From its inception, the Third World project faced an enemy in the advanced capitalist states (led, with confidence, by the United States), determined to subdue any independent dynamic in the darker nations.

The main culprit was not corruption, one-party rule or famine it was what we have come to call globalization. It was not a failure, for that implies it was doomed from the start. Today the Third World project is no longer.

“Are we only going to continue to be veranda boys,” he asked, watching from the balcony as the five permanent members controlled the debate? Nigeria’s Foreign Minister Jaja Wachuku chided his fellows for their acceptance of the inequality built into the new international body. They would carry these aspirations to the United Nations, where, forming a Non-Aligned Movement, they engaged in a concerted struggle to gain ascendancy. What would that voice say? It would speak of three core principles: peace (nuclear disarmament), bread (what they dubbed a New International Economic Order, in which human needs would take precedence over profit) and justice (social development and an end to racism). No more the serfs of their colonial masters, they wanted to have a voice and power on the world stage. Politically they wanted more planetary democracy. Galvanized by mass movements and by the failures of capitalist maldevelopment, leaders in the darker nations looked to one another for an alternative agenda. For them, the Third World was not a place it was a project. The central concept for the new nations was the Third World. “There are new conditions, new concepts, new problems, new ideals abroad in the world.” “Irresistible forces have swept the two continents,” said Indonesia’s Sukarno. Twenty-nine new nations and movements had gathered together at Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955 to lay out how they wished to reshape the world. Crucially, they also articulated a vision for a new global dispensation. These new nations did not want only to rid themselves of their colonial masters.

The darker nations by vijay prashad