ARTICLES
Third World Quarterly, Vol 25, No 1, pp 000–000, 2004
After the Third World? History,
destiny and the fate of Third
Worldism
M.T.BergerInternational Studies ProgramUniversity of New South WalesSydneyNSW 2052Australiamt.berger@unsw.edu.au
MARK T BERGER
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 nationstates 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 PanAmericanism. 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, the emergent new
nation-states, the international political–economic order and the changing
character, and eventual end, of the Cold War.
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.
ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/04/010000-00 2004 Third World Quarterly
DOI: 10.1080/0143659032000173150
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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
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AFTER THE THIRD WORLD?
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 special 25th anniversary issue of Third World Quarterly 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
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MARK T BERGER
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 AfricanAmerican 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
12
AFTER THE THIRD WORLD?
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 before, the
complicated and conflicting interests of the new nations in Asia and Africa
(against the backdrop of the universalisation of a system of sovereign nationstates centred on the United Nations) were increasingly preventing the creation
of a strong coalition of non-aligned governments. Despite Third Worldist
attempts at non-alignment, most nationalist movements and Third World regimes
had diplomatic, economic and military relations with one or both of the
superpowers. Also, as already noted, Third Worldism was further complicated
by the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s. After 1949 the People’s Republic of
China (PRC) had initially aligned itself with Moscow, signing a Treaty of
Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance with the USSR. in 1950.19 This
coincided with the rise and fall of the PRC’s commitment to a Soviet-style
development model and its increasing efforts in the 1950s to play a leadership
role in the emerging Third World. From 1949–53 Mao and the Chinese
leadership followed economic policies that included co-operating with or allowing the continued commercial activities of those members of the bourgeoisie
who had not worked with the Japanese. At the same time in rural areas they
focused on land redistribution, the execution and purging of landlords and the
consolidation of the power of the Communist Party. In 1954 the Chinese
leadership set up a state planning apparatus and began nationalising industry and
commerce, while in 1955 they moved to collective agriculture along Soviet lines.
By the second half of the 1950s, however, many members of the Chinese
leadership became increasingly critical of the operation of the Soviet model in
China. In particular, they were concerned about low levels of agricultural growth
and excessive centralisation. This was the context for the launch of the Great
Leap Forward (1958–61).20
The Great Leap Forward was closely connected to China’s various foreign
policy initiatives towards the emerging Third World generally and towards
Southeast Asia more specifically. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership
was seeking to increase China’s economic significance and its international
position dramatically. At the Bandung Conference Zhou Enlai had successfully
vied with Nehru for a leading role among the non-aligned nation-states in Asia.
In the wake of Bandung China’s relations with Indonesia increasingly improved,
while Zhou Enlai’s personal relationship with U Nu of Burma led to the
resolution of concerns about their shared border. China’s relations with Cambodia, Laos and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) were also
strengthened in the late 1950s, while only Thailand and the Philippines had
joined the US-sponsored Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO), set up in
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MARK T BERGER
1954 to support South Vietnam.21 The winding back of the policies associated
with the Great Leap Forward in the early 1960s coincided with the complete
rupture of Beijing’s relationship with Moscow, and growing friction with the
USA. The USSR and USA signed a nuclear test ban treaty in 1963 which was
roundly criticised by Mao. China successfully tested its own nuclear weapon in
1964. As the Chinese leadership’s war of words with Moscow and Washington
escalated, Beijing sought to position itself as a key nation-state in, if not the
leader of, a wider Third Worldist challenge well beyond Asia. Ultimately,
however, the China-led Third Worldist push had limited success—reflected in
Beijing’s unsuccessful effort to have the USSR. excluded from the ‘Second
Bandung Conference’ that had been scheduled to meet in Algeria in June 1965.22
Beijing’s initiative led to the cancellation of the conference when many of the
governments involved, such as Egypt and India, saw continued benefits in
maintaining their connections to Moscow and thus not supporting Beijing. Prime
Minister Nehru’s opposition to China’s manoeuvres also flowed from the fact
that the relatively good relations between China and India that had characterised
the 1950s had been completely ruptured by the Sino-Indian war of 1962 fought
along the disputed Himalayan frontier.23
Challenging Neocolonialism II: a tryst with destiny
India’s credentials as a leading Third Worldist state were also in relative decline
more generally by the mid-1960s. Gopal Krishna has characterised the Indian
diplomatic trajectory in this period as a ‘retreat from idealism’.24 In the 1950s
Nehru’s international profile and his commitment to a combination of parliamentary democracy, economic planning and socialist principles helped to focus
considerable world attention on India, while his diplomacy sought to mobilise a
Pan-Asian coalition and a broader grouping of non-aligned Third World
regimes.25 For some observers in the USA, meanwhile, India was regarded as an
important prize: they conjured with the political and ideological benefits for
Washington that an alliance with one of the most influential non-aligned
governments in Asia would bring. According to this vision, if the USA
strengthened ties with Nehru’s government, Washington could help ensure that
India would serve as an anchor for, and model of, democratic capitalist
development in the Third World to counter the explicitly anti-capitalist and
state-socialist alternatives exemplified by China and the Soviet Union. However,
for other US strategists Pakistan was the most important nation-state in the
region for military-strategic reasons: they emphasised its proximity to the Soviet
Union and its position in relation to the Middle East. By 1954 the emphasis on
the relative importance of Pakistan had led to the decision to enter into a mutual
security agreement between the USA and the government of Pakistan. At the
same time Pakistan also became a founding member of the US-sponsored SEATO
that was formally established in February 1955.26
In this period the government in New Delhi set about balancing its relationship with Washington by deepening its economic and military links to Moscow,
while also seeking to maintain good relations with the Chinese government.27 In
part as a result of these changes, by the end of the 1950s the US approach to
14
AFTER THE THIRD WORLD?
South Asia had shifted away from an emphasis on Pakistan and towards an
emphasis on India. Worried that the USSR, in particular, was gaining influence
in Indian government circles, via its generous trade and aid arrangements, and
concerned that if the Indian government failed to achieve its national development plans the strength of the country’s communist movement would increase,
President Eisenhower expanded his administration’s economic aid programme to
India in his final years in office. By the end of the 1950s the Eisenhower
administration also shared the concern, voiced by Senator John F Kennedy and
others, that economic decline in India could enhance the Chinese government’s
prestige in international affairs, undermining the US claim that the democratic-capitalist model was superior to the state-socialist model of national
development.28
Nehruvian socialism and Nehru’s commitment to Third Worldism reached
their peak during the second half of the 1950s. By the time Nehru died in May
1964 the notion that a benevolent technocratic elite could successful guide India
to Nehru’s distinctive vision of Indian socialism and that India could both be
part of a broad Third World coalition and serve as a model for other parts of the
Third World was already in crisis, as were the first generation of Bandung
regimes more generally.29 Nehru’s conception of state-guided national development is often seen as being shaped by the Soviet model; however, his approach
was always tempered by a critique of the lack of democracy in the Soviet Union
and the human cost of Soviet industrialisation. In fact, for some observers
Nehru’s views by the 1950s had much more in common with social democracy
in post-1945 Western Europe than they did with state-socialism in the Soviet
Union, despite the much publicised Soviet support for national development in
India. Nehru certainly rejected key aspects of the Soviet model and his
perspective bore similarities to social democratic currents in Western Europe.
However, Nehru’s government also drew on China’s post-1949 approach to
national development, especially its approach to agriculture.30 In fact, Nehruvian
socialism exemplifies the way in which Marxism was assimilated to national
circumstances in the wider context of decolonisation, the Cold War and the
emergence of Third Worldism.31
Within less than two years of Nehru’s death, Sukarno, another key exponent
of Third Worldism—who sought to synthesise nationalism, Islam and Marxism,
a project that was embodied in his famous formulation Nasionalis-AgamaKomunis (NASAKOM)—was overthrown by General Suharto in a bloody and
prolonged anti-communist purge in Indonesia.32 While Nehru had earlier, and
somewhat patronisingly, regarded Sukarno as one of his ‘disciples’ in Asia and
antagonised his host in Bandung in 1955 as a result, the Indonesian leader had
also attained a position in the Third Worldist pantheon that was as transcendent
as, although different from, that occupied by Nehru.33 During the 1950s parliamentary democracy in Indonesia had increasingly given way to what Sukarno
called ‘Guided Democracy’. By the late 1950s Indonesia had embraced an
approach to economic development that involved an increasingly high level of
state intervention to restructure the economy in the context of the nationalisation
of Dutch owned property. The Indonesian state directed earnings from the
commodity export sector into the primarily state-owned and -operated manu15
MARK T BERGER
facturing sector. Export earnings were also directed towards public works,
health, food production, education and transportation, not to mention as payment
on foreign debts. The Indonesian Army (ABRI) played an ever more important
political and economic role under Sukarno, taking over direct control of large
sectors of the economy in the late 1950s.34
Apart from the military, Sukarno’s ‘Guided Democracy’, which involved full
presidential powers and rule by decree, rested on a complex web of political
alliances that revolved around the Partai Nasional Indonesia (Nationalist Party of
Indonesia—PNI), the Communist Party (PKI) and a major Muslim party. He
played these parties off against each other, at the same time as he pitted the
mainly anti-communist military against the PKI. ‘Guided Democracy’, underpinned by Sukarno’s strident anti-Western nationalism and its synthesis with
NASAKOM, bolstered by the Third Worldist vision of which he was an important
proponent, represented an explicitly state-led attempt at national development.
By the early 1960s, however, stagnation and decline in the sugar and rubber
sectors, combined with falling commodity prices, had resulted in a shortage of
funds and a serious balance of payments problem. By the first half of the 1960s
it was increasingly apparent that not only was Indonesia’s economy on the brink
of collapse, but the political structure centred on Sukarno was also in crisis.35
This was taking place against the backdrop of a conflict (Konfrontasi) with
Malaysia over the setting of their respective postcolonial borders.36 When it
came, the end of Sukarno’s regime in Indonesia involved a much sharper break
with first-generation Third Worldism than did the more gradual waning of
Nehruvian socialism in India. Following Sukarno’s overthrow in 1965–66,
Suharto dramatically reorientated Indonesia’s military and economic links,
bringing Indonesia into close alignment with the USA and Japan, against the
backdrop of the effective elimination of the large PKI, which had been an
important source of support for Sukarno. Suharto presided over an increasingly
conservative anti-communist and authoritarian version of national developmentalism in Indonesia, erected on the foundations of Sukarno’s failed state-guided
national development project.37
Challenging neocolonialism III: an appointment with destiny
Another pivotal first-generation Bandung regime was Egypt under Gamal Abdel
Nasser. After World War II Egypt emerged at the centre of Pan-Arabism and the
wider Third-Worldist push in the Middle East.38 Of particular geostrategic
importance because of the Suez Canal, Egypt effectively became a protectorate
of Britain in the 1880s (a status that was formalised in 1914). After World War
I the former Ottoman province emerged as a nominally independent monarchy
with links to Britain that were increasingly perceived by Egyptian nationalists as
neocolonial. But it was not until over 30 years later, on July 23 1952, that
Egyptian nationalists ousted the British-backed King Farouk in a bloodless coup.
This initiated a process that led to the departure of all British troops from Egypt
and the Egyptian takeover of the Suez Canal in 1956.39 The Suez crisis (which
involved an ultimately unsuccessful Anglo-French-Israeli effort to regain control
of the Canal) dramatically undermined British prestige and influence in the
16
AFTER THE THIRD WORLD?
region at the same time as it catapulted Nasser to prominence as a major figure
not only in Egyptian nationalism, but also in Pan-Arabism and Third
Worldism.40 A radical and secular nationalist, Nasser’s ideas became increasingly
socialist over the course of his years in office.41 Shortly after coming to power
he published Egypt’s Liberation: The Philosophy of the Revolution, which held
up the Egyptian military as the vanguard of the national struggle against
‘feudalism’ and ‘imperialism’. He conjured with the idea of an independent Egypt
as the pivot, not only of an expanding group of united and liberated Arab
nation-states, but of Africa and the Islamic world as well.42 At the same time,
like Nehru in India and Sukarno in Indonesia, Nasser was presiding by the late
1950s over the dramatic deepening of the state-led national development project
in Egypt. The central goal was industrialisation; however, in Nasser’s grandiose
vision of progress, and his vague conception of socialism, industrialisation and
socialism were usually conflated. At the same time the Egyptian leader clearly
linked nationalism and import-substitution industrialisation to both wider social
(or populist–socialist) goals and to the broader Third Worldist agenda and the
struggle against neocolonialism. In a well known speech in late 1958 (at a time
when Egypt was part of the United Arab Republic (UAR) with Syria), Nasser said
that ‘we have an appointment with destiny to build up in the UAR a strong nation
which feels independent’ and in which everyone works for themselves ‘not for
foreigners’ and ‘imperialists’.43 From the vantage point of the 1970s, however,
the socialism of the first generation of Bandung regimes, such as Nasser’s Egypt,
seemed increasingly tepid. For example, although the coup in Libya, led by
Muammar Qaddafi in 1966, had been directly influenced by Nasser’s own
trajectory, the regime that emerged in Tripoli was far more radical and far less
secular in its approach.44
A key, if not always terribly effective, vehicle for Nasser’s influence in the
Middle East was the Arab League. Formed in the waning days of World War II
at a conference in Alexandria attended by the governments of Egypt and Iraq,
along with Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Transjordan and the Yemen, the Arab
League was ostensibly aimed at the promotion of economic, technical and cultural
interaction between the governments and people in the Arab world. A representative of the Palestinian Arabs also attended the initial conference. Libya joined
the League in 1951. Sudan joined in 1956, followed by Tunisia and Morocco in
1958, Kuwait in 1961, Algeria in 1962, South Yemen (formerly Aden) in 1968,
then Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the Trucial States in 1971. A council based in
Cairo guided the operations of the League, but there was no significant central
governing body and it operated as a relatively decentralised collection of
nation-states. Until the mid-1960s the main foci of activity for the League were
supporting the Palestinians against Israel and attempting to check the French
presence in Lebanon and North Africa. While Nasser was president of Egypt he
dominated the organisation. With his death in 1970 Egyptian influence on the
League declined, while that of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) rose.
After Anwar Sadat became president of Egypt, the headquarters of the League
shifted from Cairo to Tunis.45 At the same time, throughout the 1950s and 1960s,
Nasser not only sought to link his brand of Egyptian nationalism to Pan-Arabism,
going so far as to federate Egypt with Syria to form the United Arab Republic
17
MARK T BERGER
(1958–61), but also to Pan-Islamism and Pan-Africanism. His government
provided political and material assistance to national liberation movements in
Africa. In the late 1950s and early 1960s Egyptian government radio repeatedly
irritated London and Paris with its enthusiastic support for the Mau Mau rebellion
in Kenya in the early 1950s and the FLN in Algeria during its struggle against
French colonialism from 1954 to 1962.46
Despite Nasser’s support for national liberation in Africa, the key figure in
Pan-Africanism and the key African Third Worldist in the 1950s and early 1960s
was, of course, Kwame Nkrumah.47 He was the first prime minister of Ghana,
which was, in turn, the first colony in southern Africa to gain independence.
Formerly the British colony of the Gold Coast, it became an independent
nation-state in 1957. Numerous other transitions from colony to nation-state soon
followed. In 1960, for example, 16 new African nation-states, including the major
new national polities of Nigeria and the Republic of the Congo (formerly the
Belgian Congo), were inducted into the United Nations.48 Meanwhile, PanAfricanism, which had been discussed as early as the 1860s and had gained some
significance in political and cultural terms in the USA between the first and
second world wars against the backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance, took on an
increasingly explicit socialist tone by the 1930s and 1940s, emphasising cooperative agriculture and state-guided industrialisation. However, this vision
remained linked to the goal of recuperating Africa’s pre-colonial cultural heritage
and the building of regional unity along cultural as well as political lines. While
Pan-Africanism underpinned the push by Nkrumah and others for national
self-determination and some form of post-colonial socialism, attempts to deepen
the political structures of Pan-Africanism in the immediate post-colonial period
were relatively short-lived. For example, Nkrumah (who ruled Ghana until he was
overthrown in a military coup in 1966) and Ahmed Sékou Touré of Guinea
formed the Ghana–Guinea union in 1958. However, this was a relatively brief
arrangement, as was the Ghana–Guinea–Mali union, not to mention the Federation of Mali (Senegal and Mali). The regional vision that informed PanAfricanism increasingly lost momentum as more and more independent
nation-states emerged.49 Nevertheless, Pan-Africanism survived in an attenuated
form with the formation of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in 1963.50
Meanwhile, shortly before the Ghanaian military overthrew him in 1966,
Nkrumah published Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, which
argued that, although the erstwhile colonies of Africa had gained political
independence, national liberation could not be achieved until they attained
economic independence via a break with neocolonialism, something that could
be more effectively carried out on a regional or transnational basis.51 In the
post-cold war era Nkrumah’s concern that independent African nation-states
could only progress as part of a wider economic and political grouping is now
seen as more prescient than ever. At the same time Muammar Qaddafi has
spearheaded a recent attempt to revitalise Pan-Africanism and the OAU, with the
latter having been reorganised and renamed the African Union (AU). With the
judicious use of military and economic aid Qaddafi ensured that 42 of the member
governments of what would become the AU showed up for a major conference
in Tripoli in 1999.52
18
AFTER THE THIRD WORLD?
Third World reorientated: second-generation Bandung regimes, 1960s–70s
The golden age of Third Worldism
Qaddafi still leads one of the few surviving one-time second-generation Bandung
regimes. Apart from Qaddafi, the other main survivor from this period is Fidel
Castro in Cuba, who has been in power since 1959. Qaddafi and Castro came to
power against the backdrop of a wider wave of second-generation Bandung
regimes that included those of Ahmed Ben Bella (1962–65) and Houari Boumédienne (1965–78) in Algeria, Tanzania under Julius Nyerere (1965–85), Chile
under Salvador Allende (1970–73), Jamaica under Michael Manley (1972–80),
Libya under Muammar Qaddafi after 1969, the Derg (Committee) in Ethiopia
(1974–91), Guinea-Bissau from 1974 under Amilcar Cabral’s successors, the
People’s Republic of Angola under the Popular Movement for the Liberation of
Angola (MPLA) after 1975, Mozambique under Samora Moises Machel (1975–
86) and Nicaragua under the Sandinistas (1979–90). This far from exhaustive list
could also include the rapid rise and fall of Patrice Lumumba, the leader of the
Mouvement National Congolais (MNC) who emerged as the key figure and Prime
Minister in the Republic of the Congo at the time of independence in June 1960
until his assassination by the Belgian authorities (with the complicity of
Washington) in January 1961.53 Like Che Guevara after him, Lumumba’s early
death quickly elevated him to a position of major significance in the pantheon
of Third Worldist leaders. More broadly, the second-generation Bandung
regimes (framed by the Cuban Revolution at the beginning and the Nicaraguan
Revolution at the end), for which figures like Lumumba and Guevara became
powerful symbols, increasingly intersected with a major revolutionary wave
between 1974 and 1980. If the revolutionary regimes with dubious long-term, if
not short-term, progressive credentials that emerged in the second half of the
1970s are counted, the list of ‘revolutionary’ regimes in this period not already
mentioned above includes: Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in Southeast Asia; Iran
and Afghanistan in Central Asia; and Zimbabwe, along with Sao Tomé e
Príncipe and Cape Verde (which, like Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique
emerged out of the collapse of the Portuguese Empire) in Africa. Meanwhile,
Grenada under Maurice Bishop in the Caribbean was also part of this wave, at
the same time as major, albeit unsuccessful revolutionary movements were
gaining ground in El Salvador, Guatemala, the Philippines and elsewhere in the
late 1970s and early 1980s.54
Second-generation Bandung regimes (with the exception of post-1979 Iran,
which was, and sometimes still is, positioned as a revolutionary Third Worldist
regime) reflected a more radical, more unambiguously socialist, Third Worldism
than the first-generation Bandung regimes. (Important exceptions were the
People’s Republic of China and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, which
were both first-generation Bandung regimes led by Communist parties committed to Marxism–Leninism and state-socialism.) In fact, some commentators, such
as E San Juan Jr, emphasise that the first-generation regimes, led by nationalists
such as Sukarno, Nehru and Nasser, were exemplars of the ‘bourgeois national
project initiated by the Bandung Conference’. He also includes Ghana and the
Philippines in the same category as Indonesia, India and Egypt, while juxta19
MARK T BERGER
posing these ‘nationalist bourgeois struggles’ with Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh
and Cuba under Fidel Castro. San Juan situates the first-generation Bandung
regimes led by Nasser, Nehru and Sukarno with newly independent nation-states
generally, representing them all as ‘postcolonial states’ that were ‘modernising
on the basis of anticommunism and pragmatic philosophy’, while relying on
‘Soviet military support’ and engaging in a ‘cynical playing of the ‘American
card’.55
However, as outlined in the previous section of this introduction, this
characterisation does not actually apply to many of the first-generation Bandung
regimes. Nehru, Sukarno and even Nasser often had a more complicated
relationship with ‘socialism’ and their own national communist parties than is
conveyed by San Juan’s formulation. At the same time San Juan celebrates
leaders of the second generation movements such as Amilcar Cabral, who led the
African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) from
1956 until his assassination in 1973.56 San Juan acknowledges that ‘we cannot
of course return wholesale to the classic period of national liberation struggles’.
He says he is primarily concerned with using Cabral ‘to refute the argument that
historical materialist thinking is useless in grasping the complexity of colonialism and its aftermath’.57 Ironically, by making such a sharp distinction between
the ‘national bourgeois project’ of first-generation Bandung leaders and the
socialism of primarily second-generation leaders, he simplifies the ‘complexity’
of the ‘colonialism and its aftermath’ he is seeking to understand. Firstgeneration Bandung regimes were certainly, by and large, less radical than the
second-generation Bandung regimes, but to view the former as simply anticommunist national bourgeois projects not only misrepresents their intellectual
and organisational relationship to Marxism, but also stereotypes the complexities
of their interactions with the cold war superpowers. Furthermore, Cabral’s
particularly pragmatic brand of socialism makes him an exceedingly poor
example of the ostensibly sharp break between the bourgeois nationalism of the
first-generation of Bandung leaders and the second-generation of which Cabral
was a member. While he was widely regarded as progressive, he drew on
Marxism rather than positioning himself as a Marxist.58
While the representation of the first generation of Bandung regimes as
reformist supporters of the national bourgeoisie and the second generation as
revolutionary Marxists committed to state-socialism is overdrawn, the latter
group was still generally more radical than the former. For example, if the
Bandung conference was symbolically the most important meeting for the first
generation of Bandung regimes, one of the key events for the second generation
was the Tricontinental Conference of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia
and Latin America, held in Havana in January 1966. While the Bandung
Conference had brought together a relatively small number of leaders from
mainly recently independent nation-states in Asia in order to stake out a
non-aligned position in the Cold War, the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in
Havana involved delegates from throughout Asia, Africa, the Middle East and
Latin America. It articulated a far more radical anti-imperial agenda that located
the participants firmly in the socialist camp at the same time as they formally
emphasised their independence from the USSR and Maoist China.59 Second20
AFTER THE THIRD WORLD?
generation Bandung Regimes, directly or indirectly linked to the tricontinentalism of the late 1960s and 1970s, represented the practical complement to the
rise and spread of dependency theory (along with other revitalised Marxist
theories of development and social and political change).60 In this era secondgeneration Bandung Regimes and their supporters attempted to radicalise statemediated national development efforts in various ways in the name of socialism
and national liberation. The example of the Vietnamese revolution had
influenced many of the second-generation Bandung regimes. At the same time,
revolutionary regimes were also directly inspired and, in the case of Algeria, for
example, supported by Castro’s Cuba.
Triumph and tragedy: from exhausted colonialism to exhausted nationalism
In Algeria the escalating military struggle against French colonialism that began
in 1954, in the context of the expanding Cold War, culminated in the departure
of the exhausted colonial rulers and the triumphant emergence of an independent
Algeria in July 1962.61 The triumph of the FLN in Algeria marked an important
turning point for the region and for Third Worldism more generally.62 Robert
Malley goes so far as to call the FLN’s ascension to power in 1962 ‘a defining
moment in the history of Third Worldism’. The Algerian Revolution was pivotal
to Third Worldism because the struggle had been so lengthy and violent at the
same time as the FLN was ‘acutely aware’ of the struggle’s ‘international
dimension’.63 Following the founding meeting of the OAU in Addis Abba in May
1963, the Algerian leader, Ben Bella, delivered a particularly stirring address to
those in attendance as ‘one of the leaders of the Third World struggle’. While
attracting the attention of the USA for his radical ideas and his links with Cuba,
Ben Bella was also able to garner allies in sub-Saharan Africa during what
would be a relatively brief period as president of the Algerian republic.64 In 1965
Ben Bella was ousted in a military coup led by Houari Boumédienne, his
Defense Minister and also his former comrade-in-arms. The latter, a charismatic
military officer who enjoyed considerable popular support in Algeria and
remained more or less committed to the populist socialism and state-guided
economics of his predecessor, emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as a key figure
in Third Worldism. Boumédienne, as will be discussed below, played a central
role in the call for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) at the United
Nations in the mid-1970s.65
Meanwhile, the way in which the Cuban revolution overthrew a regime that
had long enjoyed the support of Washington and embarked after 1959 on the
creation of a radical socialist state in such close proximity to the USA was also
extremely important to Marxist and Third Worldist intellectuals and revolutionaries.66 Following the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, and the replacement of
Nikita Khrushchev (1953–64) by Leonid Brezhnev (1964–82), Moscow increasingly urged the Communist parties in Latin America to adopt a gradual approach
to social change.67 This approach had the effect of further encouraging many
revolutionaries to break completely with Moscow in the 1960s and try to
emulate the Cuban revolution. While the new regime in Cuba became highly
dependent on the Soviet Union, members of the Cuban leadership continued to
21
MARK T BERGER
articulate a far more revolutionary stance than their patrons in Moscow in this
period—Havana gave considerable encouragement and support to insurgent
groups in Nicaragua and Guatemala which had split from the traditional
communist movement (or had never been linked to it in the first place). In fact,
the early 1960s in particular were characterised by a concerted effort to try and
spread the Cuban revolution to the rest of Latin America and beyond. This
process was reflected in Ché Guevara’s assertion of the need to create ‘two,
three, many Vietnams’ and it reached its zenith with his death in 1967 in
Bolivia.68
Che Guevara personified revolutionary idealism and Third Worldism in its
second-generation form. While Fidel Castro increasingly aligned himself with
the Soviet Union and sought to focus on building communism in Cuba as the
1960s progressed, Guevara was increasingly influenced by Trotskyism and by
the idea that the success of Cuban communism was dependent on the spread of
revolution to the rest of the Third World. However, Guevara departed from
Trotsky’s emphasis on a vanguard party, and found in foco theory the key to
initiating action. With foquismo Guevara emphasised that a small nucleus of
guerrillas could provide the leadership and revolutionary élan required to
establish a successful guerrilla insurgency. In early 1965 Guevara resigned from
the Cuban government and led an expedition to the Congo. This effort was a
disappointment, however, and he soon shifted his focus back to Latin America,
arriving with his small group of foquistas in Bolivia. However, his guerrilla
group failed to gain the support of the indigenous inhabitants of the Bolivian
highlands. His efforts to foment revolution were also regarded with suspicion by
the Bolivian Communist Party. He was captured and executed in October 1967
by counter-insurgency troops of the Bolivian armed forces.69 Following
Guevara’s death, and the virtual elimination of guerrilla groups in Colombia,
Venezuela and Guatemala by the end of the 1960s, rural insurgency and Cuban
militancy in Latin America were curtailed.70
As the 1970s began Cuban policy in Latin America had come more into line
with that of the USSR. At the same time the Cuban government had helped to
educate and influence an entire generation of revolutionaries in Latin America
and beyond.71 For example, the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional
(Sandinista National Liberation Front—FSLN) in Nicaragua, and its leader Carlos
Fonseca (who was killed in 1976 in a battle with Somoza’s national guard), was
profoundly influenced by the Cuban experience.72 And, although Cuba had
curtailed its direct involvement in Latin America by the 1970s, Africa was a
different matter—Cuban troops played an important, even pivotal, role in the
revolution in Angola in the 1970s.73 As has already been noted, Africa was a
major arena of the revolutionary resurgence of the late 1970s. In 1974–75 the
ongoing, armed struggles in Portugal’s colonies, combined with the overthrow of
dictatorship in Portugal itself, led to the independence of Angola, Mozambique,
Guinea-Bissau and Sao Tomé e Príncipe and Cape Verde.74 Angola and Mozambique, in particular, continued to be torn by externally funded guerrilla insurgencies seeking to topple the Marxist and Third Worldist leadership, a process that
continued into the post-cold war era, only apparently winding down in the case
of Angola in recent times. Angola represents a particularly stark example of the
22
AFTER THE THIRD WORLD?
tragedy that came in the wake of national liberation and the ostensible pursuit
of Third Worldist goals.75 White-ruled Rhodesia also emerged as central to the
wider dynamics of national liberation and the Cold War in southern Africa. In
1965 the white settlers of Southern Rhodesia, under the leadership of Ian Smith,
launched the famous Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI). What followed was a protracted war of national liberation led by the Patriotic Front, an
uneasy coalition of Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African Political Union (ZAPU)
and Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU).76 In 1980
Zimbabwe achieved full independence and majority rule under the elected
government of former guerrilla leader, and now President, Mugabe. His increasingly erratic and despotic rule, which is now in its third decade, has become an
extreme example of the exhaustion of national liberation as a political project
and of the tragedy of Third Worldism more generally.77 For example, while
millions of Zimbabweans were facing the prospect of a major famine as a result
of Mugabe’s government’s shortcomings, Mugabe himself sought to burnish his
Third Worldist and nationalist credentials at the latest meeting of the NonAligned Movement in Kuala Lumpur in late February 2003, joining the Iraqi
delegation, General Than Shwe of Burma and Fidel Castro in their enthusiastic
support for the lambasting that their host, and the incoming leader of NAM,
Mahathir Mohamad, delivered to Washington and the West at the summit.78
The last avatar of development economics: The
national development
NIEO
and the global crisis of
Third Worldist regimes such as Mugabe’s in Zimbabwe had come to power with
the intention of dramatically transforming what were still profoundly hierarchical
and primarily rural societies via land reform and state-directed import-substitution industrialisation strategies. However, despite these efforts, which sometimes never went beyond the planning stage, long-standing divisions in these
societies, in the context of complex colonial legacies, were reinforced and
reconfigured rather than undermined, and most state-capitalist and socialist-orientated national development projects in the Third World were already in crisis
before relative late-comers such as Mugabe even came to power.79 The statemediated national development project as it emerged in Africa and elsewhere
rested on a growing range of governmental structures to manage production for
domestic and export markets. These elaborate tariff systems and dual exchange
rates, and a range of subsidies on food and other items, combined with the
expansion of the education system, health care and other social services and led
to the emergence of overburdened states that increasingly buckled under rising
foreign debt and the predations of corrupt elites both civilian and military.80 This
general crisis provided the context for the UN Declaration on the Establishment
of a New International Economic Order (NIEO).81 The call for a restructuring of
the world economy in favour of the nation-states of the Third World made at the
special session of the General Assembly of the UN between 9 April and 2 May
1974 was reinforced by the 1973 oil crisis, but flowed from, and built on, earlier
efforts to address the structural inequalities of the international political–
economic order. These previous efforts included the establishment of the Group
23
MARK T BERGER
of 77 at the 1962 Economic Conference of Developing Countries in Cairo and
the establishment in 1964 of the United Nations Conference on Trade and
Development (UNCTAD). Raúl Prebisch, who was Director-General of the UNsponsored Economic Commission for Latin America (Comisión Economica para
América Latina—CEPAL) from 1948 to 1962, also helped to found and then went
on to head IMCTAD from 1964 to 1969, using the latter as a forum to encourage
preferential tariffs for exports from the late-industrialising nation-states of the
Third World. The immediate impetus for the NIEO, meanwhile, was the decision
by the Non-Aligned Movement, taken at its meeting in Algiers in September
1973, to ask the UN to hold a special session on ‘problems relating to raw
materials and development’.82
As noted earlier, a central figure in the promotion and planning of the NIEO
Declaration was Houari Boumédienne, President of Algeria, who was responsible for the initial request to the UN that a special session on international
economic development be held. The other main sponsors were the presidents of
Venezuela and Mexico, Carlos Andres Pérez (1973–78) and Luís Echeverría
Álvarez (1970–76) and the Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi (1954–79).
The changes asked for in the NIEO were, of course, never implemented. The NIEO
effectively called for the extension to the international economic system of the
redistributive framework that had been consolidated in the social democracies of
Western Europe after World War II but was now in crisis at its point of origin.
Implementing such a set of reforms would have required a new global structure
of governance that went far beyond the UN-centred international system. This
new global structure would have required the power to reorganise global markets
and extract taxes at a global level and then redistribute them globally as well. In
retrospect the NIEO was, in the words of one commentator, the ‘last avatar’ of
post-World War II development economics, while the latter was, in turn, the
intellectual anchor of state-mediated capitalist development between the 1940s
and the 1970s.83 The call for an NIEO followed on the heels of the 1973 oil crisis
and the demonstration by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries
(OPEC) of its ability to set the price of oil. While some commentators see OPEC’s
assertiveness in the 1970s as an example of the wider Third Worldist push in this
period, OPEC’s growing influence weakened rather than strengthened Third
Worldism. The rise of conservative, anti-communist, oil-rich nation-states,
particularly in the Middle East, and their often strong links to the USA,
represented a major obstacle to the realisation of the NIEO and the wider Third
Worldist project. Of course, in a somewhat contradictory fashion, the new
‘petro-states’ were also in a position by the 1980s to resist the economic
liberalising thrust of the US-led globalisation project.84
Third World retreating: the end of the Bandung era, 1980s–2000s
The climacteric of Third Worldism
The 1980s ushered in the climacteric of Third Worldism. At the very moment
when the Third World was being seen by some observers to have ‘come of age’,
the Bandung era was already coming to a close.85 For example, wars between the
24
AFTER THE THIRD WORLD?
‘red brotherhood’ of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and China in the late 1970s
pointed to the obvious failure of socialist internationalism and its close relative,
Third Worldism.86 More broadly, by the beginning of the 1980s, the emphasis
on restructuring the world economy to address the North–South divide was
challenged with increasing effectiveness by the emergent US-led globalisation
project.87 With the world recession and the Debt Crisis at the start of the 1980s,
and the subsequent spread of neoliberal economic policies and practices, the
UN-sponsored idea of a New International Economic Order disappeared from
view, displaced by the globalisation project. The International Monetary Fund
and the World Bank, supported by the administration of Ronald Reagan
(1981–88), the governments of Margaret Thatcher in Britain (1979–90) and
Helmut Kohl in (West) Germany (1982–98), encouraged the governments of the
Third World to liberalise trade, privatise their public sectors and deregulate their
financial sectors.88 This trend also coincided with the renewal of the Cold War
and the further weakening of the Non-Aligned Movement. Despite regular
meetings, NAM played an increasingly limited role in international affairs during
the so-called New Cold War and after.89
During the New Cold War, from the end of the 1970s to the late 1980s, the
Reagan administration presided over an unprecedented military build-up and a
reinvigorated anti-communist crusade directed at the Soviet bloc and Third
Worldist regimes such as Nicaragua.90 Apart from Central America, a key
regional focus of the New Cold War, which also highlights the vicissitudes of
non-alignment specifically and Third Worldism more generally, was Southwest
Asia. Once the Soviet Union entered Afghanistan to prop up the increasingly
embattled state-socialist regime in Kabul in late 1979, US aid to Pakistan, which
Washington had suspended because of nuclear testing by Islamabad, was
restored and then significantly increased. In the 1980s the Pakistani military, and
the country’s powerful intelligence organisation, the Inter-Services Intelligence
directorate (ISI), played an important role (along with the Saudi Arabian and the
Chinese governments) in supporting the loose coalition of resistance groups
(Islamic Unity of Afghan Mujahideen) fighting the Soviet occupation. The
Carter administration (1977–80) also attempted to improve its relations with the
Indian government, under Prime Minister Morarji Desai (1977–80), who was
trying to lessen reliance on the USSR. However, once the USA resumed military
and economic aid to Pakistan and increasingly tilted towards China against the
backdrop of Washington and Beijing’s rapprochement in the 1970s and the war
in Afghanistan after 1979, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who replaced Desai in
1980, moved again to strengthen Indian relations with the USSR. This situation
only changed when Soviet military forces withdrew from Afghanistan (between
May 1988 and February 1989), and when the subsequent end of the Cold War
brought about the end of all US aid to Pakistan (in the context of renewed US
concern about Pakistan’s clandestine nuclear weapons programme in the 1990s).
The general deterioration of US relations with Pakistan was paralleled by
improvements in US relations with India in the post-cold war era.91
While there were clear shifts in direction and geographical orientation in
post-cold war USA foreign policy there were also significant continuities. On the
one hand the administration of Bill Clinton (1992–2000) introduced a range of
25
MARK T BERGER
reforms that were ostensibly aimed at ‘enlarging the community of democratic
nations worldwide’ with important implications for the erstwhile Third World.92
For example, the four main goals of US foreign aid in the post-cold war era were
identified in the 1997 US Agency for International Development (USAID)
Strategic Plan as: the promotion of the ‘rule of law’, the promotion of ‘elections
and political processes’, building and expanding ‘civil society’ and improving
‘governance’. Movement towards all these objectives was regarded by USAID as
‘necessary to achieve sustainable democracy’.93 A greater emphasis was also
placed on humanitarian assistance and sustainable development. However, the
foreign aid bill that was passed by the US Congress in 1994 continued, not
surprisingly, to reflect a commitment to often long-standing geopolitical concerns. In the year the bill was passed Israel and Egypt received over one-third
of all US foreign aid. The figure for Israel was US$3 billion and for Egypt it was
$2.1 billion, while the 1994 figure for sub-Saharan Africa as a whole was $800
million.94 This was more or less the same percentage for Israel and Egypt as they
had received in the 1980s. Israel’s importance to US foreign policy (and to
domestic US politics) goes back decades, while Egypt has been a major strategic
outpost for Washington since 1977 when Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat,
ended his government’s ties to the USSR and became a central player in the
US-sponsored peace process in the region. From the time of this reorientation to
the end of the 1990s Cairo received at least $46 billion in military and economic
aid from Washington. Since the late 1970s US policy towards Egypt has viewed
it as the key to making and expanding peace in the region.95 With the end of the
Cold War foreign aid was also directed increasingly at the former Second World,
again for broad geopolitical reasons, related particularly to a concern to improve
relations with, and enhance the political stability of, a post-communist Russia
that still possesses a major capacity for nuclear warfare and is the world’s second
largest oil exporter after Saudi Arabia.96
The redirection of, but limited changes to, the basis of US foreign aid policy
after the Cold War make clear the relative continuity in US strategic thinking in
the 1990s. For example, planning documents and the public pronouncements that
emanated from the administration of George Bush Sr (1989–92) reflected the
continued preoccupation with Russia and some of the other successor states,
such as the Ukraine, that had emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union.
There was also a continued focus on the Middle East, at the same time as Central
America quickly dropped from view.97 Despite the high degree of continuity in
US foreign policy in the 1990s, the Clinton administration emphasised at the
outset that it intended to shift from ‘containment to enlargement’.98 Clinton
advised that his administration’s main goal was not just to ‘secure the peace won
in the Cold War’, but to strengthen the country’s ‘national security’ by
‘enlarging the community of market democracies’.99 However, like the administration of his predecessor, the Clinton team understood that the immediate
post-cold war world conferred clear geopolitical and economic advantages on the
USA and they sought primarily to manage and maintain the status quo. Like the
Bush Sr administration, Clinton remained focused on the major powers: the UK,
Germany, France, Russia, Japan and China. Clinton, like Bush before him, also
attempted to maintain as high a level of defence spending as possible. Through26
AFTER THE THIRD WORLD?
out the 1990s rhetoric about humanitarian intervention to the contrary, the
Clinton administration clearly viewed Europe, East Asia/the Asia–Pacific and the
Middle East/Southwest Asia as the three most important regions in the world in
terms of US strategy and security. Meanwhile, Latin America, Africa and South
Asia, were perceived as regions where no vital US security or economic interests
were at stake. Europe was apparently at the top of the list, while the Middle
East/Southwest Asia was third. In this period East Asia/the Asia–Pacific was
regard as number two and rising. The interconnection between security and
economic development was also particularly obvious in the thinking of defence
planners in relation to East Asia. For example, a 1995 Department of Defense
document described the US military operations in the Asia–Pacific as the
‘foundation for economic growth’ and the ‘oxygen’ of ‘development’.100 This
reflected the wider approach that perceived a close connection between China’s
economic development and geopolitics, as the search for threats to the US
position in the world shifted increasingly to East Asia in the 1990s.
It was in the Asia–Pacific, in fact, where the end of the Bandung era and the
decline of Third Worldism more generally had become particularly evident well
before the end of the Cold War. For a growing number of observers the
economic success of the Newly Industrialising Countries of Northeast and
Southeast Asia by the 1980s and 1990s had called into question many of the
tenets of, and the need for, Third Worldism. For increasingly influential
neoliberals the capitalist transformation of Asia had undermined the Third
Worldist idea that the hierarchical character of the world economy was holding
back the Third World. From this perspective, and from the perspective of
proponents of state-mediated development as well, the notion of a Third World
remained relevant. Now, the developing countries of the Third World could
become successful late-developers by emulating the Newly Industrialising Countries (NICs) of Asia. At the same time, by the late 1970s successful capitalist
development in East Asia had displaced the socialist agenda contained in the
idea of the Third World and Third Worldism.101 This process of displacement
was consummated by the turn to the market on the part of the People’s Republic
of China and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (the only first-generation
Bandung regimes that had pursued fully fledged state-socialism) in the 1980s
and 1990s. In ideological terms, Third Worldism was increasingly marginalised
in Asia by efforts to promote a distinctly post-Third Worldist Pan-Asianism
grounded in state guided capitalist development.102 Most of the key elements of
this shift are reflected in the efforts of Singaporean leader, Lee Kuan Yew
(whose recent autobiography was entitled From Third World to First). He linked
an increasingly conservative nationalism to an equally conservative PanAsianism, while presiding over a state-guided export-orientated industrialisation
project grounded in a very particular history, which he, nevertheless, represented
as providing development lessons for the rest of the world.103 Meanwhile, by the
1980s the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad (1981– ), was
articulating a particularly strident anti-Western Pan-Asianism that was grounded
in an explicitly racial conception of national and international power relations.
Interestingly, however, Mahathir not only increasingly took on the mantle of the
voice of Asia, but at the very moment when Third Worldism was in dramatic
27
MARK T BERGER
decline, he also positioned himself as a voice of the Third World.104 Against this
backdrop, as already noted, Mahathir assumed the chairmanship of NAM (which
now has 114 member nation-states) in February 2003.
Reinventing the Third World
As demonstrated by Mahathir’s Third Worldism, undergirded by Malaysia’s
assumption of the leadership of NAM, the idea of a Third World continues to have
geopolitical, if not conceptual, significance in many quarters. In fact, in her
contribution to this special issue Vicky Randall argues that, while the idea of a
Third World has continued, albeit diminishing, relevance at the geopolitical
level, there has been a dramatic decline in its conceptual relevance for comparative political analysis.105 She concludes, however, that it still retains strategic
relevance in some geopolitical circumstances. In ‘The rise of neo-Third Worldism: the Indonesian trajectory and the consolidation of illiberal democracy’,
Vedi Hadiz suggests the Third World retains even more conceptual utility than
that implied by Randall. His article examines both the older and more recent
theories of modernisation and development in the Third World, with a focus on
debates about democratisation in Indonesia. This provides the backdrop for a
detailed examination of the intellectual sources for ideas and definitions of
democracy deployed by contemporary Indonesian political actors in their efforts
to rebuild the archipelago’s political system in the wake of the demise of
Suharto’s New Order. He goes on to argue that the Post-cold war world order
centred on US hegemony is weakening rather than strengthening those forces
that support liberal democracy in Indonesia, reinforcing the consolidation of
illiberal democracy and the rise of ‘neo-Third Worldism’ in Indonesia and
beyond. For Hadiz, neo-Third Worldism has revived the most conservative
characteristics of Third Worldism without retaining any of the progressive and
internationalist ideals of the early cold war era.
John Saul also looks at the significance of the deployment of Third Worldist
rhetoric in the post-cold war era. He looks at what he regards as both the
strengths and weaknesses of the continued use of the Third World, grounding his
analysis by focusing on the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa
since its election to government and the end of apartheid in 1994. Saul is
especially interested in the presidency of Nelson Mandela’s successor, Thabo
Mbeki. Under Mbeki, the ANC has continued to present itself as a leader of the
Third World. However, there are, argues Saul, ‘profound contradictions inherent
in the ANC’s effort both to retain its Third Worldist credentials and to present
itself as a reliable client to the Bretton Woods institutions and foreign investors’.
Since 1994 the ANC has followed a series of policies that Saul describes as
‘deeply compromised quasi-reformism’, which have worked ‘to deflect consideration away from the options pressed by other, much more meaningfully radical
international and South African labour organisations, environmental groups and
social movements’. This has meant that, as the ANC reaches the 10-year mark as
a governing party, a number of significant grassroots movements has increasingly opted to mobilise against the government’s ‘bankrupt policies’. This
growing grassroots opposition might eventually help to steer South Africa—via
28
AFTER THE THIRD WORLD?
the dramatic transformation of the ANC or the establishment of a new political
project in South Africa with the same potential for hegemony as the ANC—away
from quasi-reformism and back into the ranks of the progressive groups,
movements and governments that are increasingly looking for and applying
‘innovative and appropriately revolutionary approaches to challenge the geographical, racial and class-based hierarchies of global inequality’.
Taking up a set of concerns that flows from the same geographical location
and the same political–economic question, David Moore examines the current
crisis in development theory and development policy. Moore seeks to advance
the ongoing debate about progress beyond the cold war nomenclature of three
worlds of development into the increasingly global, but still highly differentiated, political–economic terrain of the 21st century. At the same time he seeks
to retain and reinvent the notion of the Third World. The post-cold war era of
neoliberal globalisation, says Moore, is also the ‘Second Age of the Third
World’. In its ‘First Age’, the Third World’ was defined by comparisons with
advanced capitalism and state socialism and by Third Worldist efforts to pursued
a non-aligned path between the two superpowers and the competing models of
development they represented. In its ‘Second Age’, argues Moore, the identity
of the Third World is now framed by its re-entry into the protracted process of
primitive accumulation. For Moore, ‘the uneven, destructive and creative, route
towards proletarianisation and private property’ is both accelerated and aggravated under neoliberal globalisation. The brutality of primitive accumulation in
the post-cold war era has thrown ‘contemporary development theory into
disarray, especially when confronted with the ever-present but usually hidden
role of the increasingly internationalised state’. A key response by development
theorists has been the notion of ‘global public goods’. Moore, by contrast,
following a detailed discussion of primitive accumulation and global public
goods, proposes that a better alternative is to be found in what he calls ‘public
accumulation’.
Meanwhile, in her contribution, ‘Re-crossing a different water: colonialism
and Third Worldism in Fiji’, Devleena Ghosh looks closely at the possibilities
and prospects for postcolonial Fiji in the wake of a series of major political and
social crises in the past 15 years. She emphasises the deterritorialisation, or
transnationalisation of the Fijian conflict, looking at the ways in which indigenous Fijians and Fiji’s Indian communities have sought to reconstitute national
and communal identities via various strategies that involve transnational networking as well as more localised approaches. Drawing on the specificity of the
postcolonial Fijian trajectory she proffers a ‘non-reductive way to think about
decolonisation, cultural transformation and notions of autonomy and Third
World solidarity’. From a complementary perspective Arif Dirlik probes the
Eurocentric dimensions of Third Worldism. In ‘Spectres of the Third World:
global modernity and the end of the three worlds’ he emphasises that the three
worlds of development ‘was a product of Eurocentric mappings of the world to
deal with the postcolonial situation’ that unfolded in the aftermath of the World
War II. By ‘mortgaging’ their future to some form of socialism or some form of
capitalism, ‘which was a premise of this mapping’, Third Worldist regimes
embraced ‘a future dominated by alternatives of European origin’. Meanwhile,
29
MARK T BERGER
the present juncture, Dirlik argues, is one of ‘global modernity’ by which he
means ‘a post-Eurocentric modernity that has scrambled notions of space and
time inherited from modernity’. While the post-cold war era flows directly from
‘the struggles that the idea of three worlds sought to capture … those struggles
have led to unanticipated reconfigurations globally, including the reconfiguration
of capitalism, which has globalised following the fall of the second world (the
world of socialisms)’ and produced a range of new challenges. In particular
Dirlik examines the way in which the ‘spectre of the Third World’ continues to
inform questions about globalisation and modernity regardless of whether or not
we are reinventing the Third World or ending with the Third World.
Ending with the Third World
In contrast to the contributors discussed above the rest of the contributors to this
special issue clearly seek to exorcise the spectre of the Third World and move
beyond the three worlds framework rather than revise or reinvent it. In ‘Transforming centre–periphery relations’, Fouad Makki traces the history of the idea
of development and its rise to centrality in ‘understanding global hierarchies of
wealth and power’. His article historicises the ‘development framework’ and its
links to the making and unmaking of the Third World (the latter formulation
was, of course, made well known by Arturo Escobar in the mid-1990s in his
influential book, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the
Third World), highlighting the way that neoliberal globalisation has emerged as
a new, but still fragile, framework of global power relations grounded in the
transformation of the centre–periphery dynamics that underpinned the earlier
development framework. Meanwhile, in ‘From national bourgeoisie to rogues,
failures and bullies: 21st century imperialism and the unravelling of the Third
World’, Radhika Desai draws attention to the fragility of neoliberal globalisation. In fact she goes further than Makki and argues that: ‘if globalisation spelled
the end of development … then the launching of the war on terrorism signals the
end of globalisation’. According to Desai, the ‘post-globalisation phase’ ushered
in by the ‘war on terrorism’ represents a particularly ‘aggressive’ form of ‘US
imperialism’. For Desai, the US imperium is ‘no longer based on primarily
financial globalisation’ as the means by which Washington and US-based
corporations exercise and extend global power. Instead, US imperialism is ‘now
more openly based on the direct control of productive assets and territory’. In her
view this historical turning point also signals ‘the definitive end of the idea of
the Third World and its associated ideology of Third Worldism, although this
end has, of course, been repeatedly proclaimed and contested over the past two
decades’. She argues that ‘the idea of the Third World, and the associated ideas
of development and non-alignment were predicated upon the core concept of the
national bourgeoisie and associated notions of the inherently progressive potential of nationalism’. Furthermore, the ‘idea of a united and rising Third World
had a greater reality as a hope than it ever had as an objective historical
possibility’.
The analysis I have offered in this introductory article, meanwhile, has also
argued that the age of the Third World has passed irrevocably into history. I
30
AFTER THE THIRD WORLD?
have also emphasised that the state-centred character of Third Worldism and its
emphasis on an alliance of ostensibly sovereign territorial nation-states is a key
element in the overall failure of Third Worldism generally and of the failure of
a wide array of state-guided national development projects more specifically. As
we have seen, the nation-state became the embodiment of the efforts of both the
first- and second-generation Bandung regimes to mediate the transformative
impact of colonialism and build an anti-colonial politics that combined tradition
and cultural specificity with Marxism and/or ‘Western’ modernity more generally. Once in power, however, Bandung regimes used Third Worldism as a
powerful legitimating narrative at the same time as they were unable to realise
the prosperity and progress that national liberation and independence were
supposed to deliver. The failure of Third Worldism—as an ideological trend
centred on a wide array of anti-colonial nationalisms and national liberation
movements that linked the utopian strands of Marxism and/or liberalism to
romantic conceptions of the pre-colonial era—needs to be set against the wider
history of decolonisation, the formation of new nation-states and the Cold War.
It was the contradictions inherent in the universalisation of the nation-state
system and the global economic order of the cold war era that both produced the
Third Worldist challenge and eventually helped to undermine it as a serious
alternative to liberal capitalism or state-socialism. At the same time, even if the
mantle of Third Worldism can successfully be taken up in the post-cold war era
by non-state centred movements, the now irrelevant tripartite political, economic
and territorial division of the globe lingers on in the continued use of the idea
of a Third World to manage diverse and complex polities in an era when the
US-led globalisation project is at the centre of the reshaping of the nation-state
system and the global political–economic order. I take the view that the notion
of a Third World, even in a limited or reinvented form, is intellectually and
conceptually bankrupt, while politically Third Worldism has already lost any
relevance or legitimacy it once had. Challenging neoliberal globalisation and
post-cold war capitalism means moving beyond the territorial politics of nationstates—a politics to which Third Worldism is inextricably connected. Furthermore, it can be argued that the notion of the Third World has now been most
successfully appropriated by the very US-led globalisation project that proponents of a reinvented Third Worldism want to challenge.
The way in which the Third World has been appropriated as part of the
managerial repertoire of the US-led globalisation project is highlighted in detail
in Heloise Weber’s article, ‘Reconstituting the Third World? Poverty reduction
and territoriality in the global politics of development’. She notes that world
politics are increasingly conceptualised by development theorists and policy
makers in terms of globalisation and/or fragmentation. Implicit in much of the
discussion about globalisation (whether by proponents or critics) is the idea that
territorially grounded notions of the political should be superseded by an
approach that takes global social formations as it primary focus and views world
order as socially and not territorially constituted. Significantly, however, the
dominant political and policy prescriptions for alleviating inequality and
immiseration are still articulated primarily, if not exclusively, via strategies of
poverty reduction and development that focus explicitly on ‘developing coun31
MARK T BERGER
tries’ and the ‘Third World’. Weber argues that, against the backdrop of the
globalisation project, it is not just the continued deployment of the Third World
that is problematic—it is, in fact, the ‘continued political significance of the
territorial in strategies of neoliberal governance’ that needs to be addressed and
challenged. At the same time, she emphasises that the centrality of ‘territorial
politics’ to the dominant discourse on development and world order is most
readily apparent in relation to the theory and practice around the ‘governance of
the Third World’. By and large the ‘governance of the Third World’ is
approached via the incorporation of the politics of development (or more
specifically by focusing on the question of poverty reduction) in the so-called
‘developing countries’ into the overall framework of ‘neoliberal governance’.
Weber points in particular to the recent revision of conditional lending strategies,
centred on the introduction of the ‘Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP)
approach’ by both the IMF and the World Bank. While the PRSP approach has
been promoted as a way of strengthening democracy, Weber argues that the PRSP
approach is best seen as an effort to ‘constitutionalise’ a particular type of
‘supra-state governance of the Third World’ via detailed conditions and constraints that include directly linking poverty alleviation and development objectives to the goals of the World Trade Organization (WTO). She concludes that the
PRSP approach ultimately promotes a type of governance that ‘reconstitutes the
Third World’ geographically regardless of the increasingly supra-territorial
character of globalisation. For Weber the Third World is being reconstituted
within the contemporary global order in a way that cuts across efforts to pursue
‘social solidarity as a political project—both within and across state boundaries’.
This means that the Third World serves as a key site of ‘empowerment’ in the
global politics of development and also as a key site of ‘disciplinary efforts to
manage the contradictions’ of neoliberal globalisation.
Arturo Escobar also sees a need to overcome the limits the idea of the Third
World continues to place on the pursuit of progress. He argues that, as it
becomes increasingly clear that ‘there are modern problems for which there are
no modern solutions’, it also becomes clear that it is necessary to move ‘beyond
the paradigm of modernity and, hence, beyond the Third World’. Escobar points
to the need for ‘imagining after the Third World’. The post-cold war context for
this project includes what he calls the an emergent ‘new US-based form of
imperial globality’, which he defines as ‘an economic–military–ideological order
that subordinates regions, peoples and economies world wide’ which is in turn
complemented by what he calls ‘global coloniality’: a process that involves ‘the
heightened marginalisation and suppression of the knowledge and culture of
subaltern groups’. Another key characteristic of this new era is ‘the emergence
of self-organising social movement networks, which operate under a new logic,
fostering forms of counter-hegemonic globalisation’. For Escobar ‘these movements represent the best hope for reworking imperial globality and global
coloniality in ways that make imagining after the Third World, and beyond
modernity, a viable project’. As part of an effort to do this he looks in particular
at the social movements in black communities on the Pacific Coast of Colombia.
In ‘Third Worldism and the lineages of global fascism: the regrouping of the
global South in the neoliberal era’, Rajeev Patel and Philip McMichael also seek
32
AFTER THE THIRD WORLD?
to move the politics of development beyond the Third World. They argue that
the theory and practice of development generally has been grounded in a form
of ‘biopolitics, rooted in a regime of sovereign state control, and designed to
mobilise citizens in ways favourable to capital’. Furthermore, Third Worldism
‘embraced this form of sovereignty and its biopolitics’ at the same time as Third
Worldism can be also be located in direct relation to the rise of ‘global fascism’.
They emphasise that many ‘contemporary resistances to neoliberalism’ (global
justice movements, or the forces of ‘globalisation-from-below’ or counterglobalisation), now recognise the state’s complicity with capital. These ‘new
internationalisms’, which have emerged from the wreckage of Third Worldism,
increasingly articulate an approach to ‘sovereignty’ that runs counter to the
dominant conception of state sovereignty that was universalised during the rise
and decline of Third Worldism between the 1940s and the 1970s.106
A major exemplar of ‘globalisation-from-below’ has been the rise of the
Zapatistas in southern Mexico in the post-cold war era. As Thomas Olesen
emphasises, the rebellion launched on 1 January 1994 by the Ejército Zapatista
de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), better known as the Zapatistas, captured the
imagination of activists and academics in the Americas and around the world. In
the second half of the 1990s the Zapatistas and their main spokesperson,
Subcomandante Marcos, increasingly occupied an important international position comparable with, but also clearly distinct from, the romantic guerrilla
Marxism and Third Worldism of the cold war era.107 Virtually all observers
agree that the uprising in Chiapas represented an important departure from the
Marxism and Third Worldism of this era. Furthermore, the Zapatistas have had
an important impact on progressive politics in Mexico and in Latin America.
Olesen, meanwhile, focuses on the way that the Zapatistas quickly became an
important rallying point for progressive organisations and solidarity activists in
Europe and North America and beyond. In the mid-1990s they emerged as a
symbol of progressive social change for those looking for new political alternatives in a post-cold war world apparently bereft of systemic alternatives to
neoliberal globalisation. Olesen argues that one of the important aspects of the
global solidarity efforts that surround the Zapatistas is the partial dissolution of
cold war era ideas about ‘solidarity with the Third World’ and the ‘one-way’
paternalism that was often central to this type of support. Many of the post-cold
war global solidarity efforts around the Zapatistas are based on what he suggests
is a new, ‘two-way’ relationship between the Zapatistas and their international
supporters. This reflects the changing character of the post-cold war global order
and the notion that there are lessons flowing in both directions in a world in
which the analytical salience and political purchase of the idea of the First World
and the Third World have dramatically diminished or disappeared entirely.
Conclusion: history, destiny and the fate of Third Worldism
The articles in this special issue both reflect, and reflect on, the overall breadth
and significance of the idea of the Third World and the practice of Third
Worldism. As they also make clear, both the history of, and the current
perspectives on, the Third World and Third Worldism are linked to a wide range
33
MARK T BERGER
of political and intellectual positions, organisations and initiatives engaged in the
rethinking of the history and contemporary significance of the Third World
against the backdrop of a whole range of other trends. It is hoped that by
bringing together a number of approaches to the question of ‘After the Third
World?’ this special issue will facilitate and stimulate engagement with the
power of the idea of the Third World and the wide range of Third Worldist
currents and their relationship to the changing global order of the 21st century.
Notes
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.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
34
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, Q1
‘Re-articulating the Third World coalition: the role of the environmental agenda’, Third World Quarterly,14 (1), 1993; RO Slater, BM Schutz & SR Dorr, ‘Introduction: toward a better understanding of
global transformation and the Third World’, in Slater, Schutz & Dorr (eds), Global Transformation and
the Third World, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1993; Slater, Schutz & Dorr, ‘Global transformation and
the Third World: challenges and prospects’, in Slater et al, Global Transformation and the Third World;
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
AFTER THE THIRD WORLD?
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
Capitalism, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997; V Randall & R Theobald, Political Change and
Underdevelopment: A Critical Introduction to Third World Politics, London: Macmillan, 1998; 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 & KE Wigen, The
Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997;
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 Negri, Empire,Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2000; 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, ‘les troisième états’, L’ Observateur, 1952. See also TC Lewellen, Dependency Q2
and Development: An Introduction to the Third World, London: Bergin & Garvey, 1995, p 3; 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 & A Watson (eds), The Expansion of International
Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, pp 229–230; HW Brands, The Specter of Neutralism: The
United States and the Emergence of the Third World, 1947–1960, New York: Columbia University Press,
1990.
For first hand accounts of the conference see A Appadorai, The Bandung Conference, New Delhi: Indian Q3
Council of World Affairs, 1955; G McTurnan Kahin, The Asian–African Conference, Bandung, Indonesia,
April 1955, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1956.
Young, Postcolonialism, pp. 191–192. Christie, Ideology and Revolution in Southeast Asia 1900–1980,
pp 131–132.
Malley, The Call From Algeria, p 90.
RF Betts, Decolonization, London: Routledge, 1998, p 43.
P Willetts, The Non-Aligned Movement: The Origins of a Third World Alliance, London: Macmillan, 1978;
and RA Mortimer, The Third World Coalition in World Politics, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984.
OA Westad, ‘Introduction’, in Westad (ed), Brothers in Arms: The Rise and Fall of the Sino-Soviet
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20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
36
Alliance, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998, pp 7–29. see also C Jian, Mao’s China and the
Cold War, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
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 & AJ Nathan, ‘Searching
for the appropriate model for the People’s Republic of China’, in M Goldman & A Gordon (eds), Historical
Perspectives on Contemporary East Asia, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000, pp 298–299,
302–303. In the 1960s the PRC increasingly pursued a rural-orientated communism based on mass
mobilisation culminating in the social and economic upheaval of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s
and early 1970s. Despite this shift, both the Chinese leadership and most outside observers took the view
that, up to the second half of the 1970s, China’s economy remained grounded in the Soviet model. Only
with Mao’s death were many basic Stalinist economic concepts challenged even if the Soviet model had
been domesticated to and reorientated by Chinese practice at least two decades earlier. NP Halpern,
‘Creating socialist economies: Stalinist political economy and the impact of ideas’, in J Goldstein & R
O Keohane (eds), Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions and Political Change, Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1993, pp 101–102; 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.
G Krishna, ‘India and the international order: retreat from idealism’, in H Bull & A Watson (eds), The
Expansion of International Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, pp 269–271, 282–286.
S Wolpert, Nehru: A Tryst With Destiny, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp 466–467.
RJ McMahon, The Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India and Pakistan, New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994, pp 7, 337–338.
Wolpert, Nehru, p 460.
D Merrill, Bread and the Ballot: The United States and India’s Economic Development, 1947–1963,
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990; and D Engerman, ‘West meets East: the Center
for International Studies and Indian economic development’, in D Engerman, N Gilman, M Haefele &
M Latham (eds), Staging Growth: Modernization, Development and the Global Cold War, Amherst, MA:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2002.
S Khilnani, The Idea of India, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997, pp 81–86.
F Frankel, The Gradual Revolution: India’s Political Economy, 1947–1977, Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1978, pp 124–125.
S Seth, Marxist Theory and Nationalist Politics: The Case of Colonial India, New Delhi: Sage
Publications, 1995, pp 215–218, 221–222, 232–236.
Christie, Ideology and Revolution in Southeast Asia, pp 159–174.
Wolpert, Nehru, pp 460–461; G McTurnan Kahin, Southeast Asia: A Testament, London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002, pp 145–146; JD Legge, Sukarno: A Political Biography, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1990.
N Schulte Nordholt, ‘The Janus face of the Indonesian armed forces’, in K Koonings & D Kruijt (eds),
Political Armies: The Military and Nation Building in the Age of Democracy, London: Zed Press, 2002,
pp 137–141.
MT Berger, ‘Post-cold war Indonesia and the revenge of history: the colonial legacy, nationalist visions,
and global capitalism’, in MT Berger & DA Borer (eds), The Rise of East Asia: Critical Visions of the
Pacific Century, London: Routledge, 1997, pp 174–175.
M Jones, Conflict and Confrontation in Southeast Asia, 1961–1965: Britain, the United States, Indonesia
and the Creation of Malaysia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
MT Berger, ‘Old state and new empire in Indonesia: debating the rise and decline of Suharto’s New Order’,
Third World Quarterly, 18 (2), 1997.
M Doran, Pan-Arabism Before Nasser: Egyptian Power Politics and the Palestine Question, New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999; and A Dawisha, Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph
to Despair, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.
K Kyle, Suez: Britain’s End of Empire in the Middle East, London: IB Tauris, 2003. 1991.
As observers, such as Edward Said, have emphasised, Nasser ‘was never popular in the West’, but for
many this was ‘a true index of how successfully he stood up to imperialism, despite his disastrous military
campaigns, his suppression of democracy at home, his over rhetorical performances as maximum leader’.
Ultimately, he was ‘the first modern Egyptian leader … to transform Egypt into the major Arab and third
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world country’. EW Said, ‘Egyptian rites’, in Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural
Essays, London: Granta, 2001, p 161.
Young, Postcolonialism, pp 189–190.
GA Nasser, Egypt’s Liberation: The Philosophy of the Revolution, Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press,
1955.
MM Wahba, The Role of the State in the Egyptian Economy, 1945–1981, Reading: Garnet Publishing,
1994, pp 70, 75–80, 86–87.
Young, Postcolonialism, p 190.
By the l980s there were major divisions within the Arab League. Out of a membership of 20 governments,
12 supported the UN-sponsored and US-led ‘Gulf war’ against Iraq in February 1991 after the latter’s
invasion of Kuwait. R Schulze, A Modern History of the Islamic World, London: I. B. Tauris, 2000,
pp 123–135, 260–267.
Young, Postcolonialism, pp 190–191.
For a good critical overview, see D Rooney, Kwame Nkrumah: The Political Kingdom in the Third World,
London: IB Tauris, 1988.
HS Wilson, African Decolonisation, London: Edward Arnold, 1994, pp 92–110, 177.
F Cooper, Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002,
pp 58–59, 81
Young, Postcolonialism, pp 236, 240–241.
K Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, London: Heinemann, 1968.
D Farah, ‘Gadhafi seen as root of instability in Africa’, Guardian Weekly, August 21 2003, p 28.
L De Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba, London: Verso, 2002.
F Halliday, Cold War, Third World: An Essay on Soivet–American Relations, London: Hutchinson Radius,
1989, pp 29–31; and Malley, The Call From Algeria, p 111.
E San Juan Jr, ‘Postcolonialism and the problematic of uneven development’ in C Bartolovich & N Lazarus
(eds), Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002,
pp 221–222, 238. For a similar perspective see A Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures,
London: Verso, 1992, pp 291–304, or S Amin, Empire of Chaos, New York: Monthly Review, 1992,
pp 8–9.
The year after Cabral’s death Guinea-Bissau emerged as an independent state under President Luis de
Almeida Cabral, while Cape Verde was inducted into the United Nations in 1975.
For San Juan, Cabral’s ‘originality’ and significance lay in ‘his recognising that the nation-in-itself
immanent in the daily lives of African peoples can be transformed into a nation-for-itself, this latter concept
denoting the peoples’ exercise of their historical right of self-determination through the mediation of the
national liberation movement, with the PAIGC as an educational organising force that seeks to articulate
the national-popular will’. San Juan, ‘Postcolonialism and the problematic of uneven development’,
pp 233–237.
P Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976, Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 2002, pp 185–186; P Chabal, Amílcar Cabral: Revolutionary Leadership and People’s War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983; and R Chilcote, Amilcar Cabral’s
Revolutionary Theory and Practice: A Critical Guide, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1991.
Young, Postcolonialism, p 213.
AG Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil,
New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967; Frank, Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution: Essays
on the Development of Underdevelopment and the Immediate Enemy, New York: Monthly Review Press,
1969; Frank, Lumpen-Bourgeoisie, Lumpen-Development: Dependence, Class and Politics in Latin America, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972; W Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, London:
Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1972; S Amin, Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory
of Underdevelopment, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1974; Amin, Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social
Formations of Peripheral Capitalism, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976; and Amin, Imperialism
and Unequal Development, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977.
IM Wall, France, the United States and the Algerian War, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
2001.
M Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold
War Era, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Malley, The Call From Algeria, p 81. The particularly dark side of both the FLN’s eventual triumph and
the tactics of the French colonial authorities in their effort to avert defeat are now well known and the
subject of considerable debate. For a good overview of the recent literature on this issue see A Shatz,
‘The torture of Algiers’, New York Review of Books, 49 (18), 2002, pp 53–57.
Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, pp 38–39.
L Addi, ‘Army, state and nation in Algeria’, in K Koonings & D Kruijt (eds), Political Armies: The
Military and Nation Building in the Age of Democracy, London: Zed Press, 2002, pp 182–184.
37
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SB Liss, Marxist Thought in Latin America, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984,
pp 238–239.
N Miller, Soviet Relations with Latin America 1959–1987, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
R Munck, Politics and Dependency in the Third World: The Case of Latin America, London: Zed Press,
1984, p 328.
PJ Dosal, Comandante Che: Guerrilla, Soldier, Commander and Strategist, 1956–1967, University Park,
PA: Penn State Press, 2003. See also RL Harris, Death of A Revolutionary: Che Guevara’s Last Mission,
New York: WW Norton, 2000; J Castañeda, Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara, London:
Bloomsbury, 1997.
TP Wickham-Crowley, Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America A Comparative Study of Insurgents
and Regimes Since 1956, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992, pp 209–213.
Munck, Politics and Dependency in the Third World, pp 328–239.
M Zimmermann, Sandinista: Carlos Fonseca and the Nicaraguan Revolution, Durham, SC: Duke
University Press, 2000.
Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions.
N MacQueen, The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa: Metropolitan Revolution and the Dissolution of
Empire,London: Longman, 1997; P Chabal et al, A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa, London:
Hurst and Company, 2002.
T Hodges, Angola: From Afro-Stalinism to Petro-Diamond Capitalism, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001.
MT Berger, ‘The Cold War and national liberation in Southern Africa: the United States and the emergence
of Zimbabwe’, Intelligence and National Security: An Inter-Disciplinary Journal, 18 (1), 2003. Meanwhile
the control of South West Africa (Namibia) by the white minority government in South Africa and the
apartheid system in South Africa itself generated powerful, armed resistance movements throughout much
of the cold war era. Namibia eventually emerged as an independent nation-state in 1990, while the
apartheid regime in South Africa finally gave way to black majority rule under the African National
Congress in 1994.
P Bond & M Manyanya, Zimbabwe’s Plunge: Exhausted Nationalism, Neoliberalism and the Search for
Social Justice, Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2002; and M Meredith. Our Votes, Our Guns:
Robert Mugabe and the Tragedy of Zimbabwe, New York: Basic Books, 2002.
M Baker, ‘West bent on domination, says Mahathir’, Sydney Morning Herald, 25 February 2003, p 9.
DA Low, The Egalitarian Moment: Asia and Africa 1950–1980, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996, pp 1–2; and M Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late
Colonialism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Hoogvelt, Globalization and the Postcolonial World, pp 176–178.
Third World governments had gained significant numerical influence at the UN by the 1970s. The UN’s
membership rose from 51 in 1945 to 156 in 1980. The vast majority of the new members were from
Asia and Africa.
R Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1987, pp 275, 298–301.
Rist, The History of Development, pp 143–144, 153–154.
TL Karl, The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro-States, Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1997; CM Henry & R Springborg, Globalization and the Politics of Development in the Middle
East, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
LS Stavrianos, Global Rift: The Third World Comes of Age, New York: William Morrow, 1981.
G Evans & K Rowley, Red Brotherhood At War: Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos Since 1975, London:
Verso, 1990.
P McMichael, Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective, Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge
Press, 2000, pp 147–237.
SD Krasner, Structural Conflict: The Third World Against Global Liberalism, Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press, 1985.
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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F Halliday, The Making of the Second Cold War, London: Verso, 1986.
SR Tahir-Kheli, India, Pakistan, and the United States: Breaking With the Past, New York: Council on
Foreign Relations Press; 1997.
WI Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention and Hegemony, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. see also T Carothers, Aiding Democracy Abroad: The Learning Curve,
Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1999.
USAID, ‘Agency objectives’, at http://www.usaid.gov/democracy/dgso.html.
F Adams Dollar Diplomacy: United States Economic Assistance to Latin America, Aldershot: Ashgate,
2000, pp 110–111.
This has resulted in the emergence in Cairo of the ‘biggest USAID program in the world’ and the ‘largest
US diplomatic complex in the world’. R Owen, ‘Egypt’, in R Chase, E Hill & P Kennedy (eds), The
Pivotal States: A New Framework for US Policy in the Developing World, New York: WW Norton, 1999,
pp 120–121, 133.
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.
DCF Daniel & AL Ross, ‘US strategic planning and the pivotal states’, in Chase et al, The Pivotal States,
pp 385–387.
A Lake, ‘From containment to enlargement’, US Department of State Dispatch, 4 (39), 27 September
1993.
Office of the President of the United States, A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement,
Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1996, at http://www.fas.org/spp/military/docops/
national/1996stra.htm, p 2.
Daniel & Ross, ‘US strategic planning and the pivotal states’, pp 388–392, 402; US Department of
Defense, Office of International Security Affairs, United States Security Strategy for the East Asia and
Pacific Region, Washington, DC: US Department of Defense, February 1995, pp 1–2.
N Harris, The End of the Third World: Newly Industrializing Countries and the Decline of an Ideology,
London: IB Tauris, 1986.
MT Berger, ‘The new Asian renaissance and its discontents: national narratives, Pan-Asian visions and
the changing post-cold war order’, International Politics: A Journal of Transnational Issues and Global
Problems, 40 (2), 2003.
KY Lee, From Third World To First: The Singapore Story, 1965–2000, New York: Harper Collins, 2000.
BT Khoo, Paradoxes of Mahathirism: An Intellectual Biography of Mahathir Mohamad, Kuala Lumpur:
Oxford University Press, 1995, p 332; MT Berger, ‘APEC and its enemies: the failure of the new regionalism
in the Asia–Pacific’, Third World Quarterly,20 (5), 1999; and I Stewart, The Mahathir Legacy: A Nation
Divided, A Region At Risk, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2003.
For implicit, if not explicit, defence of the continued relevance of the idea of the Third World for
comparative politics, see J Haynes, Third World Politics, London: Blackwell, 1996; BC Smith, Understanding Third World Politics: Theories of Political Change and Development, Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1996; P Calvert & S Calvert, Politics and Society in the Third World, London: Longman,
2001; and December Green & Laura Luehrmann, Comparative Politics of the Third World: Linking
Concepts and Cases, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003.
R O’Brien, AM Goetz, JA Scholte & M Williams, Contesting Global Governance: Multilateral Economic
Institutions and Global Social Movements, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000; A Starr, Naming
the Enemy: Anti-Corporate Movements Confront Globalization, London: Zed Press, 2000; WK Tabb, The
Amoral Elephant: Globalization and the Struggle for Social Justice in the Twenty-First Century, New
York: Monthly Review Press, 2001; S Gill, Power and Resistance in the New World Order, Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2003; N Harris, The Return of Cosmopolitan Capital: Globalization, the State and War, London:
IB Tauris, 2003.
MT Berger, ‘Romancing the Zapatistas: international intellectuals and the Chiapas rebellion’, Latin
American Perspectives, 28 (2), 2001.
39
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