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Third World Quarterly

ISSN: 0143-6597 (Print) 1360-2241 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctwq20

Using and abusing the concept of the Third World: geopolitics and the comparative political study of development and underdevelopment

Vicky Randall

To cite this article: Vicky Randall (2004) Using and abusing the concept of the Third World: geopolitics and the comparative political study of development and underdevelopment, Third World Quarterly, 25:1, 41-53, DOI: 10.1080/0143659042000185327

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Third World Quarterly, Vol 25, No 1, pp 41–53, 2004

Using and abusing the concept of the Third World: Geopolitics and the comparative political study of development and underdevelopment V.RandallDepartment of GovernmentUniversity of EssexWivenhoe ParkColchesterCO4 [email protected]

VICKY RANDALL

ABSTRACT This article argues that, while the notion of a ‘Third World’ retains relevance and usefulness in the context of geopolitical analysis, generalisations about Third World politics are no longer helpful or justifiable. It begins by reviewing the historic rationales for the notion of the Third World together with criticisms made of these arguments. It then considers reasons why the term may retain some value at a geopolitical level: in signalling a major axis of inequality, providing a symbolic basis for collective action and, possibly, as an alternative to less attractive perspectives. The article then turns more specifically to the field of comparative politics, suggesting that in the past the notion of a Third World could be justified pragmatically as a response to the insularity of Western political science and because there was, up to a point, a common paradigm of Third World politics. Such justifications have been undermined by the growth in specialist knowledge of individual Third World countries or regions together with increasing differentiation among them.

The concept of a ‘Third World’ has clearly proved useful in a range of political contexts over the years. But its ideological significance was always ambiguous. As deployed in the West it tended to carry pejorative connotations of otherness and backwardness, although there was an alternative, more radical construction, reflected in the rise and fall of Third Worldism between the 1950s and the 1980s. Persuasive arguments remain for retaining some version of the notion for purposes of geopolitical analysis. However, in the field of comparative politics, it is more than time that we moved beyond Third World-type generalisations to consider the (former) Third World’s constituent regions and countries in their own right. This article begins by looking at the old rationales for using the term and the reasons why these have been undermined. It then considers whether there are still any arguments for retaining the concept—or something like it—for political analysis in general. Turning more specifically to the field of compara- tive politics, it first revisits previous justifications offered for combining such a

Vicky Randall is in the Department of Government, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK. Email: [email protected].

ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/04/010041-13  2004 Third World Quarterly DOI: 10.1080/0143659042000185327 41

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great number of political systems or states into a single category and then considers how far these justifications are still valid.

The undermining of the old rationales

The etymology and history of the concept of a Third World have been much discussed and are reviewed again elsewhere in this special issue.1 It would be tedious to relate them at length here. However, it is necessary briefly to indicate what I see as having been the principal and most persuasive arguments for this conceptualisation in the past in order to consider why and to what extent they no longer hold.

Successive rationales for marking out a distinct Third World have associated it with nonalignment, with the experience and consequences of colonisation, with economic dependence, and with poverty and economic ‘backwardness’. The nonalignment argument, in the context of which by some accounts the term Third World originated, was never very convincing even in the early Bandung days and was undermined by the collapse of the Soviet bloc, since this removed one of the two camps between which a non-aligned position could be adopted. The so-called Nonalignment Movement itself has persisted and still meets roughly every three years; at its meeting in February 2003 in Kuala Lumpur representatives from 114 member states were expected, but the actual meeting received minimal press coverage.2

There were always problems with the argument about shared postcolonial status. The nature of the colonial experience varied widely. A few of the countries conventionally included in the Third World were never directly colonised, while most countries of Latin America had gained formal indepen- dence from Spain or Portugal by the 1830s, leading Cammack et al to suggest that their relationship with the USA had long since become much more important than any Iberian connection.3 Certainly by the 1990s it was far from clear that, for most countries, the impact of colonisation continued to play a major determining role.

Arguments seeking to extend or replace the significance attributed to colonis- ation by reference to neocolonialism or economic dependency have also become increasingly difficult to sustain. Empirically they have been challenged by examples of countries seemingly breaking free of dependency’s iron logic— the oil-exporting countries, the Newly Industrialising Countries (NICs)—and theoretically they have been challenged by the new paradigm, or paradigms, of ‘globalisation’. By the same token, the various statistical indicators that have been used to produce world league tables of poverty and development reveal by now that the countries of the former Third World are scattered right across the categories from misery to affluence.

Geopolitics: uses of ‘the Third World’

So has the time come to abandon ‘the Third World’ as an organising concept? That is the central question posed in this special issue but, for me, the answer is far from straightforward. It depends on the context. Although I shall be

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arguing that the category is problematic as a basis for understanding and comparing the politics of different countries, it remains both relevant and illuminating when the focus is on geopolitical processes and relationships.

In the first place, we should not be too preoccupied with semantics. Obviously the specific phrase ‘Third World’ is largely anachronistic in the wake of the collapse of what, in the original schema, was held to be the Second World, that is the Soviet Union and its satellites, although a case could possibly be made for continuing to distinguish for the moment between the (former) Second and First Worlds because of the enduring consequences of their very different histories. As Thérien notes with the end of the Cold War, the tendency has been to replace the First–Second–Third World categories with a simple North–South dichotomy, or some variant thereof.4

Nor does the fact that some former Third World countries no longer seem to fit its defining criteria fatally undermine its coherence. It is possible to draw the belt tighter, to exclude in particular the wealthy oil-exporting countries and the NICs, although there will always be disagreements about which specific countries should be in and which out. To the extent that the old category of a Second World has been dissolved, some of its former members should probably also be brought into the Third World fold. The old category, as far as it was specified, spanned both ‘developed’ and industrialised countries of Eastern Europe and ‘developing’, predominantly agricultural countries such as Vietnam, Cuba and of course China. These latter countries would need to be included in a revamped Third World, together with the five Central Asian former Soviet Republics— Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

A Third World-type category, first, draws attention to what continues to be a major axis of economic and political inequality. It is an understatement to say that access to the benefits and opportunities of globalisation have been unevenly distributed between nations. And while it may be true, as Berger, Weber and other globalisation theorists have argued in this special issue and elsewhere, that increasingly the Third World or the South, is becoming a world-wide social category rather than a geographically defined one, this is only a trend; it is not a completed process. In 1995, as reported in Thomas, the 23% of the world’s population living in the North still enjoyed 85% of its income, while the 77% in the South made do with 15 %.5 In 1996 UNDP reported that between 1960 and 1993 the gap in annual per capita income between developing and developed countries had increased from $5700 to $15 400.6 Such stark material differences do have substantial social and political consequences. For instance, Collier’s recent study for the World Bank of the factors giving rise to civil war, reported in the Economist, finds that ‘the most striking common factor among war-prone countries is their poverty … the poorest one-sixth of humanity endures four- fifths of the world’s civil wars’.7

Second, and given this continuing political and economic inequality among nations, Third Worldist ‘discourse’ potentially provides a powerful rhetoric and rallying-point. Just as the signifiers, ‘woman’, and more obviously ‘black’, have been political constructs obscuring or transcending the actual complexities of experience and identity formation, but nonetheless with a strategic usefulness in particular political contexts, so the terms South or Third World can help to create

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as much as to reflect political alignments and solidarities. How far this happens in practice is less clear. Although media reports on the World Summit on Environment and Development held in Johannesburg in August 2002 referred to the differing interests and perceptions of the developing and developed worlds, or the richer and poorer countries, it does not appear that the national delegations adopted this language themselves in any sustained way, still less that it provided the basis for a co-ordinated strategy.8

A third possible argument is still more contingent or tactical than the previous two and is actually a consequence or response to recent developments in Western analysis of global politics. Beginning with his article in Foreign Affairs in 1993 and then in his book The Clash of Civilisations and the Making of World Order, Samuel Huntington has played a leading intellectual role in articulating the ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis. In his book Huntington draws on an extensive scholarly literature to develop his theme, providing a more complex and open-ended account than in his original ‘call to arms’.9 Some of the issues he raises are serious ones to which I return in presenting my own reservations concerning the utility of Third World-type generalisations for comparative politics purposes. Nonetheless there are manifest dangers, made clearer in the wake of 11 September, in this kind of perspective, or its cruder versions, which give a sort of intellectual respectability to cultural determinism and the politics of mutual deafness and intransigence that goes with it.

Faced with this culturally polarising discourse and most pressingly with the opposition drawn between a Judao-Christian and a Muslim ‘civilisation’, it becomes important to (re)introduce an alternative, political-economy, viewpoint that emphasises both the historic impact of Western imperialism and contempor- ary dimensions of economic inequality. A Third World perspective provides a vital corrective, cutting across a civilisation-based mapping of world regions and bringing back into the picture the context of global economic relations and local economic conditions from which apparently culturally driven politics has emerged.

So far then I have been suggesting that, despite all the difficulties in deciding exactly where boundaries should be drawn and in establishing some kind of scientifically respectable, underlying or structural logic, for the distinction, a division—if only a rhetorical division—of the world into first and third worlds remains useful, even essential in some global political contexts. Indeed, I have become more convinced of this in the process of writing this article.

Comparative politics: the uses of the Third World

What about the Third World’s value for comparative politics? First, I need to justify a focus on comparative politics at this point. Nowadays, more than ever, we should beware of too rigid a separation between the field of international relations and the study of politics within individual countries. The two spheres are increasingly interdependent and our scholarly perspectives should reflect this. It has also been argued that the same globalising trends that underpin this growing interdependence call into question the traditional focus, in political studies, on the country, or nation-state, as the unit of analysis. While this is not

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the place to pursue these debates, I am much less persuaded by this second argument: for a host of reasons including its symbolic, historic, geo-juridical and institutional resources and importance, it seems at best premature to write off the nation-state as a key determining level of political interaction. The point of these observations is to explain why the sub-field of comparative politics, centred on, though not confined to, understanding and comparing internal political processes of the world’s different countries, remains a necessary and valuable part of political studies. Is the category of ‘Third World’ useful for purposes of this kind of comparative political analysis?

As someone who has written textbooks and taught courses whose intellectual coherence to an extent relies on making such a distinction, it seems to me that in the past there have been two main justifications, one pragmatic and the other more substantive, for doing so. The pragmatic consideration was that political science, and even comparative politics, as they developed from the 1950s remained decidedly provincial for a long time. In the UK comparison—or parallel description—was typically restricted to the USA and one or two Western European countries. The field did open up over time, of course, with the cold war-driven focus on the Soviet Union leading the way. But even then, if you wanted to get beyond a continuing parochialism that largely ignored three- quarters of the world’s population, the best, sometimes the only, way to get this huge swathe of countries onto the syllabus was to bring them in under some plausible unifying rubric, such as that offered by the concept of a Third World.

It is doubtful whether such a rationalisation still holds. Even if the notion of a Third World supplied a useful vehicle, or legitimating device, through which to broaden the scope of comparative politics, this Trojan horse kind of argument could only be justified in the short to medium term. In the longer run the inclusion of an undifferentiated Third World should help to give rise to a more substantive and systematic interest in a whole range of regions or countries beyond the Western fringe. In practice, certainly in the UK, the traditional provincialism of comparative politics has not entirely disappeared—in fact my impression is that over the past 10 or so years, in a climate of educational funding constraints, it has been reasserting itself. Nonetheless (and as discussed further below) there has been growing interest and specialisation in the politics of particular regions—notably Latin America, South Asia, China and East Asia, and the Middle East.

But in addition to this pragmatic justification, it was also possible to argue that countries in the Third World, with some partial exceptions, the most noted being India, had many important political features in common. In the first place they shared what Robin Theobald and I have described elsewhere as a ‘predicament of economic dependency and backwardness’ that constrained politics even while it strongly shaped its imperatives.10 Hawthorne similarly talks about the two problems, the political problem of building legitimate authority based on a sense of nationhood and the economic problem of development, facing all Third World (and also some Second World) countries.11 But beyond this, there was, one could argue, a common pattern or ‘syndrome’ of Third World politics which included instability and conflict, authoritarianism and military intervention, pervasive clientelism and corruption, and which was evident whether you focused on

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Africa, the Middle East, Latin America or Asia. While such features were not unknown in the First World, their extent, convergence and degree in the Third World offered a stark apparent contrast, helping to justify studying the politics of Third World countries together as a separate group.

The question is how far this still remains the case. I don’t want to suggest that the situation has been transformed, that the countries of the (former or restyled) Third World no longer have enough in common politically and in contrast with those of the First World to warrant seeking to generalise about them as a category in some comparative contexts. But changes over the past two or more decades, both in the nature of politics in these countries and, just as importantly, in what we know about it, make this kind of approach appear increasingly crude and arrogant.

Political diversity in the Third World

There was always something disquieting about lumping together such a vast range of societies—covering around 75% (by the turn of the century more like 80%) of the world’s population and 70% of its landmass—for purposes of comparative political analysis. It meant subsuming what were recognised to be very different cultural traditions, pre-colonial and also colonial histories. But arguably the expansion and development of relevant scholarship in the ‘First World’ and in those countries themselves has made such differences increasingly difficult to avoid.

Even if we simply focus on broad analytical approaches to Third World politics and how they have changed over time, we can see that the political ‘development’ or modernisation paradigm that was influential from the late 1950s was soon under attack from a social anthropology perspective for its cavalier generalisations about ‘tradition’, and that the ‘modernisation revision- ism’ which succeeded it was much more sensitive to and indeed interested in the interaction of political processes like elections with the particularities of local culture and social structure.12 There was to some extent a parallel move subsequently in the Marxist camp to modify dependency theory’s sweeping generalisations about the impact of metropolitan capital on satellite economies and their societies by much more careful examination of capital’s ‘articulation’ with specific local ‘modes of production’.13 So, from early on, attempts to impose general theories or analytic frameworks through which to understand Third World politics or political economy came up against arguments from ‘reality’ as mediated in particular by experts working in the ‘field’ and employ- ing a more anthropological or ethnographic perspective.

At the same time, and presumably reinforcing this scepticism, there was a marked expansion in specialised ‘area studies’ focused on different regions of the Third World. In the UK, while there had been isolated centres such as the School of Oriental and African Studies founded in 1912, this expansion really originated in postwar government policy concerns about the country’s future. Two reports to the Universities Grants Committee played a key role, that of the 1961 ‘Hayter’ Committee on Area Studies (covering Africa and the ‘Orient’) and the 1962 Parry Committee on Latin American Studies.14 Following their

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recommendations a series of centres were set up or enlarged for African studies, Southeast Asian studies, Middle Eastern and Islamic studies and Latin American studies. The field of Caribbean studies seems to have taken longer to separate out from Latin American studies: its first Centre was established at Warwick University in 1984.

Along with these university centres went the creation of area-studies-based professional associations such as the Society of Latin American Studies (SLAS) founded in 1964, the British Association of South Asian Studies (BASAS) founded in 1986 and the African Studies Association. To the ranks of existing area-based journals like African Affairs, founded in 1901, and the Middle Eastern Journal, founded in 1946, were added new publications such as China Quarterly, founded in 1959, the Journal of Modern African Studies, founded in 1962, and the Bulletin of Latin American Research (linked to SLAS) founded in 1981.

And these processes were of course mirrored by the growth of area studies in other ‘developed’ countries including France, the Netherlands, Australia (with a particular interest in the Pacific), Canada and above all the USA. There has been an African Studies Association in North America since 1957, which, despite internal rows and recent funding constraints, continues to draw well over 1000 participants to its annual conferences, while the US-based Latin American Studies Association (LASA) presently claims over 5000 members.15 If there have been localised phases of contraction, there has been expansion elsewhere; for example, the African Studies Association of Ireland was established in 2000. Finally, to admittedly quite varying degrees, within the countries of the former Third World there has been increasingly systematic study and analysis by indigenous scholars of their own society and politics. India, for instance, has a large and highly respected community of social scientists who play a leading role in interpreting Indian political developments, much of the time in Indian English-language journals, including the esteemed (Bombay) Economic and Political Weekly.

The point I may risk labouring here is that collectively at least we now know so much more about the process and ingredients of politics in different Third World countries than in the 1950s. And with this enhanced knowledge has come confirmation of an earlier more intuitive sense that Third World thinking, the kinds of analytic containers it employed, might be obscuring key differences, whether regional or even country by country, in what politics meant, what determined it and how it worked. This is not to condone the romantic or historicist claim that each country—or indeed province—is unique, ‘exceptional’ and not to be bracketed with any other. Rather the contention here is that all along there have been such major differences within the Third World as to seriously limit the scope for meaningful political generalisation.

What kinds of differences are being referred to here and what has given rise to them? One answer might be to point to longstanding cultural differences among Third World countries, or regions, to some degree rooted in wider divisions between ‘civilisations’. Huntington, we have seen, has recently taken up this approach. He follows the historian Fernand Braudel and others in understanding civilisations to be totalities: ‘none of their constituent units can be fully understood without reference to the encompassing civilization’.16 At the

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same time he emphasises their cultural dimensions—their ‘values, beliefs, institutions and social structures’—and especially their historic foundations in the world’s great religions. The civilisation constitutes the broadest cultural unit within which are grouped culturally differentiated regions, nationalities and so on. Civilisations are not eternal or immutable but evolve and decline; nonethe- less by definition they are long lasting and far-reaching. Huntington identifies five definite contemporary civilisations: Sinic, Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, and Western, the latter having significantly outgrown its historical roots in ‘Christen- dom’. Then there is Latin America, which may merit its own civilisation, and Russia and Israel as further possible candidates. Africa is confined to a ‘possibly’. Huntington sees these civilisational differences as having always been there, although they were to some extent muffled or obscured by ideologi- cal divisions of the Cold War; subsequently, they have acquired new visibility and resonance, especially in a global political context, and as anchors of identity.17

As already noted, there are serious problems with this kind of thinking not just because of the political ends it can be made to serve but because of the element of arbitrariness in the selection of categories and because of cultural determin- ism. It tends to present culture as consisting of a single block of meaning rather than as ‘polysemic’, subject to reinvention, contestation and so on. It can be deployed in a highly—sometimes ridiculously—judgemental way; for instance in the edited volume Culture Matters, many of the contributors more or less explicitly rate the cultures under review according to how far they promote human progress—for which read capitalist entrepreneurship.18 And Huntington’s relegation of Africa to little more than a footnote is scarcely helpful.

Even so this perspective does draw attention to major cultural traditions, beyond any simple First/Third World dichotomy. With the inclusion of Japanese civilisation in the First World it cannot be said that any of these civilisations actually straddles the First/Third World divide but the deep-seated cultural heterogeneity of the Third World is underlined. Just to cite one context in which the relevance of such traditions has been asserted, consider the debate about ‘Asian values’, particularly as they explain, even justify, distinctive attitudes to human rights. There are arguments about whether, logically, such values need to clash with conceptions of human rights; there is also awareness that the Asian values argument has been articulated by and provided useful political ammu- nition for autocratic leaders such as Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew and Malaysia’s Mahathir.19 Even so Michael Barr has recently concluded that it is possible to discern Asian values, or at least East and Southeast Asian values, ‘that are basically communitarian, consensual and hierarchical’, whether associated with Islam, Buddhism or Confucianism, and that each of these worldviews has ‘fundamental difficulties in establishing an interface with the liberal and Christian human rights agenda’.20

Even if we are reluctant to accept the degree of cultural determinism implied in these kinds of arguments, the notion of an extended political trajectory, in which cultural elements play a part, is more difficult to resist. This idea has been developed in particular by Bayart, an eloquent advocate of the need to recognise the political diversity of the Third World.21 He focuses in the first instance on

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‘the historical irreducibility’ of the Third World state. In order to analyse modern Third World states, he argues that we should view them through the perspective of the extended political trajectory or, in Braudel’s phrase, the longue durée, going back as far as pre-colonial times. It is not just that a great number of future Third World states had their own developed and distinctive political systems, especially in Asia—India, China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Siam/Thailand and Cambodia—but elsewhere, notably Ethiopia and Egypt. Even where such politi- cal systems were absent, when the colonial powers ‘effectively created’ states, like Iraq and Jordan or most of those in tropical Africa, they did not create them out of nothing and these ‘colonial creations were also subject to multiple acts of reappropriation by indigenous social groups’. And while these Third World countries faced common or similar ‘ruptures’ and challenges, in the form of colonisation and subsequent exogenously derived developments, their responses were markedly different and set off in consequence chains of further differen- tiation.

This leaves open to some degree the question of what it is that provides identity or continuity—what endures over the longue durée? We could conceive of it in terms of culture, even civilisation, of systems of economic production and the social power relations associated with them, or of discourses, or what Bayart calls the ‘cultural constructions of politics’.

The point being made here is that there have always been important political differences between Third World countries. These differences can be understood in terms of the varying political trajectories traced by different Third World societies from pre-colonial times, however we understand the distinctive ele- ments that have shaped these trajectories. Such differences have become clearer with the passage of time and growth of specialist knowledge.

Increasing diversity?

Not only have we become more aware of diversity; that diversity has itself increased over time. There have been many and changing meanings or rationales of the idea of a Third World. Its brief association with ‘nonalignment’ suggested that Third World countries would find their own paths forward rather than emulating the capitalist or socialist West. But in other conceptions the opposition has been between the Third World and a more advanced, powerful First (and even Second) World, which, in some sense, represented what Third World countries should want to become. To that extent there has been an assumption if not that Third World countries had in common their gradual approximation to the West, then—in more left-wing accounts—that the West provided a common unifying measure of what it was they could not become. Either way one could suggest that contributing to the readiness to group so many countries together for analytical purposes in a single Third World category was a belief either that as they developed they would converge towards a Western model or that they were effectively frozen in their inability to do so. Perhaps what was less anticipated was that different regions and in many cases countries would develop or modernise—or possibly regress—in different directions.

The paradigm of globalisation which has come to the fore from the late 1980s

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takes many different ideological forms and has many dimensions, but to the extent that globalisation itself is understood as a process of progressive global economic integration, it could be seen as a common externally derived pressure and/or opportunity all Third World (and all other) states must respond to. But globalisation does not present the same pressures and opportunities to each state. While some, most notably those of East Asia, have been able to harness it and adapt their economies to make the most of it, for much of tropical Africa opportunities for increased trade and Foreign Direct Investment have been severely limited and globalisation has meant rather the imposition of neoliberal structural adjustment regimes by debt-regulating International Financial Institu- tions (IFIs).

Even when we focus more specifically on patterns of politics, it is now much more difficult to demonstrate a shared ‘political syndrome’. Common political features are still observed, most obviously, and in different forms, the politics of clientelism and corruption, not confined to the former Third World but seem- ingly particularly concentrated and endemic there with very few exceptions, including perhaps Singapore, Botswana, Chile and Costa Rica. In Africa there is little suggestion that patrimonial or neo-patrimonial politics are in decline; rather, according to Chabal and Daloz, what all states in Africa share is:

a generalized system of patrimonialism and acute degree of apparent disorder, as evidenced by a high level of governmental and administrative inefficiency, a lack of institutionalization, a general disregard for the rules of the formal political and economic sectors and a universal resort to personal(ized) and vertical solutions to societal problems.22

But in Latin America too, O’Donnell suggests that the by now widespread institutionalisation of elections and a relatively free press coexist with a second extremely important institution which is ‘informal, pervasive and permanent’, that of particularism or clientelism, meaning:

nonuniversalistic relationships, ranging from hierarchical particularistic exchanges, patronage, nepotism and favours to actions that, under the formal rules of the institutional package of polyarchy, would be considered corrupt.23

Even in many, perhaps most, of the economically dynamic countries of East and Southeast Asia, personalistic ties, based on family-type relationships and linking business and government, have featured prominently. While the factors under- lying the financial crisis of 1997 have been much debated, according to Perkins, there is by now a consensus that the nature of government–business relations, sometimes referred to pejoratively as ‘cronyism’, played a significant contri- butory role in Thailand, South Korea and even more so in Malaysia and Indonesia.24

However, these few examples already suggest variations in the forms that these ‘nonuniversalistic’ relationships take and in their implications for the political and economic system. Why, asks O’Donnell, who is interested in democratic transition, have they not proved an insuperable obstacle to consolida- tion in India (or Italy or Japan)? Instead of being explored, he says, this anomaly

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has been shunted off into a ‘theoretical limbo’. Rather than talking about such relationships under broad and homogenising labels like neo-patrimonialism then, we now need to produce more discriminating taxonomies that distinguish between their forms and consider how these interact with the wider political context.

The ‘third wave’ of democratisation could be seen, along with, or even as part of, globalisation, as another commonly experienced and at least partially exter- nally driven pressure or influence on Third World states but its effect has been to further disrupt the old ‘syndrome’ of Third World politics and to accentuate and make clearer the political differences within the Third World. At a superficial level the wave’s spread has been rapid and dramatic; already by the early 1990s there were no remaining military regimes in South America—as distinct from central America—and there were strong pressures on Mexico to democratise its one-party system. In tropical Africa by 1995 a plurality of the 40-odd regimes had multiparty systems and in 13 of these there had been a change of government through the ballot box. But some governments, including the substantial case of China, have barely made any concessions to democratic norms, in other countries such as Pakistan fragile multiparty regimes have succumbed to military coups (1999), while in the search for the holy grail of ‘democratic consolidation’ the relevant literature has coined any number of terms to describe regimes falling short—‘delegative’, ‘illiberal’, ‘low intensity’, ‘facade’, and so forth. While there are inter-regional variations, there are also regional contrasts, most strikingly between Latin America, where democracy in some shape or form, and despite wobbly moments in Peru and most recently Venezuela, prevails everywhere, and the Middle East where only the most tentative steps have been taken.

The Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 brought home to many Western observers the growing salience of religion in Third World politics.25 Political conflict based on or articulated through religious differences has been on the increase in South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa and Nigeria. The events of 11 September 2001 have made Islamic ‘fundamentalism’ almost the number one issue associated with Third World politics, eclipsing debt and democratisation. The (re)politicisation of religious difference has been associated with the end of the Cold War and with responses to economic and cultural globalisation on the one hand and with mobilisation strategies of those engaged in domestic power struggles on the other. Yet, leaving aside problems about how and why religion emerges as a political issue, one basic requirement, as Nikki Keddie has emphasised, is that there exists a mainspring of deep religious sentiment and identification to tap into.26 It is clear that this kind of politics really does not figure to any significant degree in large parts of the Third World. In Latin America, ‘liberation theology’ played an interesting, if debated, role in nourishing popular social movements, (re)building civil society and contributing to pressures for democratic reforms through the 1970s and 1980s, but this was not about religious conflict, it was about bringing greater social and political awareness into what was then overwhelmingly the dominant form of Christian- ity, Roman Catholicism. Observers may argue about the role Confucianism— more a moral outlook than a religion anyway—has played in shaping the

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political culture of East Asian states but no one would claim that religion is a major political issue in these societies.

Ethnic conflict and ethno-nationalism have likewise been on the rise in the former Third (and Second) World and, indeed, religiously identified political movements, such as that for hindutva in India, are often best understood as a kind of religious nationalism. But similarly the salience of ethnic conflict, and indeed of ethnicity as a basis of political identities, varies greatly within the Third World. While the character of ethnic politics has changed from its more ‘primitive’ tribal form in the 1960s, ‘ethnicity is more central than ever to the politics of many Africa countries’.27 In different forms it features prominently in a range of Middle Eastern and Asian contexts, but notwithstanding ethnic dimensions of guerrilla movements in Peru or the Chiapas movement in Mexico, much less so in Latin America. This may be partly because ethnic differences are ‘ranked’ to use Horowitz’s term, corresponding to rather than cross-cutting social stratification, so that ethnic conflict is subsumed in broader class-based conflict, and it may also be that the future will see ethnicity featuring more explicitly. For the moment this marks one further important respect in which meaningful generalisation across the former Third World is constrained.28

Conclusion: using and abusing the concept of the Third World

There are still compelling arguments for retaining the notion of the Third World in the context of geopolitical analysis. The actual term used doesn’t really matter—South would probably be better than Third World, or possibly some other term such as developing countries/world or ‘emerging areas’.29 The boundaries of the Third World can also be re-specified to exclude some old members and include some new ones. The term is needed to denote the continuing imbalance of economic and political power between (and not only within) the world’s nations. Given this axis of inequality, it also provides an important rallying point as a focus of symbolic identification. In addition it may be desirable to hold onto the idea of a North and South as a corrective to current clash of civilisation arguments.

But in the field of comparative politics, Third World-type generalisations are no longer helpful. It must be recognised that there is a basic tension in the idea of a Third World. It can be understood as a response to global inequality but it is also a symptom of First World thinking, a category imposed as part of a specific First World way of seeing things. In the past the readiness to generalise about a Third World type of political system was at least partly the result both of the need to get the Third World onto the syllabus at all and of the degree of ignorance about the substantial historically shaped differences in the political trajectories of the countries that composed it. The growth of specialist area studies has generated increasingly systematic knowledge of these differences while the passage of time has revealed them more fully and reinforced their extent. We no longer have excuses for failing to do justice to the political diversity of the (former) Third World.

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Notes I should like to thank Mark Berger and Joe Foweraker for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. 1 See for instance V Randall & R Theobald, Political Change and Underdevelopment, Basingstoke:

Macmillan, 1998; MT Berger, ‘The end of the “Third World”?’, Third World Quarterly, 15 (2), 1994, pp 257–275; and B Smith, Understanding Third World Politics, London: Macmillan, 1996.

2 Details provided at http.//www.namkl.org.my. 3 P Cammack, D Pool & W Tordoff, Third World Politics: A Comparative Introduction, Basingstoke:

Macmillan, 1993. 4 J-P Thérien, ‘Beyond the North–South divide: the two tales of world poverty,’ Third World Quarterly,

20 (4), 1999, pp 723–742. 5 C Thomas, ‘Globalization and the South’ in C Thomas & P Wilkin (eds), Globalization and the South,

London: Macmillan, 1997. 6 Thérien, ‘Beyond the North–South divide’. 7 See The Economist, Special Report—Civil Wars, 24 May 2003, pp 23–25. 8 See reports in the Guardian during August 2002. 9 S Huntington, ‘The clash of civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs, 72 (3), 1993, pp 22–49; and S Huntington,

The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. 10 Randall & Theobald, Political Change and Underdevelopment, p 11. 11 G Hawthorne, ‘“Waiting for a text?” Comparing Third World politics’, in James Manor (ed), Rethinking

Third World Politics, London: Longman, 1991. 12 As described in Randall & Theobald, Political Change and Underdevelopment, ch 2. The classic example

of this revisionist approach is the Rudolphs’ analysis of the interaction of the caste system and modern forms of political participation in India. L Rudolph & S Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1967.

13 For an overview, see A Foster-Carter, ‘The modes of production controversy’, New Left Review, 107, 1978, pp 47–77.

14 For a valuable account of the development of African studies in the UK, see the collection of essays edited by D Rimmer & A Kirk-Greene, The British Intellectual Engagement with Africa in the Twentieth Century, London: Macmillan, 2000, especially the essays by Kirk-Greene. I am grateful to Chris Clapham for bringing this to my attention. For a shorter but useful review of the development of Latin American studies in the UK, see L Bethell, ‘The British contribution to the study of Brazil’, Centre for Brazilian Studies, Working paper no. 37, 2003, at www.brazil.ox.ac.uk/papers.html.

15 On Latin American studies in the USA see MT Berger, Under Northern Eyes: Latin American Studies and US Hegemony in the Americas, 1898–1990, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995.

16 Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, p 42. 17 Ibid, pp 40–48. 18 LE Harrison & SP Huntington (eds), Culture Matters, New York: Basic Books, 2000. 19 MT Berger, ‘The new Asian renaissance and its discontents: national narratives, pan-Asian visions and

the changing post-cold war order’, International Politics, 40 (2), 2003, pp 195–221. 20 MD Barr, Cultural Politics and Asian Values: The Tepid War, London: Routledge, 2002. 21 J-F Bayart, ‘Finishing with the idea of the Third World: the concept of the political trajectory’, in Manor,

Rethinking Third World Politics. 22 P Chabal & J-P Daloz, Africa Works, London: James Currey, 1999, p xix. 23 G O’Donnell, ‘Illusions about consolidation’, Journal of Democracy, 7 (2), 1996, pp 151–159. 24 DH Perkins, ‘Law, family ties and the East Asian way of business’, in Harrison & Huntington, Culture

Matters. 25 J Haynes, Religion in Third World Politics, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1993. 26 N Keddie, ‘The new religious politics: where, when and why do fundamentalisms appear?’, Comparative

Studies in Society and History, October 1998, pp 696–723. 27 M Ottaway, ‘Ethnic politics in Africa: change and continuity’, in R Joseph (ed), State, Conflict and

Democracy in Africa, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999, p 300. 28 D Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985. 29 ‘Emerging areas’ has been part of the sub-title of this journal—Third World Quarterly: Journal of

Emerging Areas—since it was first launched in 1978.

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