The Third World

Fülszöveg

The 'World' began in the nineteenth century. For the first time one coherent pattern spread across the whole globe, as the colonial powers forced their way of life and industrial culture on the traditional societies of Africa, Asia and South America. Today the colonial empires of the world are shrinking, and the new nations which have emerged from the colonial past are rapidly developing into an important force in international affairs - the'Third World'. They are faced by a common problem: the 'urgent necessity to achieve the take-off from a peasant society to a modern industrial economy, and are united by a Common outlook: their absolute opposition to all forms of colonialism and neocolonialism. Peter Worsley analyses the unique political forms that have evolved as a result of these two basic conditions. In the 'Third World' the two great world ideologies of today are rejected - European capitalism is seen as the imperialist force which supports reactionary governments in South... Tovább

Fülszöveg

The 'World' began in the nineteenth century. For the first time one coherent pattern spread across the whole globe, as the colonial powers forced their way of life and industrial culture on the traditional societies of Africa, Asia and South America. Today the colonial empires of the world are shrinking, and the new nations which have emerged from the colonial past are rapidly developing into an important force in international affairs - the'Third World'. They are faced by a common problem: the 'urgent necessity to achieve the take-off from a peasant society to a modern industrial economy, and are united by a Common outlook: their absolute opposition to all forms of colonialism and neocolonialism. Peter Worsley analyses the unique political forms that have evolved as a result of these two basic conditions. In the 'Third World' the two great world ideologies of today are rejected - European capitalism is seen as the imperialist force which supports reactionary governments in South Africa, Viet Nam, the Middle East oil sheikhdoms and many other parts of the world, and, although the new countries are willing to learn from the communist example of industrialisation, they are too intimately aware of the hardships of their own people in recent years to countenance a repetition of the human misery of Russia in the twenties and thirties. Their own solutions are unique in world history, being based on populism and socialism and, often, the one-party state, which, although anathema to the European liberal, is a natural development where class differentiation is still largely undeveloped, and where men are united in
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Jacket design by John Curtis Vissza