The Third World is most easily defined negatively, in that it consists of those countries not in the First World or Second World. The First World consists of the leading Western industrialized countries of Europe, North America, Japan and the old British colonies which are of the same level of economic development; it is, in fact, the world of the industrially developed capitalist economy. The Second World (a term very seldom used, if not now extinct) covers the industrialized nations of the former Soviet bloc. Thus the Third World is the less industrialized, non- or under-developed world, much of it consisting of ex-colonies of the European powers.
Despite its popularity as a media label, the Third World has very little homogeneity, exhibits vast social and economic differences, and has little in the way of common political or economic interests and policies.
It is not even certain whether any particular country not in the first two worlds will always automatically qualify for membership of the Third World. Is India, for example, a Third World country? Despite its poverty and its status as an ex-colony, it is a nuclear power in terms of energy and weapons, and manages to run a political system not always very different from a Western parliamentary democracy. Other countries, notably the oil-producing states of the Middle East, have enormous international political influence while otherwise being obvious candidate members. The economically highly productive but politically backward countries of the Pacific rim, notably South Korea and Taiwan, similarly defy categorization. Some would introduce a further category, the Fourth World, for those underdeveloped countries which also lack any significant exploitable natural resources. The label Third World is probably too deeply entrenched to be avoided, but in fact very few statements using it can be made with any reliability (as, increasingly, with the other two worlds), and any degree of precision requires so many qualifications as to render the tripartite categorization largely useless.
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