1963-1975
MICHAEL E. LATHAM
In 1958, only one year after his country gained independence fTom Britain, the Ghanaian prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah, delivered a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. In addition to a resolute antiimperialism, he emphasized that two related imperatives would play a crucial role in shaping the orientation of Africa toward the wider world. First, the tremendous "industrial and military power concentrated behind the two great powers in the Cold War" demanded that the new states of Africa pursue a policy of non-alignment. In Africa, Nkrumah insisted, "the opportunities of health and education and a wider vision which other nations take for granted are barely within reach of our people." To preserve their impoverished continent from devastating violence, African nations would have to remain apart from the Cold War’s military alliances, rivalries, and strife. Second, Africa would have to seek dramatically accelerated development. Colonial overlords had failed to deliver promised advances, but "now comes our response. We cannot tell our peoples that material benefits and growth and modern progress are not for them. If we do, they will throw us out and seek other leaders who promise more. And they will abandon us, too, if we do not in reasonable measure respond to their hopes. We have modernize."365
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the goals of non-alignment and rapid development shaped the ambitions of a wide range of postcolonial leaders. From the Asian-AfTican Conference at Bandung (1955) through the Non-Aligned Conferences at Belgrade (1961) and Cairo (1964), figures like Indonesia’s Ahmed Sukarno, India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, Algeria’s Ahmed Ben Bella, and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser articulated a shared vision of anti-imperialism, disarmament, accelerated development, expanded trade, and economic cooperation among those emerging from colonial domination. Above all, they
Rejected the ideological rigidity of the Cold War and insisted on the right to define freely their own paths to progress in a world of different social systems. As the official declaration from the Belgrade conference put it, "aware that ideological differences are necessarily a part of the growth of the human society, the participating countries consider that peoples and governments shall refrain from any use of ideologies for the purpose of waging cold war, exercising pressure, or imposing their will.”366
That hope, however, would go unrealized. For the United States, the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Cold War was a fundamentally ideological conflict, a struggle over the direction of global history and the definition of modernity itself. At the very same moment that the first generation of postcolonial leaders articulated their ambitions for non-aligned, self-determined development, each of the Cold War’s main adversaries approached the phenomenon of decolonization through hegemonic, univer-salistic models of social change. In that context, Third World elites made a variety of difficult choices. Some, attracted to the Soviet Union’s impressive record of industrialization and eager to centralize their authority in strong state and party structures, sought ties to Moscow. Others gravitated toward the vastly superior economic resources and development funds offered by the United States and international financial bodies. A final group ofstates, wary of the military alliances that were often linked to development aid, drew selectively from the different camps, played the superpowers off against each other, and tried to maintain an independent course. In the ideologies through which American, Soviet, and Chinese policymakers interpreted the world, decolonization expanded the scope of the Cold War and created new fields in which the struggle over the acceleration and destination of global change would be fought. In the upheavals ofThird World revolution, each ofthe major powers came to perceive crucial test cases in which liberal capitalism and diverse forms of state socialism would engage in a contest of universal and lasting significance. As a result, places like Cuba, Vietnam, Indonesia, Congo, and Angola all became points of intense Cold War conflict.
Cold War interventions in the Third World would also become more lethal over time. In the early 1960s, the major Cold War adversaries approached the postcolonial world with striking ambitions. Despite the obvious differences in their objectives, US, Soviet, and Chinese policymakers all believed that decolonization provided them with a moment of profound opportunity, a window in which they might draw on their own historical experience to identify the crucial levers of social change and transform the future of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. By the mid-1960s, however, their expectations became increasingly frustrated. The Third World, they learned, was not nearly as malleable as they had anticipated. American policymakers found themselves unable to promote a modernizing turn to liberal, democratic capitalism in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Soviet leaders faced growing tensions with Cuba and watched in dismay as governments they supported in Southeast Asia and Africa were overthrown. Chinese policymakers, finally, witnessed diplomatic reversals in Africa and the erosion of their relationship with North Vietnam.
The result, by the late 1960s, was a reorientation in Soviet, American, and Chinese policies that only amplified the ideological polarization of the Third World. As the first postcolonial governments were replaced by repressive military dictatorships or radical Marxist regimes, the space for nationalist elites to pursue viable, non-aligned development diminished. By the middle of the decade, US policymakers increasingly shifted from approaches stressing modernization and accelerated development to a greater reliance on direct coercion and military force. The Soviet Union also turned from a pluralistic embrace of anticolonial movements toward a more rigid insistence on Marxist-Leninist party-building. China, meanwhile, emerged from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution willing to support nearly any cause in the campaign against its Soviet rival. By the late 1960s, superpower-supported violence escalated dramatically. The struggle to determine the course of the Third World helped destroy the foundations for detente, but the greatest damage was done by its contribution to a tragic pattern of expanded militarization, civil war, and human suffering across some of the poorest regions of the globe.
World History
