If You Shouldn’t Call It The Third World, What Should You Call It?
Our blog was born in 2014, and I’ll let you in on a little secret: We had a really hard time coming up with our name (see: "Why Goats? Why Soda?").
But that naming struggle was nothing compared to figuring out what to call the parts of the world we cover. Third world? Developing world? Global south? Low and middle income countries?
Every label has its problems — and, as it turns out, an interesting back story. Here’s what I learned from talking to many, many experts.
More than half a century ago, the Cold War was just starting. It was Western capitalism versus Soviet socialism. But there was another group of countries. Many of them were former colonies. None of them were squarely in either the Western or Soviet camp. Thinking of these three factions, French demographer Alfred Sauvy wrote of “Three worlds, one planet” in an article published inL’Observateur in 1952.
The First World consisted of the U.S., Western Europe and their allies. The Second World was the so-called Communist Bloc: the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and friends. The remaining nations, which aligned with neither group, were assigned to the Third World.
The Third World has always had blurred lines. “Although the phrase was widely used, it was never clear whether it was a clear category of analysis, or simply a convenient and rather vague label for an imprecise collection of states in the second half of the twentieth century and some of the common problems that they faced,” writes historian B.R. Tomlinson in the essay, “What was the Third World,” published in 2003 in the Journal of Contemporary History.
Because many countries in the Third World were impoverished, the term came to be used to refer to the poor world.
This 1-2-3 classification is now out-of-date, insulting and confusing.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.
Image by Jing Wei for NPR
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