support national liberation movements in non-Western societies, and
many displayed considerable unease with forms of nationalist politics
which would dilute the internationalist commitments of classical
Marxism (Warren 1980; Nairn 1981). The fact that Marxism is a
Western doctrine with its roots in the European Enlightenment is the
crucial point here. Marxist cosmopolitanism was developed in the era of
European dominance – in the colonial era which Marx greatly admired –
and at a time when it was reasonable to assume that the non-European
world would become more similar to the West in most ways. The rise of
Third World Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s was a powerful reminder
that the modern world was gradually entering the post-European age. Its
emergence might be regarded as an illustration of ‘the cultural revolt
against the West’ or as an attempt to adapt European ideas to very
different circumstances (Bull 1984a; Brown 1988). In more recent years,
many non-Western governments and movements have openly rejected
Western models of economic and political development, and many
oppose what they see as alien and decadent Western values. In this
context, all forms of cosmopolitanism – whether Marxist or not – meet
with suspicion. The main problem is not that classical Marxism underestimated
the importance of nationalism, the state and geopolitics
but, many would argue, that it expressed a culture-bound view of the
world which was inherited from the European Enlightenment. Classical
Marxism may have defended the ideal of universal human emancipation,
but its vision of the future assumed the non-European would and
should become the same as the modern West. The issue then is whether
its project of emancipation was always at heart a project of domination
or assimilation.