Conservative's Guide to the Third World

...system, where numbers counted and where the prevailing cant was conducive to the exertion of "moral" pressure against the guilt-ridden in the West...

...The specific programs pushed—the famous New International Economic Order, for example, or UNESCO's notorious attempt to set up a communication and information "order"—are ill-conceived and, if realized, would do more harm than ever to the Third World...

...But Cuba, Ethiopia, and at least a dozen others are in no sense non-aligned...

...pseudo-entity, not to be taken seriously either politically or as a tool of analysis...

...They regard the Third World—or, as they usually have it, "the so-called Third World"—as a phony concept, a Owen Harries is co-editor of the National Interest...

...There is nothing about the concept of the Third World that prevents or discourages us from being so aware, and if famine and physical suffering receive great attention in the West, it is because they are tragic and dramatic facts, not because of the effects of any conceptual apparatus...

...But we can neither accommodate its legitimate needs nor effectively counter its hostility and folly until we face the fact of its existence...

...I know these people well, because in most respects I'm one of them...

...in the case of op-posing colonialism and racism, with very considerable effect...

...And again: "Of all the terms available to us—underdeveloped,' `developing' and so on—the idea of a Third World is the one least confined by reality and the most promiscuous in the political temptations to which it gives rise...

...What required statesmanship of a high order—an enormous and very rapid revolution involving the dissolution of all the Western European empires, a tripling of the number of states in the world, and a fundamental transformation in the consciousness and expectations of millions of people—has instead been met by a combination of shallow "realism" (involving evasion, delay, and an unimaginative pragmatism) and sentimentality (the assumption that poverty ensures virtue and wealth guilt...

...As well as all this, corruption set in on an impressive scale, as a class of politicians, diplomats, and intellectuals emerged with a vested interest in exploiting the aspirations of the Third World for personal gain and manipulating its members to consolidate their own power...

...Apart from OPEC, their natural forum of operation was the U.N...

...My conservative friends tend to dismiss my disagreement as an aberration in someone who is otherwise sound, referring indulgently to my Australian background ("Of course, it's a special problem for you down there") and to the understand-ably traumatic consequences of serving a term in UNESCO...

...Most of these countries became in-dependent around 1960...

...To qualify for membership it is sufficient to possess some of those characteristics—it is not necessary to possess them all, and it is not necessary to possess any particular one of them...

...The ideology of the Third World is ramshackle and intellectually substandard, even by the low-going standards of twentieth-century ideologies...

...This is simply wrong...

...The possession of any combination of some of these is sufficient to qualify...

...If it didn't exist, some substitute would have to be invented...

...Denying its existence merely postpones the question of what to do about it, and so far the West has been singularly unsuccessful in addressing this question...

...To recognize this is not to approveof it...

...he transformed his sinister buffoonery into an intensely experienced spectator sport...

...Small wonder that, faced with this blend of pretentiousness, cynicism, and hypocrisy, the West has become increasingly skeptical and impatient towards it and its demands...

...Cuba is aligned to the Soviet Union—but it is also poor, an ex-colony, non-white, not industrialized, and dependent on aid...

...First, there is the argument from diversity and discrepancy...

...One of the last pieces he published—an article in the London Spectator titled "A Thousand Million Invisible Men"--summed up what he had come to feel about the phenomenon of the Third World—which was, in brief, that it did not exist...

...Again: "The Third World is an artificial construction of the West...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1986 15...

...But the concept was never imposed by the West...

...Philosophers speak of "cluster concepts" or, in Wittgenstein's terminology, of "family resemblance concepts...

...This is a view worth serious consideration—not only because it comes from someone as intelligent and in-formed as Naipaul was, but because it is shared by many Western intellectuals of a conservative disposition...

...Well, there's poverty...

...Thus Singapore is prosperous and doesn't qualify under the poverty criterion—but it is an ex-colony, non-white, and nonaligned...

...but at other times we want to speak of those countries as typical actors within a collective movement—and then the term "Third World" is appropriate...

...In terms of strategy and tactics, after the early period of imaginative innovation, rigidity set in rapidly and what had originally been pragmatic and flexible policies became reified and sacrosanct...

...In-deed, if anything the term should be helpful in this respect...

...You can see them in the corridors and committee rooms of any multilateral organization or conference, sleek men in well-cut suits who speak of hunger and exploitation—and the next conference in New York or Paris...

...Obviously, I believe the former: One can speak meaningfully of "the Third World...

...But that is true of many other key political concepts: "nationalism," for example, or "class," "democracy," andthe notion of "the West...

...They pursue their own particular interests, they compete, they quarrel, they fight each other (most wars fought since 1945 have been intramural Third World affairs...

...Double standards are blatant (witness the contrast between the "justice" demanded on the inter-national scene and how nearly all Third World governments behave toward their own subjects...

...Indeed, they would certainly feel deprived without it...

...The arguments that lead Naipaul to his conclusion are pretty typical...

...How then to be effective on the world stage...

...The idea of the Third World," he concluded, "despite its congenial simplicity, is too shadowy to be of any use...

...And so on...

...Nonalignment...

...To some extent the Third World is demonstrating this capacity already...

...Third World countries are not without power and strategic significance in the conventional sense—consider, for ex-ample, the number of straits, canals, bases, ports, airspaces, and airports they control...

...it does exist in a real, politically significant sense...

...Ethiopia was not a colony and is aligned, but it is spectacularly poor, black, completely without industry, and, again, aid-dependent...

...But how the point relates to his general argument is obscure...

...A third complaint Naipaul makes is that by giving all of these countries—there are about 120 of them all together—one label, we rob them of their particularity, their individuality, what he calls "the flesh and blood of the actual...

...Under their influence, the U.N...

...He traveled extensively in and wrote at length about them, with insight, a mordant wit, and considerable ambivalence...

...Membership is defined in terms of a colonial or quasi-colonial past, a non-white population, poverty, the absence of large-scale industrialization, nonalignment, being an aid receiver, and so on...

...These countries did not—do not—act as members of the Third World all the time...

...Disconcertingly but typically, he chooses to use Idi Amin to exemplify these dreams: "Amin's genuine obliviousness to what is sometimes called civilized opinions aroused admiration...

...But, he points out, some of them—Singapore, for example—are not poor at all...

...This, again, is often cited as evidence of the unreality of the Third World...

...exaggerated respect for Third World "thinkers...

...In a few years—from 1960 to 1965—they created (and it was an impressive act of statesmanship by states with virtually no international experience) a number of key institutions for this purpose, among them the Organization of African Unity, the Group of 77, the Non-Aligned Movement, and OPEC...

...He grew up in poverty in ainidad, won a scholarship to Oxford University, became a successful writer, and ended up living in the London suburb of Hampstead, that stronghold of successful middle-class English intellectuals...

...Its moderate members, increasingly skeptical of the zero-sum game strategy in private, were too inhibited by the principle of solidarity to challenge it in public...

...But, again, it misses the point: In certain circumstances (usually ones involving their relationships with the West), on certain important issues (including colonialism, racism of the white variety, the redistribution of the world's wealth, and, latterly, the Israeli Arab conflict), they have acted with impressive unity and to some effect...

...They lacked political clout, military power, economic leverage, and diplomatic experience...

...One does not have to subscribe to the cataclysmic view of the future to believe that, if it persists, the consequences are sure to be very serious...

...Whatever one makes of that example, Naipaul is certainly right in insisting on the importance of an awareness of these "dreams...

...It's true that the term is of Western—and, more specifically, French—origin, having an obvious association with the old French term Tiers Etat, the third estate of pre-French Revolutionary days, those who were neither of the nobility nor the clergy...

...But on the question of the Third World I think they are wrong...

...With that background, it is not surprising that Naipaul was fascinated by what we have come to call the Third World: the countries of Africa, Asia, and South and Central America...

...Well yes, I suppose we do to an extent...

...for its evocation of the "third estate" of Europe serves as a reminder that what the new countries want, perhaps above everything, is respect, status, recognition, and the equivalent of full citizenship to go with their, in most cases newly-won,independence—in very much the same way as the "third estate" of Europe (first the bourgeoisie, then the working classes) wanted these things in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries...

...What it establishes is that tight, formal definition of the concept is difficult, perhaps impossible...

...and to pre-tend otherwise is to misunderstand the world quite-seriously...

...But India, surely considered an archetypical Third World country, has one of the dozen largest industrial sectors in the world...

...Even if one puts aside all considerations of altruism and morality (and one should not), the self-interest of those concerned to maintain an orderly world requires that the Third World be taken seriously...

...One of the things that worries Naipaul—and about which he writes powerfully—is that the "promiscuous idea of a Third World" focuses attention on physical needs and suffering ("Those slow-moving files of refugees in stony landscapes, those motionless babies with flies clustered round their eyes") and away from the dreams and fantasies which illuminate the deeper desires of its members...

...Then there is industrial backwardness...

...Either it makes sense to speak of "the Third World" or it does not...

...E Thus Singapore is prosperous and doesn't qualify under the poverty criterion—but it is an ex-colony, non-white, and nonaligned...

...The idea here is of a concept defined in terms of a number or cluster of characteristics...

...It is not an argument against the term "Third World" in particular, but against all general terms...

...But we can't do without such terms, because often we want to make general statements about large agglomerations acting as more or less single entities, just as at other times we wish to be quite particular...

...To the cluster of characteristics which define the Third World should certainly be added this common aspiration, as expressed in a vague, often wrong-headed and muddled, but strongly held ideology...

...But so do we when we use any general term to describe any collection of particular people or things...

...In the face of such discrepancies, such evidence of diversity, doesn't the whole idea of a Third World just "crumble away," as Naipaul suggests...

...If its sense of failure and frustration grows, it is reasonable to expect that it will do so on a much larger scale...

...Shiva Naipaul, who died suddenly last August at the age of forty, was the child of an Indian family transported by the British to the West Indies at the beginning of the century, to work as indentured labor in the sugar plantations...

...In fact, it is that ideology, more than anything else, that transforms the Third World from a rather messy socioeconomic category into a political fact...

...But this, an example of the relativism and the substitution of motive attribution for argument that they otherwise deplore, will not do...

...But potentially and collectively, the most potent power they possess is that stemming from weakness and desperation, the capacity to create disorder, instability, and, in-deed, chaos, on a scale that threatens world order...

...Conservative skepticism and liberal guilt have both contributed to this failure...

...There are, however, other kinds of definitions...

...Instead of adapting to changing circumstances, the Third World persisted in a policy of frontal assault (by vote) on the West, long after it had become obvious that this policy could not succeed...

...What, he asks, are the supposed characteristics of the Third World...

...Thus, sometimes we want to make specific statements about, say, local conditions or events in Sri Lanka or Zambia...

...In fact, the great majority of the countries called the Third World have all these characteristics in common, and all of them have most of them in common...

...On the contrary, from the beginning it was eagerly and quickly adopted by the elites of the new post-colonial countries as a term of self-identification, carrying with it the suggestion both of distinctiveness and 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1986 of solidarity...

...The answer they came up with was: by making solidarity an overriding principle in their dealings with the rich and powerful, so that they could take full advantage of their one obvious asset—their formidable number...

...has become an increasingly sleazy side-show devoted largely to career pushing, irresponsible posturing, the manipulation of double standards, and attempted moral intimidation...

...The "Third World" is such a concept...

...pop-singer statesmanship of the "We Are the World" variety...

...Well, not really...

...A second worry Naipaul has is that the concept is a Western one imposed on the reality of the countries involved...

...To state these facts, however, is not to deny, but to acknowledge and characterize, the reality of the Third World...

...He] offered release to pent-up emotions and fantasies...