With its focus on Algeria’s oil and natural gas industries, this paper asks why that country epitomized the rise and fall of the global “Third Worldist” project to transform the world’s political and economic structures for the benefit of developing countries. After achieving its independence in 1962, Algeria pursued a revolutionary strategy to take control of its energy resources and harness them as drivers of a broader-based socialist development program. Over the next decade, its leaders diluted France’s dominant position in that sector by forging new commercial and technological relationships with Britain, Italy, and the United States. In the late 1960s, Algiers brokered pioneering deals with America’s Getty Oil and El Paso Gas, deals that reversed the traditional balance of power between a developing country and Western multinationals. In 1971, the Algerians nationalized their oil and gas holdings and imposed unilateral price rises on France—an action that French President Georges Pompidou compared to a “Hitlerian diktat”. Throughout this period, Algeria held up this strategy as an example to other developing countries in terms of both economic and political development. Then in 1973, mere weeks after Algeria had used its status as host of the Non-Aligned Summit to press its philosophy further, OPEC’s oil embargo and subsequent massive price increases seemed to provide the most emphatic vindication of the Third Worldist strategy. Yet, the fall was swift. By the 1980s Algeria was the epitome of Third World decline by dint of its economic collapse and rising political unrest. Relying principally on new documentary evidence from the archives of the Algerian state—including those of the Foreign Ministry and Ministry of Industry and Power—this paper argues that Algeria’s supposedly Third Worldist strategy contained a fundamental contradiction. On the one hand, as an expression of economic nationalism, Third Worldism was intended to reinforce state power against the strengthening forces of “globalization”—namely, Western multinationals. Yet, by encouraging the decentralization and diversification of the global oil and gas economy, Algeria’s energy strategy actually epitomized the incipient processes of globalization that proved so fatal to the long-term economic goals of the Non-Aligned Movement and the G77 countries. Presaging the prevailing discourse of the 1990s, President Houari Boumedienne’s assertion in the early 1970s that Algeria had become a “non-ideological” country was, perhaps, the inadvertent admission of a revolutionary nationalism that had lost its way.

The paper will analyse the roots and dynamics of the alliance between Syria and the East Germany in the early phase of the Ba’thist regime (1963-1970). The paper will show how material interests first, and the challenges of development set out by social and political conflicts soon after moved the Ba’thist regime closer to communist East Germany. These factors, in turn, opened the stage for the “translation” by Syrian officials of the institutional framework offered by the GDR along their needs and beliefs. At first, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) made inroads into the Arab country because of the waning influence of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), whose alliance in the Western camp of the Cold War and posture towards Israel disrupted its presence in Syria. Though not exactly interchangeable, East Germany partially filled the gap left by the Western rival: non-monetary trade transactions, high and medium-level technology, professional training and political support in international arenas were the main “goods” imported by Damascus from Berlin. As such, material as well as “realist” considerations among Syrian officials drove the regime closer to the GDR. The paper will set out the main elements forging this dimension on the basis of commercial accounts and diplomatic correspondence. However, facing the rising expectations of their social constituencies and the attacks from their rivals, the Ba’thist leaders in Damascus looked at the GDR as a valuable partner for their development projects as well, in particular as far as the reform of the central state apparatus was concerned. The extensive archival research integrated with oral interviews has shown the importance of the convergence on ideas and beliefs on key-issues like: the role of the state in economy, the patterns of social mobilization and discipline, the relationship between the Party and the Army. The control of the state and its bureaucracy was a central element in their project to transform Syria and the Arab world at large. As such, their programmes were a peculiar “translation” of the development process elaborated at that time along the patterns of “modernization” theories. Through the comparative analysis of GDR reports and Syrian official documents and reports, as well as oral interviews conducted in both countries, the paper will highlight the differences and similarities between Syrian and East German approaches to development and how these changed over time along their implementation by the Syrian and German officials deployed on the ground.

In 1965 the Soviet leadership instructed the Academy of Science and it’s affiliates in the Central Asia to “study the experience” of Central Asia’s development, in order to produce lessons that could be applied in the Third World. This made sense, since the post-1953 development of Soviet Central Asia was motivated in part by the desire to make it a model for post-colonial states. And there were indeed some interesting similarities, if not the ones the Soviet leadership had intended to make: the tendency to pick development projects based on local elites' political considerations rather than economic necessity, the focus on big projects, the reliance on “outside” skilled labor, and so forth. Drawing on sources from Russia and Tajikistan, this paper will examine how Soviet planners working abroad understood the successes and failures of Soviet policy in Central Asia and to what extent they actually applied these lessons when they went to provide aid abroad. The first half of the paper will focus on Soviet aid to Afghanistan, investigating whether or not these aid plans incorporated lessons learned from the Central Asian experience. The second half will explore how Tajik specialists came to represent these programs abroad, what sort of knowledge informed their work, and what lessons they may have brought home from these experiences.

Following the first day of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser delivered a speech to the Arab world that accused Amreeka (“America”) of colluding with Israel to the detriment of the national welfare of Arab societies. Many Lebanese embraced this false rumor and concluded that Amreeka—the perceived apotheosis of the nation-state form, defender of self-determination, and global umpire of decolonization—stood in the way of Lebanon’s national development. In the wake of the Arab Naksa (or setback), Lebanese peoples believed that U.S. diplomacy facilitated Israeli settler colonialism and thus endangered Lebanon’s national sovereignty. By facilitating Israeli expansionism and belying Arab rights, Washington clearly chose empire over decolonization and thus betrayed its invented tradition of anti-colonialism. Lebanese perceptions of U.S. global power, at this moment, finalized a profound shift, which had begun during the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948-49 and Arab Nakba in Palestine. A cultural process, in others words, consolidated itself in which the United States became an “imperial” power in Lebanese imaginations. Lebanese peoples equated the U.S. way of seeing them and its subsequent conduct and foreign policies to those of fading imperial powers and Cold War allies, Britain and France, and their perceived Middle Eastern surrogate, Israel. Henceforth, Lebanese society viewed the United States as being far from exceptional. By investigating Lebanese newspapers, speeches, and public protests alongside U.S. diplomatic records, this paper explores the ways in which the Lebanese public sphere processed and projected Amreeka during the 1967 war. It argues that the United States’ imperial turn in Lebanese imaginations profoundly shaped Lebanese identity by challenging official and popular thoughts of the nation-state form and solidifying postcolonial ideas regarding the changing nature of the supposed post-imperial international system. In the process, by zoning in on a vibrant Lebanese public sphere, it demonstrates how the Lebanese Cold War fortified imperial structures and interrupted the imagined linear trajectories of the nation-state, decolonization, and modernity.