The Demise of the Third World Agenda
Developing countries managed to - for some time after WW II - articulate their demands for a more just world and "to hold a dialogue with the powerful and to try to hold them accountable". Unfortunately, their efforts eventually failed due to "built-in flaws", "compromised ideologies", and the powers of finance capital, the IMF and World Bank.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, journalist, author and a professor of international studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He is the author of many books and an expert on global inequality, colonial history and North-South relations in general. Prashad regularly comments on current affairs (in The Guardian, Frontline, The Hindu and Alternet and other media), maintains his own blog and tweets.
Originally published as the introduction to Vijay Prashad's book The Darker Nations; A People's History of the Third World (2008), published by The New Press. The Darker Nations was chosen as a Best Nonfiction Book of the Year by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and won the Muzaffar Ahmad Book Prize.
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"The Third World
today faces Europe like a colossal mass whose project should be to
try to resolve the problems to which Europe has not been able to find
the answers."
-
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 19611
The Third World was not a place. It was
a project. During the seemingly interminable battles against
colonialism, the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America dreamed
of a new world. They longed for dignity above all else, but also
the basic necessities of life (land, peace, and freedom). They
assembled their grievances and aspirations into various kinds of
organizations, where their leadership then formulated a platform
of demands. These leaders, whether India's Jawaharlal Nehru, Egypt's
Gamal Abdel Nasser, Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, or Cuba's Fidel Castro,
met at a series of gatherings during the middle decades of the
twentieth century. In Bandung (1955), Havana (1966), and elsewhere,
these leaders crafted an ideology and a set of institutions to bear
the hopes of their populations. The “Third World” comprised these
hopes and the institutions produced to carry them forward.
From the rubble of World War II
rose a bipolar Cold War that threatened the existence of humanity.
Hair-triggers on nuclear weapons alongside heated debates about
poverty, inequality, and freedom threatened even those who did
not live under the U.S. or Soviet umbrellas. Both sides, as Nehru
noted, pelted each other with arguments about peace. Almost
unmolested by the devastation of the war, the United States used its
advantages to rebuild the two sides of Eurasia and cage in a battered
Soviet Union. Phrases like “massive retaliation” and
“brinkmanship” provided no comfort to the two-thirds of the
world's people who had only recently won or were on the threshold of
winning their independence from colonial rulers.
Thrown between these two major
formations, the darker nations amassed as the Third World. Determined
people struck out against colonialism to win their freedom. They
demanded political equality on the world level. The main institution
for this expression was the United Nations. From its inception in
1948, the United Nations played an enormous role for the bulk of
the planet. Even if they did not earn permanent seats on the UN
Security Council, the new states took advantage of the UN General
Assembly to put forward their demands. The Afro Asian meetings
in Bandung and Cairo (1955 and 1961, respectively), the creation of
the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade (1961), and the Tricontinental
Conference in Havana rehearsed the major arguments within the Third
World project so that they could take them in a concerted way to
the main stage, the United Nations. In addition, the new states
pushed the United Nations to create institutional platforms for their
Third World agenda: the UN Conference on Trade and Development
(UNCTAD) was the most important of these institutions, but it was not
the only one. Through these institutions, aspects other than
political equality came to the fore: the Third World project included
a demand for the redistribution of the world's resources, a more
dignified rate of return for the labor power of their people,
and a shared acknowledgment of the heritage of science,
technology, and culture.
In Bandung, the host Ahmed Sukarno
offered this catechism for the Third World:
“Let us not be
bitter about the past, but let us keep our eyes firmly on the future.
Let us remember that no blessing of God is so sweet as life and
liberty. Let us remember that the stature of all mankind is
diminished so long as nations or parts of nations are still unfree.
Let us remember that the highest purpose of man is the liberation of
man from his bonds of fear, his bonds of poverty, the liberation
of man from the physical, spiritual and intellectual bonds which have
for long stunted the development of humanity's majority. And let
us remember, Sisters and Brothers, that for the sake of all that, we
Asians and Africans must be united.”2
The idea of the Third World moved
millions and created heroes. Some of these were political gures like
the three titans (Nasser, Nehru, Sukarno), but also Vietnam's Nguyen
Thi Binh and Ho chi Minh, Algeria's Ben Bella, and South
Africa's Nelson Mandela. The project also provided the elements of a
new imagination for its cultural workers - people such as the
poet Pablo Neruda, the singer Umm Kulthum, and the painter Sudjana
Kerton. The horizon produced by the Third World enthused them, along
with those who made history in their everyday lives. The Third World
project united these discordant comrades.
The Third World project came with
a built-in flaw. The fight against the colonial and imperial forces
enforced a unity among various political parties and across
social classes. Widely popular social movements and political
formations won freedom for the new nations, and then took power. Once
in power, the unity that had been preserved at all costs became
a liability. The working class and the peasantry in many of these
movements had acceded to an alliance with the landlords and emergent
industrial elites. Once the new nation came into their hands, the
people believed, the new state would promote a socialist program.
What they got instead was a compromise ideology called Arab
Socialism, African Socialism, Sarvodaya, or NASAKOM that combined the
promise of equality with the maintenance of social hierarchy. Rather
than provide the means to create an entirely new society, these
regimes protected the elites among the old social classes while
producing the elements of social welfare for the people. Once in
power, the old social classes exerted themselves, either through the
offices of the military or the victorious people's party. In many
places, the Communists were domesticated, outlawed, or massacred to
maintain this discordant unity. In the first few decades of state
construction, from the 1940s to the 1970s, consistent pressure from
working people, the prestige of the national liberation party, and
the planetary consensus over the use of the state to create demand
constrained these dominant classes to some extent. They still took
charge of the new states, but their desire for untrammeled profit was
hampered by lingering patriotism or the type of political and
economic regimes established by national liberation.
By the 1970s, the new nations were
no longer new. Their failures were legion. Popular demands for land,
bread, and peace had been ignored on behalf of the needs of the
dominant classes. Internecine warfare, a failure to control the
prices of primary commodities, an inability to overcome the
suffocation of finance capital, and more led to a crisis in the
budgets of much of the Third World. Borrowings from commercial banks
could only come if the states agreed to “structural adjustment”
packages from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World
Bank. The assassination of the Third World led to the desiccation of
the capacity of the state to act on behalf of the population, an end
to making the case for a new international economic order, and a
disavowal of the goals of socialism. Dominant classes that had once
been tethered to the Third World agenda now cut loose. They began to
see themselves as elites, and not as part of a project - the
patriotism of the bottom line overcame obligatory social solidarity.
An upshot of this demise of the Third World agenda was the growth of
forms of cultural nationalism in the darker nations. Atavisms of all
kinds emerged to fill the space once taken up by various forms of
socialism. Fundamentalist religion, race, and unreconstructed forms
of class power emerged from under the wreckage of the Third World
project.
The demise of the Third World has
been catastrophic. People across the three continents continue to
dream of something better, and many of them are organized into social
movements or political parties. Their aspirations have a local voice.
Beyond that, their hopes and dreams are unintelligible. During the
middle decades of the twentieth century, the Third World agenda bore
these beliefs from localities to national capitals and onward to
the world stage. The institutions of the Third World amassed these
ideas and nailed them to the doors of powerful buildings. The Third
World project (the ideology and institutions) enabled the powerless
to hold a dialogue with the powerful, and to try to hold them
accountable. Today, there is no such vehicle for local dreams. The
Darker Nations is written to remind us of that immense labor and
its importance.
The account is not exhaustive but
illustrative. The Darker Nations makes a broad argument about
the nature of the Third World political project, and the causes and
consequences of its decline. The world was bettered by the attempt to
articulate a Third World agenda. Now it is impoverished for the lack
of that motion.
NOTES
NOTES
1 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (NewYork: GrovePress,1963), 314. I have substituted “project” in place of “aim.” The original is “Le Tiers-Monde est aujourd'hui en face de I'Europe comme une masse colassale dont Ie project doit être d'essayer de résoundre les problèmes auxquels cette Europe n'a pas su apporter de solutions.” Frantz Fanon, Les Dammés de la Terre (Paris: François Maspero, 1961), 241.
2 George McTurnan Kahin, ed., The Asian-African Conference: Bandung, Indonesia, April 1955 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1956), 43-44.
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