²

Participants and observers subsequently conjured with the ‘Bandung Spirit’, while others now talk retrospectively of a ‘Bandung Era’ (1955–75).³ The historic meeting in Bandung became the touchstone of a wide array of initiatives associated directly and indirectly with Third Worldism.⁴ The idea of the Third World was increasingly deployed to generate unity and support among a growing number of non-aligned nation-states whose leaders sought to displace the ‘East-West’ (cold war) conflict and foreground the ‘North-South’ conflict.⁵ The 1970s were the ‘golden age’ of Third Worldism. Some commentators point, for example, to the Declaration and Programme of Action for the Establishment of a New Economic Order, passed in April 1974 by the Sixth Special Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations, as evidence of the ‘triumph of Third Worldism’.⁶ While a number of governments committed to Third Worldism had appeared and/or disappeared in the 1950s and 1960s, the 1970s saw the emergence of a number of new rulers who adopted a distinctly revolutionary Third Worldist tone and outlook in Asia, Africa and Latin America. By the 1980s, however, Third Worldism as both a revolutionary and a reformist project had entered into a period of precipitous 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. The views of the former are not homogeneous, but they all generally agree that the new circumstances of the post-cold war era and the 21st century can still be clarified via the elaboration and reconfiguration of the idea of the Third World and/or that progressive political initiatives can still be pursued under the umbrella of some sort of revised form of Third Worldism.⁷ Critics of Third Worldism, however, often emphasise its profound shortcomings during the Cold War. They also emphasise that the spatial and political divisions of the cold war era between the First, Second and Third Worlds, had become so thoroughly scrambled by the dawn of the post-cold war era that the idea of the Third World now imposes a dubious homogeneity on a large and diverse area of the world at the same time as Third Worldism is grounded in political, economic and territorial distinctions that have become irrelevant.⁸

This book contains a wide range of contributions, all of which engage with the idea of the Third World and with Third Worldism. In some cases this involves ‘reinventing the Third World’, while in other cases the authors make a case for ‘ending with the Third World’. In an effort both to establish an historical framework for the contributions that follow and to take a position in the ongoing debate about the idea of the Third World this introductory article provides a critical overview of the history of the rise and demise of Third Worldism in its classical form. I attempt to clarify both the constraints on, and the appeals of, Third Worldism in the context of its wider emergence and its eventual (and in my view at least, terminal) decline. Movements and governments directly informed by Third Worldism in the cold war era can be divided into first-generation (1950s-60s) and second-generation (1960s-70s) Bandung regimes.⁹ While these generations overlapped and displayed considerable internal diversity, second-generation regimes (as already suggested) were generally more explicitly socialist in their overall approach to national liberation and economic development than first-generation regimes. As a worldhistorical 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 often 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 cultural and politico-intellectual strands, Third Worldism eventually came crashing down because of the contradictions between its Utopian vision on the one hand and the ungainly scaffolding for a rising Third World provided by the emergent new nation-states and the international political-economic order of the Cold War on the other.¹⁰

Third World rising: first-generation Bandung regimes, 1950s–60s

Challenging neocolonialism I: the dawn of Third Worldism

The first stirrings of Third Worldism can be traced to the complex milieux of colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism in the early 20th century.¹¹ At the same time, of course, the overall consolidation of Third Worldism is grounded in the post-1945 conjuncture of decolonisation, national liberation and the Cold War.¹² For example, the Bandung Conference flowed from the slow pace of decolonisation and the way in which the United Nations had become enmeshed in the rivalry between the two cold war superpowers. More specifically, the organisation of the Bandung Conference by the governments of newly independent Indonesia, Ceylon, India and Pakistan was a result of their frustration with the political logjam surrounding new membership in the United Nations. By 1953–54 no new members had been inducted into the organisation since the acceptance of Indonesia in January 1950.¹³ The 1955 meeting in Bandung was attended by delegations from 29, primarily new, nation-states or nationalist movements in Asia and Africa. Also included in the proceedings were members of the African National Congress, as well as observers from Greek Cypriot and African-American organisations. The key figures at the conference, and the main leaders of the first generation of Bandung regimes, were Sukarno, President of Indonesia (1945–65), Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India (1947–64), Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of Egypt (1954–70), Ho Chi Minh, leader of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (1954–69), Kwame Nkrumah, the future Prime Minister of Ghana, (1957–66) and Zhou Enlai, Prime Minister (1949–76) and Foreign Minister (1949–58) of the People's Republic of China.¹⁴

At the Bandung meeting, these leaders and the other assembled delegates emphasised their opposition to colonialism, singling out French colonialism in North Africa for particular criticism. The French war (1954–62) to prevent Algerian independence was underway at this time and representatives of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), which would eventually come to power in the 1960s and occupy an important position in the Third Worldist pantheon, were in attendance in Bandung. There was also a major debate as to whether Soviet domination of Eastern Europe was equivalent to Western European colonialism in Asia and Africa. The final communiqué of the conference condemned all ‘manifestations’ of colonialism and was thus widely viewed as not only an attack on the formal colonialism of the Western European powers, but also on the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe and the informal colonialism, or neocolonialism of the USA. The proceedings ended with a call for: increased technical and cultural co-operation between the governments of Asia and Africa; the establishment of an economic development fund to be operated by the United Nations; increased support for human rights and the ‘self-determination of peoples and nations’, singling out South Africa and Israel for their failure in this regard; and negotiations to reduce the building and stockpiling of nuclear weapons.¹⁵

Although the Bandung Conference failed to lead directly to any long-term organisational initiatives (a second Asian-African Conference planned for Algiers in 1965 never took place because of the politics of the Sino-Soviet split) it did, as already emphasised, provide the indirect inspiration for various Third Worldist organisations. A particularly radical example was the formation of the African-Asian Peoples' Solidarity Organisation (AAPSO) at a meeting in Cairo in 1957. In contrast to Bandung, which was primarily a meeting of government leaders, AAPSO was set up as an organisation of ruling and non-ruling political parties, including delegates from the USSR and China. Despite a number of meetings in the late 1950s and early 1960s, AAPSO soon lost its significance in the context of the Sino-Soviet split and the formation of the more moderate Movement of Non-Aligned Countries, which would become known as the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) by the 1970s.¹⁶ In September 1961 the First Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries was held in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Hosted by Josip Broz Tito, President of Yugoslavia (1953–80), it was attended by officials from 25 governments and representatives from 19 different national liberation movements.¹⁷ A number of governments, such as Pakistan, which had been in attendance in Bandung, were excluded if they were seen to be clearly orientated towards the USA or Soviet Union. A number of former French colonies that were closely tied to Paris were also excluded, but this stipulation did not lead to the exclusion of representatives from Castro's Cuba from the meeting, even though Havana was becoming an important client-ally of Moscow. The Belgrade Conference was followed by Cairo in 1964, then Lusaka (Zambia) in 1970 and Algiers in 1973.¹⁸

By the time of the non-aligned meeting in Cairo in 1964, if not befor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 After the Third World? History, destiny and the fate of Third Worldism
• Part One: Reinventing the Third World
• Part Two: Ending with the Third World
• Index