7 - Post-colonial nationalism

Summary

In chapter 6 it was argued that the liberal world order has been substantially eroded by a powerful nationalist logic embedded in the organisations and values of western industrial societies. The purpose of the final two chapters is to examine the parallel failure of the reconstructed world order to accommodate the developmental nationalism of third world countries. In this chapter the intellectual and political foundations of post-colonial nationalism are examined; in chapter 8 the collective third world campaign to reform the international economic order.

In these chapters, the claim is not, as some authors have argued, that an essentially coherent and viable western system has been undermined by attempts to accommodate states and societies whose value systems are radically different to those of the West. Perhaps Asian and African societies have found some western ideas indigestible, but the concept of the sovereign state is not one of them. On the contrary it is the most successful western export to the rest of the world. Rather, the claim is that the experience of third world countries in international relations provides further evidence of the underlying weakness of (and contradictions in) the liberal scheme of international cooperation.

Admittedly, for the student of international society, third world nationalism poses an unavoidable problem of evaluation. In the west, nationalism is very often considered to be a curse, whereas in the south it is thought of as a blessing.