After the third world?

By Berger
The 70’s were the golden age of the third worldism and the Declaration of Programme of Action for
the Establishment of a New Economic Order. The emergence of several new rules who adopted a
distinctly revolutionary third worldism turn and outlook in Asia, Africa and Latin America. By the 80’s
however third worldism as a both revolutionary and 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 recent and revitalize the idea of a Third world. Third worldism however often
emphasise this profound short coming during the Cold War.

The spatial and political division of the Cold War era between the First Second and Third world has
became so thoroughly scrambled by the down of the post-colonial and post-cold war era that the
ideas of the third worldism 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 distinction
that have become irrelevant.

Third worldism in the contexts to its wider emergency and its eventual decline movement and
government directly informed by third world in the cold war era can be divided in the first generation
(50-60) and second (60-70) banding regimens second generation regimes were generally more explicit
socialist in their overall approach to national liberation and economic development than the first
generation. Third worldism emerged out of the activities and ideas of anti-colonial nationalism and
their efforts to mess often highly romantized interpretation of pre-colonial traditions and cultures
with the utopismo embodied by Marxist and socialist specifically and western vision of modernization
and development and generally.

The first shirring’s of third worldism can be traced to the complex milieu of colonialism and anti-
colonialism nationalism in the early 20th century. The overall consolidation of third worldism is
grounded in the 1945 conjecture of decolonization, national liberation and the cold war and the
Bandung conference. The proceeding ended with a call for increased technical and cultural
cooperation between governments of Asia and Africa and increased support for human rights and the
self determination of people and nations. Banding conference provide the indirect inspiration for
various third worldism organizations. A radical example was the formation of African Asian people
solidarity organization.

Despite third worldism attempts at non-alignment most nationalist movements and third world
regimes had diplomatic economic and military relations with one or both super power. India
credentials as a leading third worldism state were so in relative decline more generally by the mid
1960’s. there was in the 60’s a fail of the first generation of leaders from the third world base in the
banding conference. First with the alliance of China with the URSS, the Nehru in India because the
socialist politics after sukarno in Indonesia suffer problems. It happened also the same with Nasser in
Egypt.

Nationalism and import substitutes industrialization to both wider social goals and to the broader third
worldism agency and the struggle against neo colonialism. In a well know speech in the late 1958
despite Nogoer’s support form national liberation in Africa the third worldism in the late 50’s and early
60’s was of course Kwone Nkrumah. He was the first prime minister of Ghana which was the first
colony southern Africa to gain independence. While pan Africanism underpinned the push for national
self determination and some forms of post-colonial socialism attempt to deeper the political
structures of pan Africanism in the immediate post-colonial period where relatively short life. At the

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same time Muammar Qaddaffi has super headed a recent attempt to revitalise pan Africanism and
the CAU with the latter having been reorganized and renamed the African Union.

Qaddafi still leads one of the few surviving one time second generation Bandung regimes. Qaddaffi
and Castro come to power against the backdrop of wider wave of second generation. The second-
generation Banding regimes reflected a more radical more unambiguously third worldism than the
first one. It emphasizes that the first category led by nationalist such as Sukarno, Nehru, Nasser were
examples of the bourgeois national project intentioned by the Bandung Conference. As outlined in the
previous section of their introduction this characterization 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 won national communist parties.

Frist generation banding regimes were constantly by and large less radical than the second-generation
Bandung regimes but to view the former as simply anti communist national bourgeois project not only
misinterpretation their intellectual and organizational relationship to Marxist but also stereotypes the
complexity of their institutions with the cold war super powers. While the representation of the first
generation of Bandung regimes as reformist supporters of national bourgeoise and the second
generation as revolutionaries Marxist commented to state socialism is over drawn the latter group
was still generally more racial than the former.

It articulated a far more radical and imperial agenda that located the participants in the socialism
commission the same thing as they formally emphases their independence forms the URSS and Maoist
china. Second generation Bandung regimes directly or indirectly linked to the in continentalism of the
late 60’s and 70’s represented the practical complement to the rise and spread of dependency theory.
In this era second generation Bandung regimens and their supporters attempted to radicalizes state
mediated national development efforts in various ways in the same of socialism and national
liberation. The triumph of the FNL in Algeria market an important turning point for the region and for
the third worldism more generally. The Algerian revolution was punctual to the third worldism
because the struggle has been so lengthy and violent at the same time as the FNL was acutely aware
of the struggle’s international dimension. Che Guevara personified revolutionary idealism and third
worldism in the second-generation form. Angola and Mozambique continued to be turn by externally
funded guerrilla insurgencies seeking to troupe the Marxist and third worldism leaderships
approaches that continued in to the post cold war era only apparently winding down in the case of
Angola recent regimes time.

The world regimes elaborate tariff systems and dual exchange rates and a range of subsides on food
and other items combined with the expansion of the educational and food and other social services
and led to the emergence of over blundered states that increasingly bulked wide rising foreign debt
and the predation of corrupt elites both civilian and military.

A central figure in the promotion and planning of the NIEO declaration was the president of Algeria
follow by the presents of Venezuela and Mexico and the shah of Irak. The changes asked for the NIEO
were never implemented. The NIEO effectively called for the external of the international economic
system of the redistribute framework that had been consolidate in the social democracies western
Europe after world war II but was not only in crisis at its point of origin. Implementing such a set of
reforms would have required a new global structure of governance that went for beyond the UN
countered international system. This new global structure would have required the power to
reorganized global market and extract taxes at the global level and then distribute them globally as
well.

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The 60’s ushered in the climacteric of third worldism. At the very moment when the third world was
being see to some observers to come age the Bandung era was already ending. It introduces a range
of reforms that were ostensible aimed at enlarging the community of democracies nation world wide
with important implications for the restructure third world. The promotion of the rule of law the
promotion of elections and political process building and expanding civil society and improving
governance. A greater emphasis was also placed un humanitarian assistance and sustainable
development.

The redirection of the basis of US foreign aid policy after the cold war snake clear the relative
continuity in US strategy thing in the 90’s. there was also a continued focus on the middle east at the
same time as central America quickly dropped form the view. It was in the Asia pacific where the end
of the Bandung era and the decline of third worldism more generally had become particularly evident
well define the end of the cold war. For a growing number of observers, the economic successful of
the newly industrializing countries of northeast and southeast Asia in the 80-90 had called into
question many of the tenements of third worldism. For increasingly influential neo liberals the
capitalism transformation of Asia had undermined the third worldism idea that the hierarchical
character of the world economy was holding back the third world. Form this perspective the nation of
the third world remained relevant. But now the developing countries of the third world become
successful late developers by emulating the newly industrialising countries of Asia.

In ideological term third worldism was increasingly marginalized in Asia by efforts to promote a
distinctly post third worldism pan asialisms grounded in state guided capitalism development. He
linked an increasingly conservative nationalism to an equal conservative pan asialism while presiding
over state guided export-oriented industrialization project grounded in a very particular history which
he nevertheless represented as providing development lesson for the rest of the world. The very
moment when third worldism was in dramatic decline he also positioned himself as a voice of third
world.

NAM idea of third world counties to have geopolitical if not conceptual significance in many quarter.
That is still retains strategic relevance in some geographical circumstances. Reinforcing the
consolidation of illiberal democracy and the rise of neo third worldism in Indonesia. Neo third
worldism has reinvented the most conservative characteristic of third worldism without retailing any
of the progressive and internationalism ideas of the early cold war era.

Taking up a set of concerns that flows form the same geographical location and the same political
economy question David Moore examines the current crisis in development theory and development
policy. To retain and reinvent the notion of the third world post cold war era of neoliberal globalization
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 worldism efforts to pursue a nonaligned
path between the two super powers and the competing models of development they represented. It
is a second age the identity of the third world is not framed by its re entry into the protected process
of primitive accumulation. A key response by development theorist has been the notion of a global
public goods. third world regimes embrace a future domainer by alternatives of european origin.

It clearly seeks to exercise the sphere of the third world and move beyond the three worlds
frameworks rather than re use or reinvented it. encountering development, the making and unmaking
of the third world highlight the way that neoliberal globalization has emerged as a new framework of
global power relations guarded in the transformation of the centre periphery dynamic that
underpinned the earlies development frameworks. The definitive end of the idea of third world and
its association ideology of third worldism although this end has of course been repeatedly proclaimed

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and contested over the past two decades, the idea of the third world end the associated ideas of
development and non-alignment were predicated upon the core concept of the national bourgeoise
and associated notions of the inherent progressive potential of nationalism. The idea of a united and
raising third world had a greater reality as a hope than it ever had as an objective historical possibility.

Third worldism analyst its emphasis on the alliance of assembly sovereign territorial nation state is a
key element in the overall failure of third worldism generally and on failure of a wide array of state
guided national development projects and specifically. Nation state become the embodiment of the
efforts of both the first and second-generation Bandung regimes to mediate the transformative
impact of colonialism and built on anti-colonial politics that combines traditions and cultural specificity
with Marxist and or western modernity more generally. 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 third
worldism need to be set again the wide history of decolonization the formation of new nation state
and the cold war. Third worldism challenge and eventually helped to undermine it as a serious
alternative to liberal capitalism or state socialism.

Significally however the dominate political and policy prescriptions for alleviating inequality and
immesitation and still articulated primary if not exclusively via strategies of poverty education and
development that focus explicit on developing countries and that third worldism and large the
governance of the third world is approadered a via detailed conditions and contains that included
already linking poverty alleviation and development objectives to the goals of the world trade
organization. This mains that the third world serves a s key site of empowerment in global politics of
development and as a key side of disciplinary efforts to manage the contradiction of neo liberal
globalization.

Arturo Escobar also sees a need to overcome the limits the idea or the third world continues to place
on the pursuit of progress. Escobar point to the need for imagining often the third world. Another key
characteristic of their new era is the emergence of self-organising social movements network which
operate wider or new logic fostering forms of counter hegemonic globalization. These movement
represent the hope for reworking imperial globality and global coloniality in ways that make imagining
after the third world and beyond modernity a viable project.

Third world embraces this form of sovereignty and its bio politics at the same time as third worldism
can be also located in direct relations to the rise of global fanatics. They emphasize the state complicity
wit residences to neo liberal9ism. Now recognise the state’s complicity with capital these new
internationalisms which have emerged from the weak age of third worldism increasingly articulate
and approach to sovereignty that runs counter to the dominant conception of state sovereignty that
was universalized. A major exemplar of globalization from below gas been the rise of Zapatistas ion
Southern Mexico in the post-cold war weak.

This reflects the changing characteristic of the post cold war global order and the nation that there re
lections flowing in both directions in a world in which the analytical silence and political purchase of
the idea of the first world and the third world have dramatically diminished or disappeared entirely.