Hi. Welcome back. In this presentation, we'll talk about another creation of the 1950s: The Third World. A focal point is the Suez Crisis of 1956. Just give you a little background. In 1956 remember, there is a US-led, anti-communist confederation. [SOUND] Members of the confederation include the British Empire, French Empire. So then here's the dilemma: How does the United States reconcile its anti-communist goals with the imperial goals of these empires? Because the United States is worried that these empires' imperial interests are creating colonial rebellions that are playing into the hands of the communists. So the United States kind of wants to be on the side of aspiring nationalists for the sake of its anti-communist confederation that puts it in conflict with the empires. On the other hand, if they undermine the empires too much, they've undermined the strength of their allies. So, you see the tension. The tension came to a head in the Suez Crisis of 1956, while these empires were still strong. The French Empire had just suffered a bitter defeat, in 1954, losing Indochina. But the French government was locked in an intense struggle to retain Algeria, its North African department of France. The setting for the crisis is that there's an independent government in Egypt, led by a former Egyptian military officer, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nasser is determined to take control of the Suez Canal and its revenues as a way of shoring up the finances of his state. He's obliged the British to withdraw their forces from Egypt, forces that had been there since the occupation of Egypt in 1882, a crisis that had also arisen over a dispute over the Suez Canal. Here's the scene. Newly created state of Israel here, separated from Egypt by an armistice line. A lot of tension between the Egyptians and the Israelis. Now the Egyptians have taken on the British. The French don't like Nasser's Egypt either because they think Nasser is supporting the Algerian rebels. The British, on the other hand, see Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal as a threat to cut one of their historic imperial lifelines. By the way, here is a British cartoonist giving you the English perspective on what Nasser has done. This is D.A. Low's caricature. That's Nasser there, standing athwart the canal [LAUGH], The Colossus of Suez, waving the flag of Arab nationalism, obstructing the great vessel of international communications. Meanwhile, over here on the left, fishing in troubled waters, is the Soviet minister, Shepilov. What happens then is that the British and French secretly collude with the Israelis so that all three countries will launch a joint military occupation that will seize the Suez Canal while the Israelis attack Egypt in Sinai. Here's a map that shows you the air attacks, which were then followed by the landings of troops as the Israelis rushed across Sinai in the last days of October 1956. So what happened? Was it a replay of 1882? Did Egypt get reoccupied one more time? No. In fact, just the opposite conclusion from 1882. The British and the French had to climb down. The British had to undertake a humiliating withdrawal. The British government collapsed. The Israelis were forced to withdraw from Sinai and go back to their territory. Why? Because the American government insisted on this withdrawal. And the American government pressured the British, squeezing its economy through the British reliance on American support for them in the international financial system. This was a bitter pill for the British and French, but they had to swallow it. The significance of the crisis was great. For the West, at one level, it meant the Americans had reaffirmed the centrality of the anti-communist confederation and had tried to reach out to nationalists. On the other hand, it meant that the British and French began looking towards the dismantlement of their empires as something that was inevitable, and the process of decolonization accelerated rapidly. Meanwhile, too, giving up their imperial identities, the British and French governments more and more start looking at an alternative European identity, and maybe a European identity that pushes the United States at arm's length. There's certainly a lot of residual hostility toward the United States coming out of this crisis, among both British and French conservatives. For the Soviet Union, the Suez Crisis opened what was already for them an opportunity to be more active in taking sides in the Middle East, finding states who wanted Soviet arms supplies, developing new allies. For a lot of the less developed countries, Nasser seemed to them a great hero who'd stood up to the West, who'd vindicated the cause of nationalism. He, as much as anyone, symbolized the new power of the Third World. Alright. The Third World, then, is that world of countries in between the members of the anti-communist confederation led by the United States and the members of the communist bloc led by the Soviet Union or by China. In between, the large, uncommitted middle, so to speak, well, let's call that the Third World. And indeed, some of the leaders of these countries very much thought of themselves as a Third World, as a non-aligned movement. In their minds, as well as the eyes of the US leaders, the Soviet leaders, the Third World seemed so important. Whichever way the Third World swung, that would determine the future balance of world power between the rival blocs. So from the point of view of the superpowers, the Third World is very important as objects. Objects either for new kinds of dependent relationships, patron-client relationships, not formal colonies but junior partners on one side or the other. Or the Third World were important objects to them as experimental laboratories for their ideas about development. American ideas about development, communist ideas about development, a lot of which in the 1950's evoked notions of the construction of enormous new infrastructure projects, dams to generate electricity, things like that. Also, looking at Third World countries again as objects, as geo-political locations, strategic pivots controlling choke points to this or that place. Another way in which people in the West, in the developed countries, thought of the Third World as objects is they thought of these peoples as more authentic somehow, symbols of striving against hierarchical oppression. Symbols of liberation. You remember, in one of the very first presentations we had, in the very first week, I showed you the romanticized portrait of a young man Captain Cook had brought back from the South Seas. Omai. And the idealized image of this natural person, perhaps in a way the 1960s equivalent of the Reynolds portrait is this iconic image of Che Guevara as the symbol of authenticity and liberation hanging in thousands of college dorm rooms. What is important to underscore is that the Third World seemed important. What was happening in these countries was something people cared about. They followed it. You can see it on the covers of Time magazine as we'll see. You can see it on the front pages of newspapers. But now let's switch the perspective. Let's look at the Third World from their point of view. Third World as subjects. If you were leading one of these countries, Egypt, Indonesia, think about the issues you'd be facing. First of all, you'd want to distinguish yourself as neither subservient to the East bloc or the West bloc. And indeed, 1955, President Sukarno in Indonesia hosts a great conference of a new non-aligned movement to give that sense of identity, of separateness. Solidarity of the people who aren't members of the bloc. Here are some of the leaders gathered in 1955 for that Bandung Conference. You see Colonel Nasser of Egypt there in the middle, leaders from some of the other Middle Eastern countries in the front row. Here's a map that shows you the countries that were represented at that conference. It's interesting to note that China rose its hand and said that it, too, was part of the non-aligned movement in 1955. Probably no one was a more important symbol for the Third World and for non-alignment than Jawaharlal Nehru, the long-time prime minister of India, there talking to Mahatma Gandhi, who was assassinated by a radical Hindu nationalist in 1948. Here's the way that Nehru was being presented to the American people by Time magazine in this issue of 1949, shortly after Indian independence. You can see it's a basically sympathetic image. Prime Minister Nehru, the caption says, a hard climb. A harder one ahead. We see the teeming masses ascending a slow staircase toward the light. These countries, too, you're inheriting a legacy that's an imperial legacy. They're shaped by imperial rule. The whole contours of their country, a place called India, a place called Indonesia, are shaped by the legacy of imperial rule. The forms of government you've inherited, a lot of the property laws, the court systems, the armies that you've inherited, all shaped by imperial rule. Even the political vocabulary you're adopting, including, by the way, the political vocabulary of opposition to imperialism. Because all these people are shaped by the anti-imperialist struggle, the rhetoric of that, the ideology of that. So they're simultaneously both products of imperial rule and products of the hatred of imperial rule. So from the point of view of a leader of one of those countries, now what do you do? Again, think about their problems. Remember this old paradigm we've been talking about all semester long. Situation, problem, solution. Think about some of the problems that these leaders face as they're making choices. First, notice just the scale of all these new countries coming into existence. Here's a map showing you the breadth of the different colonies and mandates around the world in 1939. The details are not so important. You can just see all the colors though. Now, here's a map of decolonization after 1945, including the years in which these new countries gained their independence. No need to go through this in detail. You can just look at this map for a minute or so and simply see the scale of choices that are being made by so many new leaders. Or you can look at this map from southeast Asia on the end of Western rule there, again with the dates. Or this map, showing decolonization in the Caribbean. So again, what problems did they face? First, and this is a subtle point, easily overlooked. Just basic fragility. The structures of some of these new states are just really small. There might be one radio station, one newspaper, and a small capital. Loyal army units you can count on, might be one, two, three battalions. Several hundred soldiers in the capital might make the difference for who is in power on a given day. Because of all that fragility, you're going to feel very conscious of what would it take for someone to overthrow me and how easily foreigners might meddle and topple me if they buy the right colonel, if they ally themselves with a particular set of big businessmen. So this consciousness of fragility is always in the minds of these leaders and also some of the foreign powers circling them, both worried about the fragility and tempted by it. Another great concern for all these leaders is going to be independence. They want to feel more independent. It's very easy from the point of view of the developed countries to look out and say, well, this country's my friend so it was part of a Soviet empire or American empire. Believe me, if you begin to take the point of view of the leaders of these countries, they had not thrown off empire to become a part of a new empire. They're struggling to maintain their independence as best they can, and they're trying to manipulate the foreigners to serve their interests. They're also of course almost all concerned about modernization, catching up, lifting their people out of poverty. This, of course, maybe gives some of them the benefit of the doubt. You can cynically write off some of these new leaders as corrupt people out for their personal enrichment, but I think a common theme among many of these countries is a desire for modernization, however they define that term. This issue of modernization is so strong. Let's dive more deeply just into that concept. If there are 80, 90 less developed countries, all trying to figure out how do we modernize, it's such a blank term. What does it mean? What choices do they have to make? Let's study that for a second. If you were the leader, or among the leaders of a new country, you're going to have to make choices about the following subjects. Finance, that is, where do I get my money? If from the private sector, who controls my big banks? To whom do the big banks give money? Do I let the banks decide that, or will my government take control of the big banks, either formally or informally, in order, to direct who gets access to credit in my country? You also have to think about what's the relationship of my government to key industries. Let's say my country, my key industries are plantations that grow certain commodities, like rubber, valued by the outside world or mines, for, say, tin or copper. Who controls those industries? Private firms, foreigners, the government? Land. Who gets the land? Are you satisfied with the current distribution of the land, or do you think you need to re-distribute the land to give poor people more land holdings? What's your approach to trade? Do you like the kind of trading system that the imperial power left you with? Do you want a freer trading system, or do you want to raise barriers to trade? Wages. Do you just let the market set the wages, or do you try to control what the wages will be? Ditto for prices. Leave them alone, try to control them. Or try to control some of them? In other words, do you let the market set the price for bread? Do you let the market set the price for gasoline? Because that'll cause a lot of problems for poor people. If you subsidize those prices, where do you get the money to do that? How do you then manage all the economics that go with that? Now I know it might seem odd to put justice down as an aspect of modernization, but, in purely economic terms, the system for administering the justice is the system that guarantees property rights to people who have property. So people who have property are going to look very hard at the justice system to decide whether they have rights they can protect. So as a leader of the new government, you have to decide how the court system is going to be run. Is it going to be truly independent? What kind of property rights will those courts protect? Now if you just take a look at this list, you can see, if you make choices under each of these headings, you sure are going to define the character of your state, the character of your economy and all kinds of political relationships and the distribution of resources, who gets what, inside your new nation. Now, there are different theories as to how to answer all those questions. For example, there would be a communist theory of how to answer it. The great example of the communist theories of modernization might be China. And of course, that theory would be, the government controls it all, all those things on that list, and then the government makes decisions as to how to help the people. Or you could look at some ideas from democratic socialism. What would be some examples for that in the late 1950s? India, might be one. Nehru regarded himself as a democratic socialist. Mexico perhaps, might be another. And you'd look at those questions and the answers would be, the state would control quite a lot of that. The state would be involved in redistributing land. The state would control key industries. But the state would allow some significant scope for private property ownership, some significant scope for market setting, wages, prices of some things. But, a very heavy government role. And then, of course, a very heavy role between the government and the people who ran those vital industries, like say, the relation between the Mexican government and the Mexican oil industry, which it had nationalized during the 1930s. Another model for modernization might be this one, import-substitution industrialization. One country that would be an illustration of that approach, in this period, might be Brazil. Now, what exactly do I mean by that? What would you do if you had I, an ISI approach? Well, for instance, what you do is, you would increase barriers to trade in order to develop your own native industries. That means, low trade. That means increased local industry. [NOISE] It means reducing local imports of foreign goods. You want to reduce your reliance on foreigners because you're not earning a whole lot of foreign exchange to use with which to buy those imports. You know, it's worth going into just a little bit of detail about some of this because this set of ideas was very intriguing to a lot of the less developed countries in the 1950s and 1960s. And that term, ISI, is worth remembering. Or, here's yet another approach you could adopt. Export-oriented industrialization. Your models might be countries like, Japan, recovering from the devastation of World War II, or South Korea, especially the South Korea of the 1960s. If you adopted this export-oriented industrialization approach, EOI, gee, what's implied by that? Well, interestingly, your barriers to imports might actually still be high, just like in the import substitution approach. You would try to keep out foreign imports as much as you could. Remember, the United States of America was a protectionist country during the period of its early industrial development in the late 1800s and early 1900s. So Americans shouldn't get on too high horse about this. But, in the same time, you want high trade, not low trade. How do you do that then? Well, you depress wages. Try to keep workers' wages low. You also depress the real value of your money, your currency. In other words, you keep your exchange rates low. Why? I want to manufacture goods cheaply. So my workers' wages are low, I keep the value of my currency low so that rich countries are going to think: That stuff that they're making is so cheap, I want to buy it. I want to buy it even though that country doesn't import many of my rich country products. I resent that, but I still would just as soon make my consumers happier by buying their cheap goods. And besides, politically, I'm willing to kind of overlook the fact that they're keeping their trade barriers high because they're my allies in an anti-communist confederation. And then you understand some of the bargain involved in American relations with Japan and South Korea. And you say, well gee, that sounds like a great idea. You have high trade. What's the problem with this? Well one problem, of course, is that you are actually keeping the wealth of your own people lower. The buying power of your people is being consciously reduced in order to increase the sales of your goods in foreign markets. Now that implies some potential political problems because, of course, the companies that are making the exports, the people running those companies are making plenty of money. But the workers actually working in the factories, well they're not making so much money. After a while, that can begin to rankle. And that also helps define some of the politics in South Korea and Japan in the 1970s and 1980s. And by the way, it helps define some of the issues of the politics of a place like China today, where the government and the big exporters are very close to each other, but a lot of the workers who are working for the exporters are increasingly unhappy. But let's suppose you don't like any of these approaches to modernization because what you'd really prefer is a more classic liberal stance, along the nineteenth century lines, and you just kind of want the government to stay out of these matters. You want the government to confine itself to a limited set of duties, keeping public order and the like, and only regulate the capitalist system to the minimum extent necessary. That would be a liberal approach. One of the downsides of this, of course, if you were opposing them, would be, well, you're not using the government to keep the foreigners out. You're not using the government to redistribute income to the people who don't have so much. So for them in practice it might seem like a liberal ideology is just the way to preserve the rights of the rich people and preserve social inequality. So you can see some of the arguments and tradeoffs you're making both ways. But finally, suppose you're just a dictator of your state, and you don't want to have to fuss with with all this complicated economic reasoning and worry so much about modernization. You just want to be an old fashioned sort of ruler. Well, then you can just fashion an old- fashioned predatory state, really just like the ones that have been around for thousands of years. And you figure out what in your country makes money, and then you grab control of it and try to squeeze as much of it as you can for yourself. And frankly, there are a number of states in the world during this period and in the world today in which the leaders essentially seize power, try to identify something that makes money, grab control of it, and siphon as much as they can for themselves. As I say, it's a very old-fashioned pattern that doesn't really require much ideology to figure it out. Okay. So now, Madame Third World Leader or Mr. Third World Leader, you've been working through your problems of how fragile you are, how you want to maintain your independence. You're working through all your theories about modernization. You then still have some problems of: How do I define my national community? Who gets what, how do I solve my distribution problems, my politics problems? And what then you get is some really careworn Third World leaders, who are having trouble holding things together. You know, take for example this portrait now of the worried, pensive, troubled Nehru in India in 1959, with, of course, the Chinese dragon beginning to plant its claw across the Himalayan mountains, eyeing his country. At least that's how Time magazine saw it. Of course, Time was always on the lookout for promising leaders in the new Third World. Here Time is spotlighting for American readers in 1953 Africa's Kwame Nkrumah in the Gold Coast. It's part of Western Africa. In the dark continent, they ask, is he dawn's early light? Or their spotlighting at the end of 1954, the new leader of communist North Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh. Or, you've already seen this cover before, in 1955, they're telling people about Premier Nasser in Egypt. Or here, in 1958, during the struggles of Algerians to free themselves from French rule, here's one of those Algerians involved in the revolutionary struggle, Ferhat Abbas. In the background, those are French paratroopers strolling the Casbah in Algiers looking for insurgents. Or take a look at this cover. It's a very interesting one of a new Kenyan leader in East Africa, Tom Mboya, in 1960. Mount Kenya in the background. A form of traditional tribal life here over on the left behind him, a Maasai tribesman. Over here on the right, a member of the white minority in a now independent Kenya. Mboya is looking out towards the future. Interestingly, this is a time at which the United States government was spending money to bring promising young Kenyans to the United States to get advanced degrees. One of those Kenyans who came to the United States in this year, when this magazine was published, was a follower of Mboya named Obama, who would become the father of an American president. Now Mao Zedong in China is also interested in these distribution problems, but his approach is quite radically different. It's much more like what Stalin did in the early 1930s, when Stalin, in effect, engaged in a revolution at home to take land and food away from the rural peasants and redistribute what they had to the state and to the cities. Mao is doing the same thing while also trying to organize an industrialization all through the Chinese countryside where everybody could start converting their farms into places where they would build kilns for the manufacture of homemade iron implements. This Great Leap Forward caused a famine, as Stalin's collectivization had caused a famine in the early 1930s. Mao's Great Leap Forward in fact probably caused the loss of a great many more lives even than were lost in the Soviet Ukraine. Estimates are that the Great Leap Forward probably cost at least 20 to 30 million lives lost because of starvation and malnutrition between 1958 and 1962. So that's one kind of distribution challenge. Here's another kind of distribution challenge, between different ethnic communities in the disparate multi-lingual country called Indonesia. You'll remember this Time cover. This is from December 1946. This showed you the new quote President Sukarno leading these Indonesian independent strivers. See the picture there? He's actually a somewhat menacing insurgent figure, yet in the background all these hands clasping towards a new emblem of national independence. Alright, so that's Sukarno in 1946. Now let's see how Time features Sukarno 12 years later, in 1958. Here's a photograph of Sukarno, now the somewhat weary, embattled president of a country that's being torn apart by civil war. And in India, Nehru also is confronting all sorts of issues of disputed territory and separatist movements. This map gives you some sense of this. As you look at this map, you'll see how that at the time British India gained its independence in 1947, it was immediately partitioned into two different states, India and Pakistan. Pakistan really being defined as its identity as a Muslim majority nation. But, Pakistan had national movements of its own between Punjabis, Baluchis, frontier tribes, and a part of Pakistan here in the East Bengal province. And in 1971, after another Indo-Pakistani conflict, East Bengal seceded from Pakistan and created an independent country of its own, which it called Bangladesh. So these countries are all confronting internal turmoil that sometimes also turns into international conflict. And from Time magazine's perspective, you see how they're portraying Nehru at the end of 1962. India's lost illusions. Nehru, also weary, embattled, with the figure of Mao in the background. One of the things I'm doing by just showing you all these different images, I just want you to get a sense of the variety of these people, the variety of the kinds of problems that they were confronting, though they all have the same sorts of questions they have to answer. One of the inspirational figures in the Third World at the beginning of 1959 was this man, the young Fidel Castro, then portrayed very flatteringly as the leader of a revolutionary movement, the 26th of July movement, that had combined some liberals, communists, everybody united against the aging dictator, Batista, overthrowing him in early �59 and representing a lot of hope for Cuba's future. Both Time magazine and the American government would quickly become disillusioned with Castro as they became convinced, correctly, that Castro was choosing a communist model of development and modernization for his country. So back again to the perspective of the Third World leaders or people who cared about their point of view. If you were again, Madame Third World Leader, Mister Third World Leader, one of your problems as you look at this menu of choices is: How do I use these powerful foreigners? I might need foreign help for one thing or another, for my security, for my economic life, but how do I manipulate them, use them, while achieving my goals? So rather than view them through the lens of puppets of one or another foreign power, see this from their angle because, really, the relationships of the great powers with all of these countries are two-way relationships where each side has their goals for how they work with the others. But these Third World issues fade into the background in the first years of the 1960s as the world becomes riveted by crises directly between the United States and the Soviet Union and a genuine threat of a global thermonuclear war. We'll come to that next. See you then.
