Third World nations: Global demands, local political realities

Bill Geddes

27 November 2009    XPS Version: PDF Version: MOBI Version:

Chief among the forms of organisation thought to be most important in moving into the modern world, have been the political forms of the industrialised West. This article examines the processes and consequences of applying Western political forms to the political realities of Third World communities.

Amongst the important influences on governments and people in Third World countries have been the reification of 'the state' and 'the people' in most discussion of Third World nations and peoples and the formulation of governmental policies based on that reification.

This reorganisation has usually been undertaken as an exercise in 'modernising' non-Western communities. The modernisation thesis,2 espoused in various forms and with various emphases by most development specialists over the past fifty years, has been an optimistic one. It has assumed that, for those nations which genuinely and consistently implement the necessary social, political and economic changes, transformation into modem industrialised countries is inevitable. The state has been assumed to be a self-existent entity, separate from the communities which it controls, and able to impose necessary changes, however radical, on its populace. Important responsibilities placed on new nation-states by these specialists have included establishing those institutions necessary to economic development, and providing the social and political climate necessary to stimulate self-interested, competitive material accumulation, leading, it is assumed, to an inevitable 'take-off into self-sustained economic growth' (cf Rostow 1961).

Because most political and economic theorists and practitioners believe that 'traditional' societies are being transformed into modern societies, with traditional features destined for oblivion, Third World communities have been regarded as transient. Problems encountered by 'traditionally orientated' individuals and communities are assumed to be, in large measure, consequences of this shift to modernity. So, rather than focusing on the social problems of such communities, one needs to step up the pace of modernisation. Third World governments, it has been believed 3 should, therefore, in the face of the breakdown of law and order and social cohesion in traditional communities, more rigorously implement those measures which will transform them into industrialised communities, with all the advantages of such a transformation. The dissolution of the old is a necessary precursor and concomitant of modernisation and the state should keep its eyes firmly fixed on that goal, not deviating to attend to problems which are inevitable, but transient consequences of moving toward it. As Sangmpam says:

... modernisation theory assumes an imaginary society because the real society in the Third World is perceived as 'transient' ... Various solutions have been proposed to combat underdevelopment. Central to these solutions is the role assigned to the state as the 'engine of development'. Until recently, it was thought that an authoritarian state could better perform 'developmentalist' tasks. In recent years, the state has been invested with the capacity to move toward democracy, which presumably will lead to socioeconomic development. The belief in the state is reinforced by the call to 'bring-the-state-back-in', according to which the state and its policies reflect almost autonomous institutions and the actions of those occupying these institutions.
(Sangmpam 1994, p. 1)

This assumes a 'government' separate from the people it governs, with political leaders somehow separate from and able to impose their policies on the populace. All this is based, of course, not only on a reification of 'government' and the separation of a 'political environment' from other 'environments' such as the 'economic' and the 'social' (see History of the Emergence of Capitalism), but also the depersonalisation of government and a clear separation between its political and administrative arms, that is institutional, routinised Western-style government. As Max Weber (1968) claimed of Western government, relationships are transformed into objective, instrumental, depersonalised forms. Politicians are not directly responsible to and identified with the people they represent and not directly in control of the impersonalised institutional bureaucracies through which government policies are carried out.

In the Third World, these presumptions are difficult to sustain. Political activity is not separate from other forms of activity, and those with political power exercise it personally. That is, government, both in formulating policy and in the delivery of services is personalised. And, for people who live in communities where it is both natural and proper for leaders to be personally connected with their followers, this personalisation is unexceptional. Government is not separate from the people, and politicians access the administrative departments of government through networks of patron-client relationships which link not only the administrative bureaucracy and politicians, but also politicians and their constituents.

Inevitably, when such personalised systems of government and leadership are judged aginst the standards assumed in places where depersonalised government is the norm, they are found to be 'riddled with corruption'. In order to conduct business on a 'level playing field', Western governments and corporations consider it essential to police corrupt practices. At the instigation of Western nations and agencies the United Nations Convention Against Corruption has been negotiated, coming into force in 2005. As the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime explains,

Corruption undermines democratic institutions, slows economic development and contributes to governmental instability. Corruption attacks the foundation of democratic institutions by distorting electoral processes, perverting the rule of law and creating bureaucratic quagmires whose only reason for existing is the soliciting of bribes. Economic development is stunted because foreign direct investment is discouraged and small businesses within the country often find it impossible to overcome the "start-up costs" required because of corruption.
(UNODC 2009 - accessed 26 Nov. 2009)

Unsurprisingly, corruption appears to be endemic in non-Western nations, but remarkably low in Western nations 4. In order to appreciate the experiences of Third World nations in the post-Second World War period, we need to remember that depersonalised government of the Western kind is unusual and requires understandings of the world which are distinctively Western.5 Where Western understandings don't exist, the forms of government which they require are also unlikely to exist; and where people are required to behave as though Western understandings do exist, there will be many inconsistencies in governmental organisation and practice.

In the last twenty years there have been a number of important changes in international and regional politics around the world. Most obviously, the ideologically fuelled 'Cold War' has ended, with communism and socialism in disarray and capitalism firmly established in the international arena. In the world of the 1990s there was a marked increase in conflicts which were pronounced to be 'ethnically' inspired, in contrast to those of earlier post-Second World War years, which were usually considered to be driven by commitment to First and Second World ideologies. This 'ethnic' focus (which largely took Western countries out of the equation) has, of course, since 2001, been displaced by a diffuse concern with 'terror', leading to the United States' promoted 'war on terror' around the world. Non-Western governments, confronted with ethnic challenges inside their territories, could once again trigger military aid from Western countries by labelling those with whom they were having difficulty 'separatist terrrorist organisations' and accusing them of links with 'international terrorism'. They have been quick to take advantage of Western paranoia, receiving weaponry and military training from Western countries which have largely seen them as the 'front line' in the 'war on terror' 6.

There has also been a technological revolution in worldwide telecommunications networks, with transactions of all sorts now flowing through those networks which governments are decreasingly able to effectively monitor and/ or control. This has been accompanied by a victory for neo-liberal economic reformers 7 as advisers to governments and international organisations. These advisers have managed to convince governments everywhere of the need for the privatisation of government assets and activities and deregulation of financial markets and currencies, progressively moving control of national fiscal and financial matters from national governments into the international marketplace. As Rosario Espinal claimed of Latin America during the 1980s, there was a dramatic shift away from developmentalism 8 and towards neoliberal economic and political policies:

... pro-market statements came from different quarters: agencies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), foreign governments, a growing number of Latin American economists and intellectuals and some segments of the business class ... In addition to pressure from international agencies to privatise and liberalise the Latin American economies, think tanks and research groups flourished throughout the region in an effort to publicise neoliberal views.
(Espinal 1992, p. 32)

This coincided with a change in the dominant way of 'making money' in the world - through currency, bond and stock trading and financial manipulations rather than through long-term investment in primary and secondary production. This has resulted in primary production, the most important means of income generation for new nations, becoming less and less attractive to investors, since returns on primary production are usually lower and slower - and often far more uncertain-than those resulting from financial manipulations. So, Third World nations are finding it increasingly difficult to attract and retain investment income, making their economies increasingly volatile.

The volatility of international capital investment, focused on short-term gains, means that in their efforts to retain investment capital governments must offer a range of financial inducements, competing with each other to minimise capital flight. Thus, over time, the cost of investment capital increases for those countries least able to afford such costs. Far from there being true financial deregulation, governments find themselves having constantly to interfere, to prop up their currencies and induce capital to stay. As Gerald Mier presciently described of the financial crises which assailed both Latin American and East and South-East Asian countries in the late 1990s (and which, of course, have threatened the rest of the world during the last years of the first decade of the 21st century):

The Mexican crisis was caused by the volatility of short term capital flows, produced by the unfulfilled market expectations of investors. Today capital flows are dominated by international markets, to the point that domestic autonomy and sovereignty is subordinated to the markets ... The Mexican crisis or something similar will happen again because it is impossible to keep exchange rates fixed.
(in MorIes 1996)

Governments, as a result of these influences, are now faced both by regional and ethnic challenges from within and by new international challenges to their authority, independence and economic viability. There is a strong demand for internationalisation of economies, allowing the now dominant forces of capitalism increasing entry into, and influence over internal economic activities. This, if and as it is successful, reduces the ability of governments to control economic activity and therefore to plan and implement economic, service, and welfare programs. On the one hand, governments are increasingly finding themselves at the mercy of international financial and fiscal forces, and on the other, the integrity of the nation-state is being challenged from within. During the first half of 1996, an unremarkable year for ethnic conflicts, there were ethnically or religiously inspired revolts in more than sixty countries around the world. In 2009, though the focus of revolt is claimed to have changed, the frequency of internal challenges to central government authority has increased with more and more non-Western countries teetering on the brink of being declared 'fragile' or 'failed' states 9.

Many of the problems of Third World countries seem to centre on attempts to recreate, in alien environments, Western-style 'nations' and Western-style 'nationalism' amongst their peoples. In attempting to emulate Western nations, they have introduced expectations and understandings which appear to fit very poorly into the cultural understandings and expectations indigenous to their own peoples. To understand the presumptions and expectations of those responsible for establishing new nations in the post-War period, we need to understand why they assumed the viability of such nation-states, and why they presumed that strong national sentiments amongst the people incorporated in such states would automatically follow the establishment of new nations. We also need to understand the nature of the political expectations and presumptions of the populations which have, in large measure, shaped the post-War experience of Third World nations.

A growing chorus of Third World writers has insisted on the inappropriateness of such presumptions for the government of postcolonial countries. Julius Ihonvbere is one of the clearest of such voices, claiming that:

... the masses in Africa, relate to the state as an exploitative, coercive and alien structure [whose] custodians lack credibility and legitimacy and are thus incapable of mobilising or leading the people.
(Ihonvbere 1994, p. 43)

More recently, Kamilu Fage has claimed of Nigeria (See Geddes 1997 for a historical account of the problems of post-colonial Nigeria),

... Nigerian experience leaves much to be desired. After several attempts at democratization (involving constitutional reforms, elections etc), the country is yet to evolve a viable, virile and stable democracy that will elicit popular support and or even have direct bearing on the lives of the generality of the ordinary people... the subtle re-emergence of the ugly signs of the past (violence, bickering and fracas in the state and national assemblies, feuds between the executive and legislative arms of the government, electoral malpractices, corruption, oppression etc) raise the fear that Nigerian democracy is till on shaky grounds.
(Fage 2007)

To what extent are such assertions true of Third World nation-states and governments?

Over the past three hundred years, the world has experienced widespread, drastic political reorganisation. Ethnic communities which had been self-governing, became incorporated into larger self-governing territories. These new political entities, nation-states, claimed legitimacy as representative of the people they governed. People in the incorporated communities were presumed to be not only able, but willing to subordinate ethnic and regional interests and requirements to the interests and requirements of the larger political whole within which they were placed. The nation-state was presumed to be comprised of citizens who, first and foremost, identified with the nation rather than with regions within the nation: they saw the nation's achievements as their own; the nation's problems as personal problems; and they so committed themselves to the nation that when it became threatened, if necessary, they were prepared to die for it.

This nation-state reorganisation started in Western Europe in the late eighteenth century and spread outwards over the next two hundred years to engulf the rest of the world. To understand the political problems faced by Third World nations in the second-half of the twentieth century, we need to understand the ways in which their reorganisation into nation states over the past sixty years has differed from that of Western European nation-states during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

An important feature of Western European nationhood has been the 'nationalism' of its people, their apparent identification with the nation-state and its political and bureaucratic organisations, and acceptance of the state's directive legitimacy. Because most Third World national governments have great difficulty in gaining and maintaining acceptance from their populations, we need to understand how European nation-states attained and maintain legitimacy.

During the latter half of the eighteenth century and during the nineteenth century, the populations of Western Europe became reorganised into 'nations',10 based on various forms of representative government, and expanding to include ethnic communities which, in previous centuries, had been considered politically separate from one another. As Elie Kedourie says, 'nationalism is a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century' (1993, p. 1). By the nineteenth century, as Hobsbawm (1990) shows, Western Europeans had become convinced that the aggregation of small ethnic groupings into large nation-states was an evolutionary inevitability. As List (1885) explained:

A large population, and an extensive territory endowed with  manifold national resources, are essential requirements of the  normal nationality; they are the fundamental conditions of mental cultivation as well as of material development and political power. A nation restricted in the number of its population and in  territory, especially if it has a separate language, can only possess a crippled literature, crippled institutions for promoting  art and science. A small State can never bring to complete  perfection within its territory the various branches of production. In it all protection becomes mere private monopoly. Only through  alliances with more powerful nations, by partly sacrificing the  advantages of nationality, and by excessive energy, can it maintain  with difficulty its independence.

(Chapter 15)

As Hobsbawm says, for Western Europeans, 'nations were therefore, as it were, in tune with historical evolution only insofar as they extended the scale of human society, other things being equal' (1990, p. 33). To quote J.S. Mill:

Nobody can suppose that it is not more beneficial for a Breton or a Basque of French Navarre to be ... a member of the French nationality, admitted on equal terms to all the privileges of French citizenship ... than to sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage relic of past times, revolving in his own little mental orbit, without participation or interest in the general movement of the world. The same remark applies to the Welshman or the Scottish highlander as members of the British nation.

(cited in Hobsbawm 1990, p. 34)

Hobsbawm argues that the minorities incorporated into the expanding nation-states of Western Europe accepted their incorporation as both positive and inevitable:

... small nationalities or even nation-states which accepted their integration into the larger nation as something positive-or, if one prefers, which accepted the laws of progress-did not recognise any irreconcilable differences between micro-culture and macro-culture either, or were even reconciled to the loss of what could not be adapted to the modern age.

(1990, p. 35)

Western Europeans, convinced that the social, economic, and political world was evolving towards ever increasing size and complexity,11 accepted that small ethnic communities must, inevitably, be absorbed into larger political structures, into nation-states. Those states, it was believed, should be of sufficient territory, population and resources to enable involvement in the emerging international forms of trade and diplomacy developing amongst Western European nation-states and between them and the United States of America. And, as ethnic and regional communities became incorporated, they inherited the rights of 'citizens' within the nation-state, so that the government could legitimately claim to represent them, as it did all other people who lived within its territory.

While the nation-state emerged during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Western Europe, 'nationalism' (the identification of oneself with others of the same 'nation', or 'community') has a far longer history. In the 'Middle Ages' the term 'nation' referred to groups of people, or coalitions of organisations which came from the same territorial region or district of Europe (Hobsbawm 1990, p. 16). 'Nations' of scholars existed at university centres, each nation comprised of people from a particular geographical/ecclesiastical area who supported one another, provided hospitality and security to visitors and new arrivals, and whose members maintained their links after graduating and moving to other places. Similarly, nations of merchants and traders existed, which shared identity with scholars and others identified as belonging to the same region as themselves.

The medieval use of the term 'nation', following the western European Orthodox Church's lead, referred to enclaves of people from the same region, to 'foreigners' and 'sojourners' in other regions of Europe. More emphasis was given to 'region of origin' than to 'ethnic identity' so that nations could consist of people who spoke different dialects or languages (the lingua franca was, of course, Latin), were of different ethnic ancestry, and possibly of very different skin shadings. Over time, the scope of such 'nations' became extended, to include, in loose usage, people from fairly extensive geographical/ecclesiastical regions, having a range of interests, though the principle of mutual support and acceptance remained important in claiming membership of a nation. Not until the nineteenth century did the term come to include both the people of a particular territory, and the political and bureaucratic state organisation of that territory. When it did, this usually resulted from concerted political and/ or revolutionary action involving those who already saw themselves as belonging to the same nation.12

So, in most Western European territories, the sense of national identity, of mutual support and co-operation, long preceded the recognition of the 'nation-state' as a political and bureaucratic organisation which represented the interests of people who belonged to the nation. It was not that a government was established which claimed authority within a territory, and that people who did not already identify themselves as belonging to a common nation were required to swear allegiance to it. Rather, nationalism preceded the nation-state, which received its legitimation from the already interconnected people of the territory. Representative government came from national revolution and the establishment of governments which represented the interests of those involved in the revolution.13

As such, the nations of Western Europe could include a range of ethnic and regional communities which saw their interests as coinciding with, or complementing those of the groups with which they identified in national government. National government could act in the interests of the whole territory, assuming support from the 'responsible' people in its various regions (see History of the Emergence of Capitalism). And those people who saw the government as representing their interests, saw, in a truly Hobbesian sense, their interests as coinciding with the interests of the government. They could feel a sense of personal fulfilment in its achievements, and a sense of personal difficulty in its difficulties.

Western European nation-states during the nineteenth century expanded into the rest of the world. Wherever they went they extended their political authority through the establishment of protectorates and colonies. As they did in Europe, so they did in the rest of the world. They focused on territory, and assumed the integration of the people within the boundaries of the territories they controlled. Most colonial authorities established administrative machinery throughout their territories and assumed its acceptance by the people who inhabited the governed regions 14. The colonial administrations became the governments of colonial territories. In doing so, they, in the eyes of most colonial authorities, were involved in the historical evolution of those territories, through linking them into world-wide political and economic networks. It was believed that, given the evolutionary process of constantly increasing size and complexity, colonised populations could only benefit from the establishment of colonial administration and reorganisation of their communities.

Following the Second World War, Western imperial powers, with varying degrees of reluctance, moved out of their colonies. As they did so, they created 'new nations', with responsibility for government usually inherited by Western-educated elites. Their training, based on Western European understandings of the world, led them to believe that Western forms of political and administrative organisation were essential to the ongoing well-being of their people. Because most European commentators simply assumed that where there was a nation-state one would soon find an emerging sense of nationalism, the viability of the nation-state was assumed and political failure could only result from political and economic ineptitude and/ or from a failure to provide properly representative government. The subsequent histories of postcolonial states, in large part, reflect attempts to adapt Western nation-state organisation to their territorial and ethnic realities.

International forces

As new Third World nations emerged from the late 1940s onwards, confronted by enormous political and economic problems, the industrialised world became increasingly aware of the need to 'develop' 'undeveloped', 'under developed' and 'less developed' regions. It was strongly believed in 'Third World Development' circles, that, unless Third World communities were 'developed', they would fall prey to Soviet propaganda. Over the next forty years, a wide range of national, international and voluntary development organisations were established. Chief amongst these have been international organisations with charters which require them to fund and organise Third World development programs and plans.

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have had responsibility for advising governments on economic, welfare and development matters, for funding major projects, and for overseeing economic development in the new nations. In the process, they have widely been accused of imposing their own priorities and ideological interests on those governments most in need of assistance. As Fantu Cheru claims:

In the words of former President Nyerere of Tanzania, the IMF has become 'the International Ministry of Finance', with enormous leverage to dictate the national policies of Third World governments ... As in the case of IMF loans, the [World] Bank grants credit only after a borrower-government signs a letter of intent in which it undertakes to comply with certain conditions. These conditions, however, go beyond the traditional IMF recipe and require major institutional reforms ... The critics of the IMF and the World Bank charge that these institutions represent the interests of Western countries and that their orthodox prescriptions are not appropriate to the circumstances of African countries as they fail to address the root causes of underdevelopment and unequal exchange.

(Cheru 1989, pp. 35-6, 38-9)

The United Nations has provided a forum for interchanges between developed and developing countries. It has also often been accused of being a vehicle for the imposition of First World demands on Third World governments, including the imposition of sets of 'universal principles' relating to the rights of individuals and the responsibilities of governments. Following the Second World War, with the ideological confrontation of capitalism and communism, Western nations became increasingly concerned with 'human rights', particularly with the right of individuals to freedom of movement and self-expression. No government should have the right to control movement. The United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights spelt this out clearly. Western nations, seeing this as a crucial distinction between themselves and those aligned with the Eastern Bloc, put pressure on Third World governments to comply with the United Nations covenants, which, over the years, have consistently addressed current social, political and economic concerns of First World countries. Article 12 of the above Covenant reads:

1. Everyone lawfully within the territory of a State shall, within that territory, have the right to liberty of movement and freedom to choose his [sic] residence.

2. Everyone shall be free to leave any country, including his own.

3. The above-mentioned rights shall not be subject to any restrictions except those which are provided by law, are necessary to protect national security, public order. .. public health or morals or the rights and freedoms of others, and are consistent with the other rights recognised in the present Covenant. 15

[UN 1976]

Not only were Third World governments pressured to implement such resolutions, a range of United Nations organisations (formed to provide development assistance)16 provided means of leverage to donor countries.

Where First World governments disapproved of political processes and developments within the new nations, they very often used these international organisations as forums within which they could voice their concerns and through which they could pressure Third World governments for reform. An accusation made against the activities of many of these organisations has been that the priorities which have been set, and the programs and projects which have been funded, have reflected First World rather than Third World concerns; that these programs and the activities of international organisations have very often been motivated by 'human rights' issues which reflect the political concerns of First World nations. As the Indonesian Government retorted in response to such pressures:

Human rights questions are essentially ethical and moral in nature. Hence, any approach to human rights questions which is not motivated by a sincere desire to protect these rights but by disguised political purposes or, worse, to serve as a pretext to wage a political campaign against another country, cannot be justified.

(Alatas 1993)

Given the international tensions of the period, it is small wonder that the international political concerns of donor nations strongly influenced their development priorities and led them to use development funding as a means of pressuring governments into endorsing their interests and concerns. Much of the pressure exerted on postcolonial governments was concerned, not with the material well-being of Third World peoples so much as with ensuring the commitment of governments and people to the ideological biases of the donor nations.

With the demise of the Soviet Union, 'non-alignment' has become anachronistic. Now there is only one highly successful and very dominant ideology (with its variants) in the West, with socialism and communism in disrepute. Those who, in the past, sought to remain nonaligned, now have little option but to accept the ascendancy of capitalism and attempt to reorganise their communities to participate in the rapidly expanding international capitalist system. Many of them, in the 1980s and 1990s, have, at World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) instigation, implemented structural adjustment programs (SAPs) to reorientate their political and economic organisation and activity to neoliberal, free-market requirements. In the new international climate, no nation can escape involvement in the emerging global communications, financial, enterprise, information and entertainment networks. Nor can they insulate themselves from the deregulative forces which are exposing populations to the vagaries of the international marketplace and giving transnational corporations and organisations increasing influence within national boundaries.

As colonial territories gained independence, they entered a world threatened by the confrontation of two world industrial powers, armed with weapons of mass destruction. No country was immune from the resulting tensions and from the demands made upon them to support or oppose the Western and Eastern blocs. While there was no Third World War during this period, there were innumerable 'brush fires' or small wars funded by the major world players and their allies, as superpower tensions spilt over into the rest of the world, reclassifying local disputes in Cold War terms.

During the Cold War period, these wars were fought in colonial and postcolonial countries, with opponents armed and supported by the two superpowers or their allies, and each conflict recast as an ideological confrontation between capitalism and communism. Ironically, because the superpowers and their allies were only directly involved in three of these wars, which were all fought on Third World soil, this period of worldwide turmoil and bloodshed has often been described by people in Western nations as a prolonged period of peace, and that peace has usually been attributed to the balanced build-up of nuclear weapons, which guaranteed the 'mutually assured destruction' (with the appropriate acronym 'MAD') of the two superpowers should they enter into war with each other. But during this period millions of people were killed in wars which were bankrolled and armed by the superpowers and their allies in the name of the ideological confrontation of capitalism and communism.17

This was not a period when newly independent countries could concentrate on their 'development' equitably aided by 'developed' nations and development organisations whose interests in their affairs were wholly benign and positive. This was a period when countries which wished to receive 'aid' from the 'developed' 'First' (capitalist) or 'Second' (communist) worlds had to demonstrate their ideological commitment to the bloc which provided the aid.18 It was a period in which the bloc which did not provide the aid almost certainly attempted to develop and/or maintain festering discontent and rebellion within the country, hoping, through successfully fuelling insurrection, to replace the leadership with people committed to its ideology. Throughout the Third World, governments, faced with the enormous task (inherited from colonial powers) of developing the infrastructures of 'modern' 'industrialised' countries, found themselves fighting 'insurgents' or 'rebels' or 'guerrilla movements', spending a great deal of their time, energy and resources on these conflicts. Kick and Kiefer claimed that:

In the last few years, developing countries have spent nearly [US] $20 billion per annum on the importation of armaments ... militarisation of the Third World coincides with a marked post-war change in the global theatres of war from the developed to the developing countries. In the first half of this century major wars involved direct contention between the prevailing world powers, but since 1945 the structure of international warfare has shifted. Sivard (1982) identifies 65 major wars and 10,700,000 civilian and battle deaths during 1960-1982, and with only two exceptions (Northern Ireland and Turkey) these wars were entirely fought on the territory of developing countries ... The rivalry between the capitalist and eastern socialist power blocs has ... been played out in the Third World by the provision of military equipment to local combatants, and less often by direct intervention either by the sponsors themselves or by their proxies.

(Kick & Kiefer 1987, pp. 34, 44)

As Michael Renner described, 'more than $1.2 trillion worth of military equipment has been transferred [to Third World countries] during the past three decades' (1994, p.23).19 It was small wonder that 'development' activities were less than successful, and that governments, by the 1980s, faced bankruptcy and economic ruin. Dan Connell spelt out some of the consequences:

In 1991, of the 25 largest Third World debtors, 12 were at war, and many were on a war footing ... From 1970 to 1989, according to UN reports, Third World debt skyrocketed from $68.4 billion to $1,262.8 billion, leaving several nations owing more than they produce in annual income. Today, many countries have been forced to restructure their economies to keep up interest payments, while living standards plunge, urban squalor and rural poverty deepen, and infant and maternal mortality rates climb toward pre-independence levels. With the best land reserved for export crops and natural resources sold off at discount rates, their ability to feed themselves declines further while environmental degradation proceeds apace. And more money is borrowed to stave off imminent catastrophe.

(Connell 1993, p. 1)

As James Speth, Administrator of the United Nations Development Program, has said of Africa:

We conveniently forget Africa's history. We forget that the transatlantic slave trade robbed Africa of about 12 million of its able-bodied men and women. We forget that colonialism which followed the slave trade introduced a system of exploitation of Africa's natural resources to feed the industries of the West. We forget the 1884/1885 Colonial Conferences of Berlin which crudely Balkanised and divided Africa into geographic areas of control by the West, with scant regard for ethnic groupings. We even forget that during the period of the cold war's geopolitical fight for spheres of influence, Africa became a focal point for the ideology and the arms that today contribute to the havoc we find in Rwanda and Burundi, in Zaire and Angola and Somalia ... Conflict and wars claim resources that would otherwise be spent on education and health and housing and other areas of development. ... A large part of the blame for this trading in death rests with the industrial countries who, while giving aid in the order of $60 billion a year, earn much more in arms sales and otherwise from the estimated $125 billion per year in military expenditures of the developing world.

(Speth 1994)

At the very time when postcolonial governments were attempting to establish viable political and administrative institutions in their countries, legitimised by popular acceptance and participation, they were required to develop sophisticated international policies and interactions, balancing the demands of the superpowers with sets of demands being placed upon them by an emerging set of international institutions. The conflicting and contradictory demands to which Third World governments were subjected made long-term, rational planning very difficult.

Problems of nation-building

The 'nations' created by colonial powers usually directly reflected the geographical territories which they had ruled. They usually incorporated a variety of ethnic groupings, sometimes traditionally opposed to one another, sometimes more closely tied to other communities not included within the national boundaries, and sometimes opposed through the activities of the colonial powers themselves 20.

As we have seen, the sense of incorporating, co-operative identity amongst a territorial population preceded the establishment of most Western European nation-states. The nationalism of most Third World nations, on the contrary, consisted in the desire of educated minorities to take over the reins of government from colonial administrators, coupled with a strong desire on the part of the populace to be freed from foreign domination. In most new nations, the nation-state preceded the emergence of nationalism amongst the vast majority of the population. Those who inherited government, inherited a responsibility which few colonial administrations had accepted - they would have to find ways in which to develop and maintain a sense of nationalism amongst the diverse peoples of their national territories.

The unity of a colony was, to the colonial power, a consequence of its administration, and did not require the active endorsement of the indigenous populations. The postcolonial nation-state, however, as a result of very strong international pressures and a presumption of the universal applicability of Western democratic forms, needed to receive its legitimation from the population. Postcolonial governments, unlike the colonial administrations which preceded them, needed to be ratified by public identification with them as legitimate and unifying authorities within national territories. Whereas colonial powers had provided administration, and administrative representatives down to the local village and household levels in the form of magistrates, police, wardens, and council officers, but had not needed to require the commitment of villagers to their supervision, postcolonial governments needed to engender in their populations a sense of 'belonging' to the nation, rather than to a particular region, ethnic group or clan. Governments, therefore, had to intrude into the lives of their constituents in ways not contemplated by most colonial authorities. As Bice Maiguashca has said:

As for the Third World, during the 1950s and 1960s most of the newly created states concentrated their attention on establishing political centralisation and fostering national integration. As a consequence, most indigenous peoples, who had enjoyed a relative degree of autonomy during the colonial period, now found themselves under the authority of local elites who were driven by the imperative of 'nation-building' and who sought to consolidate their precarious hold on power through any means available to them ...

(Maiguashca 1994, p. 361)

National governments, handed control by colonial authorities, had to intrude into the identities and self-definitions of relatively insular regions, ethnic groups and clans, attempting to inculcate new perceptions and understandings, through which people would primarily define themselves as members of the nation, so as to weld them into a coherent whole. They had to begin 'nation-building' in a way not confronted by their colonial predecessors. While those who inherited the reins of governmental power usually conceived of their task as one of establishing a European-style 'nation-state',21 the motives for support by the majority of the population usually had less to do with the establishment of a nation-state than with the displacement of those who had imposed such ideas upon them. This new, and often very intrusive, involvement of national political and governmental activity in local and regional affairs created mounting tension in many regions. In many countries the resentment generated by such intrusion led to independence claims by regions and ethnic groups.

Most colonial authorities, aware of the strong divisive forces which existed within the territories they were handing over to indigenous elites, counselled new governments to devolve political and administrative authority to regions. This decentralisation of political and governmental organisation and activity, it was hoped, would dampen demands for secession from the new nation. Conventional wisdom in political and economic development circles also held that, in order to ensure grassroots involvement in political and economic development, it was necessary to involve people as directly as possible in the responsibilities of government. Premdas and Steeves (1984) spelt out the rationale clearly:

If decolonisation means anything, it would at least entail the dismantling and re-orienting of the inherited bureaucracy rendering government administrative behaviour subservient to community will. In essence, decolonisation at the grassroots becomes more of a reality where decision making and execution do not remain the monopoly or preserve of civil servants but rather are controlled by elected local councils. The overdeveloped centre must be deconcentrated to the periphery; a meaningful measure of autonomy in political decision making should be devolved to the vast majority of citizens who are rural dwellers ...

(Premdas & Steeves 1984, p. 2)

However, the problems confronting new nations could not be so easily overcome. In most countries, devolution of governmental responsibilities to provincial and regional governments simply multiplied the problems associated with governing through poorly legitimised political structures. A further level of inefficient, ineffective bureaucracy and political office was added to a structure which was quickly to come under real strain (see Geddes 1997 for illustration of this). Further, once regions gained political voice of their own, it became easier for regional interests to argue for secession, centred on the existing political and bureaucratic structures. Many post-independence separation movements focused their rebellions through taking control of provincial and regional governments in their areas.

Postcolonial governments faced challenges to their autonomy from several directions: international organisations and major international political powers placed strong demands on them to accept and act on their priorities and interests; the deregulation demanded by those involved in the emerging international economic order made governments less and less able to control economic and welfare activity within their territories; and regional forces challenged the legitimacy of the nation-state. Benjamin Barber and Regine Temam (1992) claimed that internationalisation and tribalism in the 1990s were still, and perhaps even more successfully, undermining the traditional political institutions of the nation-state. On the one hand, global economic and ecological forces were requiring increasing integration and uniformity in the world, with deregulation making national borders permeable. On the other hand, nations were being threatened by 'resurgent, conflicting nationalities and tribal enmities' (Barber & Temam 1992, p. 13).

The leadership and internal organisation of regional and ethnic groups and clans incorporated within the new nations had very often been warped, disrupted and weakened during the colonial period. Those who sought power in the new nations found in those groups fertile soil for their own ambitions. They often attempted to subvert and/ or displace 'traditional' leadership in order to establish personal support-bases within their own ethnic and regional communities through which they could gain control of the national government (see Nnoli 1980, p. 218ff for a discussion of such activities within Nigeria). As Ikejiani described of Nigeria in 1964:

It is glaringly evident that the distinguishing mark in Nigerian public life presently is not a man's political philosophy, or religion, or party, or education, or wealth, or personal qualities, but in the last analysis his tribe or origin. Nigerians carry these tribal thoughts into all aspects of their daily life. They carry them into their friendships, into their occupations, into their loyalties and into their prejudices. Politics in Nigeria not only has a regional cleavage, subtle and most grossly evident, but also clan connotation. There is a deep struggle for tribal superiority as well ... It is certainly beyond dispute that in our factories and shops, in government offices, in corporations and in our various institutions, appointments and promotions are made, in many cases, on tribal and clan calculations.

(Ikejiani 1964, p. 122)

Rather than a shared 'nationalism' amongst the populace, the governors of new nations found that colonial administration had done little to weaken ethnic and clan loyalties and identities. It had been just as ineffective in establishing any sense of shared identity between the disparate communities within national territorial boundaries. Most people interacted with the colonial structures at the local level and seldom needed to think in terms of an over arching 'national' bureaucracy. In consequence, for most people, pre-colonial political allegiances, while distorted by colonial experience, were still potent. As Chukwudum Okolo suggested:

Perhaps the best description of the African reality is tribalism, which is Africa's foremost social evil. Tribal wars have long been part of the continent's chequered history, and a source of social, political, and economic distress since independence. The identifiable cause of coups in Africa lies in tribal struggles for power.

(Okolo 1989, p. 33)

With Western governments committed to similar reaction to those who oppose them around the world, it has become increasingly difficult for disadvantaged minorities to gain support or even a hearing in international forums. Movements which were supported during the 1990s are now cut adrift, to fend for themselves. The consequences can be seen in the increasing flows of displaced persons, no longer welcome in Western countries which now see them - whatever their age or gender - as a looming threat to national security.

So, from the outset, most Third World governments have had to contend with the competing interests of powerful ethnic and regional groups, more intent on furthering their own interests than in ensuring workable national government. This, in many countries, has led to long-term civil unrest, insurrection, and civil war. In the climate of the Cold War, such difficulties were compounded by international powers confounding tribal, regional and clan conflict with ideological confrontation between capitalism and communism. The protagonists were, therefore, often armed and funded by competing international forces. In the post-Cold War period, the flow of arms did not diminish. With huge stockpiles of weapons no longer required by Western and Eastern bloc countries, arms merchants were able to offer sophisticated weaponry at bargain basement prices with little or no check on the credentials or intentions of purchasers. James Woolsey, Director of Central Intelligence, in testimony to the US Senate Select Intelligence Committee on 10 January 1995, claimed that:

... the proliferation of advanced conventional weapons and technology [is] a growing military threat as unprecedented numbers of sophisticated weapons systems are offered for sale on the world market. Especially troubling is the proliferation of technologies and expertise in areas such as sensors, materials, and propulsion in supporting the development and modernisation of weapons systems. Apart from the capability of some advanced conventional weapons to deliver weapons of mass destruction, such weapons have the potential to significantly alter military balances, and disrupt U.S. military operations and cause significant U.S. casualties.

 (Arms Sales Monitor 1995, p. 3)

Parliamentary democracy, one-party states, military coups

Destructive as the weapons build-up and regional and ethnic challenges were within Third World countries, there were other equally disruptive forces involved in challenging the viability of new nation-states. Where postcolonial governments were established through the electoral processes of democracy, those who entered parliament were supposed to conform to Western European parliamentary and governmental practices. Parliamentary democracy, particularly of the Westminster form, depends on those elected seeing themselves as representatives, not of people in particular residential regions within the nation, but of particular 'parties' which represent the interests of particular social 'classes' and pressure groups, each with its distinctive ideology.

Ethnic and clan differences are assumed to have been overridden by economically-based class distinctions which cut across group boundaries. People are presumed to be committed to particular ideological positions espoused by the parties for which they vote. Parliamentary democracy of Western European varieties philosophically presupposes a commitment by the majority of the population to the nation, with individuals vicariously sharing in the achievements of the nation as though they were their own achievements. Thomas Hobbes, in the seventeenth century, provided the philosophical underpinnings for this form of nationalism. The commitment of individuals to the nation creates:

... a real unity of them all in one and the same person, made by covenant of every man with every man, in such manner as if every man should say to every man: I authorise and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition; that thou give up thy right to him and authorise all his actions in like manner. This done, the multitude so united in one person is called a COMMONWEALTH.

(Hobbes 1909 [1651], ch. 17)

The government becomes the individual writ large, and individuals effectively enter into contract with the government to support it as long as all other individuals in the nation do so, too. However, this form of commitment presupposes an existing unity or nationalism amongst the populace. Government is aimed at balancing the competing interests of classes and pressure groups, fulfilling their aspirations at the national level.

Neither the 'classes'22 nor widely endorsed 'parties'23 and ideologies existed in most newly independent countries. As General Murtala Mohammed said of Nigeria in 1976:

There has been a lively debate in the press urging the introduction of one form of political ideology or another. Past events have, however, shown that we cannot build a future for this country on a rigid political ideology. Such an approach would be unrealistic. The evolution of a doctrinal concept is usually predicated upon the general acceptance by the people of a national political philosophy and, consequently, until all our people, or a large majority of them, have acknowledged a common ideological motivation, it would be fruitless to proclaim any particular philosophy or ideology in our constitution.

(Murtala Mohammed  1976, pp. 12-15)

As Murtala Mohammed argued, variant political ideologies within a nation detail alternative biases in organisation and activity, based on a common underlying understanding of the world and commitment to national government. Where that common understanding and commitment do not exist, it is difficult, if not impossible, to gain widespread, long-term support for the particular ideology of a political party. Rather, people define themselves in terms of ethnic and regional identity.24

In Third World nations, therefore, while those elected to office might have publicly endorsed particular political ideologies25 which spelt out alternative forms of centralised government of the nation, they knew, or soon found out, that their constituents were not committed to the articulated ideology and many of them simply did not understand its rationale. Rather, people presumed members of parliament to be committed to the communities which they represented. The communities saw central government, not as an important institution through which the national economy might be safeguarded and nurtured or through which the nation might achieve 'stability' or 'economic well-being' or 'greatness', but as the source of jobs, wealth and goods which could flow to themselves if their representative was astute. As Okwudiba Nnoli said of Nigeria:

Nigerianisation involved efforts by the ethnically based ruling parties in the regions to secure the complete domination of the regional public service positions by the relevant regional functionaries, or, in their absence, to prevent rival ethnic groups from filling the relevant posts. This same strategy was evident in the inter ethnic struggle for positions in the federal public service.

(Nnoli 1980, p. 196)

Paula Brown spelt out a similar scene in her study of leadership in the New Guinea Highlands:

... achievement of a high elective position has the greatest prestige and rewards ... The competition and ambitions of Simbu are demonstrated in the large number of nominees, the lavish expenditure of candidates on their campaigns, the significance of success and expectations of rewards by their followers. Support of a candidate is an important rural social activity. Provincial and national political office are the counters in Simbu intergroup and interpersonal competition of the 1980s.

(Brown 1987, p. 102)

This direct relationship between the politician and his or her constituency is, of course, closer to the Athenian ideal of democracy than is the party system of Western democracy, but in the absence of a sense of unity amongst all those whose representatives formed government, it resulted in political and governmental chaos. When parliamentarians are intent on ensuring that as much of the national wealth as possible is siphoned off to themselves and to their regions, government becomes a process of dividing up the spoils of office, not of focused 'national development'. As Brown said:

With the continued concentration of financial resources in government, politics is the way to wealth ... Power and prestige in the province focus upon the town; a multi ethnic elite runs the affairs of the province and has connections with the national government, business, and sports activities. The rural communities are its dependents and the source of votes, customers, clients, and parishioners ... these leaders are not detached from their rural relatives for two reasons. First, the selected officials represent rural constituencies where they must be nominated, campaign, receive votes, and serve rural supporters. In their distribution of benefits they reward their supporters and constituents with jobs and services. Second, the upper and urban segment is not independent of a rural base. Although they may live and work outside the rural area they contribute to rural affairs of their kinsmen, clan, and constituents and participate in some rural activities.

(Brown 1987, p. 103)

Nnoli described the situation as it developed in Nigeria:

Most Nigerians have come to believe that unless their 'own men' are in government they are unable to secure those socio-economic amenities that are disbursed by the government. Hence, governmental decisions about the siting of industries, the building of roads, award of scholarships, and appointments to positions in the public services, are closely examined in terms of their benefits to the various ethnic groups in the country. In fact, there has emerged a crop of 'ethnic watchers' who devote much of their time and energy to assessing the differential benefits of the various groups from any government project.

(Nnoli 1978, p. 176)

During the 1980s, while living on the island of Tabiteuea in the Republic of Kiribati in the central Pacific during national elections, I canvassed the views of people as to the right kind of parliamentarian for their community. Every person with whom I spoke said that it was the responsibility of the elected person to gain as much for their community as possible from the central government. People also focused on the cash income and other benefits flowing to the holder of the office. It was felt that the position of member of parliament was something of a sinecure, and the salary and 'perks' which went with the job belonged not only to the member but also to the community to which he or she belonged. It was, therefore, reasonable to 'share the job around', so that a number of communities might benefit from this cash flow.

The candidates all similarly claimed that they would only be elected if they could show that they could obtain more for the community than others before them and that their own income would be more widely distributed. Re-election depended on this perception of the performance of the member of parliament. The man who was finally re-elected for a second term had developed a strategy through which his income was shared beyond his own community. In fact, he insisted, and it seemed correct, that he spent more of his money in helping marginal groups than in helping those who strongly supported him and considered him a member of their community.

Both the candidates and people in the electorate were able to name those in the previous parliament who had been most successful, and in all cases their success was judged by what they had managed to obtain for their electorates. When I asked people how they knew who were most successful, they answered that they knew through listening to the parliamentary broadcasts. People in the community who had radios often listened to parliament, not to find out about the country's external relations, or to judge the effectiveness with which the nation was being governed, but in order to hear who were most forceful and effective in representing their electorates and which electorates were being favoured in any 'development' exercises or in infrastructure maintenance and upgrading. If the community felt that their representative was inadequate, that person was most unlikely to be re-elected, and so each new parliament comprises large numbers of new members, with little or no experience of parliamentary procedures, and far more commitment to their own electorates than to centralised government. As was found (Geddes 1997) in examining Papua New Guinean parliamentary experience, during the 1980s and 1990s some sixty per cent of those elected in national elections were first timers, elected because they were perceived to be capable of better representing the interests of their communities and regions.

Not only are members of national and regional parties considered to be conduits of wealth and goods to their electorates, local-level politics is similarly competitive. Peter Weil (1971) explained this well for local council activity in the Gambia:

Within any given electoral ward, various villages have particular demands. Inevitably some villages do not get the well or other project they have been demanding during their councillor's tenure, and the interests of these villages will then probably be in opposition to those of other villages. If a group of villages tends to unite around an issue, that group tends to be opposed by another group of villages with another issue. Thus, a type of opposition over specific issues operates at the local level in Area Council elections.

(Weil 1971, p. 110)

This orientation, of course, makes it extremely difficult to govern nationally, regionally or locally. Parliamentarians and councillors are far more interested in gaining resources for themselves and their constituents than they are in regional government and development planning. And, since it is more important to obtain resources than to observe the niceties of Western concepts of 'honesty' and 'integrity', based as they are on presumption of the separation of politics and administration, of political activity and government spending, Third World governments, at whatever level, seem, almost inevitably, to be riddled with 'corruption'.26 Politics becomes reduced to patron-clientism, with those in power concentrating wealth and influence in their own hands, maintaining their support bases through providing privileged access to the jobs, wealth and influence they control. As Awazurike said:

The evidence in the last decade continues to point to a dismal outlook for third-world democracies ... The twin forces of economic woes and the opportunism of powerful oligarches ensure that from India and Pakistan to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, the fate of fledgling attempts at democratisation continues to raise more questions than answers - not least of which is the seeming ambivalence of the advanced industrial nations to the spread and deepening of genuine democratic movements since the late 1950s.

(Awazurike 1990, p. 56)

One-party states

In many postcolonial nations, leaders, in the face of such pressures, did away with democratic multi-party politics, declaring 'one-party' states with strong leaders who appointed the representatives from each region of the country, or who ensured that the candidates in any election all accepted their leadership. The ways in which this shift to single-party rule were effected varied from country to country. The movement to one-party rule was, of course, often not entirely internally determined. In the international climate of ideological battle, the intelligence services of major Cold War countries attempted to ensure that Third World governments remained ideologically committed to their bias. In Indonesia, the overthrow of President Sukarno and the installation of Suharto as President of the country in 1967 seems to have been a consequence of just such activity. As a Baobab Press article described of Indonesia's move to this form of government:

By the early 1960s, tensions between Washington and Jakarta were at an all time high, in large part because of Sukarno's 'growing resistance to foreign aid from Western countries,' explains a States News Service report that appeared in the Washington Post on May 21, 1990. It was then that U.s. diplomats and intelligence officials decided to consummate the results of years of painstaking espionage. Over a period of several months beginning in October of 1965, high-ranking officials of the State Department turned over the names of more than 5,000 key members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) to Sukarno's opponent, Gen. T. N. J. Suharto, says the States News Service report. The story adds that the Indonesian communist group was at the time the largest in the world after the U.5.5.R. and China, and that American diplomats, after supplying the list of names, 'later checked off the names of those who had been killed or captured.' The report describes the list of names turned over to the Indonesian general as 'a detailed who's who of the leadership of PKI,' that identified committee members and organisers of labour and youth groups at the national, provincial and municipal levels ... It is unknown how many people were killed in the bloodbath that followed ... The CIA estimated in 1968 that at least 250,000 people were rounded up and slaughtered, and called the incident 'one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century.' A 1966 Washington Post report estimated deaths at closer to half a million. But all accounts agreed that the Indonesian communist movement had been wiped out. The disclosure of the names and the subsequent massacre were not isolated events. They took place against a backdrop of psychological warfare which helped set the stage for Sukarno's eventual removal from office. A 1975 Congressional investigation into CIA covert activities uncovered evidence, for example, of a clandestine U.S.-sponsored propaganda campaign designed to discredit Sukarno by circulating accusations of sexual improprieties to news media throughout the world. By the time of the bloody anticommunist purge, Sukarno was on his way out. Gen. Suharto was installed in March of 1967 as interim president.

(Baobab Press 1993)

The following was the official Suharto Indonesian Government explanation of the precursors to, and rationale for, its political reorganisation of the country from 1967, following the period of political turmoil described above (see Cribb 1990 for a detailed examination of the period):

The Government Manifesto of November 3, 1945, opened the way to a rapid growth of political parties. Soon a multi-party system emerged with parties of different ideologies, ranging from nationalism to socialism, religion and even Marxism/Leninism. Hence, the political structure developed into a liberal democracy that was a complete departure from the type of democracy envisaged by Pancasila.

With sharply conflicting ideologies, political rivalry was the order of the day and a stable Government was out of the question. With a total of 23 political parties and their factions, cabinets could only be formed on the basis of a shaky compromise between the strongest parties. In point of fact, coalition cabinets were formed and dissolved very often. The administration was a complete shambles and development was a far cry.

The first and only general election ever held during the rule of the Old Order took place in 1955. Even that election did not produce a strong cabinet with a solid back-up in Parliament. On the contrary, because political conditions continued to deteriorate, the President ordered the formation of a Constituent Assembly to draft a new constitution. However, as mentioned earlier, this only ended up in a total deadlock which led the President to take all the power of the state into his own hands under the pretext of guided democracy.

Having learned from the experience of the unlimited multiparty system of the past, the New Order Government, which came into office in 1967, decided to Simplify the political system along the following lines:

1. In order to minimise ideological conflicts between political organisations, all political organisations shall adopt Pancasila as their sole basis principle.

2. To simplify the political system, particularly for the purpose of choosing a political organisation by the people in general elections it was felt that the number of these organisations should be reduced.

3. In the past, villages were made the bases of political activities and manoeuvres, most notably in the heyday of the Indonesian Communist Party. This adversely affected the social and economic life of the village populations. Hence, it would be desirable to free villages from the activities of political organisations.

Furthermore, the large number of organisations has been reduced by the fusion of parties and their affiliated organisations into two political parties-Partai Persatuan Pembangunan (The United Development Party or Partai Persatuan) and Partai Demokrasi Indonesia (the Indonesian Democracy Party or PDI), and one Functional Group or Golongan Karya (Golkar).

Partai Persatuan is a fusion of Nahdlatul Ulama (the Moslem Scholars Party), Parmusi (the Moslem Party), PSII (the Islamic Confederation) and PERIl (the Islamic Union).

PDI is a fusion of the former PNI (the Nationalist Party), the Catholic Party, the Christian (Protestant) Party, the Indonesian Independence Party, and Partai Murba (the People's Party).

Golkar accommodates the aspirations and political rights and duties of functional groups that are not affiliated with either party, namely civil servants, retired members of the Armed Forces, women's organisations, professional groups, farmers, students, etc.

By virtue of the 1983 Guidelines of State Policy and on the basis of Act No.3 of 1985, Pancasila has finally been adopted as the one and only ideological principle upon which all political organisations base their activities.

(Soetjipto et al. 1995)

This reorganisation of political activity placed the ruling party (Golkar) in the powerful position of claiming the allegiance of the armed forces and members of the civil service, scrutinising and approving the constitutions and platforms of the other parties and of controlling their electoral activities in rural areas. The President was given the right to dissolve any political party whose policies were not 'in the interests of the state' or whose membership comprised less than one quarter of the population. Indonesia became, and effectively remains a 'one-party' state, despite its apparent multi-party organisation.27

Indonesia was not alone in reorganising its political landscape. In Africa, by 1969, ninety per cent of the postcolonial nations were governed through single-party systems or by military regimes, many of which justified their seizure of power by claiming that the elected governments had become irredeemably corrupt (Young 1970, p.460). In former Asian colonies effective one-party states quickly emerged in most countries, and military coups occurred in many of the new nations. Sangmpam claimed that:

Third World countries are characterised by a specific form of political competition marked by violent eruption of conflicts. From 1958 to 1965, about 70 percent of Third World countries experienced violent conflicts ranging from secession to open warfare, and 68 military coups were successful. From 1965 to 1985, about 130 coups occurred in Third World countries; of about 10 million violent, conflict-related deaths in the world, 99.94 percent were in Third World countries ...

(Sangmpam 1994, p. 4)

Where one-party government was imposed, or governments were deposed by military leaders, this frequently seemed to provide strong central government, though such governments have been widely condemned for their 'human rights' records. Fred Riggs claimed that:

... data from a 1985 survey of Third World regimes reveal correlations between breakdowns and regime type. The high survival level of single-party regimes reflects the ability of ruling parties to control the elected assembly (and hence to govern arbitrarily), and to dominate the bureaucracy (and hence to prevent a coup). By contrast, since all presidentialist regimes in the Third World have experienced catastrophic breakdowns, it is concluded that the ability of divided government to control its bureaucracy and to provide coherent policy direction is so flawed that coups are virtually unavoidable.

(Riggs 1993, p. 199)

Military coups

Throughout the Third World multi-party democracies have, as Riggs suggested, 'experienced catastrophic breakdowns', usually followed by military coups. Arthur Nwankwo spelt out his view of the situation in Nigeria in 1966 when a multi-party, democratically elected parliament was overthrown by a military coup:

On 15 January 1966 Nigeria's post-colonial experiment with democracy ended when soldiers struck, killing some politicians, sacking the civilian government, and imposing military rule. Several factors were responsible for the collapse of Nigeria's First Republic, but among the most crucial was Regionalism, with its attendant ethnic dominance of each of the three regional governments. The regions constituted the political base for the contenders of power at the Federal level, and tribal or ethnic sentiments were used by these politicians to whip up support for their equally regionally and ethnically-based parties ... In the struggle, the powerful regional governments overwhelmed and incapacitated the Federal Government, regardless of the central government's constitutional superiority. Thus, it was not the Constitution that failed, but the politicians who operated it, for they were too narrow-minded, too reckless and intellectually and emotionally unprepared for the functions the Constitution placed on them. It was the violent rivalry for power among the politicians, coupled with massive corruption, brazen injustice and political and religious intolerance which brought about the demise of the First Republic.

(Nwankwo 1984, pp. 6-7)

Where military coups were avoided, multi-party democracy has usually been displaced by single-party systems. Since countries which opted for one-party rule or which were ruled by military juntas were often already experiencing inter-group tension and confrontation, in many cases the imposition of military or one-party rule masked continuing conflict within the nation. In Nigeria, as in many other countries ruled militarily, military rule has been punctuated by coups and counter-coups.

In both militarily ruled and one-party states, those holding power have intruded ever more directly and forcefully into those areas of activity which Western people are strongly convinced should be outside the realm of politics. Sangmpam has argued that the state, in many Third World countries, has become 'over politicised'. As he said:

By over politicisation I mean (1) the use of overt compulsion by those holding power to organise political representation, participation, and competition for ... goods and services ... ; (2) the fluidity of state power and constant insecurity characterising holders of state power in their relations with other social actors; (3) political participation and competition outside established institutions; (4) the lack of compromise over the outcome of political competition; and (5) the general use of open violence and confrontation in such participation and competition.

(Sangmpam 1994, p. 5)

Rather than government providing a stable backdrop to the self-interested activities of people competing within the marketplace (which neo-liberal commentators in the West consider to be the function of government), political power holders have become direct players in the economic sphere, using their positions and power to advantage themselves and their supporters. This has effectively reorientated many Third World communities toward patron-client forms of political, economic and social organisation. The activities of political, business, traditional, military and other leaders become interfused as networks of mutual support and promotion develop. In such patron-client orientated systems, political and economic spheres are intermeshed. To succeed economically, one needs a political patron.

Richard Robison (1990) provided an interesting description of a variety of forms of this kind of political / economic activity in Indonesia. The most important of these in Third World countries is undoubtedly what he called 'bureaucratic capitalism'. As he explained, 'bureaucratic capitalism is a product of patrimonial bureaucratic authority in which the demarcation between public service and private interest is at best blurred' (1990, p. 14). Many of those involved in this kind of political activity develop 'joint ventures' with overseas companies and transnational corporations. The politician, or person who has strong links with political authority, obtains licences, concessions, finance, and favourable terms of business for the overseas partner and, in return, holds stock in the company formed within the country or is rewarded in other ways. As Robison said, 'The central feature of the joint venture is the exchange of politically controlled economic concessions for financial reward' (1990, p. 17).

While Robison's study focused on such activity in Indonesia, very similar arrangements can be found in almost every Third World country. For businesses involved in this kind of activity it is very important that the political leaders be secure and hold power over a long period. Every political upheaval becomes a business upheaval as new political patrons have to be secured. For this reason, many multinational and transnational businesses have been accused of supporting dictatorial, repressive regimes, securing their own interests by ensuring the long-term survival of their patrons.28 Where this cannot be arranged, businesses have to hedge their bets, securing the commitment not only of key political figures of the present, but also likely future players. The game becomes much more complex and certainly more costly. It is, therefore, less likely that foreign businesses will be attracted to countries where the political leadership is likely to be displaced in a short period, whether by electoral or any other means. Economic 'development', therefore, seems to favour stable regimes, as the East and South-East Asian countries have demonstrated.

In the climate of the 1990s, with an emphasis on privatisation introduced through the variety of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) imposed by the World Bank and the IMF, it became increasingly acceptable for transnational companies to hire 'security firms' to ensure the safety of their operations in areas of political instability and lawlessness. This was justified by corporations as being very similar to their use of such private security agencies in Western countries. If the scale of security operations was greater, this was simply because security problems in many Third World countries are more acute.

A development which emerged during the 1990s has been the use of these 'security' organisations to provide protection not only for transnational corporate activities but also for the governments with which they do business. Two major organisations operating in African countries during the 1980s and 1990s were the South African-based company 'Executive Outcomes' which provided protection to mining interests in Sierra Leone and Angola, while also providing 'consultancy services' to the governments of both countries; and the US-based 'MPRI' company which took over the activities of 'Executive Outcomes' in Angola. Of course, in the first decade of the 21st Century, the use of private security firms has become far more wide-spread, fuelled by the employment of these organisations by the U. S. military and by major corporations and organisations operating in danger zones in non-Western countries.

The effect of these developments has been to reintroduce mercenary soldiers into non-Western countries in the guise of security personnel. Whereas the mercenaries which plagued African communities during the 1970s were funded as expatriate soldiers who were supporting regimes fighting 'communist insurgency', the new mercenaries, in the spirit of the times, are seen to be fighting 'international terror', the enemies of democracy and capitalism and ensuring the stability of regimes (or the successful insurgency of an opposing group if a regime proves unreliable) and the profitability of transnational corporations. As such, they no longer come in the crude guise of soldiers of fortune, now they come as 'security consultants', providing security services and helping to 'privatise' yet another arm of government activity, forming an even closer alliance between transnational corporations and their political patrons.

Political support is not only available to foreign companies (though these are usually the most lucrative source of income). Similar arrangements are made with business people within the country, as Sklar and Whitaker described of Nigeria:

In every region, the party waxed fat in its house of patronage. It had money, favours, jobs, and honours to distribute among those who would support it. To a large extent, these regional patronage systems were based on regional marketing boards ... Invariably, the vast majority of those who receive or hope to receive loans from the boards or the banks are attracted by powerful inducements to join or support the regional government party; insofar as they prosper, they may be expected to support the party financially. The same may be said of commercial contractors who work for the regional governments and their statutory corporations .... Who are the masters of the regional governments? High-ranking politicians, senior administrators, major chiefs, lords of the economy, distinguished members of the learned professions ...

(Sklar & Whitaker 1991, p. 79)

As key economic, political, professional, military and traditional leaders support one another, avenues to wealth are increasingly controlled by them, to be made available, at their discretion, to those who support them. The result is what is commonly seen in Third World countries: a marked division between the 'haves' and 'have nots', with those who do not have access to the wealth of the region increasingly dependent on those who have, tied to them in bonds of clientage. In the climate of ethnic and clan rivalry which exists in many Third World countries, patrons and clients see their interests as separate from those of opposing groups who are also competing for the spoils of political and economic power. The consequences, as both Sangmpam (1994) and Weil (1971) have suggested, are increasing tension and eruptions of violence which cannot be easily countered.

In the worldwide political climate of the 1950s-1980s, this usually meant that one or other of the internationally dominant ideological blocs readily financed and armed opposing groups, leading to continued unrest and rebellion. Opposing leaders, each intent on establishing their patronage and power, soon learned to speak the language of international ideological tension, and so ensured funding of military requirements in either resisting or instigating rebellion and armed insurrection. Over the last decade, the language empoyed to gain support has changed, but the consequences have not. Now, support is given to bolster regimes or favoured insurgents in combatting 'international terror' rather than 'Communism', but the results are very similar 29. Third World politicans and their economic counter-parts have learned a new language and are becoming increasingly fluent in its use.

Civil/military rule

In many countries, long-term 'civil-military' regimes have emerged, in which the leadership, while 'civil' (that is, not holding military rank or position), is closely allied with the military leadership. As Hassan Gardezi described, there has emerged, in Pakistan, a 'strong bureaucratic-military oligarchy at the helm of the state which uses its regulatory powers to mediate the mutually competing and at times conflicting interests' (1985, p. 1) of the country.

Arthur Nwankwo, writing of Nigeria, suggested that this form of rule should be called 'cimilicy' and should be based on:

... civilianising the military and militarising the civilians in a new arrangement for a new dispensation. Government being the authoritative allocator of national resources in response to articulated and organised group interests, it is necessary that people who participate in government articulate and organise their views and work together, each being fully conscious of the strength, weaknesses and rights of others in a new social compact where the artificial lines of demarcation between the military and the civilians is eradicated. For in theory and in deed, all civilians and all military persons of Nigerian extraction are Nigerians and are entitled to equal rights, privileges and dispensations and equally endowed for the onerous task of building a New Nigeria.

(Nwanko 1984, p. xii)

To date, Nigeria has not managed to establish a stable coalition of such interests. Other postcolonial states, however, have been much more successful in pursuing such policies. In nations as diverse as Egypt and Indonesia, this kind of civilian-military alliance has been effectively pursued over some thirty to forty years. The degree to which such alliances have disenfranchised communities and populations has been a matter of vigorous debate over the past fifteen years. It has commonly been claimed that such 'dictatorships' ride roughshod over individual human rights, as expressed in various United Nations declarations. Some of the more stable of these regimes have replied, as Indonesian authorities have, that:

It is now generally accepted that all categories of human rights-civil, political, economic, social and cultural, the rights of the individual and the rights of the community, the society and the nation-are interrelated and indivisible. The promotion and protection of all these rights should therefore be undertaken in an integrated and balanced manner. Inordinate emphasis on one category of human rights over another should be eschewed. Likewise, in assessing the human rights conditions of countries, particularly developing countries, the international community should take into account the situation in relation to all categories of human rights-following the principles contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 29 of that Declaration addresses two aspects that balance each other: On the one hand, there are principles that respect the fundamental rights and freedoms of the individual; on the other, there are stipulations regarding the obligations of the individual toward the society and the state.

(Alatas 1995)

United Nations emphasis on the rights of individuals, at the expense of community and nation are considered unbalanced and in need of correction. However, such statements have been vigorously rejected by prodemocracy groups throughout the world. As Jeremy Hobbs of Community Aid Abroad (CAA) has said:

Australia's special relationship with Indonesia is viewed with bitter cynicism by Indonesian non-government organisations. For them it is supremely ironic that Australia, arguably the most democratic country in the region, is not prepared to take a tougher line on free speech, human rights, democracy and labour issues. Worse, we have been happy to fill the breach when the [US] Clinton administration withdrew military support because of its concerns over human rights.

(Hobbs 1995, p. 1)

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Western powers have increasingly insisted on a return by Third World governments to multiparty political systems based on Western democratic ideals. As Andrew Purvis claimed:

As recently as five years ago, sub-Saharan Africa seemed poised on the verge of a new democratic era. The end of the cold war and mounting pressure from Western donors for political reform as a condition for ongoing aid led to a flurry of multiparty elections, and millions of voters eager for a change trekked to the polls ... [However] Africa's veteran rulers know what they are up to. Many of them have been denied foreign aid because of their autocratic regimes. But once elections have been held, or in some cases merely promised, Western aid dollars begin flowing again ... This is not the first time Africa has wrestled with multiparty governance. Immediately after many countries gained independence in the 1960s, political parties flourished, elections were called, and voters rejoiced. But then many of independent Africa's founding fathers convinced their people that the single-party state was the only way. The result was the lost years of the '70s and the economic disarray of the '80s. The only hope is that Western donors, together with Africa's more reform-minded leaders, will not stand for such backsliding again.

(Purvis 1996)

Like Purvis, many Western commentators believe that most of the Third World's woes can be traced to the forms of government which have emerged over the past forty years. Autocratic governments, dominated by corrupt, self-serving politicians, have mismanaged economies and increased their own wealth and power at the expense of their electorates. In order to overcome these problems, it is considered necessary to return to Western governmental practices, to multi-party, democratic government. However, it can be argued, as Nef (1991, pp. 16ff.) has for Latin America, that, in part, the emergence and dominance of repressive regimes has been a requirement and a consequence of the kinds of 'economic development' pursued in those countries since the late 1960s. As Nef argued:

The 1970's was a period of drastic de-democratisation and demobilisation. It was also an era when the old 'structuralist' policies of import substitution industrialisation (with its corollary, the welfare state) were replaced by the new monetarist policy of deindustrialisation, denationalisation, shrinkage of government services, the early phase of structural adjustments and a profound vertical expansion of the police function of the state (and repression) throughout the hemisphere. The events are too oft repeated to require discussion here. What is important, however, is to highlight the decline of developmentalism as a desired strategy and discourse for conflict-management by both Latin American and U. S. elites. In fact, new 'reactionary coalitions' were forged, leading to a new type of dependency resulting from a growing process of transnationalisation of the Latin American state ... As time went by and the illusion of economic miracles became ever more distant, development along orthodox Keynesian, liberal lines moved ever further and further to the background. To make prices and wages 'competitive', in the context of neoliberal, free market strategies, labour was repressed and purposely atomised, working class organisations were persecuted, left wing parties disbanded ... as the foreign-induced economic miracles failed to materialise, all that was left was a repressive state keeping a very large marginal sector at bay.

(Nef 1991, pp. 17-18)

The developmentalist models of Third World development experts, which placed emphasis on the role of government in stimulating and guiding economic development, came into disrepute during the 1970s, at about the same time as the Keynesian economic models of the West came under siege from neo-liberal alternatives. In their place the neo-liberal monetarist policies of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and of conservative politics throughout most of the Western world during the late 1970s and the 1980s and 1990s, became the stuff of development specialist advice in the Third World through the 1970s and since that time.30

This shift coincided with a rapid increase in Third World indebtedness following a sharp increase in oil prices in the early 1970s. From the late 1970s, lenders became increasingly concerned at the mounting debt of Third World countries. As Dan Connell has said, 'From 1970 to 1989, according to UN reports, Third World debt skyrocketed from $68.4 billion to $1,262.8 billion, leaving several nations owing more than they produce in annual income' (1993, p. 1). This came to a head in the early 1980s, when international creditors decided it was time to act to protect their investments. For most, the central consideration in ensuring the economic viability of Third World nations was the 'downsizing' of government and the deregulation of all economic, financial and fiscal activity. Effectively, this meant a complete reorganisation of government, a determined swing away from 'left-wing' politics to the politics of the marketplace. As Friedson has spelt out for Latin America:

... for neo liberals developmentalism had hampered development, and only a free-market economy guaranteed the road to prosperity. For them, the main problem of Latin America was not dependency but the burden of an inefficient and corrupt state that prevented growth and modernisation ... with the worsening of the economic situation in the early 1980s, newly established civilian governments found themselves with few resources to confront a powerful community of international creditors determined to collect their, debts. Thus, military governments as well as their civilian successors endorsed versions of the IMF adjustment program, which stressed domestic mismanagement as the cause of payment problems and domestic adjustment (reduction of government expenditures, curtailment of public subsidies, devaluations and trade liberalization) as a way out of the crisis ... many of the IMF measures curtailed state power, which carried obvious political costs. In the first half of the 1980s, many Latin American governments found themselves signing agreements that were, for the most part, not to their liking ... instead of prosperity, Latin America witnessed further economic decline and impoverishment as a result of the externally-enforced adjustment programs implemented in the early 1980s ... This no doubt represented a major blow for the technocratic approach to the debt crisis promoted by the IMF, which assumed that all it took to overcome the economic crisis was the decisive action of governments to liberalise their economies.

(Friedson 1983, pp. 33-5)

Cheru has spelt out some of the demands of such programs:

a) liberalization of import controls;

b) devaluation of the country's exchange rate;

c) a domestic anti-inflationary program which will control bank credits and [exercise] control over government deficit by curbing spending, increased taxation, abolition of consumer subsidies;

d) a program of greater hospitality to multinational companies (MNCs) .

... As President Kaunda of Zambia put it, 'The IMF does not care whether you are suffering economic malaria, bilharzia or broken legs. They will always give you quinine'. The policy prescriptions listed above reflect the Fund's political and economic ideology rather than the interests of the developing countries.

(Cheru 1989, p. 37)

In order to ensure that the necessary 'structural adjustments' were made to Third World economies so that they might benefit from the increased competitive advantages that it was assumed would accrue from an unfettered 'enterprise economy: governments needed to be firmly in control, able to apply the 'pain' which would, necessarily, precede the economic' gain' of this radical shift from welfare economics to free market economics. As Mark Moberg described for Chile, one of the first Latin American countries to experience these changes:

After overthrowing the elected Allende government in 1973, the Chilean military crushed leftist parties, unions, and peasant associations. Then, in an unwelcome surprise to some elites that had initially invited the coup, the military disbanded right wing and centrist parties as well ... Such measures were necessary, the military claimed, to enable it to impose harsh deflationary policies 'in the national interest' without organised opposition.

(Moberg 1994, p. 216)

The need for this degree of control resulted, in many countries, in an increased emphasis on 'law and order', and increased expenditures to bolster both police and paramilitary strength to support government in its determination to set in place the necessary changes to ensure long-term economic growth. As Ihonvbere claimed:

The political tensions that have accompanied monetarism have furthered repression, human rights abuses, riots and national disintegration ... The very high degree of human suffering, disillusionment, anger, alienation, rural decay, urban dislocation, suicides, marital crises, prostitution and crime which have accompanied monetarist responses to the African economic crisis, hold major implications for the potency of ethnicity and the subversion of the goals of nationhood.

(Ihonvbere 1994, p. 51)

The appearance of democracy

As tensions have mounted in many countries, governments have felt compelled to increase their coercive authority. Most Third World governments, in the past thirty years, have found themselves on the horns of a dilemma. They are being pressured by First World governments and organisations into both deregulation of economic activity, which requires increased coercive authority, and the ratification and implementation of human rights programs and principles. As Purvis suggested, this has led to a rhetoric in favour of multi-party democracy 31 and implementation of human rights programs, accompanied by further politicisation of the directive agencies of government.

This increasing politicisation of both the police forces and court systems has delegitimised both sets of institutions in the eyes of many people in Third World countries, leading to increasing fear and tension within Third World nations and to further political repression. The politicisation of police forces and courts has been accompanied by the politicisation of law, establishing statutes which can be used to legitimise government repression and make it increasingly difficult for individuals and groups to defend themselves against politically motivated criminal charges. As Amnesty International spelt out for the African continent:

There is a developing pattern of human rights violations in parts of Africa in which governments publicly committed to political pluralism adopt methods of curbing domestic opposition and criticism which are designed to minimise the likelihood of international disapproval and to keep their democratic credentials intact. Certain types of legal charge are proving increasingly attractive to governments seeking to criminalise peaceful political activity or dissent in this new context. These charges include sedition, contempt of court, subversion, defamation, possession of classified documents, and holding meetings or demonstrations without an official permit.

(Amnesty International 1995)

The reality in many Third World nations since the mid 1990s is that while governments are being pressured to reinstitute multi-party democratic political processes, contradictory pressures coming from the First World, in fact, produce multi-party democratic rhetoric, coupled with the entrenchment of coercive, autocratic government. This has resulted in continuing unrest and rebellion in many Third World countries.

The tensions we have examined in this article have not lessened in the first decade of the 21st century. In many cases they have become stronger and more challenging to the viability of Third World national governments. Governments are being subjected to international pressures from First World governments and non-government organisations; to demands of the international marketplace; of international organisations and enterprises; to the demands of electorates which see central, regional and local government as resources to be mined; and to the tensions associated with competing regional, ethnic and clan-based patron-client networks. They are also being pressured by demands from First world countries to control incipient terrorism within their borders and, simultaneously, to prevent refugee flows to Western countries which, in the minds of Western populations, might include individuals and groups seeking to pursue terrorist agendas within First World countries. These problems, compounded by a range of environmental and economic problems of equal magnitude, make the future of many Third World governments highly problematic.

In Geddes (1997) some of the internal political experiences of two of these new nations: Nigeria, which received its independence from Britain in 1960, and Papua New Guinea, which gained independence from Australia in 1975 are examined. These nations provide insight into many of the political problems experienced by Third World nations as they have attempted to forge workable national political and administrative institutions in the face of mounting internal and external pressures.

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Wijeyewardene, G. (ed.) 1990. Ethnic Groups Across National Boundaries in Mainland Southeast Asia, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore ..

Young, C. 1970. 'African political system types, independence and after', in The African Experience, eds J.N. Paden & E.J. Soja, vol. 1, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Ill.

Notes

1This developmental project is based on a millennial belief in the existence of an evolutionary process in which all cultures and all peoples are involved. Human beings have a common evolutionary direction.  This assumed process inverts the biological model of evolution. Whereas the biological model assumes increasing diversity, the social evolutionary model assumes increasing convergence.

The process has been explained in many ways and takes many forms, as Blaut (1992, pp. 1-2) has described, his own explanation, of course, being one of them:

... the date 1492 represents the breakpoint between two fundamentally different evolutionary epochs. The conquest of America begins, and explains, the rise of Europe ... Before 1492, cultural evolution in the Eastern Hemisphere was proceeding evenly across the landscape; in Africa, Asia, and Europe a multitude of centres were evolving out of (broadly) feudalism and toward (broadly) capitalism.

This belief in a universal evolutionary direction is a feature of the particular historical experiences of Western Europeans (see History of the Emergence of Capitalism). Blaut's schema is no less Eurocentric than all those others which he condemns for this 'evil'. Capitalism, of course, is no more advanced or retrograde than any other cultural form underpinning systems of status and ranking in communities, it is required by the particular social templates which govern behaviour in Western societies. And, it requires the historical antecedents of Western Europe.

It can no more successfully be grafted onto other cultural communities than the Potlatch could successfully be grafted onto Western communities. Hence the catalogue of failures amassed by those most deeply involved in this enterprise. And hence, also, the disorientation and disruption of communities, and cultural and material poverty of so many people in the world affected by those intent on global modernisation.

9 see Mair, Stefan, 2008, 'The Need to Focus on Failing States' in
Failed States, Vol. 29 (4) - Winter Issue  for a balanced discussion of the nature of failed states and reality of their threat to 'international security'.

10 Nation-states in Western Europe emerged during the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Their forms of organisation and interaction however were not invented overnight. They were forged in more than a 1000 years of European history. ‘Nation’ was a term which originally referred to administrative regions of the Medieval Western-Orthodox Church, based in Rome but governing western Europe through a bureaucratic organisation controlled by regional ecclesiastical administrators. The representatives of those regions in Rome lived in a set of enclaves known as ‘nations’. As Thomas Dandelet (1997) has explained, ‘it was in medieval Rome that the numerous local identities of Europe were commonly grouped under the five major "nations" of France, England, Spain, Italy, and Germany’. A rag-bag of regions not included in those named was referred to as the ‘Netherlands’ (the lands beyond the recognised regions). Peoples who lived in these regions not only thought of themselves as members of their local communities but also knew the name of the administrative region of the Church within which they lived. And, almost inevitably, over a thousand years, political aspirations of rulers in western Europe (who were, on their accession to power, annointed to their positions by regional ecclesiatical administrators) became identified with the regions and with the names they bore. By the 18^th century everyone in western Europe knew the name of the region within which they lived and identified themselves in some way as belonging to the region that bore that name. So, national identity (that is, nationalism) preceded the establishment of nation-states.

In stark contrast, the names and identities of Third World nations were, in large measure, inventions of the past 100 years of colonial rule, through which colonial powers identified regions they controlled. The colonised peoples identified the names and the administrative organisations through which they were controlled as ‘foreign’ colonial impositions. Yet, over the past sixty years, Western nations have insisted that people living in those artificially contrived nation-states would, with little difficulty, identify themselves with, and commit themselves to the nations within which they lived.

 A brief selection of relevant texts includes: Gellner (1994); Goddard, Liobera & Shore (1994); Hobsbawm (1990); Kedourie (1993); and Norbu (1992).

11 See Herbert Spencer (1968 [1840], pp. 49-65, 1857) for a succinct nineteenth-century 'theoretical' statement of this principle for the social sciences:

... the series of changes gone through during the development of a seed into a tree, or an ovum into an animal, constitute an advance from homogeneity of structure to heterogeneity of structure. In its primary stage, every germ consists of a substance that is uniform throughout, both in texture and chemical composition. The first step is the appearance of a difference between two parts of this substance; or, as the phenomenon is called in physiological language, a differentiation. Each of these differentiated divisions presently begins itself to exhibit some contrast of parts: and by and by these secondary differentiations become as definite as the original one. This process is continuously repeated—is simultaneously going on in all parts of the growing embryo; and by endless such differentiations there is finally produced that complex combination of tissues and organs constituting the adult animal or plant. This is the history of all organisms whatever. It is settled beyond dispute that organic progress consists in a change from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous.
Now, we propose in the first place to show, that this law of organic progress is the law of all progress. Whether it be in the development of the Earth, in the development of Life upon its surface, in the development of Society, of Government, of Manufactures, of Commerce, of Language, Literature, Science, Art, this same evolution of the simple into the complex, through successive differentiations, holds throughout. From the earliest traceable cosmical changes down to the latest results of civilization, we shall find that the transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous, is that in which progress essentially consists.
(Spencer 1857, p.10)

This belief, of course, still holds in many 'evolutionary' theoretical constructs of the present.

12 England experienced its revolution in the second half of the seventeenth century; France in the late-eighteenth century; Germany in the mid-nineteenth century; and other Western European nation-states experienced similar revolutions during the same period.

13 Those who identified with each other as belonging to the same nation were usually those who had reason to travel or to associate with others who travelled. In Western Europe there was a strong sense of unity amongst merchants, traders, landed gentry, and educated people which resulted, in Britain as elsewhere, in a revolution of these 'middle sorts' (Manning 1976) against feudally-based aristocracies and governments. Through such revolution, in which, very usually, these 'middle sorts' managed to obtain the commitment of peasant and labouring people, they established new forms of government which reflected and enhanced their particular interests (see History of the Emergence of Capitalism), .

14   see Crick 1997 for further discussion of colonial practices and influences.

15 Such pressures have not lessened in the post-Cold War years. The following is a brief excerpt from a much longer and more detailed commitment by all the nations of the world to 'human rights' and 'social development' on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the United Nations (UN 1995):

We heads of State and Government are committed to a political, economic, ethical and spiritual vision for social development that is based on human dignity, human rights, equality, respect, peace, democracy, mutual responsibility and cooperation, and full respect for the various religious and ethical values and cultural backgrounds of people. Accordingly, we will give the highest priority in national, regional and international policies and actions to the promotion of social progress, justice and the betterment of the human condition, based on full participation by all.

The resolutions of the World Summit for Social Development list, in detail, the concerns of First World governments during the 1990s, transferred onto the rest of the world as the concerns of all nations.

16 Including: United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF); Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO); United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR); World Health Organisation (WHO); United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO); International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO); United Nations Development Program (UNDP); United Nations Environment Program (UNEP); United Nations Centre for Human Rights (UNCHR); World Food Program (WFP); International Labour Organisation (ILO); International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); International Maritime Organisation (IMO); International Telecommunications Union (ITU); International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (The World Bank); International Monetary Fund (IMF); United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD); United Nations Population Fund (UNPFA); and United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA).

17 With the demise of the Soviet Union, the wars and rebellions of the Third World continued. However, they were no longer cast in the ideological frames of capitalism and communism, so the perception was that in the 1990s the world became increasingly Balkanised and 'ethnicised'. In fact, of course, this process began with the breakdown of empires-it was simply mis-diagnosed and warped to international interests in the era of Cold War politics.

In 1996, serious internal fighting continued within more than thirty postcolonial countries, including Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Burundi, Cameroon, Chad, Colombia, Guatemala, Iraq, Kashmir, Lebanon, Liberia, Myanmar, Philippines, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sudan and many others.

In 2009, with the same tensions and confrontations now claimed to be part of the 'war on terror' by Western countries, serious conflict continues in many non-Western countries including Algeria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Chad, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Georgia, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Mali, Mauritania, Nepal, Niger, Oman, Pakistan, Philippines, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Yemen,Colombia, Sudan, Afghanistan, and many other countries around the world.

18 As Nef says (1991, p. 13):

... development-along neo-Keynesian and social democratic lines was perceived as an explicit antidote to Soviet-type regimes. This fundamental 'orthodoxy' which conceived development as an alternative to revolution affected most of the subsequent development aid schemes, whether multilateral or bilateral. The Colombo Plan, President Truman's Point Four, or later the UN First Development Decade, were imbued with a reformist, missionary zeal.

19 In comparison with the literature on 'Third World development', writings on the involvement of the 'superpowers' in fomenting and sustaining Third World conflict in the post-Second World War period are sparse. A selection of them includes: Renner (1994); Chubin (1991); Economist (1994); Elguea (1990); Gareau (1994); Kick & Kiefer (1987); Makhijani (1992); Neuman (1994); Penny (1992); De Roux & Chelala (1993); and Nelson, Taylor & Kruger (1983).

20 Anene (1970) described how African colonial territories were determined:

In the successive phases of the European partitioning of Africa, the lines demarcating spheres of interest were often haphazard and precipitately arranged. The European agents and diplomats were primarily interested in grabbing as much African territory as possible, and were not unduly concerned about the consequences of disrupting ethnic groups and undermining the indigenous political order... The manner in which these boundaries were made was often a subject for after-dinner jokes among European statesmen.
(Anene 1970, p. 3)

21 A brief selection of texts which address these issues is: Anderson (1991); Arnason (1990); Brass (1991); Cohen (1991); Cole, Clay & Hill (1990); Eriksen (1993); Featherstone (1990); Feinberg (1990); Gellner (1983); Hassall (1991); Held & McGrew (1993); Ihonvbere (1994); James (1994); Lee (1990); Olwig (1993); Parker, Russo, Sommer & Yaeger (1992); Schiller, Basch & Szanton (1992); and Wijeyewardene (1990).

22 Many researchers have consciously set out to identify 'classes' in Third World nations, and a variety of studies have sought the emergence of the kinds of classes identified in Western nations. Many more have simply assumed the relevance of 'class' to the examination of Third World communities. However,  (see History of the Emergence of Capitalism, pp. 94ff.), classes in Western nations are a consequence of particular historical experiences which have not been repeated in these non-Western countries. One needs to be very cautious in applying the concept of 'class' to non-Western communities.

23 Where such parties existed they usually symbolised the struggle for independence and received their legitimacy from that recognition, not from their representation of the interests of particular 'classes' or espousal of a particular ideology.

24 This has proved a problem for many new nations. Indonesia, attempting to do what Murtala Mohammed  (1976, pp. 12-15) claimed was not possible, has tried to deal with the problem by spelling out a single ideology to which all political parties must adhere. The Government's aim is to have all Indonesians commit themselves to these ideals and accept them as fundamental to all public and political life. It has described its philosophy in the following way:

Pancasila Democracy is a system of life for the state and society on the basis of people's sovereignty. It is inspired by the noble values of the Indonesian nation. Pancasila itself, which means the five principles, is the name given to the foundation of the Indonesian Republic. The five principles of Pancasila are Belief in the One and Only God; A Just and civilised humanity; the Unity of Indonesia; Democracy guided by the inner wisdom of deliberations of representatives; and Social Justice for all the Indonesian people.
(Soetjipto et al. (1995))

25 Which usually came from First or Second World sources, based on those, not indigenous, conceptualisations of the world (see History of the Emergence of Capitalism).

26 The issue of corruption relates, of course, not only to pressures placed on government departments and personnel to favour particular regions and politicians, but also to the personalisation of government. Western democratic government emphasises impersonal and impartial bureaucratic delivery of government services and administration of expenditure. In most patron-client orientated communities such impartial and impersonal administration is considered distinctly odd. Government is inevitably personalised and Western commentators inevitably view that personalisation as corruption.

27 The following snippets from discussions reported by the on-line service of Kompas (Kompas 1996), one the largest circulation newspapers in Indonesia, provides some insight into the actual relationships between the armed forces, Golkar (the ruling party) and the other two parties under Suharto's rule. Key terms and acronyms to understand the following excerpts are:

ABRI: Indonesian armed forces

Golkar: ruling party in Indonesia

KIPP: The Independent Election Monitoring Committee (suggested by PDI and PPP as a replacement for Panwaslak)

OPP: The three General Elections Participants Organisation (PPP, PDI, Golkar)

Panwaslak: The Election Monitoring Committee

PDI: The Indonesian Democratic Party

PPP: The United Development Party.

Chief of Staff of the Army General Hartono said it was clear that each member of the armed forces (ABRI) was a Golkar cadre and therefore persistent questions broaching the issue, themselves need to be queried. Hartono conveyed his sentiments at the Sabilil Muttaqien Pesantren (Islamic school) in Magetan, East Java on Thursday (14/3 [1996]) ...

In a meeting with Golkar officials in the Matesih Square, Central Java, Hartono said ABRI exists behind Golkar. Historically ABRI has never been separate from Golkar. Every ABRI member is a Golkar cadre and therefore there is no need for them to be dubious about stating their allegiance to Golkar (Kompas, 14/3 [1996]) ...

Hassan explained, it is not true that the existence of KIPP is the expression of all Indonesians. Golkar with 35 million card-holding members and its 1.5 million cadres can actually be called as the voice of the majority. 'So the refusal of KIPP is actually the majority desire. But Golkar does not claim that the people refuses KIPP, Golkar alone is enough to refuse KIPP,' he said. Regarding to the Initiative Rights Bill on the Amendment of the General Elections Law proposed by United Development Party Faction in the House of Representatives, Hassan said, Golkar refused it not because the present Election Law brings benefit to Golkar. 'No, the Election Law brings benefit to all OPP. The law has been approved by the three General Elections Participants Organisation (OPP), so if there should be any changes in the law, it must be on the approval from the three OPP,' he said ...

The theme for the working meeting which will be held March 26-28, 1996 is: 'Strengthening the Security Stability of Regions to ensure the Success of the 1997 General Elections'. The meeting is aimed at uniting perceptions in the effort to increase development and preparations for the upcoming elections. Besides all the governors, this meeting will be attended by the Chairpersons of the Regional House of Representatives, the First Assistant Secretaries of the Regional Government, the Heads of the Regional Social Politics Directorate, and the Heads of Regional Bureau of Governmental Affairs. Soebrata who is also the Secretary of the General Election Commission said that although governors are the Chairpersons of the Consultative Board of Golkar and the bureaucratic officials in the regions are Golkar functionaries, it does not mean that the meeting will discuss efforts to win Golkar, rather it is an effort by the governors as the Heads of the Regional Election Committee to execute the General Election successfully, safely, and orderly.

Asked why the governors' perceptions have to be unified, the Secretary General said that at present, there are many disturbing reports that disrupt the preparations of the General Election, for example, the matter of an independent election monitor al').d other matters related to the preparation of the General Election. 'Therefore the unifying of perception among government officials as the administrator of the General Election concerning the problems that arose,' he said ... Soebrata also reminded the governors as the officials in charge of the administration of the General Election in their respective region to implement their functions well while on duty, meaning that they should not mix up between their functions as the administrator of the General Election and their role as a Golkar functionary. 'I think this has been stressed enough, do not mix between the duties of an administrator of the election and Golkar functionary. While on duty as the election administrator, he should not campaign. Aside of that, please campaign,' he said. Soebrata said, until now there are no policies that forbid the governors to become campaign managers, as it was done in the 1992 General Election since the period of Minister of Home Affairs Rudini

28 The 1972 American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T)/CIA conspiracy in Chile, resulting in the overthrow of an elected but antagonistic government and the emplacement of a friendly dictatorship is one instance of such activity (see Moberg 1992). However, similar support for autocratic governments can be found throughout Central and South America, East and South-East Asia and Africa since the post-Second World War era.

29 As Rachel Stohl (2008) describes,

there have been important changes since the September 11 attacks, with the United States finessing its arms export policies to support its war on terrorism. The most significant changes have involved the lifting of sanctions, the increase of arms and military training provided to perceived anti-terrorist allies, and the development of new programs focused and based on the global anti-terrorist crusade. To understand and document this trend, the Center for Defense Information has analyzed military assistance data (using U.S. government data solely) for 25 countries 60 that have been identified by the United States as having a strategic role in the war on terrorism. These countries include those that reflect the counterterrorism priorities of the United States—17 are “frontline” states identified by the Bush administration as “countries that cooperate with the United States in the war on terrorism or face terrorist threats themselves”—and others strategically located near Afghanistan and Iraq.

60. Algeria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Chad, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Georgia, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Mali, Mauritania, Nepal, Niger, Oman, Pakistan, Philippines, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Yemen

30 See Ahene & Katz (1992); Bienen & Waterbury (1989); Gamble (1994); Jessop (1988); and Letwin (1993).

31 Many commentators seem to have accepted the rhetoric at face value, characterising the last twenty years as a remarkable period in which many formerly authoritarian Third World governments turned to democracy. Superficially, the change from authoritarian to democratic government has been very marked over the past twenty years. As an FAO report summarised: 'The United Nations reports that in 1993, elections were held in 45 countries and nearly three quarters of the world's population now live in countries with democratic and relatively pluralistic regimes' (UN 1996).

Sadly,

The results of the Economist Intelligence Unit's (EIU's) Democracy Index (full report and methodology) confirm that, following a decades-long global trend in democratisation, the spread of democracy has come to a halt. A comparison of the results for 2008 with those from the first edition of the index, which covered 2006, shows that the dominant pattern in the past two years has been stagnation.…
The Economist, October 29th 2008

Original Citation:

[Revised and updated 27 November 2009]

Geddes. B. 1997 'Third World Nations: Global demands, local political realities' in Geddes B and Crick M. (eds) Global Forces, local realities: Anthropological perspectives on change in the Third World, Deakin University Press, Geelong, pp. 11-62