In 1995, Canadians held their breath as the French-speaking province of Quebec prepared for a referendum to decide whether to become an independent nation or remain part of Canada (the latter option was chosen by a small margin). During the debate leading up to the referendum, Sergio Martinez, a columnist for Toronto's daily Spanish-language newspaper El Popular, commented on the sympathy of some Hispanics for the Quebec separatist movement. Martinez objected to the argument that Hispanics should support Francophone Quebecers in their quest for independence on the grounds that the latter were Latin too. That would mean, he explained, that Hispanics should have supported the French rather than the Algerians during the latter's struggle for freedom from France.

I don't dispute Martinez's reasoning that one should not back a cause simply because it's embraced by an individual or group of similar background to oneself. As an Italian-Canadian, I would never vote for a political candidate of Italian descent who advocated restrictive immigration laws, for instance. I do question Martinez's seeming assumption that Hispanics would feel an instant bond of solidarity with Algerians. Such a bond, Martinez appeared to say, is warranted not only because the Algerians were in the right but because both Latin Americans and Algerians are inhabitants of the Third World and thus victims of oppression and imperialism.

Martinez, a leftist, subscribes to a vision common among progressives: the idea that the various populations of the Third World share, or should share, a mutual bond in view of their oppression by the industrialized world. According to this vision, the world consists of two parts: the industrialized "white" First World -- Europe, Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand -- and the less technologically developed "non-white" Third World, that is Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East. Ironically, many right-wingers, especially white supremacists, also divide the world up in such a manner. Whereas right-wingers, however, demonize the Third World and everybody they perceive as non-white and cling to the notion of a Great White Brotherhood, leftists see the First World as the bad guy and the Third World as the underdog fighting for justice against the all-powerful West.

Yet there are problems with the picture of a rich, industrialized, imperialistic white West versus a poor, oppressed non-white Third World. Some countries don't fit quite so easily into this scheme. For example, Japan is one of the most technologically advanced nations on the planet, but its people are by no means white and its culture certainly not Western. Eastern Europeans similarly defy easy classification. While they are part of Europe geographically and while their culture has more in common with that of Western Europe than with anywhere else, Eastern Europeans -- even those from Catholic countries like Poland and the Czech Republic -- generally don't consider themselves as part of the West. And it's hard to think of places like Russia and Ukraine, where life expectancy is low, poverty rampant, and women joining their Filipina and Colombian sisters as mail-order brides in an attempt to find a rich husband abroad, as members of some monolithic oligarchy.

Latin Americans too might run into difficulty trying to place themselves in this binary scheme. Most inhabitants of Central and South America are not of entirely European origin in a racial sense and are not rich, but they share more culturally with Europeans, and with Latin Europeans in particular, than with Africans, Asians or Middle Easterners. For example, the average Latin American and average Italian speak mutually intelligible languages, practise the same religion, and follow -- the word "follow" here is fairly relative, as Italians aren't famous for their law-abiding nature -- similar legal codes. The same Latin American shares none of these things with a Chinese Buddhist or Moslem Arab. Perhaps the Third World region closest to Latin America in terms of culture is the Philippines, which was also colonized by Spain and which is predominantly Catholic in religion. But at the end of the day, the connection between the two isn't really much stronger than that between Britain and Spain, two former Roman colonies that nonetheless turned out very differently. Spain today is a Latin country; Britain is not. Likewise, while culturally Latin America belongs to the West, the Philippines has remained essentially an Asian nation despite three centuries of Spanish rule. As Roberto Hernandez Montoya, the editor of a Venezuelan on-line publication, says, most Latin Americans have never felt a living link with that distant archipelago. So it might be understandable why some Hispanic Canadians would identify with French-speaking Quebecers as "Latin brothers."

Not only do individuals from different Third World countries not necessarily have much in common, they don't always like each other either. I remember an article in the 1980s about African students in China raising the wrath of the local population by dating Chinese girls. The incident couldn't help reminding me of similar reactions among whites in the Southern United States when black men dared to "look" at white females the wrong way. Relations between minority groups may be plagued by the same hostilities as those between whites and minorities. Curiously, some Third World communities prefer Europeans to other outside groups. For instance, the traditionally endogamous Chinese are usually less upset at seeing their children marry whites than blacks or other minorities. The above-mentioned outcry at the Chinese universities might have been more subdued if the foreign students in question had been French, say, instead of African.

That non-Europeans don't automatically come together to fight First World imperialism and white racism bothers some progressives. In an essay in the book The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s, Filipino activist Steven De Castro states that "we people of color have got to pull together if we are going to get some power." But he admits that his fellow Filipinos fall short of this goal. He chides them, for example, for "cheering on America as some Arabs are getting napalmed" (though their cheers might have more to do with their love of the United States than with any hatred of Arabs). And De Castro claims that just as Filipinos can be racist towards other minorities, they too may find themselves the victims of racism and exploitation by those groups.

By the same token, it may surprise leftists and white supremacists alike that Europeans and their descendants do not necessarily see themselves as part of a Great White Brotherhood. In a recent Italian survey, Filipinos emerged as the most popular immigrants in Italy and Albanians as the least. While Filipinos may be culturally more like Italians than Albanians are (after all, Filipinos and Italians are both Catholic, and the two groups share what American commentator Jim Goad calls a "bleedingly gaudy display of papism" -- that is, the habit of decorating their homes and yards with tacky religious statues), Filipinos obviously look more different. Practically no Filipino would ever be mistaken for a native-born Italian. Albanians on the other hand are physically indistinguishable from the people of Italy. Nonetheless, Italians haven't embraced Albanian immigrants as long-lost white brothers. (I should note that one leading Italian archbishop has advocated Hispanic immigration to Italy, so aspiring emigrants in Latin America might consider that country as a destination.)

Perhaps the world is too big a place to split up into neat little parts. The industrialized, imperialistic white First World/poor oppressed non-white Third World paradigm may be too simple. And it may be even harder to get the inhabitants of either of these divisions to team up on the basis of some illusory shared bond, even if it's for as good a cause as fighting racism, imperialism and other forms of oppression. In the end, we might be better off advocating Third World causes on the grounds that they're just rather than on the notion of ethnic solidarity.

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