Remembering and Re-Examining the Third World:
A Review of Vijay Prashad's The Darker Nations
by
Ron Jacobs
Becoming politically aware in the 1960s and 1970s, one heard and read a lot about the Third World. Not only did the national liberation struggles of the Third World inspire many in the New Left to take action, those struggles also informed us about what form that action took. In fact, one of the terms used to describe various organizations -- derogatorily or in praise -- was "Third-Worldist." For example, the Weather Underground was considered Third Worldist and the Revolutionary Union wasn't.
Malcolm X was one of the first leaders of the 1960s to express
this view and the Black Panthers and others picked up the concept after
Malcolm's death. Not only did the idea of an internal black colony
have a certain appeal, it made a certain amount of historical sense. In
addition, it placed the black freedom struggle in the United States in
an international perspective.
For those coming of political age
after the fall of the Soviet Union, the concept of a Third World might
seem antiquated. After all, as Vijay Prashad explains in his new book
The Darker Nations (New Press 2007), the concept derived from the
so-called two-camp theory put forth by the United States after World
War Two. This theory held that there were only two superpowers in the
world -- the United States and the Soviet Union. Every other nation
would be best served by aligning themselves with one or the other of
these camps. Naturally, both capitols would do their best to include as
many nations as possible in their camps, since this served their needs
for protection and expansion of markets and resources. This is not to
say that there was not a difference between Washington's need to expand
its capitalist enterprise and Moscow's desire to have some kind of
socialist world, but to point out a fundamental understanding that runs
through Prashad's book: the Third World saw nonalignment to either
capitol as most beneficial to its own goals of independence and local
development so they formed a movement of non-aligned nations. These
nations shared a viewpoint that countered the view that the first and
second world were somehow better. At times, according to Prashad's
account, this was the only view they shared. Still, it was the view
that united them.
Prashad divides his book into chapters
titled after cities that represent milestones in the growth and demise
of the Third World. The titles are a shorthand travelogue of the third
world's history. Some represent formative meetings that were held in
those cities. Others represent meetings and incidents that precipitated
the project's demise. Those meetings that took place early on in the
non-aligned movement's (NAM) formation between the likes of Egypt's
Nasser, India's Nehru, and Yugoslavia's Tito reminded me of today's
meeting's between Venezuela's Chavez and Ahmadinejad; or those between
Chavez and Bolivia's Morales. In other words, they were attempts to
create a united front against the imperial power of the United States,
despite the differences between those countries looking to form that
front. As Prashad makes clear throughout his work, although the Third
World nations insisted on independence from both the US and the Soviet
camp, the predominant view among those nations was that US imperialism
was the bigger threat to their independence. Time has proven them to be
tragically correct.
Naturally, many of the nations considered
part of the third world were birthed in national liberation struggles
against their colonial masters -- Britain, France, and the Netherlands,
among others. While these movements provided real material leadership
and support to the peoples they were determined to free from
colonialism, they also provided inspiration to millions of others
around the world.
Unfortunately, it was their failure to make a
transition from national liberation movement to democratic government
that added to the difficulties these nations faced in the wake of
victories that were usually accompanied by the enmity of Washington.
When those national liberation struggles were military in nature, that
transition became even more difficult, especially when considering the
major transformation required when shifting from a hierarchical
military structure to an inclusive democratic one.
The
hopefulness of the book's first chapters is soured by the time the
chapter named after New Delhi arrives near the book's end. This chapter
describes the end of the Third World project. Although the NAM summit
described therein was a phenomenal event, with Fidel Castro leading the
charge as the movement's outgoing chairman, it was a hollow
celebration. Many of the richer nations involved in the project's
headier days had already thrown in their lot with the US capitalists
and their growing neoliberal project of capitalist globalization. The
victories of the 1970s in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Grenada, Ethiopia, and
the Portuguese colonies in Africa were either bittersweet memories or
under direct attack from the United States and its forces. In the place
of these victories and the hopes they had symbolized, the elites in
many of the third world's governments had begun a sell-off of their
nations' resources, labor and markets to the multinational corporations
headquartered in the world's north -- especially in the US. The
descriptions Prashad provides of these elite's manipulations of ethnic
and religious differences, their replacing of a nationalism informed by
a third world united against imperialism with one defined by the
religious/ethnic majority's chauvinism is a tragic tale. If one wants
an example of this process in a relatively brief and bloody
illustration, they need only look at Iraq in 2007. All of the elements
Prashad details in his book are there: national elites incorporated
into the neoliberal economic model, IMF austerity measures encoded into
law, national identity obscured by religious and ethnic differences,
and all of this instigated and encouraged by Washington, which wants
control of the country's resources and (some would argue) its soul.
Prashad's
book is part of The New Press People's History Series. According to
Howard Zinn's preface, the goal of the series is to "shake up readers'
understanding of the past -- just as common people have shaken up their
always changeable worlds." Prashad does a great job in The Darker
Nations -- the series premiere. He chronicles the rise and fall of the
Third World Project, and describes the contradictory hopes of the
project's beginning and its implosion. His thesis that the project
failed as much from Washington's aggressive opposition as from Moscow
and Beijing's sometimes purposeful inattention and the movement's own
social and political contradictions is well made and concretely
supported.
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