by Kevin Reilly
But developing countries were actors on the global stage as well as spectators and victims of the new world order. Beyond their own internal processes—sorting out political conflicts, establishing economic policies, and managing the tensions of cultural diversity—they also shaped the world they inherited.
The Rise of the Third World
The “Third World” as an Idea . The idea of the Third World was as powerful as the fact. Articulated by intellectuals, journalists, scholars, and politicians in the developing countries, it cast as heroes men such as the Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara; the Algerian intellectual Franz Fanon; Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister; and Egypt’s charismatic Gamal Abdel Nasser, who defeated British and French attempts to seize the Suez Canal in 1956. The idea of a Third World was an assertion of the historical significance of their movements and their countries in a world focused largely on the conflicts of the capitalist West and the communist East. It sought to distill a common and larger meaning from the variety of struggles that had recently won independence. Spokesmen for the Third World idea decisively rejected the notion of industrialized countries bestowing civilization and development on less fortunate regions, they viewed colonial rule as the cause of their backwardness and poverty, and they saw the world instead as a struggle between an imperialistic, exploitative West, intent on maintaining its unjust privileges, and a progressive, revolutionary South. Their countries would be laboratories for land reform, state building, industrialization, and grassroots democracy. The Third World would chart the way to a rejuvenated future for themselves and for all humankind. This kind of “talking back” to the West also appealed to many idealistic young people in Europe and America who were disillusioned by the complacency, conservatism, and consumerism of their own societies.9
Nonalignment . The political expression of Third World thinking lay in efforts to chart an independent course in world affairs, maintaining a degree of neutrality in the face of competing demands of rival superpowers. Led by Nasser of Egypt, Nehru of India, and Sukarno of Indonesia, a conference in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955 brought together 29 African and Asian heads of state, claiming to represent some 1.3 billion people. It was a symbolic assertion that global leadership no longer resided solely in London, Paris, or Washington. At this and subsequent meetings, Third World leaders pressed for more rapid decolonization and urged the United Nations to focus on issues other than the Cold War. The growing numbers of newly independent states transformed the United Nations from a group of 50 countries, mostly European and Latin American, to an organization numerically, if not politically, dominated by Afro-Asian states. While real power still rested with the Security Council of major capitalist countries and the Soviet Union, Third World countries pushed the United Nations to pay attention to issues of social and economic development and turned this international body into a “court of world opinion” on critical issues of the time.
Nonalignment (to the United States or Soviet Union) still left many options. India maintained a Western-style parliamentary democracy while tilting toward the Soviet Union in its foreign policy. Indonesia, having received large amounts of Soviet and eastern European aid, destroyed the Indonesian Communist Party in 1965, butchering half a million suspected communists in the process. Many Arab countries gratefully received Soviet support in their struggles against Israel while routinely jailing their own communists. And perhaps most famously, communist China broke decisively with its Soviet ally, creating a de facto alliance with the United States in the late 1970s.
A New International Economic Order? For most Third World countries, the core issues of international life were economic. By the 1960s, many of their leaders had come to believe that an unfair world economy, created and maintained by Western imperialism, made their own economic progress extremely difficult. If the poorer countries were to develop, they argued, the international economic system would have to change substantially. These demands continued the struggle against European political dominance that had occupied so much of the world’s history earlier in the century. It was an effort to use a newly won independence to gain greater economic advantage on a global level, much as the lower classes in Europe and America had used political pressure and the vote to demand economic improvements within particular countries. The creation of the United Nations and other international bodies provided a forum in which these demands could be expressed and negotiated. In 1964, at a UN Conference on Trade and Development, a number of Third World states joined together in the Group of 77 to demand concessions from the wealthy countries. This was the real beginning of organized class struggle at the international level.
But more than anything else, the success of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in quadrupling the world price of oil in 1973 stimulated the movement for international economic reform. Here was a dramatic breakthrough in the struggle of the poor against the rich, for OPEC, led by oilrich Arab states, presided over the most rapid transfer of wealth the world had ever seen. In 1972, a barrel of oil could be exchanged for a single bushel of wheat; eight years later, Americans and Europeans had to pay the equivalent of six bushels of wheat for that same barrel of oil. Many people in developing countries saw it as a kind of historical justice after centuries of Western imperialism. Capitalizing on this remarkable success, virtually every country in the Third World coalesced around the demands for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) at the Sixth Special Session of the UN General Assembly in 1974. What they sought was a revolutionary overhaul of the existing international economic system, including higher and more stable prices for their exports, easier access to world markets in the rich countries, more foreign aid, and greater power in international economic agencies.
Resistance by the Rich . It is hardly surprising that the Western industrialized countries, led by the United States, were decidedly unenthusiastic about most of these proposals. Despite frequent conferences and much negotiation, little real headway was made in substantially reforming the international economic system in favor of the poor countries. The wealthier countries rejected the implication that Third World poverty was the result of a capitalist world economy rather than the mismanagement, corruption, and inefficiency of Third World governments themselves. In addition, many Third World spokesmen argued that the West owed them some compensation for centuries of imperialist exploitation. This view hardly appealed to Western leaders or to their voting publics. Furthermore, the NIEO demands sought to interfere with the free working of the market economy, which many in the West held sacred.
The Debt Problem . In the 1980s and 1990s, international economic confrontations focused on the question of Third World debt, which had risen from about $100 billion in 1970 to $1.6 trillion in 1990. Making payments on those debts meant cutting other essential spending. In Ethiopia during the 1990s, for example, where perhaps 100,000 children died every year from preventable diseases, the country was spending four times as much on debt repayment as on public health.10 Such conditions generated various proposals for canceling or restructuring the debt burden of poor countries. By the mid-1990s, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, controlled largely by the wealthy countries, conceded that some of this debt might have to be canceled in order to safeguard the world economy generally. And beyond debt, the issue of reparations, raised again at the turn of the twenty-first century, posed an even more disturbing question: did the currently rich countries owe some repayment to the developing world for centuries of slavery, colonial exploitation, and oppression?
The Assertion of Islam
The Revival of the Middle East . Among the various regions of the Third World, none made a more dramatic entry on the global stage than that of the Middle East or, more broadly, the Islamic world. The larger background to this vigorous assertion of Islam in the twentieth century lay in 1,000 years of Islamic expansion (622-1600) followed by three centuries of increasingly humiliating subservience to European imperialism. Then during the twenti
eth-century, a Middle Eastern revival took shape as Islamic civilization reasserted itself. It began, like that of other colonized regions, with powerful nationalist movements that broke Europe’s political hold and gave rise to strong states, such as Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, and Iraq, committed to the modernization and economic development of their societies. Turkey in particular pioneered a unique Islamic path to modernity by pushing thoroughgoing westernization, a secular educational system, and centralized planning on the Soviet model while relegating Islam to the realm of private life.
By the 1960s, a number of these states, such as Egypt and Algeria, had governments proclaiming allegiance to an even more radical transformation of society under the banner of “Arab socialism.” And in the 1970s, the oil-producing states in the Middle East took dramatic advantage of their political independence and sharply raised the price of this precious commodity, thus gaining a measure of revenge on the West for centuries of economic exploitation. Meanwhile, the competing claims of Palestinian and Israeli nationalisms made the Middle East a focal point of the Cold War, providing Arabs in particular and Muslims generally a focus for united action and feeling, a means of overcoming, at least occasionally, their many divisions.
The Roots of Islamic Renewal . But for growing numbers of Muslims, disappointments abounded. Despite numerous experiments, little overall economic improvement occurred; poverty and inequality deepened in many countries, especially in rapidly growing cities; economic dependence on the West remained; and the Islamic world showed few signs of “catching up” in the race to modernity. Despite the successes of Arab nationalism, Arab armies had been repeatedly defeated by Israel, heavily supported by the United States. Imperialism, it seemed, had not been fully vanquished, and Israel was its Middle Eastern outpost. Furthermore, Western culture continued to make inroads within the Islamic world. Secular courts and educational systems proliferated; unaccompanied women, immodestly dressed, appeared on city streets; Western-style movie theaters sprang up; oil wealth generated materialism; and political leaders paid only lip service to Islam. All this and more made many people sympathize with the cry of the early twentieth-century Indian Muslim writer Muhammad Iqbal:
Turk, Persian, Arab
Intoxicated with Europe
And in the throat of each
the fish-hook of Europe.11
In response to these disappointments, movements all across the Islamic world strongly asserted distinctly Muslim values in the face of modern materialism, secularism, and permissiveness. They represented a sharp criticism of the West generally for its political, economic, and cultural imperialism; of communism for its atheism and materialism; and of women’s “liberation” for its subversion of the proper relationship between the sexes. Known variously as Islamic revival, renewal, renaissance, or awakening, these movements saw the deepening problems of the Islamic world as a direct consequence of departing from the original principles of the faith and from the practices established by Muhammad in the seventh century CE. The solution therefore lay in returning to those principles and putting them into practice throughout society and in political life as well as in personal behavior. Islam, after all, embraced all of life with no distinction between sacred and secular, between the mosque and the state.
Such movements of renewal had occurred periodically throughout Islamic history. But for most of the twentieth century, revivalist Islam was a minor theme in an Islamic world dominated by the more secular concerns of nationalism, socialism, and economic development. But since the 1970s, it became a powerful current in Middle Eastern political and cultural life. Governments committed to the Islamization of public life came to power in Libya, Iran, Sudan, northern Nigeria, and Afghanistan. Elsewhere, growing movements of Islamic awakening challenged existing governments in Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia, and even Turkey. In 1992 in Algeria, a revivalist party called the Islamic Salvation Front seemed poised to assume power through democratic elections, a threat that provoked the military to cancel the elections and assume power itself. Islamic groups responded with an armed insurrection that killed thousands.
Islamic Renewal in Practice: The Case of Iran . The Iranian Revolution of 1979 gave Islamic revivalism its first major international exposure. Its leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, articulated clearly the values and outlook of Islamic revival:
Islam is the religion of those who struggle for truth and justice, of those who clamor for liberty and independence. It is the school of those who fight against colonialism . . .
The homeland of Islam, one and indivisible, was broken up by the doings of the imperialists and despotic and ambitious leaders. . . . And when the Ottoman Empire struggled to achieve Islamic unity, it was opposed by a united front of Russian, English, Austrian and other imperialist powers which split it up among themselves.
Moslems have no alternative, if they wish to correct the political balance of society, and force those in power to conform to the laws and principles of Islam, to an armed holy war against profane governments . . .
What do you understand of the harmony between social life and religious principles? And more important, just what is the social life we are talking about? Is it those hotbeds of immorality called theatres, cinemas, dancing, and music? Is it the promiscuous presence in the streets of lusting young men and women with arms, chests, and thighs bared? Is it the ludicrous wearing of a hat like the Europeans or the imitation of their habit of wine drinking?. . . Let these shameful practices come to an end, so that the dawn of a new life may break!
Islam has precepts for everything that concerns man and society. . . . There is no subject upon which Islam has not expressed its judgment.12
After overthrowing the secularizing, corrupt, and American-supported regime of the shah of Iran, Khomeini established the Islamic Republic of Iran. The government has been called a mixture of theocratic, authoritarian, and democratic elements. The ayatollah was supreme leader over a body of religious leaders called the Council of Guardians. This council was directed to oversee the elected parliament and president. In practice, religious leaders replaced secular bureaucrats, and the goals of Islamic fundamentalists directed policy. The 97 percent of the population who were Muslim were to abide by a reading of Islamic law that required women to be veiled, the sexes separated in schools and mosques, and a ban on alcohol consumption. Members of minority religions—Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians—were to be administered by their own religious communities. Since 2009, the president has weathered opposition and protests with the aid of an elite military unit called the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has become the nation’s most powerful political, social, and economic institution.
Islamic Assertion on a Global Stage . Most Islamic activists attempted to further their cause peacefully through political means, religious education, providing social services for the poor, and changing their personal behavior. But some Islamic activists turned to violence in the form of assassinations, suicide bombings, and rebellions. The primary target of this violence has been the secularizing leadership of Islamic states. The leader of the group that assassinated President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in 1981 explained,
Fighting the near enemy is more important than fighting the distant enemy. . . . There can be no doubt that the first battlefield of jihad is the extirpation of these infidel leaders and their replacement by a perfect Islamic order. From this will come release.13
Of course, Western interests were attacked as well. The Iranian Revolution held dozens of Americans hostage for a year following their seizure of power. Well-organized Muslim militants brought the struggle to the citadel of Western power in the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City in September 2001, an action that prompted American wars against Afghanistan in 2001-2002 and Iraq in 2003. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, for growing numbers of people in the West, the threat of militant Islam had replaced that of communism.
The possibility of a more secular and liberal turn appeared in the “Arab spring” o
f 2011 when young, middle-class, and religious protesters joined in the streets and public squares of Tunisia and Egypt, successfully bringing down autocratic regimes. The demand for popular government, jobs, and an end to corruption spread throughout the Middle East, with mixed success but a vision of a very different future.
Successes, Failures, and Fissures
Other regions of the Third World likewise asserted themselves on the global stage in various ways. China in particular and East Asia in general experienced remarkable economic growth in the final quarter of the twentieth century and became major players in the international marketplace. Africa, on the other hand, entered the global arena largely as a consequence of its deepening problems and failures: economic disasters, famine, the AIDS epidemic, genocide in Rwanda in 1994, and many cases of political instability and disintegration. Latin America was the site of the Western Hemisphere’s only communist regime (Cuba), and its alliance with the Soviet Union gave rise to the Cold War’s most threatening moment during the missile crisis of 1962. Massive indebtedness to Western banks in many Latin American countries triggered a major international financial crisis in the early 1980s. Large-scale migration from the Third World to the West occasioned considerable cultural conflict as Algerians went to France, West Indians to Britain, Yugoslavs to Germany, and Mexicans to the United States—all in search of a better life.
