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The Third World Beyond the Cold War. Edited by Louise Fawcett and Yezid Sayigh. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 256p. $78.00.
The Cold War and the Third World are two overly written, overly studied, and undertheorized topics in the social sciences literature. This book is another attempt to theorize, and readers need to grapple with many meaty questions. Was the Cold War a turning or a punctuation point in history compared to the two world wars? What is the scholarly record in explaining and predicting the end of the Cold War and its effect on the Third World? What is the effect of state behavior in the post-Cold War Third World? What is meant by the Third World, and what has changed in it since the end of the Cold War? Was the Cold War an agent or a source of change in the Third World? Can change in the Third World be understood best by way of a top-down or a bottom-up approach? Is there a Third World beyond the Cold War? Part I of this book offers thematic assessments, and Part II provides regional analyses.
The volume makes several points, but there is no consensus among the authors. (I) The ties among the developing countries have weakened; Third World solidarity was a temporary illusion. (2) The concept of Third World identity is fragile. (3) There is no accepted definition of the Third World or about the criteria to define it (economic condition, political culture, poverty, or relations to bipolar system), but there is a reluctance to drop the term. (4) Regionalization has emerged (pp. 6-10). (5) Chapters 7-8 speak about the marginalization of Africa and South Asia. (6) Recentralization of the state is occuring in the Middle East in the context of changing local and international conditions.
Recentralization is aided by the fact that "greater reliance on international capital...