Third World

The three separate worlds during the Cold War, with their respective allies. The colors do not represent their economic situation, but their political alignment. First World: United States, United Kingdom, West Germany and Allies. Second World: Soviet Union, China and Allies. Third world: non-aligned and neutral countries.

The term Third World was coined by the French economist Alfred Sauvy in 1952, through a parallelism with the French term Third State, to designate countries that did not belong to to neither of the two blocs that were at odds in the Cold War, the Western bloc (United States, Western Europe, Japan, Canada, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and their allies) and the communist bloc (Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba and North Korea). Currently, anachronistically (the "second world" of the "socialist bloc" has disappeared as a concept), the term is used, loosely, to refer to underdeveloped or "developing" peripheral countries, in contrast to the developed countries; In the latter current sense, the term is sometimes used to refer to all undeveloped countries as a whole, and sometimes to refer only to those that register the worst development indices of great economic and social backwardness, such as illiteracy, hunger, crime, hospital and public health deficiencies, precarious housing and health services, a low life expectancy, etc. According to the DRAE, the third world is the set of economically and socially less developed countries.

Among the common characteristics are having a mainly agrarian economic base, the export of raw materials, an economy indebted to the most industrialized countries (usually those of the first and second world) and little infrastructure. In terms of international decisions, third world countries, even bringing together the majority of independent nations and the world's population, play a secondary and sometimes subordinate role compared to that of the most powerful nations. Some blocs of countries created from the 1981s to hegemonize world decisions, such as the G-7, later the G-8 and the G20 (the latter is the one that predominates at the beginning of the 21st century), are indirectly related with the idea of managing the economies of the "third world" and global decision-making. Regions such as Latin America and Southeast Asia, and continents such as Africa, have most of the countries classified in the third world concept.

History of the term

Some African countries are in a critical state of poverty, so the countries of the "fourth world" have been called.

View of Freetown, capital of Sierra Leone in Africa. As the countries of the South are the most underdeveloped, the term "South countries" or "underdeveloped south" is commonly used. Africa together with Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia concentrate the vast majority of underdeveloped countries.

The French economist Alfred Sauvy used the term "third world" (in the original "tiers monde") in an article entitled "Three worlds, one planet" published in the French magazine L'Observateur on August 14, 1952. Assimilated to the Third Estate of the French Revolution, Sauvy drew attention to the existence of a third world, “the most important”, of the underdeveloped, exploited and forgotten countries, to which the first capitalist world and the second communist world paid no attention. It should be clarified that, in French, tiers monde means third world in the sense of third in a classification and no third when counting from one to three (troisième and tiers are synonymous).

In August 1967, a group of bishops from various parts of the world signed the Manifesto of the Bishops of the Third World.

The term became widespread during the Cold War, when some countries described themselves as belonging to the third world, because they were not aligned with NATO or the Warsaw Pact. The term first world referred to the United States and its allies in the Cold War, while the second world was made up of the Eastern Bloc —disappeared after 1991—.

From the 1960s the term was used with two semantic scopes: a) a strategic meaning that expressed a position of non-alignment in the Cold War behind neither of the two opposing superpowers, which also corresponded to the expression "non-aligned countries"; b) an economic-social meaning that expressed the great asymmetry in terms of living conditions between the countries that fought in the Cold War and the rest of the world, which corresponded to the expression "North-South".

Some members of the original "third world" were Yugoslavia, India, and Egypt. Some third world countries believed that they could develop without the influence of communist and capitalist countries by following their own methods without falling under their direct influence. After World War II the countries of the first and second world struggled to expand their respective spheres of influence to the third world. The intelligence and military services of the United States and the Soviet Union both worked covertly trying to influence Third World governments, with mixed results.

There are a number of countries that did not clearly fit into any of the definitions of the first, second and third world. These countries included Switzerland, Sweden, and Ireland, European countries that chose to be neutral. Finland was under Soviet influence due to its proximity to the USSR, but it was not a communist, nor was it a member of the Warsaw Pact. Mexico, despite being a neighbor of the United States and being influenced by it, was not a member of NATO, and hardly supported its policies. Austria was under American influence, but in 1955, when the country became a fully independent republic again, it did so on the condition that it remain neutral. None of these countries were defined as Third World despite their non-alignment.

In Latin America, although there was strong interference by the United States, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, the predominant economic models in those countries were characterized by strong statism even under right-wing governments, which is added international policies in support of this trend (such as the one on export substitution promoted by ECLAC).^{[citation needed]}

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Chinese leader Mao Tse-Tung elaborated a theory that would be known as the theory of the three worlds, which differs from the one developed by Sauvy due to the fact that which is based on the GDP of nations as well as their power to classify them, without making ideological distinctions between them.^{[citation needed]} This would begin to become popular in the middle of the seventies, by the hand of the leader Deng Xiaoping, especially within Maoist circles.

With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the term second world fell out of use.

For its part, since the end of the Cold War, the term third world has changed its original meaning to become synonymous with countries with poor infrastructure or peripheral countries.^{[ citation required]}

Shanghai view. China has been historically considered a third world country, although its growth in recent years has made it increasingly closer to developed country conditions.

The term Fourth World has also appeared to refer to people living in extreme poverty or marginalized groups, both in the First and Third Worlds. It is also sometimes used to describe countries extremely poor without any industrial infrastructure or as a synonym for "the least developed countries".

More recently, the term second world has reappeared to refer to countries like Russia and the other countries that were part of the USSR.^{[citation needed]}

Some scholars argue that the term Third World is obsolete because it is an archaism describing an international situation of power and structure that existed after World War II. Other scholars to the contrary, they maintain that, after the Cold War between the first two worlds ended, the problems of the third world came to the fore; in this sense, the concept of "the South", "countries of the South" or "global South" is widely used.^{[citation needed]} The album The South there is also (1985), by the Catalan singer Joan Manuel Serrat on poems by the Uruguayan Mario Benedetti, expresses this vision of the term.

Finally, a current false generalization has been alerted^{[citation needed]}, by assuming that the third world lacks industrial infrastructure, since that many countries that are considered to be part of the Third World, such as China and other Southeast Asian countries, are in some areas as technologically advanced as many countries considered to be in the First World. The same is true of some countries in the Persian Gulf and Central America, such as Costa Rica and Panama, which have outperformed other developed countries. Therefore the term should be used with caution as classifying countries into homogeneous groups can inhibit objective perspective and rapid ongoing changes.

In 2004, John Hobson, in his book The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization, related the term to the three worlds into which European racist thought had divided the world: the first European world of the white race, the second barbarian world of the yellow race and the third savage world of the black race.

Dependency theory

A few years before the formulation of the term third world by Alfred Sauvy, the Latin American Development School from ECLAC formulated the so-called dependency theory using a model of analysis of the world economy from the center-periphery duality. According to developmentalism, the world economy is organized by an industrial center that, in international trade, benefits systematically due to the deterioration of the terms of trade of primary products generated by an agricultural periphery, which constantly decapitalizes the so-called backward countries, preventing their development. For this reason, developmentalism maintains that the States of the peripheral countries must actively promote industrialization as a crucial policy for development.

Schumpeter's posture

Economist Joseph Schumpeter argued that the global expansion of monopoly corporations, to the detriment of the development of undeveloped countries, is an atavism of pre-industrial political structures, stemming from "the foolish disposition on the part of the state toward unlimited and forced". Schumpeter argued that this expansion was not a consequence of economic interest, but a power policy of the ruling classes.

For Schumpeter, development and democracy would limit economic monopolies until they disappeared.

Third world and technology

New technologies are essential in a society like the existing one, where the countries with the monopolistic regime are in charge of supplying the others with those sources of innovation. There are considerable efforts and investments of money, aimed at promoting the use of the Internet in rural areas and groups at risk of social or labor exclusion, such as the third world, countries in highly underdeveloped regimes, with characteristics such as illiteracy, hunger and poverty. precariousness in all areas of society.^{[citation required]}

For many bureaucrats and developed states, ensuring that technology and its use adequately reach the poorest and most needy countries becomes a challenge to obtain, in most cases, some kind of benefit. But the truth is that public opinion is quite at odds with the attitude of the leaders of the large States, since they consider that integrating the Internet or mobile telephony in African or Latin American countries is a contradiction, since, according to groups As an NGO, the first thing is to help these poor people to get a job, so that they can buy a house, which will have a telephone, and then the Internet can be used. The UN has recently declared that the development of new technologies further increases the differences between rich countries and those of the third world.