The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World

"This is one of my favourite books. Vijay is a prolific leftist author and has formed an institute called the Tricontinental Institute , which is really important. But this is, for me, the most important book that manages to grasp so many aspects of that moment of ‘coming to subjectivity’ of what we would now call the Global South, but what we called the Third World. It starts with a one liner which says: ‘The Third World was not a place. It was a project.’ And that’s what the book seeks to demonstrate. It goes through moments of the awakening and the subjugation of the Third World. Belgrade is just one short chapter in there and the Non-Aligned Movement is only one short piece in it, but it gives you a beautiful overview of the complexities of that moment of optimism in the Global South. And what Vijay does brilliantly is trace the two contradictions, one internal and one external. The internal contradiction is that you have the moment of de-colonial state making, which is always about the popular rebellions of workers and peasants, and social movements, but also the local bourgeoisie, local elites and tribal leaders. And of course, you got compromises. And those compromises allowed for the possibility of independence, but they created difficulties for what kind of economic and social and political system you would have afterwards. The second contradiction is not a so much a contradiction as a problem—structural inequality. The world was run by hegemons, including the United States. And in a sense, the moment there are claims from the Global South, you get the rise of the World Bank, the rise of the International Monetary Fund, and the rise of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which is much more neoliberal. And so you get absolutely new neo-colonial forms. The book is absolutely brilliant in terms of covering class, race and gender. The book beautifully looks at the gender, race and class dimensions of the decolonisation struggle. It’s really good and it’s beautifully written. You don’t have to be a scholar to read it. And there is a new edition coming out to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of its first publication. He argues—and I think he slightly overstates the case—that the Non-Aligned Movement was much more important rhetorically than practically. I think that is a plausible narrative. You see over time a great explosion in the volume of communications. At the first meeting in Belgrade, there was a 10-page statement. By the time you get to 1973 and 1976, you have several statements running to 40 or 50 pages. But I know that Vijay has actually changed his mind. I think his view is that the Non-Aligned Movement was much more important than he gave it credit for then in that book. What he does in the book is argue, quite rightly, that the Partisan struggle in Yugoslavia during the Second World War was actually crucial to why Tito was so accepted by the leaders of the Global South. It may not have been a de-colonial struggle, but it was certainly anti-Fascist, and it was certainly anti-imperialist. And that Tito talked the talk that this was self-determination and standing up to the Soviet Union, was incredibly important."