Third World

For the Jamaican reggae band, see Third World (band).

The UN Human Development Index is one measure of a "Third World" country

Third World was a term first coined by Jawaharlal Nehru (First Prime Minister of India), originally to distinguish nations that aligned with neither the West or with the East during the Cold War, including many members of the Non-Aligned Movement. Today, however, the term is frequently used to denote nations with a low UN Human Development Index (HDI),independent of their political status. However, there is no objective definition of Third World or Third World country and the use of the term remains controversial. In geographical and political academia, it is almost never used, as it is seen as being out of date, colonialist, othering and inaccurate. In general, Third World countries are not as industrialized or technologically advanced as OECD countries.

Terms such as Global South, developing countries, least developed countries and the Majority World have become more popular in many circles, due to the potentially offensive and out of date connoations of describing a 'Third' world. Development workers also call them the two-thirds world (because two-thirds of the world is underdeveloped) and The South. The term Third World is also disliked as it may imply the false notion that those countries are not a part of the global economic system. Some note that the underdevelopment of Africa, Asia and South America during the Cold War was influenced, or even caused by the Cold War economic, political, and military maneuverings of the most powerful nations of the time.

The term Fourth World is used by some writers to describe the poorest Third World countries, those which lack industrial infrastructure and the means to build it. More commonly, however, the term is used to describe indigenous peoples or other oppressed minority groups within First World countries.

History of the term

"Worlds" during the late Cold War: First world (blue), Second world (red), Third world (green)

Perhaps the earliest use of such a ranking system to describe the peoples of Earth appears in studies of 'race' during the classic period of European imperialism. James M. Hobson, in his "The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization" (2004) discusses the 'civilizational league table' (employing categories such as 'racial colour', 'temperament', and 'climactic character'), and connects it to the work of Robert Knox, Benjamin Kidd, and the Comte de Gobineau (amongst others). Such discourse typically divided the world into three races - the 'advanced' First World of Europe, inhabited by Whites; the 'barbaric' second World of the Yellows; and the 'savage' Black Third World inhabited by Blacks.

A quite different use of the term "Third World" is found in the work of economist Alfred Sauvy in an article in the French magazine L'Observateur of August 14, 1952. It was a deliberate reference to the "Third Estate" of the French Revolution. Tiers monde means Third World in French in the sense of "third in rank" -- it does not mean "one-third" (troisième and tiers are doublets). The term gained widespread popularity during the Cold War when many poorer nations adopted the category to describe themselves as neither being aligned with NATO or the Warsaw Pact, but instead composing a non-aligned "third world" (in this context, the term "First World" was generally understood to mean the United States and its allies in the Cold War, which would have made the East bloc the "Second World" by default; however, the latter term was very seldom actually used).

Leading members of this original "third world" movement were Yugoslavia, India, and Egypt. Many third world countries believed they could successfully court both the communist and capitalist nations of the world, and develop key economic partnerships without necessarily falling under their direct influence. In practice, this plan did not work out quite so well; many third world nations were exploited or undermined by the two superpowers who feared these supposedly neutral nations were in danger of falling into alignment with the enemy. After World War II, the First and Second Worlds struggled to expand their respective spheres of influence to the Third World. The militaries and intelligence services of the United States and the Soviet Union worked both secretly and overtly to influence Third World governments, with mixed success.

During the Cold War there were a number of countries which did not fit comfortably into the neat definition of First, Second, and Third Worlds. These included Switzerland, Sweden, and the Republic of Ireland, which chose to be neutral. India was under the Soviet Union's sphere of influence but was not communist, nor was it a member of the Warsaw Pact. Austria was under the United States' sphere of influence, but in 1955, when the country again became a fully independent republic, it did so under the condition that it remained neutral. None of these countries would have been defined as Third World despite their non (or marginally) aligned status.

With the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, the term Second World largely fell out of use and the meaning of First World was extended to include all developed countries. By the end of the Cold War, the term Third World had shifted in English from its original meaning and had become a synonym for infrastructure-poor countries. The term "Fourth World" has come to denote especially poor and powerless groups, such as many indigenous peoples, living in either Third or First World countries. It is also sometimes used to describe extremely poor countries with almost no industrial infrastructure to speak of or as a synonym for "least developed countries". Heavily industrialized states that were formerly communist are simply called "former communist countries". It must be realized that enormous diversity exists within the third world and the term is increasingly being rendered obsolete because it is archaic and describes an international power structure that existed after the second world war. It is a false generalisation to say that the third world lacks an industrial infrastructure. Certainly China is far more technologicaly advanced than many first world countries; and also oil rich gulf states while having brutal regimes are richer than some "first world" countries. In retrospect the term should be used with caution as classifying countries into one homogeneous lump often inhibits an objective perspective.

Dependency theory

The dependency theory suggests that multinational corporations and organizations such as the IMF and World Bank have contributed to making Third World countries dependent on first world countries for economic survival. The theory states that this dependence is self-maintaining because the economic systems tend to benefit first world countries and corporations. Scholars also question whether the idea of development is biased in favor of Western thought. They debate whether population growth is a main source of problems in the third world or if the problems are more complex and thorny than that. Policy makers disagree on how much involvement first world countries should have in the Third World and whether Third World debts should be canceled.

The issues are complicated by the stereotypes of what Third World and first world countries are like. People in the first world, for example, often describe Third World countries as underdeveloped, overpopulated, and oppressed. Third World people are sometimes portrayed as uneducated, helpless, or backwards. Modern scholarship has taken steps to make academic discourse more conscious of the differences not only between the First World and the Third World, but also among the countries and people of each category.

See also

• Non-aligned movement
• Digital divide
• World White Web
• Orientalism
• Post-colonialism
• Emerging Markets