The massive wave of anticolonial movements that opened with the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) and came into its own by the last quarter of the nineteenth century broke the legitimacy of colonial domination. No longer could it be said that a European power had the manifest destiny to govern other peoples. When such colonial adventures were tried out, they were chastised for being immoral.
In 1928, the anticolonial leaders gathered in Brussels for a meeting of the League Against Imperialism. This was the first attempt to create a global platform to unite the visions of the anticolonial movements from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Considerations of expediency and the convulsions of World War II blocked any progress on such a platform. It would have to wait until 1955, in Bandung, Indonesia, when a smattering of newly independent or almost independent African and Asian countries sent their leaders to confer on a planetary agenda. The Bandung dynamic inaugurated the Third World Project, a seemingly incoherent set of demands that were actually very carefully worked out through the institutions of the United Nations and what would become, in 1961, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).
The central concept for the new nations was the Third World. The Third World was not a place; it was a project. Galvanized by the mass movements and by the failures of capitalist mal-development, the leaderships in the darker nations looked to each other for another agenda. Politically they wanted more planetary democracy. No more the serfs of their colonial masters, they wanted to have a voice and power on the world stage. What did that voice say? It spoke of three main themes:
a. Peace. It had become apparent by the mid 1950s and early 1960s that the Cold War between the two superpower blocs was catastrophic for the planet. Not only might the nuclear-fueled confrontation result in Armageddon, but the sheer waste of social resources on the arms race would distort the possibility of human development. By the early 1950s, the United States was spending 10 percent of its gross domestic product on its defense sector, a development that raised the ire of President Eisenhower, who at the end of the decade bemoaned the growth of the “military-industrial complex.” This complex did not end at the borders of the United States. It had ambitions for the planet, wanting to sell arms to every country and to insinuate a security complex over the social agenda of the Third World Project. No wonder that the first concrete task after the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade was to send India’s Nehru and Ghana’s Nkrumah to Moscow, and Indonesia’s Sukarno and Mali’s Keita to Washington, carrying the NAM’s Appeal for Peace. Kennedy and Khrushchev offered the typical bromides, but did not reverse the tensions that intensified with the building of the Berlin Wall and the tank standoff at Checkpoint Charlie. The Third World Project kept faith with the Bandung communiqué, which called for “the regulation, limitation, control and reduction of all armed forces and armaments, including the prohibition of the production, experimentation and use of all weapons of mass destruction, and to establish effective international controls to this end.” The International Atomic Energy Agency of 1957 was a child of Bandung, and a cornerstone of the Third World Project.
b. Bread. The new nations of Africa and Asia, and the renewed national agendas of Latin America, explicitly recognized that the countries they had seized were impoverished. Any direction forward would have to confront the legacy of colonial economy—with the advantages seized by the Atlantic powers and the trade rules drawn up to benefit those historical, not comparative, advantages. Economists like Raúl Prebisch of Argentina, who would become the first director-general of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), challenged the Atlantic institutions such as the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) and the IMF, which Prebisch called “a conspiracy against the laws of the market.” When Prebisch took the helm at UNCTAD, the economic arm of the Third World Project, he announced the need for a “new order in the international economy … so that the market functions properly not only for the big countries but the developing countries in their relations with the developed.” It was out of this general framework that the Third World fought for a revision of the “free trade” agenda, for better commodity prices, for primary goods cartels (out of which came OPEC), and for a more generous policy for the transfer of investment and technology from North to South. Fought at each turn by the Atlantic powers, the Third World took refuge in the UN General Assembly with the 1973 New International Economic Order resolution. It was the highest point of the Third World Project.
c. Justice. The NAM, created in 1961, was designed as a secretariat of the Third World Project, with the Group of 77 (1964) to act on its behalf in the United Nations. The founders of the NAM (Nehru of India, Nasser of Egypt, Sukarno of Indonesia, and Tito of Yugoslavia) recognized that little of their agenda would be able to move forward without a more democratic international structure. The UN had been hijacked by the five permanent members of the Security Council. The IMF and the World Bank had been captured by the Atlantic powers, and the GATT was designed to undermine any attempt by the new nations to revise the international economic order. It was hoped that the NAM, and the G77, would put pressure on both the West and the East to afford political space to the new nations. It was not to be. Nigeria’s foreign minister, Jaja Wachuku, came to the United Nations on September 30, 1963, and put the problem plainly: “Does this Organization want the African States to be just vocal members, with no right to express their views on any particular matter in important organs of the United Nations[?] Are we going to continue to be veranda boys?” The implication was that the NAM states would watch from the balcony while the five permanent members controlled the debate within the UN.
That was the Third World Project: for peace, for bread, and for justice. It came to the world stage on shaky terrain. The houses of the new nations were not in order. They were constrained by a lack of democracy in their own political worlds, combined with mismanagement of economic resources and a very shallow reconstruction of the social landscape. The old social classes hesitated before the anticolonial mass movements, but as these were demobilized the old elites called on the generals or on right-wing populist politicians to sweep up the mess. The Project was hampered by these failings, but it was not these limitations that did it in.
What did it in was the Atlantic project.
Nothing important can come from the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance.
-Henry Kissinger, 1969
In 1975, the seven leaders of the major advanced industrial countries met in the Château de Rambouillet to decide the fate of the planet. They were the Group of 7: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Canada. The Rambouillet gathering was their first formal meeting. The G7 leaders were detained by four facts. Three of them were encumbrances that they wished to do away with:
1. The social-democratic agenda that many of them emerged from had now become expensive (in terms not only of the social wages that had to be paid, but also the wage packets to the restive workers).
2. The communist agenda, which had become more accommodating, but was still able to offer those restive workers an alternative.
3. The Third World Project, whose most recent instantiations—the Oil Weapon of 1973, accompanied by the demand for a New International Economic Order (NIEO)—had come as a genuine shock.
These three horizons needed to be abandoned. The fourth problem was a more general one, and it ended up being the solution to their other three irritants: the new geography of production.
Gerald Ford opened the conversation at Rambouillet with a plea that the main thrust had to be for the leaders “to ensure that the current world economic situation is not seen as a crisis in the democratic or capitalist system.” The G7 had to prevent the capitalist crisis from becoming a political one; it had to be handled as a technical economic problem. This was all very well as rhetoric, but it was not a salve from the point of view of the more realistic people in the room.
Helmut Schmidt, who was a socialist and chancellor of West Germany, took the floor:
Harold [Wilson] of the UK, you talked of viable industries, and indicated that this excluded lame ducks. You referred to textiles as an example. I am a close friend of the chairman of the textile workers union in Germany. It is a union of a shrinking industry. I would hope that this would not be repeated outside this room. Given the high level of wages in Europe, I cannot help but believe that in the long run textile industries here will have to vanish. We cannot ward off cheaper competition from outside. It is a pity because it is viable; capital invested in a job in the textile industry in Germany is as high as it is in the German steel mills. But wages in East Asia are very low compared with ours. The German textile industry is viable, but will vanish in ten or twelve years.
Foresight, collusion: it does not matter. What matters is the emergence of the new geography of production, viz. the disarticulation of Northern Fordism, the emergence of satellite and undersea cable technology, the containerization of ships, and other technological shifts that enabled firms to take advantage of differential wage rates. In Schmidt’s case, the wages of East Asia.
~~The Poorer Nations : A Possible History Of The Global South -by- Vijay Prashad.
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