The
Third World ascended like a sky-rocket—and fell like the proverbial
stick. [1] Invented
by Alfred Sauvy in 1952, in an article in L’Observateur entitled
‘Three Worlds, One Planet’, the termtiers
monde became
central to the discourse of the European left (including this
journal) by the 1960s. While the long post-war boom seemed to have
taken the fight out of the metropolitan working class, revolutions
from China to Cuba, and national liberation struggles from Algeria to
Vietnam, inspired a new generation. Hồ Chí Minh and Che Guevara
became heroes, and the writings of Frantz Fanon and Régis Debray
were eagerly studied. Yet by the end of the seventies the news from
Pol Pot’s Cambodia had crushed the illusions of the sixties
generation; the advances of globalization seemed to make the very
notion of a ‘Third World’ obsolete. Today the term is considered
outdated and derogatory.
Nowhere did
Third Worldism take on such dramatic form as in France, which from
1946 to 1962 was in a nearly permanent state of colonial war, in
Indochina and then in Algeria. After 1962 it took three decades
before the full horrific truth could be faced; only in 1999 was it
officially acknowledged that there had been a ‘war’ in Algeria.
That France is still haunted by its colonial past is shown by such
films as Alain Tasma’s Nuit noire (2005) and
Rachid Bouchareb’s Hors-la-loi(2010), and novels like
Jérôme Ferrari’s Where I Left My Soul (2010).
Perhaps the most vivid depiction comes in Alexis Jenni’s 2011
Goncourt-winning novel L’art français de la guerre,
which traces the odyssey of a single soldier from the Resistance,
through Indochina and Algeria, to the violent banlieue of
Lyon. There is a huge literature on the subject, but one of the most
comprehensive and dispassionate treatments of the impact of Third
Worldism on the French left intelligentsia has come from Germany, a
nation that never suffered the trauma of decolonization. Christoph
Kalter’s carefully researched study (with a bibliography of over
nine hundred books and articles) Die Entdeckung der Dritten
Welt offers a detailed account of how ideas of the Third
World developed on the French left, in the process remaking it.
Kalter traces
the theories and debates that inspired and challenged the left in
France from the 1950s to the 1970s, in successive discussions of the
emergence and fortunes of the category of ‘the Third World’; the
respective orientations of the main forces on the French left in the
last years of French colonialism and the rise of a ‘radical new
left’; the role of ‘the politics of memory’ with its rhetoric
of ‘fascism’ and ‘resistance’; the special role of the
Maspero publishing house and in particular its journal, Partisans;
and the formation of the United Socialist Party (PSU) and the
associated centre for the study of the Third World, CEDETIM. A
concluding chapter elicits the main problems that faced the left in
this period, or that were posed by it, above all the range and
character of revolution in the later twentieth century. Kalter has
written a ‘history of ideas’, but a resolutely materialist one.
Ideas about the Third World took shape inside the skulls of women and
men who were trying to unite theory and practice, sometimes at
considerable personal risk, as with those who ‘carried suitcases’
for the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). While individuals
like Sartre and Fanon are well known, their writings and actions only
achieve full significance when placed in the context of hundreds of
other lesser-known (now often forgotten) thinkers and activists.
Kalter restores some of these individuals to the historical record.
It was a time
of collective action. Individuals were involved in rallies,
demonstrations, conferences, research centres; they joined
the groupuscules of the far left or mainstream
political parties. For ideas to circulate they had to be published;
Kalter gives considerable attention to the mechanisms of publication.
He looks in detail at the political and financial constraints on
publishing, and notably at the difficulties faced by publishing
houses and bookshops during the Algerian war, when they faced both
state censorship and physical attacks from right-wing elements. At
the same time, he links the history of the French left to the wider
history of decolonization and of political and cultural
globalization. In this way, Kalter has produced a genuinely
materialist history, in which ideas are not lost or submerged in
anecdotal details, but are given their true significance by being
placed in historical and material context. His book bears comparison
with the best works in the genre, for example Alan Wald’s The
New York Intellectuals, and makes a welcome change from the
approach of historians such as Tony Judt, who seem much more
concerned to condemn the French left than to understand its
complexities.
France’s
reluctant, blood-stained retreat from an Empire second in size only
to the British marked a whole historical period running from the
mid-fifties to the election of Mitterrand in 1981. Kalter compares
the significance of the ‘discovery’ of the Third World,
the Entdeckung forced on Europe by the
national-liberation struggles of the time, to the discovery of
America five hundred years earlier: both forced Europe to reassess
its place in the world. Decolonization had a major effect on the
French left, and is one of the factors that explains the social
explosion of 1968—some of the leading activists of 1968 had
originally been radicalized by activity in solidarity with the
Algerian liberation struggle. Kalter rejects the so-called
‘minimal-impact thesis’ argued by historian Charles-Robert
Ageron, which claims that most French people were uninformed about
and indifferent to the Third World. French perceptions of it
developed in an international context. The American war in Vietnam
was of great importance; the Tet offensive of 1968, which showed just
how vulnerable the world’s greatest military power was, raised
expectations; demonstrations in support of the Vietnamese fed
directly into the 1968 student insurrection. So too did the
widespread image of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the fact of
the continuing Cold War. The Third World seemed to offer an
alternative to both Western imperialism and the Second World of
‘actually existing socialism’.
If Sauvy’s
term ‘Third World’ gained instant popularity, what it actually
meant was rather less clear. It implied an analogy with the ‘Third
Estate’ of the French Revolution, and hence, for the French
republican tradition, acquired connotations of ‘a heroic struggle
for liberty, equality and fraternity’. Growing awareness of Third
World poverty called into question the myth of France’s ‘civilizing
mission’ in its colonial territories. The idea acquired differing
meanings in different contexts. On the one hand were the varying
theories of economists and sociologists; on the other there were
activists, from Catholics to Maoists, trying to integrate the idea
into their political practice. For some there was the idea of the
so-called ‘developing countries’—societies that were still
steeped in poverty, but which, with hard work, could eventually catch
up with their richer neighbours. Others held the view that
‘underdevelopment’ was a product of global capitalism, and that
the underdeveloped countries would remain underdeveloped as long as
global capitalism survived. Thus, much of the debate about the Third
World consisted of trying to establish exactly what the term meant.
However, by
the 1980s the concept was becoming increasingly problematic. Some of
the more naive illusions about the Third World’s potential for
spearheading world revolution had perished as a result of
developments in China and Indochina. The Third World was becoming
increasingly diversified, with Asian tigers leaping ahead while other
zones stagnated. Today the image of the Third World is on the one
hand poverty and need, on the other the danger of terrorism. At the
same time, the notion of globalization was becoming ever more
prominent; and for theorists of this phenomenon there was only one
world—the Third World was neither the problem nor the solution. If
Third Worldism had undermined a Eurocentric view of the planet, a
concept of globalization was able to both integrate and replace its
insights. As Kalter notes, the French left’s concern with the Third
World contained much that was positive, but there had also been a
sentimental, psychological aspect, rooted in feelings of guilt and
even European self-hatred. As he puts it: ‘Together with the Third
World as a place of utopia, the activists also buried the
self-deceptions that had allowed them to overlook social
inequalities, oppression and war in those non-European countries they
had admired as an alternative model of society.’
Yet despite
the problematic and contradictory nature of the concept, Third
Worldism was undoubtedly a substantial force within the French left
between 1944 and 1968. At Liberation, France had not one but two mass
parties of the working class, the Socialists (SFIO) and the
Communists (PCF). As far as the colonial question was concerned,
the SFIO was tainted from the very outset. Its thinking was
deeply influenced by the republican tradition and notably by the idea
of laïcité, or secularism, which to the present day is
exploited to legitimate Islamophobia. As Kalter rightly points out,
French imperialism was a project not of the right but of the
republican left. (Jules Ferry, pioneer of secular education in the
Third Republic, was one of the Empire’s founding fathers.) It was
under SFIO leader Mollet’s premiership that the Algerian
war escalated, with the increasingly systematic use of torture and
execution without trial. The PCF, founded in 1920, had a far
superior tradition. The Communist International required its
affiliates to support ‘every liberation movement in the colonies
not only in words but in deeds’. Among early members of
the PCF were Hồ Chí Minh (who edited the journal Le
Paria) and Messali Hadj, pioneer of Algerian nationalism; the
seeds of both the Indochinese and the Algerian wars were sown in
Paris. Unfortunately, in the post-war period the PCF did
not live up to its traditions: in 1956 the party’s deputies voted
in support of the Mollet government’s ‘special powers’ for the
Algerian situation.
Outside the
two mass parties were a number of small groupings and journals trying
to find a path independent of both social-democratic reformism and
Stalinism. These included anarchists, Trotskyists, left Catholics and
other currents such as the network around Sartre’s journal Les
Temps modernes (and from 1963 onwards, Maoists as well). The
later fifties then saw the emergence of a radical new left in France,
in response to the triple crisis of Suez, Hungary and Algeria. This
was a heterogeneous milieu, with no clearly defined unifying line or
doctrine, grouped around a number of publications. But it attracted
those opposed to the Algerian war, and support for Third World
struggles was a common theme. It was this new left milieu that
produced most of the writers and activists who made substantial
contributions to the discovery of the Third World. At the same time,
the events of 1968 recharged its impetus, and many of the newly
radicalized students and lycéens undoubtedly found
inspiration in Third World struggles, especially the Chinese Cultural
Revolution, the Cuban Revolution and the war in Vietnam. (As Kalter
notes, the events of May–June, culminating in a general strike
involving ten million workers, revived the belief of many leftists in
‘the historical mission of the working class’, which had been
denied in Third-Worldist rhetoric.)
Several
factors contributed to French Third Worldism. One was what has been
called the ‘politics of memory’. A whole generation had been
marked by the experience of the German Occupation from 1940 to 1944.
Many of those who took an active part in opposing the colonial wars
in Indochina and Algeria had themselves been involved in the
anti-Nazi Resistance, or had vivid family memories. The left-wing
publisher François Maspero’s older brother was shot by the
Germans, his father died in Buchenwald and his mother survived
Ravensbrück. So a small minority of activists came to the bitter
realization that France’s occupation of its colonies was directly
comparable to what the German occupiers had done to France. There was
a grim symbolism in the fact that on 8 May 1945, the day of the
Allied victory in Europe, events in Sétif led to a massacre of at
least 15,000 Algerians. One small leftist paper—Ohé
Partisans—described Sétif as an Algerian Oradour-sur-Glane
(the French village where Nazis murdered over 600 people in 1944).
Over the following years such comparisons were to become commonplace.
In 1950 the Martiniquan poet Aimé Césaire published his Discourse
on Colonialism, arguing that Nazism was not an aberration but the
logical consequence of Western civilization. Even before the Algerian
war broke out, journalist Claude Bourdet (a survivor of German
concentration camps) pointedly inquired whether there was a Gestapo
in Algeria. At the time of the siege of Điện Biên Phủ in 1954,
which put an end to the French war in Indochina, the Vietnamese (on
the advice of a French soldier who had gone over) played the famous
Resistance song Le Chant des partisansover loudspeakers
to the besieged French forces.
The rhetoric
of resistance thus became an important component of French Third
Worldism. It enabled opponents of the colonial wars to discredit the
state by comparisons with Nazism. It ensured that the new left would
call for victory in Vietnam (rather than the ‘peace’ called for
by the PCF). And in the long term the argument was carried. In
1991 a poll showed that 85 per cent of French people between the ages
of seventeen and thirty (i.e. with no memory of the war period)
believed that ‘the Algerians fighting for their independence are
comparable to the French Resistance fighters of the Second World
War’. No wonder the French right attempted to compel history
teachers to stress the ‘positive values’ of colonialism. The
sense of continuity between the Resistance and active support for the
Algerian liberation struggle was very real; Francis Jeanson, who
organized the best-known solidarity network, had himself been a
member of the Resistance. Yet as Kalter points out, the left was
often guilty of oversimplification. Much of what was done in Algeria
(and indeed on the streets of Paris at the time of the massacre of
demonstrating Algerians in October 1961) was indeed comparable to the
worst Nazi atrocities. But was it legitimate to move from there to
characterizing French imperialism as ‘fascist’? Indeed, the
comparison between fascism and imperialism was usually a matter of
polemical rhetoric rather than serious theoretical analysis—and, as
Kalter points out, the left in general was contrastingly uncritical
with respect to the methods used by liberation movements.
In 1958 the
Fourth Republic collapsed, and Charles de Gaulle came to power,
imprinting his authoritarian style on the institutions of the new
Fifth Republic. But he was in no way a fascist, and those on the left
who saw him as one fundamentally misunderstood the situation. As for
the right-wing settlers and army officers who fought a lastditch
murderous struggle to keep Algeria French, they may have been
fascistminded, but they had no chance of success, however much
destruction they were able to wreak. De Gaulle represented the
interests of French capital, which had decided to evacuate Algeria.
Paradoxically the right also adopted the rhetoric of anti-fascism,
describing Algerian nationalists as the new Nazis. As Kalter points
out, this was already being argued at the time of the Muslim rising
at Sétif. The myth of ‘Islamofascism’ can be traced back to
1945.
The rhetoric
of fascism again emerged in 1968. But, as Kalter shows, in going so
far as to compare themselves to Jewish victims of the Holocaust or
Vietnamese victims of US bombing, students revealed an
element of self-deception that seems to have been an integral part of
Third Worldist politics. The ‘politics of memory’ is still very
much with us. Kalter cites a 2005 statement by the Indigènes de la
République (an anti-racist organization latterly constituted as a
party) in which they declare themselves ‘the heirs of those French
people who resisted Nazi barbarism and of all those who took the side
of the oppressed’.
For Third
Worldist ideas to spread they required material embodiment, above all
in the printed word, and Kalter draws particular attention to the
role of the publisher François Maspero. Maspero owned a small Left
Bank bookshop, La Joie de Lire, which in the 1960s was no peaceful
haven for bibliophiles: in 1961 it sheltered Algerians from attack by
a murderous Paris police force, and in 1968 it was tear-gassed for
sheltering students from those same police. Maspero also ran a
publishing house that became a mouthpiece for the Third World in
France. His publication in 1961 of Fanon’s The Wretched of
the Earth, with Sartre’s celebrated preface, was a historic
landmark. In the course of the Algerian war no fewer than thirteen
Maspero titles were banned. If the new left formed a view of the
Third World, it was from reading such authors as Mao, Guevara,
Debray, Fanon and many others, and often it would be in volumes
published by Maspero or in the journal which Maspero launched in
1961, Partisans.
Alongside
Sartre’s Les Temps modernes, Partisans was
one of the most influential journals of the sixties, helping to
develop the world-view of many of the activists who played a leading
role in 1968. It covered many areas of radical thought, from
psychoanalysis to theatre, but it was born of the struggles against
the Algerian war and gave particular attention to the Third World. It
published both French writers analysing the experience of Third World
movements and writers hitherto unknown in France who gave a voice to
the parts of the world now commonly designated by that term. Its
inspirations, in addition to the Algerian struggle, were the
(somewhat romanticized) Cuban Revolution and the Vietnamese fight for
independence, and it gave particular attention to guerrilla movements
in Latin America. Combining, as Kalter notes, the political and the
theoretical, the polemical and the emotional, the pragmatic and the
utopian, Partisans was a vital voice—but it was
also an unsteady one. Often the journal seemed to veer between a
voluntaristic optimism and a pessimism bred of earlier illusions. In
1969 it entitled an issue ‘The Vietnamese people on the eve of
victory’. But the war dragged on and disillusion set in rapidly.
The struggle had not created ‘two, three, many Vietnams’, as
Guevara had urged; it had not spread revolution from the periphery to
Europe. Imperialism had learnt how to integrate and neutralize
resistance. Partisans ceased to appear in 1972; not
long after, Maspero’s bookshop was sold, and the publishing house
changed hands in 1983.
The
anti-imperialist left required not only publications but political
organization. In 1960 the pressures of the Algerian war led to the
creation of a new party of the left—the United Socialist Party
(PSU). This brought together those who had left the SFIO because
they could not stomach Mollet’s Algerian policy, activists from the
hitherto loosely organized ‘new left’ (including left Catholics)
and a few former Communist dissidents. Opposition to the Algerian war
provided the main organizing focus. The PSU often employed
revolutionary rhetoric, and former Trotskyists like Pierre Naville
and Yvan Craipeau played a significant role in the organization. At
the same time, however, it functioned as part of the political
mainstream, contesting elections and attracting career politicians,
notably former Prime Minister Pierre Mendès-France (though the
organization had the good sense to refuse an application from
François Mitterrand). It played a significant and creditable role on
the left throughout the sixties, notably in 1968, but went into
decline in the seventies when many of its members (including future
Prime Minister Michel Rocard) left to join Mitterrand’s new
Socialist Party.
The PSU had
been quick to develop contacts with liberation movements around the
world, notably in Africa, Palestine and the Portuguese colonies. The
principal manifestation of this was the founding, in 1967, of
the CEDETIM (Centre Socialiste d’Études et de
Documentation sur le Tiers Monde), which was formally independent of
the PSU, but in practice very closely linked. TheCEDETIM aimed
to unite theory and practice and to avoid the Third-Worldist
romanticism that would lead to so much disillusion in the 1970s. It
argued for ‘cooperation’ rather than aid, and maintained that the
development of the Third World would harm world capitalism and thus
advance the cause of socialism in the West. It set up small groups in
various Third World countries, including Sihanouk’s Cambodia, with
limited success, and produced a publication calledLibération
Afrique (now refounded as an online forum). CEDETIM also
took a particular interest in immigrant workers, whom one of its
leading activists, Elisabeth Courdurier, described as ‘our Third
World which has arrived chez nous’. It supported
migrant workers’ struggles, and the PSU, wisely, argued for
workers’ unity and against separate unions for immigrant workers,
even if it was unable to resolve the conflicting claims of
universalism and particularism that now arose—persisting in France
and elsewhere into the present day.
French Third
Worldism belonged to a specific historical moment that came between
the end of the colonial empires and the beginning of globalization,
with increased travel and a worldwide media. The Third Worldists both
reflected and, in their ideas and activities, contributed to this
transition, leaving a legacy that remains today. They raised a number
of crucial questions for the left. Had the locus of revolution
shifted from the First to the Third World, or would struggles in the
non-metropolitan zones provide an inspiration and a challenge that
might revive working-class struggle in the West? Did the working
class remain the central agency of socialist revolution, or would it
be replaced by the Third World peasantry? How had imperialism changed
and what were the new mechanisms by which the Third World continued
to be exploited? There were no easy answers. As Kalter shows, the
legacy of Third Worldism was contradictory.
The Third
World was indeed a discovery; it demolished the racist myth of
Europe’s ‘civilizing mission’, and made the French left rethink
its global perspective. Those sections of the French left that remain
implicated in Islamophobia could do much worse than revisit the
internationalist thought of the 1960s and 1970s. Yet the Third World
was also a disappointment. The reasons why hopes were not fulfilled
are complex, but the romanticism of the left was an important factor.
Third Worldism had psychological as well as political roots; the
illusions indulged in go a long way towards explaining subsequent
disenchantment. For some militants, struggles in the Third World
offered what the late Tony Cliff used to refer to as ‘vicarious
pleasure’.
Kalter tells
a fascinating story. But it is not the whole account. While he gives
a balanced assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the French
Third Worldists, he omits some of those who came closest to achieving
the clarity required. In the first place, Les Temps
modernes, the journal founded by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in
1945, deserves systematic analysis rather than passing references.
Paige Arthur’s Unfinished Projects (2010) has
given us the first full treatment in English of Sartre’s writings
on decolonization, and Kalter’s book in some respects provides a
complement to it, by giving the context in which Sartre and his
circle were writing. Les Temps modernes opposed the
war in Indochina from the beginning, at a time whenPCF ministers
were still in government. In 1953 it published Daniel Guérin’s
powerful article ‘Pitié pour le Maghreb’, which foresaw the
bloody conflict to come in Algeria. Two years later, rejecting the
official fiction that the country was an integral part of France, the
journal described it as a ‘colony’ subject to ‘the most obvious
exploitation’, and came close to urging soldiers to fraternize with
the enemy. It campaigned consistently against the war, being seized
by the authorities in Algeria no fewer than four times in 1957.
Sartre
himself played a significant role in encouraging opposition to the
Algerian war, notably through his preface to Henri Alleg’s account
of torture at the hands of French paratroops and by signing the 1960
Manifesto of 121, which supported those taking direct action in
support of the Algerian liberation struggle. He worked closely with
other currents, contributing prefaces to two Maspero books. Other
members of the Temps modernes team were heavily
involved: as early as 1952, Henri Moscat and Marcel Péju wrote a
pioneering article on North African workers in France; and Francis
Jeanson, managing editor of the journal from 1951 to 1956, organized
the best-known support network for the FLN.
Kalter also
says little about some of the most percipient analyses of the
struggle against imperialism. Guérin, an intransigent
anti-imperialist over six decades, gets a few passing mentions, but
does not merit inclusion in the index. Guérin had developed links
with the movement for independence in Indochina back in the 1930s,
but in 1946 he personally challenged Hồ Chí Minh over the killing
of Trotskyist Tạ Thu Thâu by Vietnamese Communists in 1945.
Likewise, he campaigned tirelessly for Algerian independence from the
beginning of the war, but was highly critical of the fratricidal
struggle waged by the FLN against its rival, the Mouvement
National Algérien, which had substantial support among Algerian
workers in mainland France.
In 1947 Les
Temps modernes carried an article by the young philosopher
Claude Lefort on the war in Indochina, in which he deployed a
combination of existentialism and Trotsky’s theory of permanent
revolution to attack the mechanical version of Marxism that saw
history as a series of predetermined stages. He made a sharp
criticism of the Indochinese Communists for abandoning the
revolutionary opportunities available in the post-war period—and
drew a vigorous reply from the Vietnamese philosopher Trần Ðức
Thảo, who defended the policies of the Việt Minh. Lefort went on
to help form the Socialisme ou Barbarie group, a breakaway from
French Trotskyism, which was always minute in size, but made some of
the most innovatory analyses of modern capitalism in the 1950s.
Another member of the group was Jean-François Lyotard—now
remembered chiefly as a post-modernist philosopher. Lyotard wrote a
series of articles for the group’s journal, Socialisme ou
barbarie, in which he analysed the nature of the FLN, which
he saw as providing the peasant masses with a leadership originating
in the petty bourgeoisie. The nature of the war meant that the
organization was effectively becoming a new, bureaucratic class: as
early as 1957 he argued (in an analysis that has been commended by
the historian and one-time leading FLN activist Mohammed
Harbi) that ‘the FLN is now already preparing itself for
the role of being the managing stratum in Algerian society’. At the
same time, nevertheless, Lyotard belonged to the minority in
Socialisme ou Barbarie who argued in favour of concrete support for
the FLN. He was actively involved in the Henri Curiel support
network, something his organization was unaware of at the time. Such
a combination of practical solidarity and lucid analysis was rare on
the French far left. The discovery of the Third World in a period of
bitter struggles for national liberation required both commitment and
lucidity, a pairing summed up in the old slogan ‘unconditional but
not uncritical support’. Alongside some of those whose activity has
been chronicled by Kalter, Guérin, Lefort and Lyotard also deserve
their place in the story.
[1] Christoph
Kalter, Die
Entdeckung der Dritten Welt,
Campus Verlag: Frankfurt am Main 2011, €45, paperback 566 pp, 978 3
593 39480 0
