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The Imaginary Third World and the Real United States
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12924 |
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BOOK WORLD
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5 / 1987 |
1,852 Words |
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Roger Kaplan
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It should surprise no one that Alain de Benoist should take potshots at the relationship between the United States and the so-called Third World. It is a fashionable political game, and has been for quite some time on both sides of the Atlantic on both the Right and Left. Benoist is considered an extreme rightwinger in France, but as he acknowledges, he is quite happy to borrow ideas from the Left. The reason it is widely fashionable to attack the United States as an imperialist power is that anti-American critics will seize any chance to vent their spleen, even on subjects - the "Third World" being a case in point - which exist only in the imagination.
Until the 1960s, the European Right attacked the United States for being anticolonialist. True enough. The United States was "the first new nation," as we used to say before "Third World" was invented by feverish ideologues. The United States had fought the first war of independence in modern times. It was considered a model and an inspiration for all nationalist movements in the colonial world that were not controlled by communists. And one could argue without too much difficulty that the United States is the only "new nation" that has been truly successful in developing durable political institutions and a viable economic base.
Haiti, for instance, won a colonial war (against France) a few years after the United States and descended into an inferno from which it may emerge now that the cruel Duvalier family is gone. The nations of Spanish America fought their way out of colonialism beginning in the 1820s, but it is noteworthy that Simon Bolivar, a leader of several of Hispanoamerica's independence movements and himself a great admirer of the American revolution, despaired at the chaos and tyranny that almost everywhere followed liberation from Spain. (Portuguese America - Brazil - was by contrast relatively successful, probably because the independence movement there was led by the Portuguese monarchy, ousted from home.) The United States was forthrightly on the side of the "new nations" of the Western Hemisphere. But despite this natural sympathy, Americans knew that success as a new nation was far from easy.
After the Great War, however, we forgot our caution. We had gone to war to make the world safe for democracy, and the world was going to get democracy, like it or not. The Europeans, very much attached to their empires, hated us for this. As Benoist points out, this was as true for many people on the Left as it was for those on the Right. Much of the democratic Left, following Marx, viewed imperialism as a positive enterprise, a way to bring science and industry to backward countries. Indeed, had the British India Company (later Service) ever needed public relations copy, it could not have done better than to use the remarkable pages Marx wrote in the 1850s about how its activities were bringing a miserable continent out of the most wretched darkness.
However, a significant part of the Left competed with Woodrow Wilson for his "self-determination" policy. The communists, in particular, made a big deal of it. Of course, to them, "self-determination" meant determination by the national sections of the Communist International at the expense of all other nationalist movements. Nevertheless, for a long time they were able to pose as "patriots," a term they repeatedly appropriated or rather misappropriated for themselves, whether in Asia, South America, or Europe itself when they were allied with authentic nationalists against Nazi domination. The
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