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u_xxviFOREWORDFOREWORDxxviifundamental importance in the colonised's psycho-affective equilibrium."54The psycho-affective equilibrium achicved throughthe creation of a national culture passes through a "nationalstage" on its way to constructing a world-system based on theideals of global equity. "This cold war ... gets us nowhere,"Fanon argues repeatedly. "The nuclear arms race must bestopped and the underdeveloped regions must receive generousinvestments and technical aid. The fate of the world depends onthe response given to this question."55 If the anticolonial movementaims at establishing national sovereignty and culturaldependence, the visionary goal of decolonization is to dismantlethe "either-or" of the cold war that dictates ideological optionsand economic choices to Third World nations as an integral partthe supranational, xenophobic struggle for world supremacy.Cold war internationalism, with its dependent states and its divisionof the spoils, repeats the Manichaean structure of possessionand dispossession experienced in the colonial world.The unraveling of the Soviet system saw the rapid emergenceethnoregional patriotisms and nationalisms of a fissionarykind that destroyed the existence of the very possibility of civilsociety in the midst of civil war and ethnic cleansing.Fanon was committed to creating a world-system of ThirdWorld nations that fostered a postcolonial consciousness basedon a "dual emergence" of national sovereignty and internationalsolidarity, for "it is at the heart of national consciousness thatternational consciousness establishes itself and thrives."56 Thehopeful symmetry of Fanon's dual emergence was based not ona "metaphysical principle" of cultural authenticity or geopoliticalexceptionalism (the African "tradition," the Asian "temperament,"the Latin American "spirit") but on the politicalethical principles of independence and security-a regional54 WE, 148. 55 WE, 61. 56 WE, 180. solidarity extended to any nation that seems to be internallynerable to antidemocratic governance or externally threatenedby hegemonic, quasi-colonial powers.57 In many ways, Fanon'scherished ideals of regional integration and economic collaborationon broad socialist principles of urban and agrarian developmentwere sullied by the corrupt and nepotistic practices ofthe colonial bourgeoisie that he despised for its hedonistic appropriationof the role of the settler, its small-time racketeering,its lack of the "pioneering aspect, the inventive, discoverer-ofnew-worldsaspect" of a progressive national bourgeoisie. (Accordingto a World Bank Working Report, almost 40 percentSouth Mrican private wealth is held outside the country.)58 ButFanon's belief in the critical importance of economic and technologicalsupport for "underdeveloped regions" "the fate of theworld depends on the response given to this question" - is a troublingissue that returns each time a new famine occurs, or a developingcountry is shackled by unredeemable debt, and theseproblems have had no satisfactory solution across the half centuryfrom his day to ours.Witl1 a few exceptions, the cartography of the global south followsthe contours of the Third World. The unanswered call for"development as freedom,"59 to use Amartya Sen's excellentphrase, has a long history of failure (for which national governmentsmust share responsibility with the international community).However, Fanon's proleptic proposal that the postcolonialnarrative of independent nation building could enter its internationalphase only after the end of the Cold War telescopes that longhistory of neglect into our times, whence it reveals the poignantproximity of the incomplete project of decolonization to the57 WE, 179.58 Paul Collier, Anke Hoeffler, and Catherine Pattillo, "Flight Capital as aPortfolio Choice," World Bank Policy Research Working Paper no. 2066mary 1999).59 See Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Anchor Books),Oxford UP, 1999).b 'I! f nO' ~__u