THE CONCEPT OF

THIRD WORLD
THIRD WORLD
■ “Third World” as shorthand for poor or developing
nations.
■ While wealthier countries such as the United States
and the nations of Western Europe are described as
being part of the “First World.”
■ Where did these distinctions come from?
■ Why do we rarely hear about the “Second World?”
“Three Worlds” Model of Geopolitics
■ First arose in the mid-20th century as a way of
mapping the various players in the Cold War.
■ The origins of the concept are complex, but
historians usually credit it to the French
demographer Alfred Sauvy, who coined the term
“Third World” in a 1952 (“Three Worlds, One
Planet”)
“Three Worlds” Model of Geopolitics
■ The First World included the United States and its capitalist
allies in places such as Western Europe, Japan and
Australia.
■ The Second World consisted of the communist Soviet Union
and its Eastern European satellites.
■ The Third World encompassed all the other countries that
were not actively aligned with either side in the Cold War.
– (Often impoverished former European colonies, and
included nearly all the nations of Africa, the Middle East,
Latin America and Asia.)
“Three Worlds” Model of Geopolitics
■ Today, the powerful economies of the West are still sometimes
described as “First World.”
■ The term “Second World” has become largely obsolete following
the collapse of the Soviet Union.
■ “Third World” remains the most common of the original
designations, but its meaning has changed from “non-aligned”
and become more of a blanket term for the developing world.
– Since it’s partially a relic of the Cold War, many modern
academics consider the “Third World” label to be outdated.
– Terms such as “developing countries” and “low and lower-
middle-income countries” are now often used in its place.
The Debate
If you shouldn’t call it the Third World, what should you call It?
■ “The 1-2-3 classification is now out of date, insulting and
confusing. Who is to say which part of the world is "first"?
And how can an affluent country like Saudi Arabia, neither
Western nor communist, be part of the Third World? Plus,
the Soviet Union doesn't even exist anymore.”
■ ”It's not like the First World is the best world in every way. It
has pockets of deep urban and rural poverty.
– "The Fourth World," referring to parts of the United
States and other wealthy nations where health problems
loom large.
The Debate
If you shouldn’t call it the Third World, what should you call It?
■ Geographic labeling: “global south” and “global north”
– The majority of poor countries are in the Southern
Hemisphere, aka the "global south."
– Then again, impoverished Haiti is in the global north.
– And many rich countries are in the south: Australia, New
Zealand, Argentina, Chile, to name a few.
– the "global south" is "tinged with politics" in a world
where there are tensions between the West and the
other countries,
The Debate
If you shouldn’t call it the Third World, what should you call It?
■ What about "Developing countries“?
■ "Developing nations is more appropriate [than Third World]
when referring to economically developing nations of Africa,
Asia and Latin America. Do not confuse with 'nonaligned,'
which is a political term."
■ They said the phrase "developing country" in Swahili would
be stated as "countries that are growing."
The Debate
If you shouldn’t call it the Third World, what should you call It?
Critics:
■ “it assumes a hierarchy between countries. It paints a picture of
Western societies as ideal but there are many social problems in
these societies as well. It also perpetuates stereotypes about
people who come from the so-called developing world as
backward, lazy, ignorant, irresponsible."
■ “..the developed-developing relationship in many ways replaces
the colonizer-colonized relationship. The idea of development is
a way for rich countries to control and exploit the poor. You can
see this through the development industry where billions of
dollars are spent but very little gets achieved.”
The Debate
If you shouldn’t call it the Third World, what should you call It?

■ Classification that is based on data?

■ This is how the World Health Organization categorizes countries.
– It uses the term "low- and lower-middle-income countries," or
LMIC.
■ Sometimes split in two: LICs and MICs.
– The LMIC category is based on World Bank statistics that divide
up countries by gross domestic product:
■ There are low income, lower middle income, middle income and high
income.
■ Seem to offer an objective way, but collecting the statistics "can
present a challenge because not every country does a good job of
estimating GDP“.
Question?
■ Do the rise and increasingly influence of major developing
states bring North/South relations back to the centre-stage
of international relations?
■ Or does the appearance of countries such as China, Brazil,
India and South Africa around the top tables of global
governance simply add one more argument to the essential
irrelevance of the South or Third World as meaningful
categories of political action and academic analysis?
■ It has become common to suggest that the rise of new powers,
the developmental gap that has opened up between them and
other developing countries, and their very different power-
political, military, and geopolitical opportunities and options
simply underscore the out-datedness and irrelevance of old-
fashioned notions of the Third World or the Global South.
■ Their success places them in an objectively different analytical
category from other developing countries.
■ They are emerging powers partly by dint of their sheer economic
size but also because of ideas that stress their right to be
recognized as major powers and by foreign policies that aim ever
more directly at increased power, influence and prestige.
Emerging Powers , Globalization and Integration
– The first narrative is about globalization, integration and convergence
– Globalization was rendering obsolete the old world of Great Power
rivalries, balance of power politics and an old-fashioned international
law built around state sovereignty and strict rules of non-intervention.
– Institutions are needed to deal with the ever more complex dilemmas of
collective action that emerge in a globalized world.
– As large states, including large developing states expanded their range
of interests and integrated more fully into the global economy and world
society –as they ‘joined the world’ in the language of the time — they
would be naturally drawn by the functional benefits provided by
institutions and pressed towards more cooperative and‘responsible’
patterns of behaviour.
The Rise and Fall of Great Powers
– The history and theory of emerging powers is simple and
straightforward.
– International Relations has always been a story of the rise and fall
of Great Powers, and will remain so.
– International politics is, by definition, the politics of the strong.
The categorizations reflect this view: ‘revisionist powers’, or
‘emerging powers’ or new ‘leading regional states’ or ‘would-be
Great Powers’
– The analytical task is to understand which new powers have the
resources and the will to make a difference; exactly how the
balance of global power is shifting; and what this implies for
patterns of conflict and cooperation.
Emerging powers and transnational capitalism
– The neo-marxist account has been neglected by mainstream western debate
but can also be deployed to support arguments about the end of the South.
– What we are seeing is, in reality, the transformation of global capitalism from
an old core centred on the advanced industrialized states into a far more
global and far more thoroughly transnationalized capitalist order.
– The systemic change has to do with the unfolding of a deterritorialized global
capitalism made up of flows, fluxes, networked connections and transnational
production networks, but marked by inequality, instability, and new patterns of
stratification.
– Rather than count up and categorize the ‘power’ of emerging powers, the
intellectual challenge is to understand the ‘transnational whole’ in which such
countries are embedded and the social forces and state-society relations that
give meaning to the national and developmental projects pursued by emerging
country elites.