In the 1920s, Dada Amir is struck by the diversity in Moscow’s universities where the new generation of global communists is being trained. Prominently described are people from the ‘colonial and semi-colonial east’, but it seems the whole world could be there.
All are there to be trained and inculcated in a new way of life. The attractions of this life include, prominently, a pride of place. There’s a new world to be created, and in this one, these previously subjugated ‘backwards’ people are the first of this new breed of human and indeed, they shall be the ones to shape it. The Second world seems to offer Dada Amir and those he sees around him a way out of the humiliating circumstances of the first, with its iron-clad hierarchies.
‘What harm is in diversity,’ Sukarno says in 1955, ‘when there is unity in desire?’ While he is using this to describe the gradually decolonizing world, it rings equally true for Dada Amir’s account of the globally ambitious nucleus of the Second World. Desire is what unites the diverse students of Moscow’s University of the Peoples of the East, a nebulous desire for this new world, and the promise of dignity implicit within it.
A geographical shift in importance is evident in both these texts. Amir sees all the world come to gather in Moscow, and Sukarno celebrates holding Third world conferences in their own countries. Each is, in some way, evidence of the convention of a new world – perhaps evidence of a continuous search for an identity to own to be proud of on the part of the colonized – those systematically denied any dignity as an essential part of their exploitation.
Amir sees this dignity in being a proletariat of the Communist International, where his class, his oppression are seen as symbols of pride. Sukarno sees the same in a form of self-emancipation – of creating a defiantly separate identity.
In his speech, he draws an image of diversity in coexistence and cooperation, different ethnicity, cultures and religions, united by their pasts as the disregarded of the world, their recent history of a fight for freedom, and by a vision for the future undefined either by, or in opposition to their previous masters.
He envisions, thus, a third world – defined by this diversity and this pride,
this defiant dignity – in this definition of themselves, by themselves. There’s a
search for worth, a need to reset the terms of engagement. After all, the diverse nations he’s addressing cannot claim preeminence in the ‘modernity’ of Europe. Instead there must be a worth found in what is intrinsic to the Asio-African nations.
Sukarno finds this worth in a morality lingering within the third world,
otherwise abandoned by a world driven to ever newer and, to him, madder, heights by cold-war polarization.
It is possible to see Sukarno’s words as the next generation of Dada’s vision of hope. Where the Second World essentially offered an alternative to the First, an alternative geography, an alternative scale of value, an alternative opinion of the otherwise epistemic empire, the Third offers a still greater break from what was, eventually, still a European conception of the world. In short, it offers a still greater reclamation of self-identity, if with less hope of a Utopian future attached to it.
In a sense, both texts offer the same thing – a new world in which a new dignity, a new worth, awaits those who previously had none. Their explanations are different – Communism sees the meek (or rather the workers – easily equated to the colonized and oppressed) as the celebrated heirs of the earth, and Sukarno sees Afro-Asia as offering a third way of humanity – a new hope for a grim world. Unity of desire, in both cases, is considered above the conflict-inducing diversity of the first world.
The difference is in the details. Both inter-war Moscow and Sukarno celebrate diversity within the unity of purpose. Moscow, however, treats it as the exporting of the second world, perhaps, where unity of purpose is emphasized over incidental diversity, while Sukarno seeks to make diversity an essential component of his third world – and unity a virtue.
Still, both together represent the evolution in counter-colonial thought, as well as trends in self-reclamation of the identity of the colonial world, first by allying with the diversity-tolerant second world, and then by owning their own diversity within their own identity. Perhaps, if there is one thing that shines through, it is the importance of reclaiming self-esteem, self-worth. Both of them represent a break from traditional first world limitations. Both of them represent hope in a new way – a new world.
Decoloniality and Decolonization 