Independent Jamaica Enters World Politics: Foreign Policy in a New State
Of all the changes in the international system since World War II, few have had more impact on world politics than the dismantlement of European colonial empires and the creation of what today are about eighty new states. The number of nation-states in the international system about doubled, increasing the complexity of the system and creating alternative subsystems of associations. Three more or less overlapping, newly emergent and articulate groups of nations appeared, the "less developed," the "nonaligned," and the "Third World."' The increase of cordiality and trade that came with detente between the United States and the Soviet Union on the one hand, and between the United States and China on the other, prompted other countries, especially the new and small states, to question the value of alliances with superpowers. It sent them seeking new networks of interactions with a diversity of countrieswithin both Western and Communist spheres-that would serve their own interests. It also sent them seeking new world views and theoretical explanations to serve as organizing principles to challenge the old international order that had permitted the rich nations to become richer and intercountry inequality to