The problems facing the ex colonial countries of the Third World after independence were immense. Lack of "infrastructure," of industries or other economic opportunities, of organization, of education, all confronted Third World leaders. All were made more intractable and were in turn exacerbated by the underlying presence of mass dire poverty. Because of all these conditions, Third World countries had very little margin for error at best.
In many respects, indeed, the new Third World nations did not exist, at least not in the sense that Westerners meant when they spoke of a nation. President Sukarno of Indonesia, for example, said that "even a small child, when he looks at a map . . . can see that the Indonesian archipelago forms a unit" (p. 244). But only on a map did the Indonesian archipelago form a unit. It possessed few common bonds save those imposed by Dutch colonial rule. The population was divided into broad Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim elements, with numberless lesser ethnic or tribal divisions. Only a small, Westernized elite had any concept of being Indonesian. Likewise, Africa had some five thousand languages, and its nations were drawn along artificial colonial lines: "African nationalism was an abstract Western ideal, inspired by pan Africanism" (p. 253).
In short, nation building, to use the cant phrase of the 1950s and 1960s, was a more fundamental problem than building roads, schools, and the like. The first task was to build the idea of a nation among disparate populations whose previous experience and traditions had little to offer in response to the problem of national existence in a Western oriented world.
According to Von Laue, indeed, the most fundamental of all the problems facing the emerging Third World was cultural. Almost all Third World countries lacked the habits of thought, the ways of relating and interconnecting, that had been developed in the West over a perio...