The Third World in the Global 1960s ed. by Samantha Christiansen and Zachary A. Scarlett (review)

Although a vast scholarly and popular literature has dissected the social movements of the 1960s in the United States and Western Europe in the most minute detail, the dearth of work on contemporaneous protest activities in the Third World is surprising. This volume seeks to help rectify that imbalance. Editors Samantha Christiansen and Zachary A. Scarlett argue that “a truly global analysis of this decade is impossible without an in-depth and prolonged conversation about the Third World” (p. 16). The idea of the Third World and especially some of its iconic revolutionary figures appealed powerfully to many activists in the West. Nonetheless, the Third World as it really was “remains terra incognita in the scholarship on the 1960s” (p. 2).

The Third World in the Global 1960s contains a diverse array of case studies of Asian, African, and Latin American social movements. The cases range from China, India, Brazil, Rhodesia, and South Africa to Jamaica, Zaire, Mexico, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The book is structured thematically. A first section considers the idea of the Third World and its historical evolution, emphasizing the ways in which the Third World served as a global imaginary: one of seemingly limitless revolutionary potential that proved deeply inspirational to radical actors in the West. The second section explores the impact of 1960s activism on several ongoing movements for reform and social change. In Brazil, for example, a long-standing student movement for educational reform gained renewed life in the social ferment of the 1960s; and in Jamaica and South Africa the black power phase of the African-American freedom struggle imparted fresh vigor to ongoing struggles against racial inequality in those countries. A final section examines four cases of student movements that challenged the postcolonial, postrevolutionary state apparatus, charging it with a conservative, complacent defense of the status quo.

The very concept of the Third World, several of the essays in this collection make clear, proved to be highly malleable. To Chinese Red Guards in the grip of the Cultural Revolution, China’s militant anti-imperialism made it a model and inspiration for the peoples of the developing countries. To help validate their own “revolutionary grandiosity,” Scarlett contends, “the Red Guards needed to construct a Third World whose revolutionary mission was nearly identical to the Cultural Revolution” (p. 51). The result was a presumed solidarity that only partly masked a deep paternalism. In a particularly insightful contribution, Konrad J. Kuhn shows how two key African developments of the late 1960s—the Nigerian civil war that brought untold suffering to Biafrans and the inception of a gigantic hydroelectric dam in Portuguese Mozambique—triggered broad-based responses in the West. Each event, in its own distinctive way, became an early Third World cause célèbre, stimulating Western sympathy for Africa and helping to construct the image of a Third World reliant on Western aid and support. The transnational mobilization of protest groups, human rights activists, and aid donors prompted by these events set an important precedent that shaped future developments.

Other themes that run through many of the volume’s essays include the essential continuity that marked key movements for political and social change across the postwar decades and the influence of local and national forces—as opposed to global ones—on protesting groups. In the latter category, the Mexican student rebellion of 1968 is a telling case in point. Julia Sloan points out that although Mexican student activists were “unquestionably influenced by the global tumult of the 1960s,” the ideology of protest was “almost wholly national” (pp. 171–172). The impetus for the student movement that turned tragically violent in 1968 derived from a struggle over the meaning of Mexico’s institutionalized revolution—a purely homegrown phenomenon, albeit one that waxed more intense in the turbulent climate of the 1960s.

There is a noteworthy absence in this collection. The Cold War only rarely makes an appearance in these pages...