What is the Third World?

POL 3570:
THIRD WORLD AND DEVELOPMENT

What Is the Third World?

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall...
- From Robert Frost's poem, "Mending Wall"

Concepts are breaks in the fabric of reality, just as a wall is a break in the limitlessness of earth. Concepts thus have the power to guide and limit our thoughts—to guide us into thinking faster and better, just as a highway guides us rapidly from one point to another, but also sometimes to limit our thoughts, like a corral keeps horses from getting anywhere. Since concepts can be either liberating or limiting, before we define "Third World", we must follow Frost in asking what we are walling in, what we are walling out, and what the consequences are likely to be.

The term "Third World" originated back in the 1950s, during the Cold War, when it was a residual category: the Third World was what was left over in the world when you subtracted the democratic, industrialized countries of the West (the First World) and the state-socialist, industrializing, Soviet Bloc countries (the Second World). At best, "Third World" denoted the collective consciousness among "non-aligned" countries that emerged at the Bandung Conference of 1955 and the later conferences at Belgrade (1961), Cairo (1964), and Lusaka (1970). So in the end, the "Third World" is pretty much just a list of countries that didn't fit elsewhere.

However, giving a list of countries doesn't mean that they necessarily share anything. So what was shared among these "Third World" countries? In general, they consisted of ... well, that's the problem: there wasn't anything general:

True, most of the countries were poorer than average, but not all.
Some of them may have called themselves non-aligned, but in practice they had definite preferences and informal alliances with the West or Soviet Bloc. Only a very few, large countries (e.g., India) were able to avoid being pulled into one camp or the other.
They were mostly not democracies, but this was by no means universally the case (e.g., India), and anyway they disputed whether the Western definition of "democratic" was either accurate or, in each country's specific circumstances, appropriate.
While none had much industry, particularly heavy industry, they differed widely in their levels of industrialization.
They also differed along many other dimensions: their religious and ethnic make-up, the nature of their economy, their political culture and institutions, and so on.

So even back when the term "Third World" was coined, it had little coherence. Now, of course, the Soviet Union no longer exists, and so for all practical purposes there isn't even a "Second World".

These days, "Third World" is usually used to denote level of industrialization. Occasionally, however—especially among political scientists, naturally—, it is used to refer to political regimes low on the scale of democratization, particularly in those countries that have never been democratic (in other words, in distinction to countries like Argentina under military rule, since Argentina was pretty well democratic before that).

Various other terms have been used since the 1950s: "underdeveloped nations"; "developing nations"; "the South"; "the world system periphery". People sometimes distinguish between a Third World and a Fourth World, the latter being the poorer members of the Third World. Some people even distinguish a Fifth World, meaning a small group of economic basket cases like Haiti, Equatorial Guinea, etc.

Despite this lack of clarity, we can be sure of one thing: the term exists, and that existence has real consequences regardless of whether it makes sense or not. Here we need to ask ourselves the question, what kind of world do we create when we use the term? One way to answer that is to ask about its connotations.

Does "Third World" imply (connote) "third-rate"? Does the term implicitly judge poor countries, or if not the countries themselves, then the way of life they happen to be inflicted with? I believe it does. It says that we are what they want to become, should want to become, and have not become.
Does "Third World" imply a certain alienness and thus a certain fear? Is knowing its people a journey into the heart of darkness, rather than a discovery of fellow human beings? Do we occupy the same moral universe, so that despite our radically different cultures we can come to true agreements? Can we know them at all? I think the term implies a separation instead of a commonality. Every break in the fabric of reality separates over here from over there—indeed, that's the point. But the best concepts also integrate the parts, enabling us to recognize not just the difference but also a deeper, more complex commonality. I don't think "Third World" does this.

In sum, the term "Third World" is pretty incoherent. Instead of a neat division in the fabric of reality, it seems to be more a gash, a ragged wound. Instead of helping us understand each other it seems to separate us. Not very useful.

If that is true, then what on Earth are we studying in a course called "Third World and Development"?

Page URL: http://www.d.umn.edu/~schilton/3570/Lectures/3570.WhatIsThirdWorld.html
Author: Stephen Chilton [email] | Last Modified: 2004-09-17
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