Democratic revolution: a background revolution

Author are used to thinking of the world as consisting of three political conglomerations: the West, the East and the uncommitted or Afro-Asian countries. Put in traditional economic terms these are the Capitalist countries, the Communist countries and the underdeveloped countries. The Cold War has been primarily a conflict be tween the first two of these groups. Each claimed to be struggling for survival and charged the other with struggling for world domination. But both agreed that in the long run the outcome of their fight could be de cided by the future of the third group, the under developed countries, and each has put much of its Cold War effort into winning the allegiance of those.
Will the underdeveloped countries go Communist? Or will they develop under the patronage of the West? For fifteen years or more these questions were central to the outlook of both sides in the Cold War.
The ideologies of Capitalism and Communism were products of the nineteenth century, and neither of them is applicable to the world we live in. Although both sides of the Cold War still go on mouthing the old theories, their practice has long ceased to accord with them, if it ever did. But the theories act as a distorting mirror, because we see and discuss reality in terms of them, and they corrupt our thinking and our vision.