The Third World was not a place. It was a project. During the seem­ingly interminable battles against colonialism, the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America dreamed of a new world. [...]

Why did the French forget liberté, egalité, fraternité when they went into the tropics? As Césaire noted, Albert Sarraut, the French minister of colonies in the 1920s, had written that France must not turn over the colonies to the nationalists in the name of " an alleged right to possess the land one occupies, and some sort of right to remain in fierce isola­tion, which would leave unutilized resources to lie forever idle in the hands of incompetents. " [...]

[...] In March 1946, the former British premier Winston Churchill had declared that an "Iron Curtain" had descended across Europe, from the Baltic to the Adriatic, and it had divided the former allies into two distinct blocs. Churchill said this during a long speech in the United States, primus in­ter pares of the First World. This First World or the "West" was formed by states, notably the United States and those of Western Europe, that pledged themselves to partly regulated market capitalism and would, in 1949, form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

The Second World rejected market capitalism for socialist planning, and it generally worked in collusion with the largest socialist state, the USSR. "Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia: all these famous cities and the populations around them," Churchill told the students at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, "lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow."

The First and Second Worlds fell out openly when U.S . president Harry S. Truman announced his support for the anticommunist forces in Turkey and Greece (1946), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) helped the conservatives defeat the popular Communists in the Italian and French elections of 1947, the USSR forced the Eastern European states into its orbit, and the animosity attained dramatic proportions during the First World's blockade of Berlin in June 1948. In this melee, an adviser to Truman (Bernard Baruch) used the term " Cold War" to describe the conflict, and a columnist (Walter Lippmann) made the phrase widely known.

[...]

The phrase "East-West conflict" distorts the history of the Cold War because it makes it seem as if the First and Second Worlds confronted each other in a condition of equality. In an insightful article from 1968, the Swedish sociologist Goran Therborn wrote, "The Cold War was a fundamentally unequal conflict, that was presented and experienced on both sides as being equal." The USSR and the United States portrayed each other as equivalent adversaries, although the former had an economic base that was far inferior to the latter. Despite the great advances of the Soviet regime in the development of the various republics, the USSR began its history with a battered feudal economy that was soon ravished
by a civil war and, later, the ferocious assaults of the Nazi war machine. In 1941, both the United States and the U S S R had populations of about 130 million, but whereas the United States lost upward of four hundred thousand troops in the war, the Soviets lost between twenty and thirty million troops and civilians. The Great Patriotic War devastated the USSR's economy, population, and capacity to rebuild itself. Further­more, the imperatives of rapid development tarnished the ideals of Soviet society since its population went into a severe program to build its
productive base at the expense of most internal freedoms. [...]

But the First and Second worlds only accounted for a third of the planet' s people. What of the two-thirds who remained outside the East­ West circles; what of those 2 billion people?

The First World saw them as poor, overly fecund, profligate, and worthless. Images of poverty in the formerly colonized world flooded the magazines and newspapers of the First world-not more so per­haps than in times past, but with a new emphasis. Now, these countries did not have the tutelage of their colonial masters but had to wallow in their inability to handle their resources and disasters. Images of natural calamities, famines, and droughts joined those of hordes of unkempt bodies flooding the First World's living rooms-where pity and revul­sion toward the darker nations festered. Paul Ehrlich's 1968 The Population Bomb received such tremendous acclaim in the First World because its neo-Malthusian ideas had already become commonplace: that the reason for hunger in the world had more to do with overpopulation than with imperialism; that the survivors of colonialism had only themselves to blame for their starvation. The people of the colonies cannot save themselves, so they must be saved. The agencies of the First World could provide them with "family planning" or "birth control" technolo­gies to break the Gordian knot of population growth, and they could offer them charitable aid. When "aid" came from the First World, it would not come without conditions. As the president of the world Bank, Eugene
Black, wrote in 1960, " Economic aid should be the principle means by which the West maintains its political and economic dynamic in the un­derdeveloped world." [...]

[...] Leopold II set up the operations to extract the maximum profit, and over the course of the decades the Free State altered its policies several times to ensure its basic objective. The many different policies were united by a premise: as a 1 923 manual put it, " The laziness of the col­ored races is a kind of genetic burden." Violence was necessary to overcome this natural indolence. Therefore, the Free State's officials brutalized the people of the Congo, killing them mercilessly, and torturing those who could not or would not work. Leopold II's Free State set up the Force Publique, a militia designed to strike terror in the heart of the workforce. If a worker did not work hard, the officer would cut off their hand; one district official received 1,308 hands in one day from his subordinates. [...]

[...] Until the early decades of the twentieth century, the dominant classes in Argentina held no brief for nation building. The oligarchs, the haute portenos, ran the country with an iron fist and held their own wealth in European banks (which meant that they preferred fiscal policies that favored Europe's currencies against Argentina' s economic strength) . This detachment of the elite fueled the growth o f a socialist movement, led by Juan B. Justo and the trade unions, and it angered patriotic sec­tions of the elite [...]

[...] the basis of trade had to be altered . It could not be premised on the idea that some states are naturally good at being harvesters of low-value raw materials and others are naturally proficient at being producers of high-value-added finished products. The theory of comparative advantage, Prebisch claimed, stifles genuine economic development. And further, since modernization theory promotes the view that national income and investment capital must be raised from the export of raw materials, it will only entrap the new nations more deeply. As Prebisch and the development economists saw it, the import of manufactured goods and the export of cheap raw materials will continue to drain capital and fail to enable the conduct of technological improvements toward socioeconomic development. The cycle of dependency would intensify rather than break.

To counter this, Prebisch argued that raw material exporting states should create some mechanism to develop a domestic industry, and absent outright grants, the best approach would be legal-political. The new nations should use tariffs to make imports prohibitive (what be came known as "import-substitution industrialization" or, in another guise, the "infant industry" thesis) . Prices in the core remained high partly because of the political role of trade unions and industrial monop­olies. The periphery needed its own political strategy, and this would have to be in the realm of interstate trade.

[...] Within the United Nations there was often talk of land reform, and there was some discussion of the distorted or even corrupt use of the surplus, but hardly any concern given to it or the conflict among the dif­ferent classes for use of the surplus (and for the surplus value drawn from the workers) . The main problem was to raise capital for the Third World's development, and the Prebisch position also ignored or down­played the fundamental role of financial capital over the world's econ­omy. The structural problems of landlordism, domestic class struggles, and the better use of the economic surplus already produced within a national economy as well as the problem of the surplus value stolen from the workers in the normal course of capitalism, rarely came up for discussion at the United Nations. It had already become sufficient to be critical of the First World alone, which became a shield that protected the national bourgeoisie from criticism for its own lack of imagination and self-sacrifice. In other words, development theory and public policy emphasized economic growth as an end in itself without a built-in con­sideration for equity.

[...] That year, the Iranian parlia­ment, the Majlis, nationalized the country' s oil industry (owned by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, where "Anglo" represented the English interests and "Iranian" simply referred to the place from which they drew the oil). [...]

[...] The multinational perspective questioned the racist claim that the darker nations could only be primordial, that blood and custom reduced the imagination of certain people. They could only be tied to kin and co-believer, not to a republican nationalism whose locus was both anticolonial and populist.

In this realm at least, Third World nationalist movements absorbed the idea of nationalism and digested it in accord with the rhythms and demands of their various histories. Fanon, who had learned about cul­tural regeneration in Algeria, developed the second strand of Césaire' s cultural program in terms of the idea of nationalism. Like Césaire, Fanon argued that the period of nationalist struggle enabled a people to rethink the feudal forms legitimized by colonialism. These liberation struggles, as opposed to those for conquest, did not feel the need to jus­tify themselves based on crude biological concepts. The colonial power tries to mobilize every racist idea to break down the morale of national­ism, but with each such attempt the imputed superiority of the colonizer wanes. The people, once held down, now determined the pace of change." Those who were once immobile, the congenital cowards, those lazy beings who have always been made inferior, brace themselves and emerge bristling." The colonial ruler does not understand what has transpired." The end of racism begins with this sudden failure to understand." Finally, the end of colonialism means that the "rigid, spasmic culture of the occupier is liberated," and it opens itself up to the culture of the colonized. "The two cultures can confront one another, enrich one another." Rather than turn inward, away from Europe or any oth­ers, Fanon contends, nationalist culture will explore other cultures as re­sources. In the struggle lies liberation, or at least the process of national struggle gives energy to the national culture, which is now able to come alive and grow. Fanon overplays the lack of racism or the mobilization of biological notions in national liberation movements. Na­tional pride or patriotism often slid into the ugly language of racism or exclusion. But if what Fanon found is not a fundamental rule, it is at least a tendency.