The Internationalist Archive
Nihal El Aasar is an Egyptian independent researcher and writer, currently residing in London. She has written and researched the Middle East and North Africa on issues spanning political economy, geopolitics, literature and more.
For Issue #81 of The Internationalist, Aasar reviews The Fate of Third Worldism in the Middle East: Iran, Palestine and Beyond ed. by Rasmus C. Elling and Sune Haugbolle (OneWorld Publications). Here she re-examines Third Worldism and its demise, identifying its gradual unravelling as opposed to a rupture.
The Third Worldism of the post-Bandung moment has been largely seen in binaries, either to romanticize or propagandize it. This lens fails to realistically examine its endings, or disregards it completely as a moment that failed. Therefore the post-Bandung moment — rightfully — seems to haunt the psyche of many who turn to it for various reasons: to explain the political defeats of the left that underscore the current moment, and to escape it; to attempt to make sense of its afterlives; or to understand its dissolution.
However, much of our thinking around Third Worldism, as with any other major political event, has been to confine it to a particular outcome. Has it failed? Why did it unravel? Have any of its remnants migrated to the current moment? Perhaps more importantly, can it be revived?
The Fate of Third Worldism in the Middle East: Iran, Palestine and Beyond edited by Rasmus C. Elling and Sune Haugbolle is an attempt to challenge our thinking around this pivotal moment. The book looks at the endings rather than the beginnings, and examines Third Worldism not as a rupture but as a gradual unravelling that continued to have afterlives long after it officially “ended”. With interventions from various authors, the book uses Iran and Palestine as prisms to explain how Third Worldism manifested itself in the Middle East and the two decades that succeeded its perceived “dissolution.” In doing so, it examines specific moments within the global demise of Third Worldist anti-imperialist movements, either as related to their gradual replacement with domestic state building projects or reform agendas.
The events discussed in The Fate of Third Worldism in the Middle East revolve around two main events: the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and subsequent civil war. These two episodes “parachute a transformative process,” according to the editors. The Iranian Revolution is posited as the end point of Third Worldism, ushering a “breaking point” or a departure from secularist socialist internationalism into a new era of Islamic formulations of internationalism. However, this volume seeks to show how this was a drawn-out process, rather than an immediate rupture, and challenge the idea of its “end.”
In the ‘50s and ‘60s, Third Worldism in the Middle East came to the fore through movements such as Pan-Arabism and within that through its Nasserite (Arab socialism) and Ba’athist (the idea of a unified Arab state) iterations. At its core was the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. However, after the setback of the Six-day War in 1967 or the Naksa, such movements lost their legitimacy, laying the groundwork for other movements to take their place. This loss, coinciding with the global turn towards neoliberalism — and the eventual fall of the Soviet Union — had disastrous consequences for liberation movements worldwide. Especially in the Middle East, this dissolution of the Third World or the Tricontinental was felt deeply as the loss of the secular revolutionary centre of the globe.
Among the movements that came to the fore during the decline of Pan-Arabism were radical tendencies like Third World Maoism. In Palestine, this was seen in the rise of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) which included the Marxist Leninist Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Maoist Democratic Front of the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP); the latter, especially, was entrenched in the idea that the national liberation of Palestine will be achieved by Palestinians first and foremost.
However, Sorcha Thompson, in the first chapter of the volume, insists that Palestinian liberation was a Third World and an internationalist cause post-1967. She does this by examining the Cuban-Palestinian fraternal relationship between 1973 and 1983 and how the PLO held a special place in Cuba’s tricontinental vision with the fida’yin or fighters at its helm; the publications; student exchange programs; and the emergence of organizations like the Organisation of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America (OSPAAL). These connections signal transnational solidarity as a product of political relationships and institutionalization rather than the romantic platitude it is often seen as.
Such connections are also studied by Marral Shamshirri in the book. She uses obituaries as a “transnational object of Third Worldist revolution” to reveal connections between Iranian and Arab women, mapping the network of Iranian revolutionaries in the Middle East, including in the Dhufar Revolution of Oman. Similarly, Klaudia Wieser examines the Shu’un Filistinya, the first journal directed towards an Arab readership by Palestinian and Arab intellectuals, as an archive of Palestinian Third Worldism. This journal was also an object of the Third Worldist revolution through knowledge production between 1965–1983, as it represented the intimate connectivities of Third Worldism until its decline.
In this process, the authors explore the material links between intellectual and political work, emphasizing the materiality of transnational links. They also go beyond the imaginary of Third Worldism and into the experience and practice of it, the granularities that make it, or a “praxis centered historiography”.
Additionally, instead of narrating the dissolution of transnational solidarity through neoliberalism, the authors highlight the specific shapes and spaces within which Third World praxis took place in the Middle East. For instance, “Nursing the Revolution” by Pelle Valentin Olsen traces the practice of medical support as a political form of solidarity, rather than the current humanitarian apolitical manifestation that we are familiar with. Central to this examination is the Norwegian organization, PalKom, (1976–1983) which was explicitly open in its solidarity towards Palestine. Significantly, PalKom saw its contribution to the Palestinian revolution through its medical work, with its volunteers supporting and standing with the Palestinian revolutionaries rather than treating them as “victims”. In an article, PalKom stated that “if the PLO believes that we can be useful then it is our duty to go,” and “we support a people in struggle, not a suffering people. We support them not because we pity them, but because their cause is just.”
Deviating even from common historiographies, the volume also shows how traces of Third Worldism in the Middle East remained long after they supposedly ruptured; how the “dual sense of endings and ambitions of third worldism” haunted the moment that succeeded it; and tensions arose from some Arab states that continued to prioritize their own interests over the newly emerging global liberation movements after 1967.
Sune Haugbolle’s chapter, “The ‘Ends’ of the Palestinian Revolution” studies these internal contradictions. She explores the muddled ends of Third Worldism, and the change of revolutionary subjectivity from radical optimism to realism, between the Palestinian revolution and the war in Lebanon where the “duress” or revolutionary life was put to the test, especially as the world witnessed massacres such as Sabra and Shatila. In line with this global turn away from revolutionary heroism to humanitarian causes, Palestinian subjectivity started being seen through the lens of “victimhood,” instead.
Exemplifying new attempts and formulations of internationalism that emerged in the Middle East during this period, the volume delves into how the “Islamic left” attempted to export its revolution through Iran, searching for allies across the Global South, and claimed Third Worldism to reconcile it with the particularities of its Shi’i commitments. This is demonstrated through the chapters of Mohammed Ataie and Maryam Alemzadeh, who examine Iran’s quest for the Islamic international. They did so by travelling to and inviting liberation movements into revolutionary Iran and adopting the Palestinian cause in the ‘70s and ‘80s after the projects of Pan-Arabism and Arab socialism had waned.
Similarly, Nathaniel George, in his chapter, shows us how Lebanon became a crucial site of struggle for secular and socialist modes of Third World anti-colonialism and revolutionary internationalism even with the rise of Islamic revolutionary politics. He particularly focuses on how Islamic political movements became the primary vehicle of organized opposition towards the end of the Cold War. They thus replaced more secular Marxist tendencies, as opposed to the ‘60s when these movements were disengaged from anti-colonial struggle.
In that sense the book paints a short durée for the post-'60s period, detailing this shift from a secular Marxist international to an Islamist one. It challenges this idea of beginnings and endings, showing that the “end” of Third Worldism brought a new set of formulations that we are still grappling with today. In our current post-October 2023 moment, these formulations have especially matured through the Axis of Resistance and are being put to the test.
In the end, books like The Fate of Third Worldism in the Middle East force us to grapple with the different shapes that anti-imperialism takes, even if it is not the secularist Marxist form of our preference. Al thawra mostamerra, or the revolution continues through resistance, is not a lost cause of the romantic ‘60s, but a dream deferred.
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