Ivana - a take on Berger's article

Berger’s article about history, destiny and the fate of the Third Worldism is as its author states “an introductory article” to clarify the constraints and the appeal of Third Worldism. He covers this movement from the late 1940s to the 1990s but considers the different agenda and scope of the first and second generation patterns and characteristics. He sees its decline as a product of global political changes, namely the era of the Cold War and the contradictions emerging from the process of decolonization.
The pivotal event, according to Berger, which put the Third World ‘on the map’ was the Bandung Conference of 1955. The non-aligned nation-states wanted to bring attention to their own concerns amidst the developed countries’ race for power and political and economic domination. Leaders of the Third World countries (Nehru of India, Nasser of Egypt, Nkrumah of Ghana, Sukarno of Indonesia, among others) called for closer cultural and technological cooperation between African and Asian governments; more support for self-determination of peoples and nations; and demanded the creation of the development fund to be overseen by the UN which would assist the economies of the countries in question. Another significant historical moment, which Berger only briefly touches upon, is the emergence of China as an economic and political polar actor.
What is also interesting to note is the idealistic tone of the Third World movement. It attempted to unify ideologies (Marxism, nationalism, Pan-Arabism) and religion (e.g., Islam in Indonesia) and yet these elements were all region- or country-specific and possibly condemned the movement to its demise by never really defining it in terms of pure non-alignment and the goals that the countries set at the Bandung Conference. This is something that the author misses in his analysis of the Third Worldism. Berger also does not expand on the idea of radicalism of the second generation of the movement, nor how it truly contributed to the downfall of Third Worldism. Che Guevara was represented as the personification of “revolutionary idealism and Third Worldism” during the second-generation.
Decolonization aside, the UN’s idea of and call for the New International Economic Order (NIEO) during the 1970s was too utopian as a concept. The vagueness of the idea about the “new global structure,” which would have the power to “reorganize global markets and extract taxes at a global level and then redistribute them globally as well,” is not criticized by the author, nor does he really imply with certain effectiveness to what extent did the rise of oil-rich and anti-communist states represent the obstacle to the advancement of the Third World project. What is also interesting to note is the new wave of ‘colonialism’ emanating from the IMF and the World Bank, which in the 1980s begins to dictate the political and economic terms to the developing world, and demands privatization of their public sectors, and deregulation of their financial sectors. Maybe the most significant observation that Berger makes is the notion that the capitalist transformation of Asia undermined the Third Worldist idea. He openly proclaims that the state-centered character of the movement is also responsible for its failure, and even the idea of neo-Third Worldism seems to be “intellectually and conceptually bankrupt.” First-generation leaders had the right ideas and ideals, but it was imminent that the corruption of government’s key bureaucracies during the second period and lack of strong historical and political connectivity among these nations also played a part in the demise of Third Worldism.