The term Third World arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either NATO or the Warsaw Pact. The United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, the Southern Cone, Western European countries and other allies represented the "First World", while the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Romania and the rest of the Warsaw Pact and their allies represented the "Second World". This terminology provided a way of broadly categorizing the nations of the Earth into three groups based on political divisions. Due to the complex history of evolving meanings and contexts, there is no clear or agreed-upon definition of the Third World. Strictly speaking, "Third World" was a political, rather than economic, grouping. Since most Third World countries were economically poor and non-industrialized, it became a stereotype or a derogatory euphemism to refer to developing countries as "third-world." In political discourse, the term Third World was often associated with being underdeveloped. China was labeled "Third World" for several decades in the 20th century before its robust development in the 21st century. Some countries in the Eastern Bloc, such as Cuba, were often regarded as Third World. The Third World was normally seen to include many countries with colonial pasts in Africa, Latin America, Oceania, and Asia. It was also sometimes taken as synonymous with countries in the Non-Aligned Movement. In the dependency theory of thinkers like Raúl Prebisch, Walter Rodney, Theotônio dos Santos, and others, the Third World has also been connected to the world-systemic economic division as "periphery" countries dominated by the countries comprising the economic "core". In the Cold War, some European democracies (Austria, Finland, Ireland, Sweden, and Switzerland) were neutral in the sense of not joining NATO, but were prosperous, never joined the Non-Aligned Movement, and seldom self-identified as part of the Third World. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, other terms have also been used instead of Third World such as developing countries, least developed countries or the Global South.
Etymology The demographer, anthropologist, and historian Alfred Sauvy, in an article published in the French magazine L'Observateur, August 14, 1952, used the term third world (tiers monde), referring to countries that were playing a small role in international trade and business. His usage was a reference to the Third Estate (tiers état), the commoners of pre-revolutionary France, who, in the Estates General, opposed the clergy and nobles, respectively the First and Second Estates (hence the use of the older form tiers rather than the modern troisième for "third"). Sauvy wrote, "This third world ignored, exploited, despised like the third estate also wants to be something." In the context of the Cold War, he conveyed the concept of political non-alignment with either the capitalist or communist bloc. Simplistic interpretations quickly led to the term merely designating these unaligned countries. Although Sauvy is commonly credited with coining the phrase in 1952, the concept may have already been in circulation at the 1947 Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi.
Related concepts
Third World vs. Three Worlds
The Three Worlds Theory was developed by Mao Zedong following the Sino-Soviet Split. Mao grouped the Soviet Union and United States together into the First World as he began to view both as hegemonic superpowers. Mao Zedong began to articulate the Three Worlds Theory in the early 1970s, and in 1974, Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping pronounced the Three Worlds Theory at the UN General Assembly. The "Three Worlds Theory" developed by Mao Zedong is different from the Western theory of the Third World. For example, in the Western theory, China and India belong respectively to the second and third worlds, but in Mao's theory both China and India are part of the Third World which he defined as consisting of exploited nations.
Third-worldism
Third-worldism is a political movement that argues for the unity of Third World nations against First World influence and the principle of non-interference in other countries' domestic affairs. Groups most notable for expressing and exercising this idea are the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the Group of 77, which provide a base for relations and diplomacy between not just the Third World countries, but between the Third World and the First and Second Worlds. The notion has been criticized as providing a fig leaf for human rights violations and political repression by dictatorships. Initially, the term Third World meant a nation was under-developed or impoverished.
Great Divergence and Great Convergence Many times there is a clear distinction between First and Third Worlds. When talking about the Global North and Global South, the majority of the time the two go hand in hand. People refer to the two as "Third World/South" and "First World/North" because the Global North is more affluent and developed, whereas the Global South is less developed and often poorer. To counter this mode of thought, some scholars began proposing the idea of a change in world dynamics that began in the late 1980s, and termed it the Great Convergence. As Jack A. Goldstone and his colleagues put it, "in the twentieth century, the Great Divergence peaked before the First World War and continued until the early 1970s, then, after two decades of indeterminate fluctuations, in the late 1980s, it was replaced by the Great Convergence as the majority of Third World countries reached economic growth rates significantly higher than those in most First World countries". Others have observed a return to Cold War-era alignments (MacKinnon, 2007; Lucas, 2008), this time with substantial changes between 1990–2015 in geography, the world economy and relationship dynamics between current and emerging world powers; not necessarily redefining the classic meaning of First, Second, and Third World terms, but rather which countries belong to them by way of association to which world power or coalition of countries, such as the G7, the European Union, OECD; G20, OPEC, N-11, BRICS, ASEAN; the African Union, and the Eurasian Union.
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