By the time of the First World War, there existed not only a worldwide international system but also an international society that was universal in the sense that it covered all the world and included states from Asia, Africa, and the Americas as well as Europe. In this universal international society, however, a position of dominance was still occupied by the European powers, or more broadly (since Europe’s offshoots in north and south America, southern Africa, and Australasia partook of this dominance) by the Western powers, which continued to occupy this position until the Second World War. After the Second World War a revolt against Western dominance—a revolt which had been growing in strength earlier in the century, and whose roots lay late in the last century—became powerful enough to shake the system.

The dominance of the European or Western powers at the turn of the century was expressed not only in their superior economic and military power and in their commanding intellectual and cultural authority but also in the rules and institutions of international society. This society was still seen as an association of mainly European and Christian states, to which outside political communities could be admitted only if and when they met the criteria for membership laid down by the founding members—as Japan by 1900 was widely deemed to have done and China not yet to have done. The rules of international law which then prevailed had been made, for the most part, by these European or Western states, which had consented to them through custom or treaties concluded among themselves; the governments and peoples of Asia, Africa, and Oceania, who were subject to these rules, had not given their consent to them. The international legal rules, moreover, were not only made by the European or Western powers, they were also in substantial measure made for them: part, at least, of the content of the then existing international law (e.g. treaty law, which upheld the validity of treaties concluded under duress; the law of state sovereignty, which took no account of the self-determination of peoples; the law governing the use of force, which made resort to force a prerogative right of states) served to facilitate the maintenance of European or Western ascendancy.

At the turn of the century the chief pillars of this system of dominance were the European colonial powers, especially Britain and France, and to a lesser extent the latecomers, Germany and Italy; and even as late as the early years of the Second World War, this still appeared to be the case. But the United States, the white dominions of the British Empire, the Latin American republics, and indeed the Russian Empire were also supporters and beneficiaries of Western dominance, even if in some cases ambiguously; and as the revolt unfolded against it, later in the century, they too became its targets.

The United States, it is true, saw itself as an anti-colonial power, sympathised with anti-colonial rhetoric, which was the rhetoric of its own war of independence, and resented the exclusiveness of European imperial structures, in which its trade was sometimes put at a disadvantage. But the American colonies which gained their independence from Britain were themselves a product of the process of European expansion; the United States carried this process further by extending its dominion across the north American continent to consolidate its territory, subjugating aboriginal peoples as it did so; it expanded in the Caribbean and the Pacific to become a colonial power in its own right; its denial of equal rights to black Americans aligned it with European policies of racial exclusiveness; and the economic position it acquired for itself in Asia and Africa was such that, when European colonial rule eventually disappeared and neo-colonialism became the principal target of Third World protest, the United States came to be viewed as the main antagonist.

Russia, it is true, has always been perceived in Europe as semi-Asiatic in character, a perception confirmed by the ambivalence in Russia’s own mind as to whether it belongs to the West or not; it was, until recently, a relatively backward and under-developed country, vulnerable to the Western great powers as Asian countries have been; the efforts of Russian reformers, from Peter the Great onwards, to learn from the West so as to be able to compete with it provide a model which Asians and Africans have followed; and since 1917 the Soviet state has rendered powerful assistance to the forces struggling against Western dominance as their ally and champion. But like the United States, the imperial Russia of the turn of the century was the product of European expansion; like the maritime expansion of the Western European states, the expansion of Russia by land proceeded by the subjugation of indigenous communities and immigration and settlement by metropolitan peoples. Its frontiers, determined in places by ‘unequal treaties’, and its non-European peoples, originally subject to Russian dominance, still partly define the character of the Soviet Union today, rendering it also a potential target of Third World hostility.

The Latin American republics, like the United States, have an anti-colonial and national liberationist tradition. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, moreover, at a time when the United States saw itself as a newly arrived great power, the Latin American states saw themselves as victims of great power dominance and intervention; their attempts to impose legal limitations on the use of force in international relations and to strengthen the principle of non-intervention were an anticipation of the later policies of the Third World. In the post-colonial world their posture in world affairs has been that of poor, under-developed states, allied with Asians and Africans in the Group of 77 and the Non-Aligned Movement. But they, too, are the products of the process of European expansion; they are founded upon the subjugation of aboriginal peoples, whom some of them continue to oppress; they are chiefly Western in language, religion, and other aspects of culture, and if anything distinguishes their position from that of the United States in the context of the revolt against Western dominance, it is only their conspicuous failure to match it in economic or political development.

European or Western dominance of the universal international society may be said to have reached its apogee about the year 1900. It is true that at that time the Western impact on the world was in many respects less far-reaching than it has since become. European colonial expansion did not reach to its fullest extent until the period between the two world wars. African and Asian societies, even under colonial rule, were not then as entangled in the world economy as they were to become in the post-colonial period. The technological distances between the most advanced Western societies and most Asian and African societies, although this is difficult to measure, may be judged to be in some respects greater now than it was then. The intellectual and cultural penetration of Asian and African societies by the West was less profound then than it was to become later.

But at the turn of the century the dominance of the European or Western powers expressed a sense of self-assurance, both about the durability of their position in international society and about its moral purpose, that did not survive the First World War. In non-Western societies also the ascendancy of the West was still widely regarded as a fact of nature rather than as something which could or should be changed. The spiritual or psychological supremacy of the West was at its highest point, even if its material or technological supremacy was not. In their attitudes to other peoples, moreover, the Western powers displayed a measure of unity, of which a striking expression in 1900 was their intervention in China to suppress the Boxer Rising. The leading states of the old, European-dominated international order sank their differences and sent an international army that inflicted humiliation upon the greatest of non-Western societies. The presence in this international army of a Japanese contingent, however, showed that the system was already changing. The Japanese did not respond to the Dowager Empress’s request to the Mikado for Asian unity against the West, but joined in the defence of the international society of states, to membership of which they had graduated.

The revolt against Western dominance, which had already begun at this time, comprised five phases or themes. First, there was what we may call the struggle for equal sovereignty. This was the struggle of those states which retained their formal independence, but enjoyed only a subordinate or inferior status, to achieve equal rights as sovereign states. The marks of their inferiority included so-called ‘unequal treaties’—treaties concluded under duress, conferring conspicuously unequal benefits on the parties to them, and impairing the sovereignty of the non-Western states concerned—and especially those conferring rights of extraterritorial jurisdiction on the citizens of Western states within the territories of non-Western states. The lead in this struggle was taken by Japan, which freed itself of extraterritorial jurisdiction in the course of the 1890s, and went on to achieve the status not merely of a sovereign state equal in rights to the Western powers, but of a great power able to impose ‘unequal treaties’ of its own on Korea and China. Turkey achieved the elimination of extraterritorial jurisdiction through the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 (the system had been unilaterally repudiated by the Ottoman Empire on entering the war in 1914, but re-imposed by the victorious Allies through the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920); Egypt through the Anglo–Egyptian Treaty of 1936; China through agreement with the United States and Britain in 1943. In the Persian Gulf, where the old international order survived for a period after it had disappeared elsewhere, as the Empire of Trebizond survived the fall of Byzantium, extraterritorial jurisdiction continued until the British withdrawal in 1971.

Secondly, there was the anti-colonial revolution, by which we normally mean the struggle of Asian, African, Caribbean, and Pacific peoples for formal political independence of European and American colonial rule, although it is worth noting that Korea between 1912 and 1945 was a colony not of any European power but of Japan, that the Sudan between 1899 and 1956 was a quasi-colony of Egypt in conjunction with Britain, and that the European peoples of Cyprus and Malta still had the status of colonial dependencies after the Second World War. Although the colonial system was disturbed by the prominence given to the principle of national self-determination in the Bolshevik Revolution, the 1919 Peace Settlement, and the evolution of the British Commonwealth in the interwar period, the revolution that overthrew it in the non-Western world belongs chiefly to the post-1945 era: the Asian colonial dependencies became independent for the most part in the late 1940s and 1950s, the African territories in the 1960s and 1970s. With the collapse of the Portuguese empire in 1974–75 the era of classic, European colonialism came to an end, even though the anti-colonial movement had further targets in white minority rule in southern Africa and Jewish rule in Palestine.

Thirdly, there has been the struggle for racial equality, or more accurately the struggle of non-white states and peoples against white supremacism. The old Western-dominated international order was associated with the privileged position of the white race: the international society of states was at first exclusively, and even in its last days principally, one of white states; non-white peoples everywhere, whether as minority communities within these white states, as majority communities ruled by minorities of whites, or as independent peoples dominated by white powers, suffered the stigma of inferior status. The struggle to change this state of affairs spans many centuries and touches the internal history of states as well as their relations with one another. It encompasses the eighteenth-century doctrine of the rights of man, at first applied effectively only to persons of European race, the movements for abolition of slavery and the slave trade in Europe and America, the emergence of Haiti as a black state, the Japanese victories over Russia in 1904–1905 and the Western powers in 1941–42, the pan-African movement in the first half of the century. But it has been in the post-1945 period that the decisive changes have come: the Afro-Asian movement launched at Bandung in 1955; the achievement of independence by so many non-white states that the whites have become a minority; the victories of the civil rights movement in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, profound in its repercussions on other Western countries; the virtual expulsion of South Africa from the Commonwealth, and its reduction to the status of a pariah in the United Nations; the development of human rights instrumentalities under the aegis of the United Nations, and especially the Convention on Elimination of Racial Discrimination of 1966. The solidarity of non-whites against whites has been one of the principal elements making for the cohesion of the loose coalition of states and movements to which we refer as the Third World.

Fourthly, there has been the struggle for economic justice. Although anti-colonial movements from the beginning maintained that imperialism was bound up with economic exploitation, and included goals of economic development or betterment in their programs, and although the assertion by Third World states of sovereignty over their natural resources may be traced back through the nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian oil company in 1951, the Mexican expropriations of foreign oil in companies of the 1930s, the experience of the Bolshevik Revolution, and in the Calvo and Drago doctrines asserted by Latin American states late in the last century against foreign intervention in their economic affairs, it was not until the 1960s that economic objectives attained pride of place in the agenda of the coalition of Asian, African, and Latin American states, which by then had become known as the Third World. By the time of the formation of the Group of 77 at the first meeting in 1964 of the UN Conference on Trade, Aid, and Development, concern about colonialism was giving place to concern about economic domination by the Western powers of the post-colonial world; the gap between the living standards of most Western and most Third World states was growing as a consequence not only of the economic boom in Western countries but also of their new policies of state promotion of minimum standards of welfare; and consciousness of the gap was growing as a result of the revolution in communications. In the 1960s the debate between Western and Third World countries over what was called international development assistance took the form of a discussion of the terms of a partnership between rich and poor countries that had common interests in development—the rich having a stake in the development of the poor, and the poor in the further development of the rich. In the 1970s by contrast, under the impact of the 1973–74 oil crisis, the world recession, the radicalisation of Third World opinion and the reaction against this in the West, the terms of the debate changed: the idea of a partnership between rich and poor gave place to that of a struggle for the world product, non-zero sum conceptions of the relationship to zero-sum, development assistance to redistribution of wealth—a change reflected in 1974 in the Declaration of a New International Economic Order and the Charter of the Economic Rights and Duties of States endorsed by Third World majorities in the United Nations.

Fifthly, there has been the struggle for what is called cultural liberation: the struggle of non-Western peoples to throw off the intellectual or cultural ascendancy of the Western world so as to assert their own identity and autonomy in matters of the spirit. The revolt against Western dominance in relation to the four earlier themes that have been mentioned has been conducted, as least ostensibly, in the name of ideas or values that are themselves Western, even if it is not clear in all cases that these ideas are exclusively or uniquely Western: the rights of states to sovereign equality, the rights of nations to self-determination, the rights of human beings to equal treatment irrespective of race, their rights to minimum standards of economic and social welfare. Perhaps the right to cultural autonomy may also be regarded as a Western value, or at all events as a value which Western countries (for example, as signatories of the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 1966) now support. But the re-assertion by Asian, African, and other non-Western peoples of their traditional and indigenous cultures, as exemplified in Islamic fundamentalism, Hindu and Sikh traditionalism in India, manifestations of ethnic consciousness in Africa, has raised the question whether what has been widely interpreted as a revolt against Western dominance carried out in the name of Western values, is not a revolt against Western values as such.

We need to bear in mind, in speaking of the repudiation of ‘Western values’ in Third World countries, that the former are neither monolithic nor unchanging. Different Western countries, and different regimes within those countries, stand and have stood for values of very different kinds: in the post-1945 period the West for some Third World peoples has been represented by the resurgent imperialism of the French Fourth Republic and the post-war Netherlands, by the Spanish and Portuguese dictatorships, and by a South African government committed to strengthening rather than removing barriers between races. In the period during which the revolt against Western dominance has been unfolding, there have been vast changes in the values prevailing in all Western societies; public attitudes towards the equal rights of non-Western states, national liberation from colonial rule, equal rights of non-white races, the rights of poor peoples to economic justice and cultural autonomy have been transformed in recent decades. Moreover, in noting the gap between Third World behaviour and what Western persons like to think of as ‘Western values’, we should not fall into the error of assuming that Western peoples are themselves always faithful to them; they are at most a statement of Western ideals, not a description of Western practices.

Yet as Asian, African, and other non-Western peoples have assumed a more prominent place in international society it has become clear that in matters of values the distance between them and Western societies is greater than, in the early years of national liberation or decolonisation, it was assumed to be. In making their demands for equal rights on behalf of oppressed states, nations, races, or cultures, the leaders of the Third World spoke as suppliants, in a world in which the Western powers were still in a dominant position. The demands that they made had necessarily to be put forward in terms of charters of rights (the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, the American Declaration of Independence, the League Covenant, the Atlantic Charter, the UN Charter) of which Western powers were the principal authors. The moral appeal had to be cast in the terms that would have most resonance within Western societies. But as Asian, African, and other non-Western peoples have become stronger relative to the Western powers, they have become freer to adopt a different rhetoric that sets Western values aside, or at all events places different interpretations upon them.

The collapse of the old, Western-dominated international order has been brought about by perhaps five factors on which we may briefly touch. First, there has been the psychological or spiritual awakening of Asian and African, Caribbean and Pacific peoples, beginning among small groups of the Western-educated, later affecting masses of people, that led them to perceive the old order no longer as a fact of nature, but as something that could be changed, to recognise that by mobilising themselves to this end they could indeed change it, to abandon a passive for a politically active role in world affairs. The great instrument these peoples have used to advance their purposes has been the state: they began by capturing control of states and then used them—domestically to build nationhood, to establish control of their economies, to combat local vestiges of external dominance; internationally to establish relations with outside states, to combine with their friends, drive wedges among their enemies, and expound their views in the councils of the world.

A second factor has been a weakening of the will on the part of the Western powers to maintain their position of dominance; or at least to accept the costs necessary to do so. The First World War destroyed the self-assurance of the European powers which had been so cardinal a feature of the old order, while also leading them to embrace a principle of national self-determination contradictory of the legitimacy of colonial rule. The Second World War left the European imperial powers too weak to maintain old kinds of dominance, even though it left the United States with a commanding position in world affairs. As Third World peoples mobilised themselves politically in defence of their interests, the use of force to maintain Western positions of dominance became more costly. At the same time it came to be questioned whether colonial dependencies were a source of material gain: the old liberal thesis, that the true interests of the metropolitan peoples lay in non-interventionism and avoidance of empire, was revived, and appeared to be confirmed by the economic triumphs of Germany and Japan, achieved without military pre-eminence or colonies. Nor were the peoples of the metropolitan countries always insensitive to the aspirations of non-Western peoples: both in Europe and in America there were many for whom the emancipation of the former dependencies represented the fulfilment of their own ideals.

It would be wrong, however, to countenance the idea that the Western powers offered little or no resistance to the dismantling of the old order, or that this dismantling came about essentially in response to their own policies. That the process of de-colonisation was an act of policy of the colonial powers themselves is the thesis both of apologists for the policies of the colonial powers (as in the argument of writers about the British Commonwealth that the purpose of empire was preparation for self-government), and of those who see the transition from colonialism to neo-colonialism, from direct to indirect domination, as the result of a conspiracy by the colonial powers themselves to bring about a form of domination that they had come to prefer. There were indeed cases in the latter stages of the process of national liberation, especially in Africa and the Pacific, in which the independence of former colonies came about through cooperation between the metropolitan power and local representatives. But such instances were made possible only by the fact that the will of the colonial powers had already been broken. The reverses that were inflicted upon the Western powers in Indonesia, Indo-China, Algeria, Suez, Cyprus, Vietnam, and elsewhere had first to be suffered before the lessons from them could be drawn.

A third factor making for the demise of the old order was the impact of the Bolshevik revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union as a major power. The influence of the Soviet Union, it is true, has not always been perceived as a positive one from the point of view of the Afro-Asian or Third World nationalist struggles. Classical Marxism was basically unsympathetic to nationalism, and although Leninism has aligned the communist movement with it, the heritage of the ideas of Marx and Engels has sometimes proved a handicap in this respect. Stalin’s Russia during the Second World War was aligned with European imperialists against Germany, and thus withdrew its support for anti-imperialist movements. Even after the War, Soviet support for communist revolution in the Third World stood in the way of an understanding with Third World nationalism until after the death of Stalin. The Soviet Union has never been able to compete with the United States and the Western European countries in providing economic and technological assistance to Third World countries. The Soviet Union’s frontiers, as we noted above, result from European expansion and subjugation of non-European peoples, which means that some Third World sentiment may be mobilised against it, as China has sought to do. The Soviet Union’s capacity for direct military intervention in Third World countries, demonstrated in Afghanistan since 1979, has attracted some of the Third World antagonism against external domination previously directed chiefly at the Western powers.

Nevertheless, the rise of Soviet power, especially since the Second World War, including its attainment of crude strategic parity with the United States by the early 1970s and development of global interventionary capacity, has been basically helpful to the struggle of Third World peoples against the dominance of the Western powers. It is not merely, or perhaps even chiefly, that the Soviet state has provided a model of socialist planning and control of economic, social, and political life that has exerted an immense attraction over Third World countries and movements. It is rather that, since the collapse of Germany and Japan, the Soviet Union has been the chief centre of power in world affairs outside Western Europe and North America. Since it is the established ascendancy of Western Europe and North America in Asia, Africa, and Latin America that the Third World has been struggling to overthrow, the alliance of the Third World and the Soviet Union against the West, at least on a limited range of issues, that has been a basic feature of world affairs for many decades, has been natural and perhaps inevitable.

A fourth factor assisting the efforts of non-Western states and peoples to transform the system has been the existence of a more general equilibrium of power, to which the rise of the Soviet Union contributed, but of which it was only part, that has operated to the benefit of those challenging the old order. It is not a new circumstance that ‘divisions among the imperialists’ should operate in favour of the independence of weak peoples. But from the very beginning of the process of Western expansion, when the Papacy sought to contain the rivalry between Spain and Portugal, there were attempts, often successful, to preserve a common front vis-à-vis the non-Christian or extra-European world, or at least a common framework for competition within it. We have noted how, in the nineteenth century, such a framework was provided by the Concert of Europe.

In the post-1945 world also some elements of this common framework still survive: it is not wholly fanciful, for example, to see in the tacit understandings through which the North Atlantic powers and the Soviet Union have excluded war from their own area of the world, while exporting their military conflicts to the periphery, an echo of the arrangements reached between France and Spain at the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559, whereby armed conflicts in the New World were allowed to continue on the understanding that they would not disturb the peace of Europe. It is clear, however, that the divisions among the advanced powers are today much deeper than they were at the time when the West could agree to send an international force with a German commander to keep a dissident China in order; and that this new circumstance has operated to assist the weaker members of the system. Deeply divided as they are, the North Atlantic states and the Soviet Union serve to check one another’s interventions in the Third World. At the same time, the existence of several major centres of power—in Western Europe, Japan, and China, as well as in the United States and the Soviet Union—provides Third World countries with a range of diplomatic options for combining with one major power against another.

Finally, the dismantling of the old order has been assisted by a transformation of the legal and moral climate of international relations which the Third World states themselves, grouped with one another in the Afro-Asian movement, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the Group of 77, have played the principal role in bringing about. Commanding majorities of votes as they do in the political organs of the United Nations, and able to call upon the prestige of numbers, not merely of states but of persons, accruing to the states claiming to represent a majority of the world’s population, they have overturned the old structure of international law and organisation that once served to sanctify their subject status. The equal rights of non-Western states to sovereignty, the rights of non-Western peoples to self-determination, the rights of non-white races to equal treatment, non-Western peoples to economic justice, and non-Western cultures to dignity and autonomy—these rights are today clearly spelt out in conventions having the force of law, even though in many cases they are not enjoyed in practice and no consensus exists about their meaning and interpretation.

The Western powers have fought a rearguard action against this rewriting of international law and quasi-law, which may be studied in the debates that led up to the passing of such historic resolutions of UN organs as the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Peoples, the 1965 resolution recognising the right to use force in a war of national liberation, or the 1974 Declaration of a New International Economic Order. As a result of the challenge delivered by the Third World to the old legal order there is today deep division between the Western powers and Third World states about a wide range of normative issues. As the political organs of the United Nations were made to subserve the political purposes of the Third World coalition, the Western powers, once able to make the United Nations the instrument of purposes of their own, became disillusioned about it. It is possible to argue that as a consequence of these disagreements and attempts to paper them over by resort to concepts of ‘soft law’, the integrity of international law has been debased and the role actually played by international law in international relations, as opposed to what John Austin once called positive international morality, has gone into decline. It is not possible, however, to doubt that the changes wrought by Third World majorities have affected the legal and moral climate of world politics profoundly, and in such a way as to assist the challenge to Western dominance.

Theorists of international ‘dependence’ tell us that the position of the Western countries in the international system is still one of dominance. It is indeed true that the present distribution of wealth and power in the world falls far short of the aspirations of Third World peoples and their well-wishers elsewhere for justice and equality. But if we compare the position occupied by non-Western states and peoples in the universal international society of today with the position in which they found themselves at the turn of the century, it is difficult not to feel that the revolt against Western dominance has had a measure of success.