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PARTISAN REVIEW
picked up by a then equally obscure agitator in Bavaria. Utopian
undertones, it seems, are contagious across cultural boundaries.
One would like to know much more about the conversations and the
books that molded the minds of all those bright young Asian and
African students, reading in their rooming houses around the
London School of Economics or talking through long evenings in
the bistros of the Left Bank, who became proponents of Third
Worldism-not to mention the subterranean manner in which the
millenarian visions of a twelfth-century Calabrian monk continue to
reverberate in the feverish revolutionary talk at twentieth-century
universities in Latin America. Be this as it may, the idea of a Third .•
World, probably conceived in just such student bistros along the
Boulevard Saint-Michel and first published in short-lived
gauchiste
magazines edited in the same vicinity, was capable oflinking up with
utopian hopes (and hatreds) in very different environments .
The idea of the Third World has, at least, two quite distinct
aspects. The first, which was ideologically ratified at Bandung, is the
aspect of nonalignment: The countries subsumed under that
category were to remain free of military alliances with either of the
two superpower camps. Needless to say, the nonalignment of the
nonaligned has in the meantime received rather strained
interpretations (suffice it to recall that the most recent chairman of
the Group of 77 was Cuban), but it is plausible that this aspect ofthe
idea has been quite irrelevant all along to the masses of people in the
less-developed countries whose notions of international politics are
rudimentary at best. Much more potent is the other aspect: The
countries of this Third World were to be countries on the road to
development, to a better life both materially and morally.
It
is
this
aspect, one may surmise, which was capable of linking up with the
profound aspirations and images of hope that may be found in every
human culture. Hope is a cross-cultural universal, and almost
everywhere it is closely linked to religion. Thus the half-baked
utopian notions brought back by those bright young men from
London or Paris could become mirrors for utopian hopes nursed for
centuries in the minds of illiterate peasants . In this mirroring
process the same conceptions attained a depth and a seriousness
(and, one may add, a human validity) that they could never have
had in their places of origin. Not so incidentally, the fact that
peasants could find their own deepest hopes mirrored in these
imported conceptions gave political legitimacy to the regimes set up,
