"The Cold War was born as an ideological contest in Europe and the European offshoots, Russia and the United States. In the second half of the twentieth century that contest came to interact with the processes surrounding the collapse of the European overseas empires. Europe had been predominant in international affairs for at least two centuries. But as the post–World War II re-creation of Asia had shown, this position of primacy could no longer be taken for granted. And in the 1950s and ’60s decolonization sped up, so that by 1970 the number of independent states had increased almost four times since 1945. They all wanted to have their say in how the world was run. And they were not willing to conform to the bipolar Cold War system without a struggle for their own interests. Out of this encounter between Cold War and decolonization came the Third World movement. It was so named by its protagonists in homage to the Third Estate, the rebellious underdog majority of the French Revolution of 1789. But its aims were very contemporary. Leaders of newly independent states, such as Indonesia’s Sukarno or India’s Nehru, believed that the time had come for their countries to take center stage in international affairs. Europeans, a small minority in the world, had dominated for far too long, and had not done a good job of it. Not only had they produced colonialism and two world wars, but within colonialism they had created a political and economic system that only served the interests of Europeans. The talents, opinions, cultures, and religions of the vast majority of the world’s people had been neglected. Now the time had come for the disenfranchised to take responsibility not just for their own liberated countries, but for the world as a whole."