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The End of the 'Third World'? Author(s): Mark T. Berger Source: Third World Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Jun., 1994), pp. 257-275 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3993146 Accessed: 09-12-2020 15:25 UTC

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Third World Quarterly, Vol 15, No 2, 1994

The end of the 'Third World'? MARK T BERGER

Introduction: globalisation and the 'Third World'

The end of the Cold War has contributed to the dramatic globalisation of market economics and electoral democracy. But the significance of global capitalism and the substance of the democratic transitions of the past few years are sub- jects of considerable debate. Some observers continue to emphasise that the end of the Cold War represents the triumph of liberalism and it is only a matter of time before the former Soviet Bloc along with the rest of the world (led by the 'newly industrialised countries' (NICS) of East Asia) arrives at the capitalist prosperity and democratic stability currently seen to prevail in North America, Western Europe and Japan.' Certainly the end of 'state socialism' in Eastern Europe and the former USSR has made an important contribution in symbolic and substantive terms to the demise of socialist development models generally and 'state socialism' in the 'Third World' more particularly.2 Nevertheless, although the so-called Asian Tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore) are at the centre of a major economic boom which is lifting them out of their 'Third World' status and shifting the axis of global political economy to the Pacific Rim, the 'neoliberal' governments of the rest of Asia, the former Soviet Bloc, Latin America, Africa and Oceania are not necessarily guiding their people to consumer capitalism and parlia- mentary democracy. Democratic transitions, where they have taken place at all, have often remained superficial, while neoliberal economic policies have stimulated economic growth without necessarily improving the quality of life for the majority of the population. The acceleration of economic and political globalisation which attended the end of the Cold War has contributed more to the resurgence of ethnic and national conflicts than it has to international peace and stability.3 The social formations which are emerging out of the ferment of Soviet collapse are not characterised by democratic order and dynamic economic 'development', but by unstable parliamentary-authoritarian governments, considerable dependence on the IMF and World Bank and trans- national capital, and growing 'ideological' and even 'cultural' subordination to the United States and Western Europe. While East Asia may be leaving the 'Third World' much of the former Soviet Bloc can be said to have (re)joined it.4

At the same time, the rise of East Asia, the demise of the 'Second World' and the onset of a new era of global capitalism, throws the problems associated with the continued use of the term 'Third World' into sharp relief. The term (along

Mark T Berger is Lecturer at the School of Humanities, Murdock University.

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with the closely related concepts of 'developing countries', 'less developed countries', 'underdeveloped countries', 'backward countries' and 'the peri- phery') continues to be a central organising concept in the social sciences and the humanities generally, and in development studies and development policy debates more specifically. In the last few years a growing number of writers has sought to reinterpret the term 'Third World'. For example, Aijaz Ahmad has emphasised that the 'Third World' 'does not come to us as a mere descriptive category'. He noted that it 'carries within it contradictory layers of meaning and political purpose'; however, he still sought to differen- tiate the theoretical uses and abuses of the term from its use in 'common parlance' to describe 'the so-called developing countries, from Cuba to Saudi Arabia and from China to Chad' . Marc Williams has argued that the 'Third World' could undergo a 'resurgence' around a global environmental agenda. He is optimistic that 'the movement toward political pluralism in much of the Third World and the important role played by NGOS in the environ- mental debate suggests that a re-vitalised Third World coalition will reflect a set of priorities which has not been set exclusively by the political elites'. 6 At the end of 1992 Vicky Randall noted, in a review of two books which seek to 'rethink' the 'Third World', that both works continued to 'hold back from any explicit or sustained questioning of the validity of talking about a "Third World" as such'. From her perspective, however, the time has come to rethink the concept of a 'Third World' and she asks: '(c)an we justify still holding on to the term?'7

In an effort to map out fresh perspectives on change and 'development' following the dramatic shift in the international order in the last few years, this article will look at the problems associated with the term 'Third World'. A brief discussion of the emergence of the 'Third World' will be followed by an examination of the various ways the term has been deployed. Then the implica- tions of the rise of the Asian Tigers and the growing diversity within and between various countries and regions of the 'Third World' will be mentioned. The existence and expansion of 'Third World' conditions within the borders of the industrialised countries will also be raised. The conceptual and cartographi- cal challenge to the 'Third World' represented by these changes, combined with the increasing 'internationalisation' (or globalisation) of elites and divisions of labour, in the context of the ever greater movement of information, capital, people and goods across borders, will then be discussed. 'Third World' elites have emerged in the international arena claiming to speak for the 'Third World' at the same time as they are deeply implicated in the prevailing international discourses and structures which work to manage the 'Third World'. In this situation it will be argued that the idea of a 'Third World' now serves primarily to generate both a dubious homogeneity within its shifting boundaries and an analytically irrelevant distinction between the 'Third World' (developing) on the one hand and the 'First World' (developed) on the other hand. At the same time, an emerging approach to 'development' which privileges historical particularity, but also adopts a global perspective, will be outlined insofar as it holds out the possibility of overcoming many of the conceptual problems linked to the use of the term 'Third World'.

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THE END OF THE 'THIRD WORLD'?

The emergence and management of the 'Third World'

In the 1950s the 'Third World' referred to the growing number of nonaligned nation-states which were reluctant to take sides in the Cold War. It was

increasingly deployed by governments and movements in the 'Third World' and their sympathisers to generate unity and support in the face of the political and

economic power of the USA and a handful of former colonial powers. During the late 1950s and 1960s the term 'Third World' gained popular currency as numerous European colonies in Asia and Africa gained their political indepen-

dence.8 Although the Bandung Conference of 1955 has come to be regarded as the event which gave birth to the 'Third World', none of the ways in which the term has subsequently been used are easily extrapolated from the meeting itself. Many of the governments in attendance were already politically aligned with one of the two superpowers, most of them were not seriously committed to an alternate economic route between capitalism and socialism, no government from Latin America or Oceania (where decolonisation had not yet begun) was in

attendance, and the gathering did not encompass all of the Asian and African governments of the day.9 Following Bandung, 'Third Worldism', as it was articulated by its main nationalist proponents, such as Nehru and Sukarno, meant that the governments of the 'Third World' sought, at least rhetorically, to chart a political and economic path between the liberal capitalism of the 'First World' and the 'state socialism' of the 'Second World'. By the 1960s 'Third Worldism' also had its Soviet and Chinese (Maoist) varieties. The former incorporated those regimes in the 'Third World' which were formally allied with the USSR and

possessed substantial public sectors, despite their sometimes highly repressive treatment of peasants and workers. This Moscow-orientated 'Third Worldism' sought to establish a broad front between the 'Second World' and the 'Third World' against the 'First World'. The Maoist variant articulated a Peking-orien- tated 'Third World', in which China was part of the 'Third World', against the 'First World' of which the USSR was perceived to be a part.'0 By the 1960s, many movements and governments in the 'Third World' had forged an alliance with the New Left in the industrialised countries of North America, Western Europe and Japan. And the Vietnam War exemplified the wider struggle between US imperialism and its allies on the one hand and the national liberation struggles sweeping Latin America, Africa and Asia on the other."

The Vietnam War proved to be a watershed for 'Third Worldism' and an important turning point for the US-led effort to manage the 'Third World'. The USA had emerged from the Second World War as the dominant global economic and politico-military power driven forward by an economic boom of unpre- cedented proportions and an ideology of assertive anti-communist globalism.'2 Connected to this was the dramatic growth of professional and policy discourses on the 'Third World' which were profoundly shaped by what became known as modernisation theory. While governments and organisations were deploying the term 'Third World' as part of an effort to stimulate politico-diplomatic unity in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Oceania, the 'Third World' also became central to North American and Western European efforts to control those parts of the globe outside the Soviet Bloc. After 1945 modernisation theory

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imposed an idealised version of North American and Western European history on Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Oceania.13 This approach, which remains hegemonic at the popular and policy level, and in many academic circles, postulated a modern and 'developed' North America and Western Europe, where the problem of 'development' had been solved, in contrast to a 'traditional' and 'underdeveloped' 'Third World'. As Arturo Escobar has argued 'to represent the Third World as "underdeveloped" is less a statement about "facts" than the setting up of a regime of truth through which the Third World is inevitably known, intervened on, and managed'."4 Over the past 40 years or more information and knowledge have been extracted from various parts of the globe and filtered through an array of intellectual and policy processes domi- nated by the so-called 'First World', the effect of which has been to contribute to the managing of the 'Third World'.

At the outset of the Cold War it was widely assumed in US government and academic circles that poverty facilitated the spread of international commu- nism.15 It was also assumed that modernisation would bring an end to poverty and undercut anti-capitalist revolution. In the 1950s and early 1960s modernis- ation theory perceived a direct causal link between economic growth, social change and democratisation. It also assigned particular importance to the emerging 'middle classes' which were expected to fulfil both a restraining and a progressive function. Although it reflected continuity with the British 'White Man's Burden', the French mission civilisatrice, and the racism of the emerging US 'imperial state' before 1945, modernisation theory was more secular and more systematic.16 Like these earlier approaches modernisation theory was committed to a period of tutelage and focused on the need for cultural transformation in order for the 'Third World' to achieve modernity. Modernis- ation theory emphasised the 'totality' of change and saw modernisation as a process, often called 'diffusion', which spread throughout a society affecting economics, the type of government, social structure, values, religion and family structure. Modernisation theorists viewed 'underdevelopment' in the 'Third World' as the result of internal shortcomings specific to the 'underdeveloped' societies in question. 'Underdevelopment' was seen as a result of their pre-col- onial rather than their colonial history. And despite detailed and tightly focused scholarship the entire edifice of postwar modernisation theory rested on a homogeneous image of a 'Third World' destined to follow the North American and Western European path.

By the late 1960s, however, the US-led mission to modernise the 'Third World' and guide it towards liberal capitalist democracy was increasingly challenged by revolution and economic nationalism ('Third Worldism') in Latin America, Africa and Asia, and by a concern in North America and Western Europe with the limits of 'Western' power. Under these circumstances distinct radical discourses on the 'Third World' emerged (as part of the rise of, and often committed to, radical 'Third Worldism') to challenge the dominant academic and policy discourses. Dependency theory was at the centre of the new radicalism. Dependency theory, as it came to be understood in the 1960s, had developed out of Latin American 'historico-structuralism', which was initially associated with Raul Prebisch and the United Nations' Economic Commission

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THE END OF THE 'THIRD WORLD'?

for Latin America (ECLA), and out of the North American Marxism of Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran."' Andre Gunder Frank, an economist who was educated at the University of Chicago, emerged in the second half of the 1960s as one of the main conduits for the entry of dependency theory into North America and Western Europe and its diffusion around the globe. Walter Rodney was another important figure whose career and work reflected the linkages between the dependency debate in the Caribbean and Latin America and nationalist and radical debates in Africa, at the same time as his overdetermined dependency model was popularised in North America and Western Europe.18 The over- whelming emphasis on external factors which characterised the dependency approach in this period and was linked to radical 'Third Worldism', contributed to a homogenised understanding of the 'Third World' as much as modernisation theory did.

This was readily apparent in Frank's work. While he was clearly influenced by Baran and the ECLA theorists, his approach departed from the reformism of Prebisch and was less historically grounded than the work of Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Falleto.19 Writers like Cardoso, now Brazilian Finance Minister, were much more concerned with the analysis of internal historical structures, rather than adopting a deterministic focus on external factors.20 In Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, which was published in 1967, Frank outlined the concept of 'the development of underdevelopment', and articulated a model of historical development, which directly linked 'underdevel- opment' and economic stagnation to the transfer of an economic surplus from the periphery to the industrialised core. Following Baran, Frank made a dramatic break with classical Marxism, asserting 'that it is capitalism, both world and national, which produced underdevelopment in the past and which still generates underdevelopment in the present'. 21 Frank's work rose to particular prominence and his ideas were produced and reproduced so widely that they emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s as the main radical interpretation, at least as it was understood in North America and Western Europe.

By the second half of the 1970s dependency theory had peaked. Its demise can be traced to its failure as revolutionary prophecy and the end of the US war in South-east Asia. Despite the Communist victory over Washington's erstwhile Saigon-based ally in 1975, by the late 1970s Vietnam represented a major setback for socialist 'Third Worldism'. From the very beginning the various types of 'Third Worldism' could not, and in most cases did not, disguise the centrality of nationalism and national liberation to the various struggles for social change in the 'Third World'. The wars between Vietnam, Cambodia and China in the late 1970s were the culmination of years of tension and fragmen- tation, and clearly reflected the way in which nationalism had undermined 'Third Worldism', and socialist internationalism more generally.22 The rise of the 'NICS' in Latin America (Mexico and Brazil) and East Asia, and the rise of OPEC also contributed to both the fading of dependency theory and the failure of radical 'Third Worldism'. At the same time, by the late 1970s an emphasis on the corruption and authoritarianism of many 'Third World' states shifted the blame for 'underdevelopment' back on to the 'Third World'. Another important factor behind the 'fall' of radical 'Third Worldism' and dependency theory was that by

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the mid- 1970s the radical challenge had been partially contained via the political accommodation of radical 'Third Worldism' by various international organisa- tions, such as the United Nations, and by the theoretical incorporation of important elements of the dependency approach into the dominant liberal discourses.23 The relative decline of radical 'Third Worldism' and the demise of dependency theory was followed by the emergence of a number of 'new' radical theoretical approaches which built on and interacted with dependency theory, and contributed to the diffusion of radical ideas in the 1970s and 1980s. Although the new radical approaches departed from the determinism associated with classic dependency theory, most of them facilitated the continued circu- lation of the idea of a homogeneous 'Third World'.

By the 1970s a Marxist dependency synthesis had begun to emerge that linked historical materialism to the insights of dependency theory, placing considerable emphasis on state and class structures in the 'periphery'. Writers in this tradition accepted dependency theory's overall critique of classical Marxism, namely that the potential for independent capitalist development is constrained by a depen- dent economic position in the international economic order. At the same time, however, this tradition also brings together revisionist arguments which empha- sise the relative potential for dependent capitalist development and the survival of pre-capitalist modes of production, emphasising that politics in the 'Third World' still enjoy a certain degree of freedom from external pressures. They focus then on local social structures, particularly the character and degree of class formation, and the concerns and ambitions of different social groups. Many writers in this tradition emphasise the colonial and post-colonial state as the location in which the local ruling classes may initially have taken form, and through which they seek to consolidate their economic and sociopolitical dominance. This approach is also concerned to determine to what degree the post-colonial state reflects the interests of international capital and/or local concerns.24 But much of this work has continued to rely implicitly on a homogeneous image of the 'Third World' and a sharp distinction between industrialised North America, Western Europe and Japan and the rest of the world.

In the 1970s, building on debates within Marxism, the 'mode of production' approach also rose to prominence as a response to dependency theory's privileg- ing of the market over relations of production. For example, in a well-known debate, Ernesto Laclau challenged Frank's sweeping characterisation of Latin America as capitalist simply because it was part of a world capitalist economy.25 This approach emphasises that some pre-capitalist 'modes of production' in the periphery have proved highly resilient to the expansion of capitalism and have not disappeared as anticipated. The problem of 'underdevelopment' in the 'Third World' is the result of a more protracted transition caused by the fact that the processes of modernisation and urban industrialisation in the periphery are dependent for a long time on pre-capitalist modes of production in the country- side which have articulated with an externally imposed capitalist mode of production. Although the 'mode of production' approach was important in shifting the burden of explanation for 'underdevelopment' back towards internal class structures and social formations, many of its proponents tended to factor

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THE END OF THE 'THIRD WORLD'?

external forces out of their analysis, while they conflated the 'capitalist mode of production' in the industrialised countries with capitalism in the 'Third World' .26 Although state and class approaches and 'modes of production' approaches shifted the emphasis away from international market relations, they often fell back on the 'Third World' as a category with some explanatory power rather than emphasising the particularity of social formations on the so-called 'periphery'.

While the state and class approach, and the 'mode of production' approach, represented a significant challenge to dependency theory as it emerged in the late 1960s, the eclipse of classic dependency theory cannot be understood without reference to the work of Samir Amin and the world-system theory of Immanuel

Wallerstein. Although Amin, an Egyptian economic historian whose work has focused primarily on Africa, is often located within the world-system and unequal exchange school, his work as a whole reflects a synthesis of 'modes of production' and a theory of 'unequal exchange' with insights drawn from dependency and world-system theory.27 While Amin's work was influential by the 1970s, Wallerstein's world-system theory emerged as the most important single trend in radical social science. Wallerstein was influenced by dependency theory and by the work of Fernand Braudel and the Annales 'school'.28 As Paul Buhle has suggested, Wallerstein's first major book on world-system theory, which appeared in 1974, has, quite possibly, been 'the most influential single book of the post-New Left era'. 29 By the time he published the first volume of The Modem World-System Wallerstein was clearly articulating the view that social change in the modern world could only be 'understood' within the framework of the historical evolution of the modern world-system as a whole. And by the end of the 1980s his central ideas continued to display considerable continuity.30

Wallerstein's project rests on the assumption that a particular country's internal development may only be 'understood' with reference to the position it occupies, or the role it plays, in the modern world-system as a whole. World-sys- tem theorists trace the historical development of capitalism, by focusing on the emergence and functioning of an international market comprised of three levels, the periphery, semi-periphery and the core. Inequality emerges and is maintained as a systemic characteristic because different regions within the world-system produce commodities for exchange using different labour control systems. The economic stagnation of the periphery, and the continued, and even expanding gap, between it and the core of the world-economy, flows from the privileged position held by core nations because of the historical terms under which they initially entered the world-economy. Although Wallerstein has highlighted the heuristic character of world-system theory, the emphasis on international econ- omic relations has left world-system theorists open to charges of economic determinism. The conception of power used by world-system theorists, sees power located in the structure of the international economy itself, particularly in the upper levels of the international order, in contrast to more orthodox Marxist conceptions which see power as flowing from class relationships and state structures. As a result world-system theory tends to represent change as a function of elite decision making, or of the system itself, rather than holding out

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class struggle or nation-state interactions and initiatives as agents of change. The world-system model has contributed to the standardisation of historically particu- lar relationships and socioeconomic structures in the 'Third World'. Ultimately world-system theory, as reflected in Wallerstein's own work and in the work of writers such as L S Stavrianos and Daniel Chirot, finds the key to the history of the 'Third World' in its relationship to an expanding world-system centred on Europe and North America, and later Japan.3'

The maintenance of the 'Third World' and the East Asian 'miracle'

While changes in the postwar order stimulated the emergence and the diffusion of radical approaches, modernisation theory continued to spread at the same time as it underwent considerable revision. An early shift was the rise of 'military modernisation' theory and the emergence of a 'politics of order' approach.32 This approach questioned the view that there was a connection between 'underdevel- opment' and instability. Its exponents argued that it was the attempt to modern- ise in the 'Third World', rather than 'the absence of modernity', which resulted in political instability. According to Samuel Huntington, for example, 'Third World' instability had to be understood as primarily a result of the 'gap between aspirations and expectations', which flowed from the dramatic expansion of 'aspirations' in the initial stages of 'modernization'. From his perspective the 'traditional polity' was 'suffering from the absence of power', and the 'problem' was 'not to seize power but to make power, to mobilize groups into politics and to organize their participation in politics', and this had to be done from the top down.33 This approach emphasised the important stabilising role of the military and a strong state.34 By the late 1960s conservative developmentalism had also found a possible source of stability in 'traditional' political and social institu- tions.35 Some of this work provided a degree of intellectual legitimacy for 'Third World' dictatorships.36 And much of this work also continued to homogenise the 'Third World' and contribute to the overall efforts to manage economic and political change in Latin America, Asia, Africa and Oceania.

At the same time a more liberal trend had emerged by the early 1970s which built on the 'politics of order' approach, but was also influenced by and incorporated radical perspectives on the 'Third World'. This was part of the wider shift in the late 1960s and 1970s towards greater influence at the UN by 'Third World' governments, the call for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) and the apparent recognition in North America and Western Europe that the North-South conflict was more important than the East-West conflict. This liberal managerialism was reformist and envisioned improving North-South relations without having to make major structural changes. The shift in the 1970s, from the East-West conflict and the containment of communism, to the North-South conflict and the management of revolution, was partially reflected in the policies adopted by the Carter administration in its first two years in office. Carter, as well as Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as his National Security Advisor, and a number of other members of the Carter administration, were members of the Trilateral Commission, which was founded in 1973 by promi- nent North American, Western European and Japanese academics, politicians

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and corporate heads. According to Brzezinski, one of the organisation's co- founders, the Trilateral Commission saw US relations with Japan and Western Europe as the 'strategic hard core for both global stability and progress'.37 The major goal of the Trilateral Commission was to develop a cohesive and semi-permanent alliance which embraced the world's major capitalist govern- ments in order to promote stability and order and protect their interests.38 In the case of the 'Third World', Trilateralism advocated and sought accommodation rather than confrontation. It sought to encourage a limited amount of reform in order to maintain long-term stability. By the end of the 1970s the Brandt Commission and its North-South report had emerged as a major initiative and a key document by which the elites of the industrial nation-states attempted to manage the 'Third World'.3

At the same time the initiatives associated with the NIEO and the liberal managerialism embodied by the Trilateral Commission, the early Carter admin- istration and the Brandt Report, were under serious challenge by the end of the 1970s from a powerful 'neoliberal' approach to 'development' associated with the ascendancy in the early 1980s of 'conservative' governments in North America and Western Europe. Although the 'conservatism' of the early 1980s dismissed many of the ideas associated with liberal managerialism and modern- isation theory, the 'conservative' revival still rested on the earlier diffusionist ideas that North American and Western European economic expansion was primarily beneficial and that economic growth tended to undermine any need for policies aimed at the redistribution of wealth. This 'free-market' counterrevolu- tion emphasised supply-side economics and recommended that 'Third World' governments follow the North American and Western European lead and privatise public companies, as well as curb the regulation of prices and wages and economic activity generally.40 These 'recommendations' were backed up by North American and West European power over the IMF and the World Bank in the context of the new found leverage provided by the Debt Crisis and the international economic recession of the early 1980s. This situation also weak- ened the impact of the United Nations and related organisations such as the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), where 'Third World' views had gained weight in the 1970s. The central prescription for the 'Third World' that flowed from 'free market' ideology was that 'underdevelopment' was caused by excessive state involvement in the economy. However, North American and Western European assumptions about economic behaviour are often irrelevant even in North America and Western Europe. During the 1980s the mechanical application of free-market economics to the countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America and Oceania, where markets are still fragmented, information is often limited and significant aspects of economic exchange are still outside the money economy, could not be expected to have, and has not had, a beneficial impact for the majority of the population.41

Despite the dubious social legacy of neoliberal economic policies in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Oceania by the beginning of the 1990s, the wide- spread failure of 'state socialism' has generally enhanced the power of liberal ideas about economic development and social change in the 'Third World'. At

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the same time the notion of a 'Third World' in sharp contrast to the 'First World', which emerged during the Cold War, has remained a central element of social science and policy discourses in the 1990s. The concept of the 'Third World' continues to be used across a whole range of disciplines which can be found in a variety of institutional settings, all of which have the 'Third World' (and 'development' and 'underdevelopment') as their targets. Most of the disciplines and organisations concerned with the study of, and the generation of policies related to, the 'Third World', continue to be shaped by a set of assumptions that flow from a conception of history as a linear progression from a condition of political and economic 'underdevelopment' and 'tradition', to a state of liberal democratic industrialism and modernity. The 'Third World' and its history has been created and understood primarily in terms of the failure of the countries of Latin America, Africa, Asia and Oceania to become idealised versions of the industrial democracies of North America and Western Europe. More broadly, economic and political liberalism (modernisation theory) has continued to provide the most influential set of assumptions about the 'Third World'. And within liberal discourses the concept of the 'Third World' and the 'First World-Third World' dichotomy continues to encourage a homogenised understanding of a large part of the globe.

The East Asian 'miracle' provides a particularly good example of the way in which the 'Third World' has been managed and homogenised over the course of the Cold War. The dramatic rise of a number of East Asian countries since World War II has resulted in the growing expectation that we are on the threshold of the 'Pacific Century'.42 The 'NIC'S' of East Asia have undergone profound economic changes and it is very difficult to continue to evaluate their economies, politics and societies as part of the 'Third World'.4 But rather than seeing the East Asian 'success' as evidence that the 'Third World' is far too homogeneous a concept, history is ignored and the 'lessons' of East Asian industrialisation are regularly held out as readily transferable throughout the rest of the 'Third World'. The East Asian 'miracle' is now the central theme in a

wide range of development literature which has sought to universalise the 'lessons' from East Asia.

A key approach to East Asian development, as exemplified by the World Bank and the related literature, has been to point to East Asian success as evidence of the global applicability of liberal economic policies.44 According to one unrepen- tant 'free trade' advocate 'such success as Asia now enjoys is the result of unremitting hard work, an unquenchable spirit of enterprise, and sound economic policies'.45 The famous novelist and one-time Peruvian presidential hopeful Mario Vargas Llosa, insists that East Asian 'success' has demonstrated that liberalism 'is the only recipe' for the 'Third World'.46 In the context of the enthusiastic response to the rise of East Asia there has been a tendency to conflate 'export-oriented' industrialisation with 'free-trade'; however, aside from Hong Kong, the governments of the East Asian NICs have played a far more interventionist and protectionist role in economic development than the liberal economic development model suggests. Because the central goal of the various East Asian NICS has been export success, their governments have, among other things, manipulated interest rates and credit channels, made major concessions

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to foreign investors-in the case of Singapore particularly-and intervened in the labour market to keep workers' wages below market rates. The importance of state intervention in East Asian development actually challenges neoliberalism and has given rise to considerable literature and debate on East Asian and 'Third World' development.47 However, most of the discussion of the applicability of the East Asian model to the rest of the 'Third World' has failed to go beyond the debates over the role of state intervention, the relationship between economic development and political democracy, and the role of liberal economic policies. There has been far less work which seeks to address the 'problem' in a way that focuses on the historically specific experience of East Asia in contrast to other parts of the 'Third World'.

The importance of various long-term historical factors specific to East Asia do come out in the more historically oriented literature, which can be divided into three categories. First there are those studies which emphasise that the East Asian Tigers all share a cultural history characterised by an emphasis on high

education levels, a highly motivated population, a 'strong state', and an 'effec- tive' bureaucracy-all of which have been traced back to a common Confucian heritage.48 Second, and also of great importance in explaining South Korean and Taiwanese success, is the region's colonial history (this is also important in a very different way for Hong Kong and Singapore). Before 1945 Korea (North and South), Taiwan and Manchuria, formed the core of the Japanese colonial empire, which had important consequences for post-1945 industrial develop- ment.49 The third historical factor which needs to be emphasised, but is often glossed over, is that East Asia was a major arena of the Cold War after 1945.

This ensured South Korea and Taiwan received sustained US military and economic aid and capital, as well as privileged access to the North American market at a time of steady growth in demand. It also resulted in the implemen- tation of land reforms, under US auspices, which contributed to economic growth and industrialisation. This is in contrast to those areas of the 'Third World' that have had a more episodic, less intense position, or have played a less 'successful' role, in US Cold War national security policy.50 A focus on East Asia's historical particularity, in the context of global trends, challenges the ahistorical assumptions on which much of the thinking about economic develop- ment in the 'Third World' is based, and problematises the whole notion of a 'Third World'.

Globalisation and historical specificity

While a historical approach to the rise of East Asia calls into question prevailing conceptions of a 'Third World', the existence, and even the expansion, of 'Third World' conditions within the borders of the so-called 'First World' further undermines the notion of a 'Third World'. The 'internal colonialism' which has characterised the history of the United States and Australia, for example, has consigned native Americans and Australian aborigines to circumstances which mirror the conditions in which the rural and urban poor of 'Third World' countries live. Mike Davis's recent history of Los Angeles seriously qualifies any attempt to view the USA as simply a 'First World' country. For African-

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Americans and Chicanos, and recent arrivals from Latin America, life in Southern California is little different from the urban poverty south of the Rio Grande.5" At the same time countries like South Africa have always presented a particular problem for anyone attempting to talk about a 'Third World'. In South Africa the white minority enjoys a standard of living comparable to any other industrialised country, while the black majority lives in 'Third World' conditions.52 The concept of 'internal colonialism' or related approaches has also been applied to parts of Latin America, in order to highlight the way in which in a number of countries a Europeanised elite continues to occupy a position of power and privilege in sharp contrast to the indigenous inhabitants and/or the descendants of African slaves.53

In a wider sense this conceptual difficulty points to the 'internationalisation' of class structure, as ruling elites in the 'Third World' and the 'First World' become increasingly integrated. The governments and elites of Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Oceania have been incorporated into the global political-economic order on favourable terms at the same time as they enthusiastically claim to speak for the rural and urban poor of the 'Third World' who have clearly not been incorporated into the current international order on favourable terms. In Latin America, and elsewhere, certain sectors of the elite are economically, socially and culturally orientated towards North America and Western Europe, where they have bank accounts, maintain business links, own homes and send their children to school. Globalisation has meant the increas- ingly tight interlocking of transnational capital and 'national' capitalist classes. Over the past decade or more, the Debt Crisis, 'the generalized economic recession' and IMF backed 'structural adjustment', has contributed to greater concentration of income, high rates of unemployment, widespread poverty and the marginalisation of a growing number of rural and urban poor around the globe. As Jorge Nef has emphasised, for much of Latin America, 'the state has become the receiver and debt-collector of a bankrupt economy on behalf of transnational creditors'. In this situation 'nation-states' have been drawn into service by interlocking national and global elites.54 It is worth noting that in contrast to the 'great modern theories of social emancipation-for democratic rights, for socialist revolution, for liberation of women; indeed anti-colonial nationalism itself', 'Third Worldism' as a political project, and the 'Third World' as a category, has usually denoted a collection of 'states' already implicated in the retention of power and in a whole array of exploitative and accumulative practices.55

The solution to the problems generated by the concept of the 'Third World' is not to find a new label, but to dispense with the term. There is already important work being done which has begun to foreshadow ways of moving beyond the concept of the 'Third World'. Although this work has, predictably, had less impact on development economics and development policy debates, it provides the basis for a theoretically informed historical perspective on 'develop- ment' which is global. While some of this work has also sought to universalise its conclusions by reference to the 'Third World', there are a growing number of approaches which in different ways seek to privilege the specific over the systemic, and have emerged out of important debates in the humanities and the

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social sciences over the past decade or so.56 Dissatisfaction with the elite-orien- tated focus of much of the work on India, for example, has given rise to Subaltern Studies. Informed by Gramscian, and later post-structural theory, Subaltern approaches have focused on the peasantry and workers with particular concern to delineate structures and techniques of domination, strategies of resistance and the historical particularity and role of culture and religion.57 Their concern to restore the subaltern classes to history, and provide the intellectual underpinning for a less elite-orientated politics, intersects with the growing amount of work by historical anthropologists coming out of the modes of production and world-system debates of the 1970s and 1980s. These scholars have drawn attention to the way in which the expanding world economy has neither historically nor currently levelled 'pre-capitalist' structures and dis- courses to the degree that many of the earlier theoretical models implied.58

In the case of Latin America, for example, the work of Steve J Stern, which has grown out of efforts to synthesise a 'modes of production' approach with Wallerstein's world-system model, has resulted in an important attempt to emphasise both historical particularity and global political economy. From his perspective the central dynamics of Latin American history since the colonial era have been the various approaches and popular resistance strategies of the inhabitants, the interests of mercantile and political elites whose 'centers of gravity' were in the Americas, and the world-system.59 The overall methodolog- ical concerns apparent in Stern's work intersect with the emphasis on the longue dure'e in the work of Jean-Fran,ois Bayart, which attempts to historicise 'states' in Africa, rejects the state-society dichotomy and argues that colonial and

post-colonial 'states' should be seen as historically rooted in particular social formations rather than regarded as alien institutions.60 This overall concern with the strategies of resistance pursued by the peasantry and subaltern classes, and the historicity of 'states', needs to be meshed with an approach which breaks down the North-South dichotomy. One of the central problems with the development discourses is the way they have treated 'development' in the 'developed' world as a problem that has been solved. There is a growing number of development theorists who emphasise the need to move beyond North America and Western Europe as implicit models and address 'development' as a historical and political question that is still common to all parts of the globe.

Conclusion: the rise and fall of the 'Third World'

The 'Third World' began as a loose political alliance ('non-alignment') between nation-states in the context of US-Soviet rivalry after World War Two. At least one tendency had evolved by the 1960s into a revolutionary ideology committed to movements of national liberation on three continents. At the same time the 'Third World' rapidly came to be more than a description of governmental coalitions and/or allied revolutionary movements in the context of the Cold War. The apparent gulf between the industrialised nation-states (where 'development' was understood not to be a problem any longer) and the rest of the world in the 1950s suggested that a distinguishing characteristic of 'Third World' countries was a shared 'underdevelopment'. The term 'Third World' increasingly came to

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be central to North American and Western European analysis of politico-econ- omic and social change in the rest of the world. The idea of a 'Third World' now serves an important function in terms of the 'management' of the global political economy and allows for the homogenisation of the history of diverse parts of the world. What began in the 1950s as an attempt to forge a political and diplomatic alliance ostensibly outside the capitalist and socialist 'camps' has now become an all encompassing category reducing the governments, economies and soci- eties of Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania to a set of variables distinct from and inferior to the 'First World'. For many of those concerned with

economic development, a relatively homogeneous 'Third World' continues to exist. And this 'Third World' is still evaluated in terms of its ability or lack of ability to advance towards a degree and type of economic development similar to the'First World'. The economic problems of the 'Third World' continue to be understood primarily as technical problems that can be overcome by the right mix of advice, investment, aid and liberal reforms. Economic development in the 'Third World' is seen primarily as a technical or policy problem rather than a historico-political problem. The information and knowledge about the 'Third

World' which has built up over the course of the Cold War has been obtained, transmitted and organised by a whole series of processes of information accumulation and dissemination aimed at managing the 'Third World'. This situation, along with the wider difficulties associated with the continued use of the term 'Third World', can be alleviated by an approach which locates the politics of 'development' in both historically particular and global processes.

Notes

I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Catherine Waldby (Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia) and

Claire Slatter (University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji) who commented on an earlier version of this article. Of course, any errors of fact or interpretation remain the sole responsibility of the author.

The most well-known exponent of this view is probably Francis Fukuyama, a RAND consultant and former

US State Department employee, who suggested in 1989 that the end of the Cold War might be the 'end of history'. In a now famous article he characterised the waning of the conflict between Washington and Moscow as the 'end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government'. He emphasised that the liberal 'victory' was still unfinished, and it had occurred mainly 'in the realm of ideas or consciousness'. The process was 'as yet

incomplete in the real or material world'. According to Fukuyama's scenario, much of the 'Third World' is still 'mired in history' and will be 'a terrain of conflict for many years to come'. At the same time he was confident that economic and political liberalism would 'govern the material world in the long run' (emphasis in original). F Fukuyama, 'The end of history?', The National Interest, 16 (8), 1989, pp 3-4, 15. See also F Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992; Z Brzezinski, The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century, New York: Macmillan, 1990; J Muravchik, Exporting Democracy: Fulfilling America's Destiny, Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1991; and R Nixon, Seize the Moment: America's Challenge in a One-Super- power World, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992. For a variety of critical views on the end of the Cold War see G Arrighi, 'Marxist century, American century: the making and remaking of the world labour movement', New Left Review, 179, 1990; R Blackburn, 'Fin de siecle: socialism after the crash', New Left Review, 185, 1991 (these articles are both reprinted in R Blackburn (ed), After the Fall: The Failure of Communism and the Future of Socialism, London: Verso, 1991); A Callinicos, The Revenge of History: Marxism and the Eastern European Revolutions, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991; I Wallerstein, 'The collapse of liberalism', in R Miliband & L Panitch (eds), Socialist Register 1992: New World Order?, London:

Merlin Press, 1992; and S P Huntington, 'The clash of civilizations?', Foreign Affairs, 72(3), 1993. 2 See C Clapham, 'The collapse of socialist development in the Third World', Third World Quarterly; 13(1),

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1992. The entire issue is devoted to 'Rethinking socialism'. Also see F J Hinkelammert, 'The crisis of

socialism and the Third World', Monthly Review, 45 (3), 1993; and E Altvater, The Future of the Market:

An Essay on the Regulation of Money and Nature after the Collapse of 'Actually Existing Socialism';

London: Verso, 1993.

3 B Anderson, 'The last empires: the new world disorder', New Left Review, 193, 1992. 4 I Wallerstein, Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World-System, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1991, pp 10, 14; and K Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction, Berkeley,

CA: University of California Press, 1992, pp 252-253. A Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, London: Verso, 1992, pp 307-308.

6 M Williams, 'Re-articulating the Third World coalition: the role of the environmental Agenda', Third World

Quarterly, 14(1), 1993, p 28.

7 V Randall, 'Third World: rejected or rediscovered?', Third World Quarterly, 13(4), 1992, p 730. See also J Manor (ed), Rethinking Third World Politics, London: Longman, 1991; and R Galli (ed), Rethinking the

Third World, New York: Crane Russack, 1992.

8 L Wolf-Phillips, 'Why "Third World"?: origin, definition and usage', Third World Quarterly, 9 (4), 1987.

9 For a thorough analysis of the Bandung Conference, particularly the role and rhetoric of Jawaharlal Nehru ('undoubtedly the main luminary at the Conference'), see Ahmad, op cit, note 5, pp 293-304. For a critique

of India's foreign policy which emphasises that a commitment to 'Third Worldism' has not meshed easily

with the imperatives of post-1947 Indian political economy, see S Dutt, India and the Third World: Altruism

or Hegemony?, London: Zed Press, 1984. A clear articulation of Bandung as the moment of arrival for the 'Third World' can be found in a recent book by Theodore H Von Laue in which he argues that '(t)he Bandung Conference of April 1955 marked a milestone in the evolution of postwar globalism. It established

the developing countries, aligned and nonaligned, as a force to be counted in world affairs'. T H Von Laue, The World Revolution of Westernization: The Twentieth Century in Global Perspective, New York: Oxford

University Press, 1987, p 239. 10 Ahmad, op cit, note 5, pp 304-308. 1 G Chaliand, Revolution in the Third World, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978, p 24; and N Miller and

R Aya, 'Preface', in N Miller and R Aya (eds), National Liberation: Revolution in the Third World, New

York: Free Press, 1971. It has been argued that the New Left's attempt to identify with and distill a whole

range of 'Third World' struggles into a radical 'Third Worldism' helped to detach the movement from its domestic roots in North America and Western Europe. N Young, An Infantile Disorder?: The Crisis and

Decline of the New Left, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977, pp 103, 133, 158-159, 163-164, 179, 183-188, 256-259.

12 G Kolko, Confronting the Third World: United States Foreign Policy 1945-1980, New York: Pantheon, 1988.

13 For recent overviews of the history of modernisation theory and development theory generally, see A Y So,

Social Change and Development: Modernization, Dependency and World-System Theories, Newbury Park: Sage, 1990; C Ramirez-Faria, The Origins of Economic Inequality Between Nations: A Critique of Western Theories of Development and Underdevelopment, London: Unwin Hyman, 1991; and R Peet, Global

Capitalism: Theories of Societal Development, London: Routledge, 1991. 4 A Escobar, 'Culture, economics and politics in Latin American social movements theory and research', in

A Escobar and S E Alvarez (eds), The Making of Social Movements in Latin America: Identity, Strategy and

Democracy, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992, p 62. See also A Escobar, 'Discourse and power in development: Michel Foucault and the relevance of his work to the Third World', Alternatives, 10, 1984-1985. A Escobar, 'Power and visibility: development and the invention and management of the Third World', Cultural Anthropology, 3 (4), 1988.

15 G Myrdal, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, Vol 2, New York: Pantheon, 1968, pp 791-798; and R A Packenham, Liberal America and the Third World: Political Development Ideas in Foreign Aid and Social Science, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973, pp 52-53.

16 M Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989, pp 402-403, 411-415. For a discussion of the relationship between Cold War development theory and pre-1945 ideas about Latin America which relates to wider thinking about Africa, Asia and Oceania, see M T Berger, 'Civilising the South: the US rise to hegemony in the Americas and the roots of "Latin American Studies" 1898-1945', Bulletin of Latin American Research, 12 (1) 1993. Also see M T Berger, Under Northern Eyes: Latin American Studies, Inter-American Relations and the History of 'Development' 1898-1990, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, forthcoming.

17 R Prebisch, The Economic Development of Latin America and its Principal Problems, New York: United Nations, 1950; P A Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957. On dependency theory, see Joseph L. Love, 'The origins of dependency analysis', Journal of Latin American Studies, 22 (1), 1990; C Kay, Latin American Theories of Development and Underdevelopment, New York:

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Routledge, 1989, pp 1-57, 125-162; and R A Packenham, The Dependency Movement: Scholarship and Politics in Development Studies, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

18 W Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, London: Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications, 1972. See also F E Mallon, 'Dialogues among the fragments: retrospect and prospect', in F Cooper, F E Mallon, A F Isaacman, W Roseberry & S J Stem, Confronting Historical Paradigms: Peasants, Labor and the Capitalist World System in Africa and Latin America, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993, p 382.

19 F H Cardoso & E Falleto, Dependencia y desarrollo en America Latina, Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1969; and T Halperin-Donghi, '"Dependency theory" and Latin American historiography', Latin American Research Review, 17(1), 1982, p 116.

20 F H Cardoso, 'The consumption of dependency theory in the United States', Latin American Research Review, 12 (3), 1977, pp 12-13.

21 A G Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967, p xi. See also A G Frank, Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution-Essays on the Development of Underdevelopment and the Immediate Enemy, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969; A G Frank, Lumpen-Bourgeoisie, Lumpen-Development: Depend- ence, Class and Politics in Latin America, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972. Frank's most famous essay is probably 'The development of underdevelopment' which originally appeared in Monthly Review in September 1966, was reprinted in Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution in 1969, and again in R I Rhodes (ed), Imperialism and Underdevelopment: A Reader, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970 and again in an abridged form in J D Cockcroft, A G Frank & D L Johnson, Dependence and Underdevelopment: Latin America's Political Economy, Garden City, KS: Doubleday, 1972.

22 G Evans & K Rowley, Red Brotherhood At War: Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos Since 1975, London: Verso, 1990. It was the failure of Marxist internationalism in Indochina that provided the impetus for Benedict Anderson's influential book. B Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1983, pp 1-2. See also B Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1992.

23 Key examples of liberal analysis informed by dependency theory include P Evans, Dependent Development: The Alliance of Multinational, State and Foreign Capital in Brazil, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978. S Haggard, Pathways from the Periphery: The Politics of Growth in the Newly Industrializing Countries, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.

24 V Randall & R Theobald, Political Change and Underdevelopment: A Critical Introduction to Third World Politics, London: Macmillan, 1985, pp 137-138. Works in this tradition might include A K Bagchi, The Political Economy of Development, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982; J Larrain, Theories of Development: Capitalism, Colonialism and Development, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989; and J Petras & M Morley, US Hegemony Under Siege: Class, Politics and Development in Latin America, London: Verso, 1990.

25 E Laclau, 'Feudalism and capitalism in Latin America', New Left Review, 67, 1971, reprinted in E Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, London: Verso, 1979, pp 15-50. (In a postscript Laclau extends his critique to Wallerstein's work.) A particularly orthodox Marxist perspective also emerged to challenge dependency theory. See B Warren, Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism, London: Verso, 1980. Also see G Kay, Development and Underdevelopment: A Marxist Analysis, London: Macmillan, 1975.

26 P F Klaren, 'Lost promise: explaining Latin American underdevelopment', in P F Klar6n & T J Bossert (eds), Promise of Development: Theories of Change in Latin America, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986, pp 24-25. See also A Foster-Carter, 'The modes of production controversy', New Left Review, 107, 1978; and J G Taylor, From Modernization to Modes of Production: A Critique of Sociologies of Development and Underdevelopment, London: Macmillan, 1983.

27 D F Ruccio & L H Simon, 'Perspectives on underdevelopment: Frank, the modes of production school and Amin', in C K Wilber & K P Jameson (eds), The Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1992, pp 138-143; S Amin, Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment, Sussex: Harverster Press, 1974; S Amin, Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976; and S Amin, Imperialism and Unequal Development, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977.

28 The influence was a two way affair insofar as volume three of Braudel's Civilization and Capitalism drew heavily on Wallerstein's 'modern world-system'. Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929-1989, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990, p 50. See F Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century Volume 1, New York: Harper and Row, 1981; F Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce: Civilization and Capitalism l5th-18th Century Volume 2, New York: Harper and Row, 1982; and F Braudel, The Perspective of the World: Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century Volume 3, New York: Harper and Row, 1984, pp 69-70.

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29 P Buhle, Marxism in the USA: From 1870 to the Present Day, London: Verso, 1987, p 265. 30 C Ragin & D Chirot, 'The world system of Immanuel Wallerstein: sociology and politics as history',

in Theda Skocpol (ed), Vision and Method in Historical Sociology, Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1984, pp 284-290. I Wallerstein, The Modem World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the

Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, New York: Academic Press, 1974;

I Wallerstein, The Modem World System H. Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy 1600-1750, New York: Academic Press, 1980; and I Wallerstein, The Modem World

System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy 1730s-1840s, New York:

Academic Press, 1989.

31 L S Stavrianos, Global Rift: The Third World Comes of Age, New York: William Morrow, 1981; D Chirot, Social Change in the Twentieth Century, New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1977; and D Chirot,

Social Change in the Modem Era, New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1986.

32 J J Johnson (ed), The Role of the Military in Underdeveloped Countries, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962; and M Janowitz, The Military in the Political Development of New Nations: An Essay in

Comparative Analysis, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1964.

33 S P Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968,

pp 41-45, 52-56, 144-145.

34 See A Zolberg, Creating Political Order: The Party States of West Africa, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1966.

35 See, for example, C W Anderson, Politics and Economic Change in Latin America: The Governing of Restless Nations, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967.

36 According to Howard Wiarda '(m)ost Western social science, with its favoritism toward democratic and civilian government, treats coups as aberrations-irregular, dysfunctional, and unconstitutional-thus

ignoring their normality, regularity, workability, often onstituted constitutional basis, the reasons for them,

their functional similarity to elections, and the fact the former may be no more comic opera than the latter.

Our antimilitary bias, however, often prevents us from seeing these events neutrally and scientifically.' H J Wiarda, Ethnocentrism in Foreign Policy: Can We Understand the Third World?, Washington, DC:

American Enterprise Institute, 1985, p 31. Also see H J Wiarda, Critical Elections and Critical Coups: State,

Society and the Military in the Processes of Latin American Development, Athens, OH: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1979.

37 Z Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Advisor 1977-1981, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983, p 289.

38 S Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 39 W Brandt, North-South: A Programme for Survival-Report of the Independent Commission on Inter-

national Development Issues, London: Pan, 1980. 40 The most famous exponent of 'conservative' development economics is probably P T Bauer. See P T Bauer,

Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. P T Bauer, Reality and Rhetoric: Studies in the Economics of Development, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,

1984.

41 See M P Todaro, Economic Development in the Third World, London: Longman, 1989, pp 82-84. For a recent analysis of the ability of the World Bank to influence the economic policies of 'Third World' governments which emphasises the significant constraints on policy-based lending and the divergent experiences that flow from the gap between the theory and the practice of 'structural adjustment', see P Mosley, J Harrigan & J Toye, Aid and Power: The World Bank and Policy-based Lending. Volume 1: Analysis and Policy Proposals, London: Routledge, 1991; and P Mosley, J Harrigan & J Toye, Aid and Power: The World Bank and Policy-based Lending. Volume 2: Case Studies, London: Routledge, 1991.

42 M Borthwick, (with contributions by selected scholars), Pacific Century: The Emergence of Modern Pacific Asia, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992.

43 Already at the beginning of the Cold War there was considerable economic diversity in the 'Third World' and throughout the Cold War era the diversity has increased. If the World Bank's new technique for the calculation of national wealth, described as 'purchasing-power parity' is taken into consideration China is ranked as the world's second largest economy (according to the IMF using the same technique it is third) with India fifth, Brazil ninth and Mexico eleventh, while just before its breakup the USSR would have probably ranked fourth on this scale. A Swardson, 'Are the right seven at the summit?' Guardian Weekly, 11 July 1993, p 16. A number of oil-rich states, in the Middle East especially, although not industrialised, have risen to positions of financial and political prominence in the international order. Saudi Arabia, with a per capita GNP of over $6000 by the late 1980s hardly seems to belong in the same category as Bolivia with a per capita GNP of less than $600 a year, or Zaire with a per capita GNP of around $150 a year. Third World Guide 91/92, Montevideo: Instituto del Tercer Mundo, 1990, pp 232, 493, 577. In fact, economic and quality of life indicators for sub-Saharan Africa as a whole suggest that throughout much of the region there has been no improvement over the past 30 years and in many cases considerable decline.

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44 See, for example, B Belassa, The Newly Industrializing Countries in the World Economy, New York: Pergamon Press, 1981; World Bank, Korea's Experience with the Development of Trade and Industry:

Lessons for Latin America, Washington, DC: Economic Development Institute of the World Bank, 1988; M

Porter, The Competitive Advantage of Nations, London: Macmillan, 1990; S Schlossstein, Asia's New Little

Dragons: The Dynamic Emergence of Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia Chicago, IL: Contemporary Books,

1991; W McCord, The Dawn of the Pacific Century: Implications for Three Worlds of Development, New

Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1991; and World Bank, The East Asian Miracle, Washington, DC:

Economic Development Institute of the World Bank, 1993.

45 M Thatcher, 'The triumph of trade', Far Eastern Economic Review, 2 September 1993, p 23. 46 M Vargas Llosa, 'A novelist in the corridors of power', Independent Monthly, September 1993, p 19. 47 For a good summary of the East Asian development literature see J Henderson and R P Applebaum,

'Situating the state in the East Asian development process', in J Henderson & R P Applebaum (eds), State

and Development in the Asian Pacific Rim, Newbury Park: Sage, 1992.

48 See for example, R Hofheinz Jr & K E Calder, The Eastasia Edge, New York: Harper and Row, 1982.

Linked to the emphasis on 'culture' there have been reductionist explanations which find in Confucianism

the same kind of dynamism that was earlier attributed to Protestantism's role in the 'rise of the West'. C H Chung, J M Shepard & M J Dollinger, 'Max Weber revisited: some lessons from East Asian capitalistic development', Asia Pacific Journal of Management, 6 (2), 1987. Weber's thesis has also undergone a certain

amount of revival in relation to Western Europe. See Daniel Chirot, 'The rise of the West', American Sociological Review, 50 (2), 1985.

49 See for example, B Cumings, 'The legacy of Japanese colonialism in Korea', in R H Myers & M R Peattie (eds), The Japanese Colonial Empire 1895-1945, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984; U Menzel, 'The Newly Industrializing Countries of East Asia: imperialist continuity or a case of catching up?', in W J Mommsen & J Osterhammel (eds), Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities, London:

Allen and Unwin, 1986; and C J Eckert, Offspring of Empire: The Koch'ang Kims and the Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism 1876-1945, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1990.

50 This point is emphasised in W Bello & S Rosenfeld, Dragons in Distress: Asia's Miracle Economies in Crisis, San Francisco, CA: Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1990, pp 4-5.

51 M Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, London: Verso, 1990. 52 H Wolpe, 'The theory of internal colonialism: the South African case', in I Oxaal, T Barnett & D Booth

(eds), Beyond the Sociology of Development: Economy and Society in Latin America and Africa, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975.

53 G Urban & J Sherzer, 'Introduction: Indians, nation-states and culture', in G Urban & J Sherzer (eds), Nation-States and Indians in Latin America, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1991.

54 J Nef, ' "Normalization", popular struggles and the receiver state', in J Knippers Black (ed), Latin America, Its Problems and Its Promise: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991, p 199.

On the 'internationalisation' of class structure in Latin America also see J Petras & M Morley, Latin America in the Time of Cholera: Electoral Politics, Market Economics and Permanent Crisis, London: Routledge, 1992, p 2.

55 Ahmad, op cit, note 5, p 292. 56 J MacKenzie, 'A second wind from the Third World', in A Ryan (ed), After the End of History, London:

Collins and Brown, 1992. 57 R Guha, 'On some aspects of the historiography of colonial India', in R Guha and G Chakravorty Spivak

(eds), Selected Subaltern Studies, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988; G Chakravorty Spivak, 'Subaltern studies: deconstructing historiography', in G Chakravorty Spivak (ed), In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, New York: Routledge, 1988; and G Prakash, 'Writing post-orientalist histories of the Third World: Indian historiography is good to think', in Colonialism and Culture, Nicholas B Dirks (ed), Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1993.

58 An important pioneering work is E Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981. See also W Roseberry, Anthropologies and Histories: Essays in Culture, History and Political Economy, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989. The emergence of, and growing interest in, the new social movements is also linked to a renewed concern with his- torical particularity in the context of global processes. A Escobar, 'Reflections on development: grassroots approaches and alternative politics in the Third World', Futures, 24 (5), 1992; A Escobar, 'Imagining a post-development era? critical thought, development and social movements', Social Text, 10 (2-3), 1992; and A Escobar & S E Alvarez, 'Introduction: theory and protest in Latin America today', in Escobar and

Alvarez, op cit, note 14. 59 S J Stern, 'Feudalism, capitalism and the world-system in the perspective of Latin America and the

Caribbean', American Historical Review, 93 (4), 1988, reprinted in Cooper, Mallon, Isaacman, Roseberry & Stern, op cit, note 18, p 55.

60 J F Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly, London: Longman, 1993; J F Bayart, 'Finishing with the idea of the Third World: the concept of political trajectory', in James Manor (ed), Rethinkingy

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THE END OF THE 'THIRD WORLD'?

Third World Politics, London: Longman, 1991. There is now a number of historical approaches to state formation which parallel Bayart's overall concerns. For example see B Anderson, 'Old state, new society: Indonesia's new order in comparative historical perspective', Journal of Asian Studies, 42 (2), 1983, reprinted in B Anderson, Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990; and B Anderson, 'Cacique democracy and the Philippines: origins and dreams', New Left Review, 169, 1988.

61 See, for example, D Senghaas, The European Experience: A Historical Critique of Development Theory, Leamington Spa: Berg Publishers, 1985; and B Hettne, Development Theory and the Three Worlds, London: Longman, 1990.

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