Political culture and a new definition of the Third World

Abstract

To say that recent global changes have thrown Third World studies into serious confusion is an understatement. Thanks to the dizzying global changes of the 1980s and the 1990s the usual standards for categorising countries and their political systems have become hopelessly outdated and anachronistic. Neither economic nor the traditional political classifications that once so conveniently placed groups of countries in distinct categories can be applied to the contemporary globe any longer. The end of the Cold War threw into confusion more than just diplomatic alliances and ideological bedfellows; it also shattered long-held assumptions about political categories based on levels of economic industrialisation, political development, or both. As the recent flurry of scholarship on the subject attests, students and scholars of the Third World are clamouring to redefine and rediscover their field of expertise and to either rethink their long-standing presuppositions entirely or to reformulate them according to the new realities of the international arena.' Scholars have scurried to make sense of the new disorder, which, as if to deliberately add to the confusion, has at times masqueraded as a 'New World Order'. The great victor, by some accounts, has been culture, the new defining essence of national identity.2 Others have declared the triumph of the path and the death of history, with those left behind only muddling through irrelevant ideological squabbles.3 In the pages to come, I hope to demonstrate that history is not dead, nor has culture triumphed, but that what has instead emerged as the ultimate arbiter of national politics on a global scale is political culture. At first look, it would appear that a new classification of the international state system can be devised by pointing to the nature and type of relationships that may exist between various states and their societies. I myself argued for such a paradigm in a previous publication,4 although I have since become somewhat unhappy with its explanatory limitations. In the Third World, I argued, as in any other region of the globe, state-society relationships may assume any one of four types: a 'strong' state dominating a 'weak' society, resulting in praetorianism; a dysfunctional state trying to rule over an internally-torn society, with a 'multiple authority polity' being the outcome; a 'quasi-democratic' system in which the state-society gap is bridged by little more than an institutional facade of democracy; and a 'viable democracy' supported by a civil society. Missing from this equation is the pivotal role of political culture, which I have since come to see as one of the most significant-if not indeed the most significant-determining element in state-society relations. The typology laid out above does not adequately address the dilemma here earlier, namely that the First, Second and Third Worlds, especially the latter