Toward a Pan-third worldism: A challenge to the association of third world studies

INTRODUCTION

The global arena has always been a muddled and combative landscape. And since the beginnings of our global community, the battle lines have been indiscriminately multiplying into the intersecting web of the strife we have today. Indeed, from the debates sparked by the establishment of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, that came to symbolize the founding of modern states and the ill-fated League of Nations founded in 1919, to the framing of the United Nations in 1945, and now to our current debate over the issue of globalization, the world has been divided by interests and convictions. Within our vessels, passions swell, making heads throb, vision hazy, and reason confounded. Swept in the current of antagonism, minds have conspired, tongues have cut, and hands have maimed for the sake of principles and grievances.

The global system is suppose to harness antagonism and conflict, much like an efficient engine harnesses violent explosions into work. Evidently, there is plenty of conflict and antagonism to go around. In fact the grievances held by Africans, Asians, Europeans, Central Americans, North Americans, South Americans, and Oceanians, women, men, and rich and poor, however ancient and some unsubstantiated, define our relationships to one another. What is "African" without hundreds of years of European oppression, repression, depression, and suppression? What is "poor" without the apathy, revile and elitism of the rich? Each group owes its position and essence to the indifference and indulgences of its antagonist.

The global system does much to harness our penchant for antagonism and competition into trillions of dollars of wealth. But economic success notwithstanding for many of the major powers, the by-products of these powers' economic engines are too disturbing and dangerous to ignore. The global system seems to literally swallow up vast social contradictions and even class antagonisms with the actual or aspirant's possession of material wealth. At the root of our problem is the fact that the fragile sense of association we do possess for one another has self-interest as its antecedent. The basis of our social organization and our great civilization is self-interest, where the means available to each citizen of the world is inadequate to the task of obtaining optimum self-interest. To ensure social harmony, the inference to be taken from this truth is that we should strive to need one another. But many of us would rather downplay our interdependence on one another's talents, energy, and creativity, and rather incite the volatile embers of our varied perspectives.

History has repeatedly shown that we would rather not allow our interdependence to breach our various distinctions and bind us together as a human family. Rather than acknowledge our interdependencies, some of us have opted to coerce others into thankless submission. Not too long ago, enslaved Africans and later colonized peoples worked tirelessly to sow and harvest the bounty of the earth for slave masters and colonialists in various parts of the world. From the needs and wants of slave owners and colonialists, supported by compelling laws, taboos, beliefs, and religions, a socio-economic system evolved out of antagonism and oppression rather than out of a sense that people need one another.

It is only natural that a deep chasm has emerged between us, spawned by our inability to deal with one another as indispensable pieces of an organic whole. Flowing between the precipices of this chasm is a river of grievances. Perhaps not inherently powerful, but the furious tremors of fiery rhetoric and cruel denials have transformed our grievances into rushing rapids. Now a violent current drags us kicking and screaming toward a great fall.

Unable to assess the failures of our ethnic and ideological antagonism, liberals, conservatives, and radicals of every dimension and quality have forced even the most peaceable and disinterested of the human family to take sides. Dismayed at the sheer scope and intensity of the battles erupting everywhere, even the most reasonable and composed persons find that there is no neutral ground upon which to stand. Even the doctors, the jurists and the priests among us must take sides, as every citizen is coerced and conscripted into participating in one conflict or another.

Thus, since the Association of Third World Studies (ATWS) has never been timid about assessing new thoughts dealing with our global relationships, what I offer here is a challenge for us to be engaged in shaping what I refer to as a Pan-Thirdworldism. This will entail the following two things: (1) a broader definition of the Third World and (2) the tasks of a Pan-Third World movement. These suggestions are not directed at the discovery of any global panacea. I present them in complete modesty. May my observations serve then, at best, as a starting point.

A BROADER DEFINITION OF THE THIRD WORLD

As our ATWS colleague, Professor Mario Fenyo, reminds us, at least two distinctions are in order when using the concept Third World. First, the English term "Third World" came about as a mistranslation of the French, "Ie Tiere Monde." More correctly translated, Ie tiers monde, as with Ie tiers etat of the pre-revolutionary ancien regime, refers to little people. Hence, the Third World concept refers to the "little people of the world"-which also implies that there never was such a thing as the second World, socialist or not.1