EDUARDO DEVÉS-VALDÉS (Translated by Sarah Hamilton)
Statement of the Problem
(1) To think from the periphery is to think from otherness. It is to think in another manner, and to think in order to leave the peripheral condition (which is a sort of exile from history) to locate oneself in a centrality, which offers the possibility of abandoning pariah status. To think from otherness is to think about other modes of emancipation, understood as the ways to leave the marginal state and to settle in a place of equality in the world space; that is, to think of ways to leave that otherness, understood as marginality.
The peripheral condition is a consciousness and a fact, to put it somewhat schematically. This chapter is about the “constitution” of the consciousness: the ways in which the intellectual agents of the peripheries, mainly American, have assumed an eidetic position with respect to their place in the world – “constituting” (rather than “building,” because it was not usually a conscious process) a notion of the world in which they place themselves in the periphery. This story then leads to the recollection of the process of constitution of that consciousness.
However, this narrative leads, on the other hand, towards the necessary rupture with this consciousness, as a step towards the rupture with the peripheral condition, since the peripheral dilemma has transformed itself into a theoretical prison or straightjacket in that it blocks out other ways, the opening of other horizons, seeing from other perspectives. The constitution of the peripheral consciousness is also a process that entraps or encapsulates the peripheries, making of that very consciousness a barrier that prevents them from abandoning the condition of being segregated from history. To break with the manner of thinking that is expressed in the peripheral dilemma (be-like-the-center versus be-like-ourselves) is to advance towards a break with one’s own peripheral status. The consciousness that was a manner of understanding the new situation created after European expansion was transformed into a prison, in a sort of intellectual cloistering that came to inhibit the development of other possibilities. The constitution of the peripheral consciousness is a process, albeit not necessarily a process that goes from error to truth, nor necessarily a process of positive maturation, nor the construction of a heroic consciousness. In a certain sense, criticism of the ideas and the peripheral dilemma is also criticism of the peripheral condition and the possibility of overcoming it.1 In this sense, to think from the periphery is to take on the direction of thought conceived in the peripheries and to capitalize on, project and overcome it, going beyond it to stop thinking peripherally and to stop being periphery.
(2) Key to the construction of the peripheral consciousness is the notion of difference from the center, a difference that can be located on several levels, but which is always relational. There are concepts that refer to geocultural, historical differences, and others that are created by economic difference. Some are understood simply as difference, others as difference produced by the actions of the center.
The construction of the idea of “different peoples,” with respect to those Europeans who showed the power of their expansion, was early. It was produced largely independently from one society to the other, although it has always been a dialectic between the intellectual construction of a peripheral region and the image delivered by the agents of the center, to which are added contributions from other peripheries.
In this process of creating an awareness of the periphery there are at least two subperiods: in one, the image of a society is constructed, passing from the “naive” ancestral vision of being the center of the world to the new notion of periphery-of-a-new-center; in the other, it is the image of difference.
Concepts such as “colonial regions,” “non-Europeans,” “non-Christianity” are some of the proto-conceptions that contribute, from the center, to the origins of this idea. But these concepts, which are not principally economic, will gradually acquire a more economic tone, assuming aspects that were not in the proto-conceptions and leaving aside others that were key there, such as religious affiliation.
Thus, concepts such as “Third World,” “South,” “poor countries,” “periphery” are intended to characterize a majority, nonprivileged segment of humanity, at least in terms of economics and power.
(3) To account for the constitution of the peripheral consciousness it is important to take into account the history of intellectual networks in which this consciousness developed and prospered, for example: Ibero-American enlightenment, peripheral romanticism, neo-Salafism, pan-Asianism, anti-imperialism, pan-Africanism, Eurasianism, Third Worldism, and the socioeconomic sciences of development. Figures such as G.M. Jovellanos, F. Miranda, P. Olavide, S. Bolívar, A. Khomiakov, A. Mickiewicz, D.F. Sarmiento, F. Bilbao, A. Herzen, Y. Fukusawa, E.W. Blyden, J. Rizal, I. Gasprinski, J. el Din Afghani, N. Kemal, S. Williams, R. Tagore, Sun Yat-sen, V.R. Haya de la Torre, Gabriela Mistral, M. Sultan-Galiev, M. Abduh, M. Hatta, V.I. Lenin, M. Gandhi, N. Trubetskoi, R. Prebisch, G. Padmore, L. Zea, K. Nkrumah, F. Herrera, P. Freire, J. Nyerere, C. Furtado, M. ul Haq, S. Amin, and F.H. Cardoso, among many others, are incomprehensible without those networks.2
The networks are normally formed and/or expressed through important meetings. These include the meeting of the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago, the pan-African conferences between 1901 and 1945 in several cities in Europe and the United States, the 1911 Universal Race Conference in London, the 1920 Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku, the 1925 anti-imperialist meeting in Paris, and especially the 1927 meeting of the Anti-Imperialist League in Brussels. These meetings are frequently organized by agents from the center and take place in important cities, but they allow peripheral intellectuals to meet, which otherwise would have been impossible at certain times. Even the pan-African meetings would not be in Africa until after Independence.
Proto-history: The Difference of the Partialities with Respect to the Center
The “proto-history” of the peripheral consciousness is composed of three expressions. Key to all three is that their diverse definitions of the periphery itself are always defined by their relation to the center. That is, people do not conceive of themselves simply as Guaraníes, Incas, Chinese or Arabs, but rather formulate a definition of their own society in relation to the center. (See Zhang, this volume.)
A first expression in the constitution of a peripheral consciousness consists of the notion of belonging to a large group, to a large set of peoples that are different from the center, although they do not conceive of themselves as exploited or oppressed by the center, but rather simply ethnoculturally different. A very early case that exemplifies the peripheral consciousness can be seen in the Peruvian Garcilaso Inca who, as early as the seventeenth century, understood some of the American identity in contrast to the center, highlighting its Spanish-American character, as Indian, as Mestizo, and differentiating it from the mainland Creoles.
Simón Bolívar, in the second decade of the nineteenth century, defined Spanish-colonized America as composed of a people that “is not European nor North American; it is more a composite of Africa and America than an emanation from Europe,” a sort of “little human species,” because
we are neither Indian nor European, but a species midway between the legitimate proprietors of this country and the Spanish usurpers. In short, though Americans by birth we derive our rights from Europe, and we have to assert these rights against the rights of the natives, while at the same time we must defend ourselves against the invaders.
By 1850, Senegalese Pierre David Boilat and Argentinian D.F. Sarmiento conceived of their respective regions as barbarous and wild relative to Europe, while Nigerian Samuel Crowther defined his people as pagans. These are other ways of marking a difference, clearly situating the Western European model as an alternative (Devés 2008b).
The Slavic discourse in the first half of the nineteenth century is very important in this regard. The Slavic-Slavophile discourse is built from elements such as a conflict between the Slavic world and Western Europe. Adam Mickiewicz contrasted the rationalism that dominated Western Europe with the spiritual character of the Slavs. The Slavs retained certain “living truths” able to lead humanity to a moral revival, which should form a sort of equilibrium (Floryńska-Lalewicz 2003). A highly developed approach to marking differences is that of Aleksei Khomiakov, one of the few who understood Russia’s difference to be associated with its Asian and not just its Slavic dimension in the first decades of the nineteenth century – a Russia composed not only of Slavs, but also of peoples of other ethnicities, languages, customs, and religions, but all united in the sense that they were different from Western Europe.
Another version of these large alliances comes from black or sub-Saharan African thought, in its pan-African, pan-Negro, and Blackness aspects. It originated on the basis of eidetic constructions present in the black world of the second half of the nineteenth century, such as Ethiopianism, Bookerism, racial-identism of E.W. Blyden, pan-Africanisn, pan-Negroism and Blackness. These trends initially considered difference on the basis of ethnic characteristics, which was associated with cultural essentialism from 1870 onwards with the works of Blyden, J.E. Casely-Hayford, and the young Aimé Césaire and Leopold Senghor. The consciousness of difference is constructed on a geo-ethnic dimension: Africa and Africanness is thought of as land, climate, race. This telluric-ethnocentric view operates from Blyden to Senghor (Devés 2008b).
Yet another version arises from Turkism, pan-Turkism and pan-Turanism. For example, Ahmed Midhat Efendi presented the history of pre-Ottoman Turks and their role in the development of world civilization, making an effort to rule out any connection of the Ottomans with Greek civilization (Shaw and Kural-Shaw 1988: 263). For his part, Ahmed Vefik Pasha defended the old Turkish customs and lifestyle, and opposed Westernization and the constitutional regime (Berkes 1998: 315). (See İslamoğlu, this volume.)
A second expression is produced when sets of people form in the peripheral regions that are distinguished not only by their cultural differences but also because they see themselves as threatened, marginalized or exploited, and thus needing to defend themselves against an invasive center, albeit without raising the similarities among themselves or proposing any collective action.
The Ottoman I. Muteferrika, writing in the 1730s, perceived things in this manner in his understanding of the precarious situation of the Ottomans, then marginalized by the European (Christian) powers. In his 1731 book on the “Rational bases for the polities of nations” (in Turkish), he asked “Why did Europeans, who were so weak in the past compared to the Muslim nations, begin to dominate so many territories in modern times, and even defeat the once-victorious Ottoman armies?” (cited by Berkes 1998: 42).
In the first generation of pan-Africanism, that of Henry Sylvester Williams in 1900, the idea of pan-African solidarity was still partial, as it referred only to those who belonged to the “African race.” Progressively, Blackness and pan-Africanism are becoming more sociopolitical and less ethnocultural. George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah and Frantz Fanon, among others, foster this eidetic change.
A third expression is the formation of a large set of peripheral regions that do not belong to a single geocultural sphere, but whose similarities arise, rather, from their marginality. “France, you whom we have loved so much, what have you done?” asked Francisco Bilbao, in The American Gospel, in 1864:
Betray and bomb Mexico. England, oh England! What is this nation of powdered wigs and rapacious lords doing in India? Blood and exploitation, tyranny and conquest. It appears in Mexico for a time and offers three ships to Maximilian … Down with so-called European civilization. Europe cannot even civilize itself and it would civilize us. Europe, with its social and political action, with its dogma, its morality, its diplomacy, with its institutions and doctrines, is the antithesis of America. (quoted in Zea 1976: 56)
These sets of regions accept the difference of power, but at the same time they come to terms with a certain solidarity between peoples that transcends ethnicity and language, though not always to the same extent. More restricted positions include Marcus Garvey’s “Negroes of the world, unite”, Pixley K. Isaka Seme’s call for the union of all southern Africans despite their differences, and the members of the Indian National Congress, who were also open to a union across ethnicities, languages and religions, within the boundaries of English dominion on the subcontinent (Devés 2008b). Broader positions include some of those belonging to the Arielists, whose innovation is that, positioning themselves as Latin Americans, they simultaneously succeed in creating a common cause with non-Latin American peoples who find themselves in similar situations of peripheralness, despite belonging to other cultural horizons.
Luís Ross-Mugica, in his Más allá del Atlántico (Beyond the Atlantic) (1909), adopts a view of the similarity between Latin Americans and North Africans, who fought for independence from European plunder. He sets the European way of life (“civilized”) against that of the Moors. He wonders where civilization is in all the invasions and exploitations to which Europe is subjecting Morocco. “And civilization? Ah! Civilization is the mudguard: Morocco is in anarchy; there are two sultans instead of one; the exalted religious passions and the wild love of independence of the Kabyle have increased. It is no exaggeration to say ‘Europe, the impotent civilizer’” (1909: 192). He then notes the similarity between “some of those new peoples, victims of European greed.” He believed that they would erase the old civilization and create a new era: “Turkey, Persia, India and some South American countries are humanity’s future” (1909: 199).
For example, by 1910, Manuel Baldomero Ugarte was maintaining that “the peace of recent years was maintained at the expense of the weak countries of Asia, Africa, and America. The force of expansion was diverted or canalized onto defenseless cores, thereby opening an era of colonial conquests or of undeclared protectorates, during which the large nations made, in a manner, a bloc against the small nations” (quoted in Hodge 2010: 98).
In this manner, a way of thinking about identity aiming at the unity of the Hispano-American space, understood as Latinness against Saxonness, was expressed in one version with a certain anti-US Americanism and anti-imperialism, associated more with the political-cultural than the economic. This discourse, with new emphases and new hybridizations, would transform from Latinism to mestizophilia and indigenism, from anti-US Americanism to anti-imperialism, and from cultural integrationism to economic and political integrationism.
Another tendency at this same level of consciousness is the classic Eurasianism of the 1920s, with its proposals about Russia as a multi-ethnic and multicultural society, clearly different from the center in many senses, where even the understanding of the Slavophiles who considered it a Slavic society fell very short. Trubetskoi’s classical or first generation Eurasianism, specifically Russia’s claiming of its Eurasianism, can serve as a guide for colonial peoples that resist against Europe. That is why he mentions Russia’s adoption of Eurasian identity with such emphasis. It is precisely now, Trubetskoi says, that the elemental face (the national specificity and the half non-European, half Asian character of Russia-Eurasia) has become more visible than ever. The genuine Russia, historic Russia, old Russia can be seen, not an invented “Slavic” or “Slavic-Varangian” Russia, but a real, Russo-Turanic Russo-Eurasia, the legacy of Genghis Khan (Laruelle 2005).
In short, these notions are the expressions of intellectuals who aim to describe the difference, either as a simple difference or as the product of the action of the center, either as a confirmation of this contrast or to generate a defensive position against the dangers of the center. These views are articulated over time, thus creating the idea of a certain fellowship based on the pan-African, anticolonialist and anti-imperialist struggles that allow distant and different peoples to see themselves as united in the common project of defense of certain interests and principles, overcoming national, linguistic, ethnic, and religious differences which until then had set up different identities among them. In this new manner of understanding things, “being oppressed by the same power” is what allows them to consider themselves united in a struggle for liberation.
If one can speak of any progress in the development of the peripheral consciousness, it is in advancing the understanding of the peripheral condition as something shared by all peoples outside the center, moving precisely towards the notion of an excluded middle: it is either the center or it is the periphery. In this sense, Eurasianists’ broadened conception of Russia as varied, multi-ethnic and multicultural, and in almost every way different from the center, is expressive, as is José Vasconcelos’s extension of Latin American mestizophilia, indigenism, and Negroism (Devés 2000–2004, vol. 1) into a region of mixed race and “cosmic race.”
History: Since the Formation of a Global Center and Periphery
A new collection of expressions, representing a qualitative leap, is manifested in the notion of the excluded middle, either center or periphery. This is achieved to the extent that the center is conceived of as exploitative and, therefore, the generator of the peripheral condition of all the peoples to which it reaches out.
It may be said that there has been a change from the notion of difference to the notion of periphery. During the twentieth century, the consciousness of the need to think about difference was consolidated, achieved by thinking about and of oneself as the periphery. In this line, major meetings were important because they permitted, at least partially, intellectuals from different parts of the periphery to meet and recognize each other.
What follows is a further development upon some of the kernels of thought that have been crucial to the constitution of the peripheral consciousness itself, in seven separate institutional and/or intellectual instantiations. These, however, must in no way be considered as a progression towards truth or even necessarily a full and proper understanding of the peripheral dimension.
First expression
A first expression of this is the theory of imperialism, in its specifically Leninist form or in others. This is a key concept that has produced many variants, not all of them orthodox, but all marked by the basic distinguishing feature that the labor of the center generates and maintains the peripheral condition. These positions emphasize economic and political elements much more than cultural ones, and are stated in historical analysis. The theory of imperialism is key because it conceives of the rest of the world (or most of it) as a unified body different from the center. It is the first notion that allows us to think of an economic similarity outside of any other condition and, simultaneously, to imagine a joint action or, even better, concerted action on the part of the peripheries. Concepts developed primarily during the years of World War I, perceiving that the capitalists divided the world among themselves, that capitalism is manifested in a handful of especially rich and powerful countries plundering the rest of the world (1916, see Lenin 1963), that “the so-called Great Powers have long been exploiting and enslaving a whole number of small and weak nations. And the imperialist war is a war for the division and redivision of this kind of booty” (1918, see Lenin 1952), are what enable us to think of a global division that divides the entire world into a few exploiter-class countries and many more exploited-class countries.
The meeting of the Anti-Imperialist League in 1927 was an important event in the constitution of an almost complete intellectual and political network inspired by these ideas. In Brussels, a meeting of individuals of the greatest importance was arranged. Among others, participants included Soong Qing-ling, the widow of Sun Yat-sen, Lamine Senghor, Mohamed Hatta and Sen Katayama, Jawaharlal Nehru, V.R. Haya de la Torre and Julio Antonio Mella. Mohandas Gandhi was invited, although he did not attend.
In Latin America and the Caribbean during the 1920s, on the basis of eidetic beginnings arising from anti-US American Arielism, theosophy, anti-imperialism, and proto–Third World nationalism, a vision of the region’s situation and its role in the global space matured. It was developed by, among others, J. Vasconcelos, M. Ugarte, Gabriela Mistral, V. Haya, and J.C. Mariátegui, and expressed through a series of publications, of which the Repertorio Americano was the most important (Devés 2000–2004, vol. 1). In this context they discussed the role of capitalism, European expansion as a world question, racial confrontations between whites and “brown races,” and of the World War as a war between imperialisms vying for the world. Like the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), it proposed concerted action against US imperialism, for the political unity of Latin America, for the nationalization of lands and industries, for the internationalization of the Panama Canal, and for the solidarity of all the peoples and oppressed classes of the world (Haya de la Torre 1990: 22–23).
This contrast between the peripheries (Latin America-Caribbean, Asia, and Africa) and the center was marked by the accentuation of otherness, not only economic but in the assertion of ethnocultural otherness: the nonwhite, in formulas such as mestizo, Indian, Afro, and Oriental. Indigenism, pan-Africanism, Blackness, pan-Asiaticism, and Orientalism are forms of expressing the claims of the others of the world (Kodera Kenkichi, Vasconcelos, Gabriela Mistral, Leopold Senghor, Marcus Garvey, Aimé Césaire).
Second expression
A second expression is that of the center/periphery of the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA). The ideas of R. Prebisch/ECLA since 1949 have helped to form a conceptualization that, from a non-Marxist Latin American perspective (albeit with vague Marxist inspirations), contributed to the idea of a world divided in two, where a certain solidarity among the underdeveloped countries was important to overcome this situation.
The peripheral condition was seen as marginal, inferior, and subordinated with respect to a center that benefited from and maintained deteriorating terms of trade, the heterogeneous distribution of science and technology, the financial management of the world economy, and thus the center–periphery relationship and with it underdevelopment.
These notions, with a basic scientific criterion of the deterioration of the terms of trade and almost no “philosophies” or “ideologies,” allowed for dialogue between agents who were thus able to set aside racialisms, socialisms, tellurisms, religious criticisms, and other principles that had previously disqualified and excluded many potential partners.
Third expression
Another expression is Third Worldism, a trend that was based on very diverse intellectual heritages with little relation to each other: pan-Africanism, pan-Asianism, Eurasianism and anti-imperialism. It dealt with the political unity of all those who were “different”: segregated, defeated, exploited, and despised. This has enabled identitarianisms, nationalisms, tellurisms, and racialisms (and even racisms) that are often exclusive to coexist, articulated on the basis of the idea that the center is primarily responsible for their woes.
One future result of the 1927 Anti-Imperialist League’s meeting was the Bandung meeting in 1955. After Bandung,3 progress was made in the constitution of the Non-Aligned Movement, one of whose key motives, giving rise to the name, consisted of nonparticipation in the Cold War. The group was organized on the basis of Nehru’s five principles and it was he who, in large part, shaped the movement. These principles, which had been previously designed for relations between India and China, were mutual respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, nonaggression, noninterference with domestic affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence. The basic formulation of Nehru’s five principles is very pragmatic, but it is not sufficient to constitute Third World thought itself.
In his 1955 speech in Bandung, Ahmed Sukarno said:
In political terms, what is the highest code of morality? It is the subordination of everything to the well-being of mankind … We are united, for instance, by a common detestation of colonialism in whatever form it appears. We are united by a common detestation of racialism. And we are united by a common determination to preserve and stabilize peace in the world … We are often told “colonialism is dead.” Let us not be deceived or even soothed by that. I say to you, colonialism is not yet dead. How can we say it is dead, so long as vast areas of Asia and Africa are unfree … Colonialism has also its modern dress, in the form of economic control, intellectual control, actual physical control by a small but alien community within a nation. It is a skilful and determined enemy, and it appears in many guises … What can we do? We can do much! We can inject the voice of reason into world affairs. We can mobilize all the spiritual, all the moral, all the political strength of Asia and Africa on the side of peace … The five Prime Ministers did not make threats. So, let this Asian-African Conference be a great success! Make the “live and let live” principle and the “Unity in Diversity” motto the unifying force which brings us all together – to seek in friendly, uninhibited discussion, ways and means by which each of us can live his own life, and let others live their own lives, in their own way, in harmony, and in peace. (Sukarno 1955)
The “hard core” of Third Worldism is very small, while its aggregates are extensive. In fact, the first true constitution possessed a strong anti-imperialist component, with essentially Leninist roots, but also brought together various other nationalist components: Indian, Indonesian, West African, Arab-Baathist, and socialist, and even more unorthodox, Nasserism, third- and fourth-generation Pan-Africanism, Titoism, and Maoism. Nehru, Zhou Enlai, Nkrumah, Nasser, and Sukarno contributed to this from the Bandung Conference; and in the 1960s, Ho Chi Minh, Fanon of the Algerian National Liberation Front, Prebisch from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Leopold Senghor, Celso Furtado, and Fidel Castro.
Fourth expression
A fourth expression is the theory of neocolonialism. The past versions were enriched, in the early 1960s, with notions of neocolonialism. Taking elements of Marx, Lenin, and Owen Lattimore, Nkrumah argued that neocolonialism represents the final stage of imperialism. Neocolonialism is the worst form of imperialism: for those who practice it, it means power without responsibility, and for those who suffer it, it is exploitation without redress (1965: 3–5). This observation, with the prior observations of Mamadou Dia and Frantz Fanon, constitutes one of the first critiques or self-criticisms of the new situation of post-Independence Africa.
Nkrumah believes that complete independence and continental integration are necessary prerequisites for economic development. Borrowing from imperialism theory, Nkrumah aims to understand the difference between countries that are merely “formally” independent but trapped in the web of financial and diplomatic dependence, and truly independent countries (1965: 232–233). The essence of neocolonialism is that the subject state is, in theory, independent and has all of the external trappings of international society, but usually they are small states, Balkanized by imperialism, and unable to cope. If Africa was united, no large power bloc would attempt to subdue it (1965: 3–4). Because of their failure to unite, the Latin American countries had suffered disastrous consequences from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present (1965: 250). This should be a lesson to the Africans. (See Simo, this volume.)
Fifth expression
A fifth expression is manifested in the foundation of UNCTAD in 1964,4 and in the ideas of the deterioration in the terms of trade, the heterogeneous distribution of science and technology, the center/periphery notion, and the “syndicalism” of the underdeveloped countries, aimed at a New International Economic Order. In this, the ECLA ideas of center/periphery and others converged with the Third Worldism of Bandung and with the ideas of anti-neocolonialism.
UNCTAD was created at the behest of ECLA and Prebisch, who was its first Secretary General. Prebisch’s ideas strongly influenced the strategies and policies for economic and social development in developing countries. Among his many achievements, he called the attention of the international community to the need for a significant change of attitudes about relationships between developed and developing countries, and for substantial modifications in the traditional patterns of the international division of labor. From UNCTAD, Prebisch promoted trade negotiations between rich and poor countries and encouraged the evolution of new approaches to multilateral development diplomacy (Love 2010: 5).5
In his famous “Five stages in my thinking on development,” Prebisch notes that
the fourth stage, related to my work at UNCTAD, was oriented toward matters of international cooperation … Despite the great differences between the countries of the world periphery, there were many common denominators … This was the beginning of the North–South dialogue … One of the main arguments prevailing in the developed countries was that the developing countries should take adequate measures to deal with their own internal development problems. (1984: 21)
Thus, Prebisch established a trio of opposites: center/periphery, North/South, developed countries/developing countries. This trio of concepts was key to understanding the global economy in the framework of thought that inspired UNCTAD.6
Sixth expression
A sixth version is that of the Third World Forum (TWF), a group whose aim was to develop a specific form of thought for the Third World.7
If UNCTAD was constituted as an intergovernmental forum, with all the potential and limitations this entails, the Forum was also created as an instance of civil intellectual society, one of the merits of which was that it was the first meeting independent of state organs that brought together important intellectuals from three continents: Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Gathered there, among other people, were Samir Amin and M. ul Haq, J. Bagwhati, F.H. Cardoso, O. Sunkel, E. Iglesias, Nurul Islam, and J. Rweyemamu, helping to strengthen links between socioeconomic experts in Asia and Africa.
The Forum was envisioned as a think-tank of the underdeveloped world, generating a dialogue about the eidetic needs of the Third World. It suggested that the world had changed, as could be observed by the depletion of the international order, the emergence of the decolonized states and the deterioration in terms of trade, increasing inequalities and progressive indebtedness, the dangers posed by multinational companies through their political action and/or the introduction of technologies that create new dependencies. In connection with this is the idea of a New International Economic Order, which aims to overcome the differential levels of privilege accorded to some (but only some) of the world’s states, thereby achieving greater equality, unity, and integration.
This group of socioeconomic experts conceived of itself as destined to resolve issues such as the fact that the Third World actually feeds on conceptions of development that are created externally and are therefore inadequate (Santiago Declaration, Third World Forum 1973), since the ideas and ideologies for the Third World should come from within (Desai 1973: 63). To change this, it would be necessary to generate relevant and appropriate research (Santiago Declaration). In other words, self-reliant intellectual institutions should be established (Third World Forum 1975). To advance this process of intellectual self-reliance, socioeconomic experts of the Third World must have a platform to exchange ideas (Santiago Declaration); Third World intellectuals should organize an environment conducive to an equitable national and international order (Third World Forum 1975). All of that is synthesized in the need to wage a permanent intellectual revolution, to overcome the dependence of the Third World and the profound changes in the internal and external order facing developing countries today.
The “Charter” of the Forum stated: “We, the social science experts and other intellectuals of the Third World, desiring to make a more constructive and significant contribution to the peoples of our countries, are convinced that for now the best form to achieve this is through the foundation, organization, and support of a ‘TWF.’” (Third World Forum 1975: 1). The principal functions are providing a platform for exchanging views; providing intellectual support to the countries of the Third World; stimulating and organizing cooperative research between developing countries; and presenting opinions about international questions that affect the Third World (1975: 1–2).
Seventh expression
A seventh version is the one developed by the South–South Commission. Yet another contribution was that of the conceptualization produced within many international bodies and commissions, synthesized by Julius Nyerere and a large team in coordination and discussion in the 1980s around the notions of South–South and North–South dialogue. The expression North–South came to complement, but mainly to rephrase, expressions such as development/underdevelopment, center/periphery, and even imperial-capitalist/exploited. In this scheme, the South emerged as the underdeveloped world, as the underdog in the economy, the historical subaltern.
The Commission of the South was established in 1987, largely inheriting the approaches created within the UNCTAD and the Third World Forum. Its members included leading figures from the South of various backgrounds and political outlooks.8 Developing countries funded its work for a period of three years, but Commission members worked as individuals, not as representatives of any particular country.
During this three-year period, the Commission issued declarations on external debt obligations, and also on the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations. It also issued a final report, The Challenge to the South, in which it summarized this work and urged further efforts for “self-reliant, people-centered development strategies” (South Commission 1990). The developing countries, it maintained, could overcome disadvantageous trade, finance, and technological relationships by working together in negotiations with the North. Growing global interdependence, in fact, suggested that allcountries – not just those of the South – would benefit if developing countries could be helped out of poverty.
The Commission then gave way to a new “South Centre.” 9 Within that framework, the Centre was created to investigate and analyze the common problems and matters of interest to the developing countries; to promote cooperation, networking and solidarity among the peoples and countries of the South; to remain “intellectually autonomous” and to act as “think tank” and “network” for the South; to provide timely political analysis and develop Southern views on major policy issues. Its objectives included promoting South–South cooperation, coordinating the participation of the countries of the South in international forums, contributing to the convergence of the countries of the South, and improving understanding and collaboration between the South and the North (Centro Sur 1995b).
Conclusion
This chapter has tried to sketch the constitution of the peripheral consciousness. To do so, it has described a varied proto-consciousness with three different expressions and then a more fully expressed consciousness in seven separate guises. This has been done primarily from the perspective of Latin American thought, but with numerous connections to other regions. Some writers have explicitly proposed the need to think about the peripheries in this way, and have sought to constitute this consciousness in an organized manner, but they are few in number. A shared interest in knowledge production brings these authors together: how to think of the periphery, how to recover peripheral thought, how to overcome various obstacles to articulate it fully, how better to understand the comparative parallels and similarities, how to gauge which are the correct formulas and which the incorrect. In most cases, however, these writers do not even know each other, and certainly they do not conceive of themselves as a whole, nor do they see their work as an articulated or joint project.
Intellectual contributions from many sources thus converge on an awareness of difference and, later, of forming part of a great world periphery, although clearly not all contributions offer a consistent definition of difference or the peripheral condition.
The “awareness of difference” associated with a “peripheral condition” is based on ancient notions that distinguished the various empires or regions of the known world for every society. Some intellectuals of great peripheral empires, such as the Russian or the Ottoman, come to terms with this “difference” more easily than do those who belong to independent states, such as Latin Americans. Membership in empires makes it easier to see the difference as, at the same time, membership in multi-ethnic and multicultural empires allows a certain similarity between distant peoples on the periphery of the Western European hub. (See Sinha, this volume.) During the eighteenth century it was possible, from the proto-periphery, to see Europe, although not to imagine non-Europe. For example, the Russian or Ottoman intelligentsia, which were seen as distinctly non-European, did not conceive of themselves as associated with Africans, Indians, or Orientals. Prior to the nineteenth century, there were very few people capable of conceiving, from the periphery, an area that transcended that of their own people; that is, to see sets of people that transcended borders, mountain ranges, and oceans. In the nineteenth century, some ideas on this, such as those of Khomiakov, timidly appeared.
However, unlike the Hegelian consciousness that marks progress when each dialectical moment represents the overcoming of the last, in this case we are simply showing cases that are found on the same level and that represent different expressions of the feeling of being and existing on the periphery. If some elements of earlier expressions are incorporated and others excluded, this is nonetheless not a dialectical progression.
Notes
1 In general, the intelligentsia of the center (and in large part, the reason that it is the center) are more vital and sophisticated than the intelligentsia of the peripheral regions, and these intelligensia of the center have been those that denominated the non-center. These intelligentsia members also, and this is no small thing, possess the capacity to find themselves atop the watchtower of the center, and to see from there the entirety of the lands and the seas. The peripheral intelligentsia, lower down and at times crushed, are barely able to understand their own regions and the metropolis through which they are articulated to the world.
2 It is true that on many occasions the networks have been loose, with sporadic relations, and populated by a minimum density so that they have not been able to constitute themselves in environments capable of generating a weight in ideas. In this sense, the role that some international levels have played has been relevant, whether interstate organizations or parts of civil society in the process of articulating regional and continental energies towards larger and, above all, more permanent and higher density organizational spaces (such as UNESCO, international policies, the World Council of Churches, and other institutions like the World Social Forum).
3 The driving group consisted of Nehru from India, Sukarno from Indonesia, Tito from Yugoslavia, Nasser from Egypt, and Nkrumah from Ghana. The first meetings of the Non-Aligned Movement were Belgrade 1961, Cairo 1964, Lusaka 1970, and Algiers 1973.
4 According to its official mission statement, UNCTAD is “the principal organ of the United Nations for the integrated study of trade, development and interrelated issues in the areas of finances, technology, investment and sustainable development. UNCTAD is a forum for intergovernmental deliberations aimed at building consensus on priority issues for developing countries.”
5 Joseph Love notes that “Prebisch became an itinerant preacher to spread the UNCTAD evangel. He took his message on unequal exchange, the Trade Gap, concessionary financing and export-substitution industrialization to Africa and Asia, as well as to Latin America. Between 1964 and 1969 he logged 600,000 miles giving speeches and meeting heads of government and their ministers. On the force of his ideas and personality, Prebisch attempted to strengthen and expand the Group of 77 as an effective voice on trade and development” (Love 2010: 8–9).
6 alvador Allende, in his inaugural address to UNCTAD III in Santiago de Chile, in 1972, complemented Prebisch’s triad, adding “we,” “Third World,” “poor peoples,” “backward nations,” and, in opposition, “imperialist domination” and “rich peoples” (Allende 1972).
7 This section reproduces, with some corrections and elaborations, passages from Devés 2006.
8 President: Julius Nyerere (Tanzania); Secretary General: Manmohan Singh (India); Members: Ismail Abdalla (Egypt); Abdlatif Al-Hamad (Kuwait); Evaristo Arns (Brazil); Solita Collas-Monsod (Philippines); Eneas Comiche (Mozambique); Gamani Corea (Sri Lanka); Aboubakar Diaby-Ouattara (Ivory Coast); Aldo Ferrer (Argentina); Celso Furtado (Brazil); Devaki Jain (India); Simba Makoni (Zimbabwe); Michael Manley (Jamaica); Jorge Navarette (Mexico); Pius Okigbo (Nigeria); Augustin Papic (Yugoslavia); Carlos Andrés Perez (Venezuela); Jiadong Qian (China); Shridath Ramphal (Guyana); Carlos Rafael Rodriguez (Cuba); Abdus Salam (Pakistan); Marie-Angélique Savane (Senegal); Tan Sri Shafie (Malasia); Tupuola Tupua Tamasese (Samoa); Nitisastro Widjojo (Indonesia); Layachi Yaker (Algeria).
9 South Centre: An Intergovernmental Think Tank of Developing Countries, at http://www.southcentre.org/ (accessed Feb. 2012). “It is the responsibility of the South,” said Mugabe in 1995, “to fund this Centre, and a test of the seriousness and the commitment we make to the South Centre is the extent to which we can make it financially sustainable ... We must show our support for the goals we have set. If all of us in the South give at least a small amount to this good cause … we will have made a great investment and also demonstrated our commitment to the cause ... The countries of the South should follow the example of industrialized countries which, despite the many support mechanisms, still employ more than 2,000 people in the OECD, hosted in Paris, to investigate and discuss matters of common interest, and help coordination of the trading platform of the North and South. The countries of the South are in a much weaker position and need a stronger support mechanism” (Centro Sur 1995a).
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