Hearts, Minds, Voices

In 2016, when Donald Trump referred to La Guardia Airport as looking like a “Third-World country,” he meant that it is shabby, dirty, and inefficient. But, as Jason Parker shows in Hearts, Minds, Voices, the term third world did not always have this baggage. Initially, it simply referred to those nations aligned neither with the “first” (the West) nor the “second” (the Soviet bloc) worlds. Third World, therefore, was initially an empty designator. But the Cold War, Jason C. Parker argues, not only proposed but also “helped to engender and nurture the concept” (p. 9). The developing neutralist movement embraced ideas beyond the conflict: “a need for economic development to overcome the poverty that imperial rule had left behind; and an often implicit, vaguely romantic sense of nonwhite solidarity” (ibid.). Parker's book, focused on the years between 1947 and 1962, shows how the clumsy insistence of U.S. and Soviet public diplomacy to fit all issues into a Cold War rubric created space for entrepreneurial Third World nations such as Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt or Jawaharlal Nehru's India to shape their nascent movement. They rejected the bipolar model of world affairs, which, Parker explains, “seemed a positive distraction” to nations with primary concerns (specifically, decolonization) elsewhere (p. 164

Cold war · Decolonization · Diplomacy · Foreign policy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Public Diplomacy · Sociology · Solidarity · World War II · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · International Relations and Foreign Policy · Law