The Third World as a Political Force

Abstract

merely taken for granted. This state of affairs, of course, resulted from what had come to be described as the tight bipolar system of international relations, with Washington and Moscow representing the dominant centers of international power. The cold war, shrewdly fabricated in the late 1940s, provided a significant psychological weapon by means of which the superpowers sought to perpetuate their ascendancy over their respective systems of international order. Yet, with the sudden emergence in the 1960s of countervailing political forces, this bipolar structure of world society was to be subjected increasingly to multilateral pressures, culminating in the present polycentric dispersal of power within the international system. Among the most critical factors which combined to undermine this bicentric management of international relations must be identified the policy of nonalignment in foreign relations, embraced by the great majority of the new states of Asia and Africa, reinforced by the historic colonial movements for self-determination, and the successive waves of nationalist self-assertiveness