[R-G] The Idea of the Third World

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

<http://montages.blogspot.com/2007/10/idea-of-third-world.html>
Monday, October 01, 2007
The Idea of the Third World

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

Paradoxical as it may sound, for the first time in history, there may
now exist conditions for the birth of the objective correlative for
the idea of a "Third World," i.e. independence from hegemony of great
powers.

1 Houman A. Sadri, "Trends in the Foreign Policy of Revolutionary
Iran," Journal of Third World Studies 15.1 (Spring 1998); and Houman
A. Sadri, "An Islamic Perspective on Non-Alignment: Iranian Foreign
Policy in Theory and Practice," Journal of Third World Studies 16.2
(Fall 1999).
2 See, for instance, Hamid Dabashi, Iran: A People Interrupted (New
York: New Press, 2006) for description of the coexistence of Shi'ism
and cosmopolitanism in Iran, rooted in part in reality, in part in
Dabashi's dream.

--
Yoshie