The term Third World was first used by the French demographer, Alfred Sauvy, in August 1952, to describe the new nation-states, mostly in Asia and Africa, which had begun to emerge at the end of the Second World War (e.g. Sri Lanka and India) but which became much more numerous when the ‘winds of change’ blew over Africa: seventeen countries became independent in 1961 alone. Latin American countries, though mostly equally underdeveloped in economic terms, were not involved until the 1970s, as they had long been independent.
At that time, the world was polarized into two camps, headed by the rival superpowers. But most of the new states went out of their way to avoid identification with either camp: as states, they claimed to be non-aligned in international politics (though some, in fact, did align themselves with one camp or the other), and, internally, to be trying to find a third way, avoiding not only the authoritarian, planned and centralized Soviet model, but also the western market economy and political pluralism one. The more radical of them claimed to be developing socialist humanism, which attracted interest in western countries, too (the concept, indeed, derives from the tiers état of pre-revolutionary France: the estate of ordinary people who lacked the privileges of the other two estates, the clergy and the nobility). Now it was used in relation to states, not estates.
By 1955, the Afro-Asian Conference, held in Bandung, Indonesia, which Nehru persuaded Zhou Enlai to attend, brought together representatives of the majority of the world’s population. To many, especially on the left, the non-aligned movement (it refused the tide of bloc) seemed to be growing into a new force capable of changing the world balance of power, and much more likely, now, to be the grave-diggers of capitalism than either the communist countries or the working class in developed capitalist countries.
The first concern of the new states was to secure the liberation of the remaining colonies and, above all, to break the South African apartheid regime. Radical leaders like Nkrumah further hoped to develop new, positive alternatives: to overcome the colonial legacy of the balkanization of the continent via the new Organization of African Unity (OAU).
But that organization quickly became primarily concerned with the opposite: maintaining the boundaries of its member states which had been constructed by the colonial powers. Given the multi-ethnic composition of these states, secession movements emerged, often, as in Katanga, manipulated by the former colonial power. Conflicts between countries broke out, too: Tanzania, where Julius Nyerere had initially wondered whether the country would need an army, found itself invaded by Idi Amin’s Uganda. Increasingly, country after country was sucked into what were often proxy wars, fought with high-tech armaments supplied by one or other of the superpowers (in the case of Somalia, first by the USSR, then by the USA).
Increasingly, though, the major problems that these countries faced, and which they discussed at successive conferences in Cairo, Lusaka, Algiers, Sri Lanka, Havana and elsewhere, were economic rather than political. As producers of raw materials and importers of high-priced manufactured goods and, most of them, of oil, they found themselves at an increasing disadvantage, in an increasingly global market: not ‘developing’, but ‘underdeveloping’.
The first victory achieved by the non-aligned on the economic front was the success of seventy-seven underdeveloped countries in winning UN backing for a World Conference on Trade and Development, in 1962. The second major breakthrough came in 1974, when the oil-producing states formed OPEC, with severe effects even on western economies.
A few countries—notably the ‘four Little Tigers’ of East Asia (Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore)—have, moreover, succeeded in developing their economies along capitalist lines, first as newly industrializing countries (NICs), and later so massively (and others somewhat less dramatically) that they are no longer part of the Third World (even if, as in the cases of Brazil and Mexico, they have incurred phenomenal levels of debt in the process, and still harbour huge sectors of rural and urban poverty). But most of the Third World has not developed so spectacularly, particularly most of Black Africa, which, in many respects, has ‘underdeveloped’.
The term therefore seems likely to persist, even though it has always attracted criticism from those who see it as a badge of inferiority (because ‘First’ and ‘Second’ seem to them to imply superiority). They see underdevelopment, too, as a consequence of western colonization, rather than attributing it—as many in the west do—to factors internal to the Third World itself, some in terms of unfavourable natural environments in which periodic famine is believed to be endemic; others in terms of social factors, such as traditional institutions (e.g. caste or patriarchalism) which are thought to hinder progress, as well as more modern hindrances to development such as dictatorial regimes.
Finally, some argue that there is only one ‘world system’ (especially since the collapse of communism), so that countries can be ranked, statistically, only as richer or poorer, not classified as belonging to one world or another. Most world-system theorists, however, argue that the status of a country depends on its place in the world system as a whole: whether it is central, peripheral or semi-peripheral.
Peter Worsley
University of Manchester
Further reading
Fanon, F. (1961) The Wretched of the Earth, London.
Singham, A.W. and Hune, S. (1986) Non-Alignment in an Age of Alignments, New York.
