[lbo-talk] The Idea of the Third World (was Re: Iran and Latin America)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 10/1/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Oct 1, 2007, at 7:17 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > It is very possible that the "Third World" never existed during the
> > heyday of the ideology of Third-Worldism, for most of the
> > "Third-World" nations in practice tilted to either the "East" or the
> > "West."  Perhaps the only authentically Third-World nation was the
> > Islamic Republic of Iran: neither East nor West, in the sense of
> > neither of the capitalist bloc nor of the socialist bloc1; and neither
> > Eastern nor Western in its cultural mythology.2
>
> East? West? China is in the same box as India? Argentina in the same
> box as Haiti? And you accuse others of Orientalism?

If the "Third World" never existed during the heyday of the ideology
of Third-Worldism, the countries you name couldn't have been in the
"same box" since the box didn't really exist.

The Non-Aligned Movement, in contrast, was and still is an actually
existing institution, albeit with little power.  India and Haiti are
both NAM members; Argentina isn't; China, as well as Brazil, is a NAM
observer:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Aligned_Movement#Member_Countries>.
(See, even "Third-Worldists" themselves understood differences.) Last
year, the NAM summit was held in Havana, as its current Secretary
General is Fidel Castro, and the summit was unusually active
diplomatically.  Iran made good use of it to emphasize its relations
with Latin America, including Cuba.

But the NAM itself won't be the main medium through which building
blocks for checking US hegemony can be built.
-- 
Yoshie