Development In Third World Countries Research Articles

The Fourth World War

The author sees the skirmishes at the UN in which US has been engaged For quite some time now as a prelude to a real war on the world body. This he characterizes as the fourth world war in which the first salvos were fired by the US representative John Scali on 6 December, 1974. The conflict has an economic dimension: The US is dead set against a new economic order, which the poor countries are clamoring for, because it would necessitate the scaling down of its reckless overconsumption; it is dead set, too, against allocating 1% of its GNP (which is one-third of what it spent on the Vietnam war) to the development of Third World countries. The conflict has also an ethnic dimension, both direct and indirect. Direct racial prejudice was in evidence during the discussions on South Africa and Isreal; indirect prejudice stems from the belief that the US is God's gift to the world, which leads the US to equate its own good with the good of the world. This war could be halted if US citizens created, through their movements, the kind of climate in which US courts could act on the ground that the US Constitution makes the UN Charter ‘the supreme law of the land’.

Some Questions of Noncapitalist Development

The colonial system of imperialism rapidly fell apart in the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s. It was then that the Third World actually took shape as a set of young national states liberated from the political rule of imperialism. In those years, bourgeois politicans and sociologists expressed the hope, even the confidence, that the Third World would become a reserve, a fountain of youth for capitalism. However, they underestimated the power of the contemporary revolutionary process, its depth, sweep, and diversity of forms. The mighty influence of the world socialist community on the destinies of the peoples, and the growth of the international workers' and communist movement, created the preconditions for a revolutionary change in the development of Third World countries.