What was the Third World?

Abstract

The term 'Third World' was used frequently in histories of the societies, economies and cultures of many parts of the world in the second half of the twentieth century. But, 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. Not even enthusiasts for the term provided any precision. As Peter Worsley, one of those who self-consciously began the process of passing it into academic currency, later confessed, . . . the nature of the Third World seemed so self-evident in the 1960s that in a book on The Third World I published in 1964, I saw no need to define it any more precisely than that it was the world made up of the ex-colonial, newly-independent, non-aligned countries. 1 Like other collective descriptions of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Pacific islands and Latin America -such as the 'South', the 'developing world', or the 'less-developed world' -the designation 'Third World' was more about what such places were not than what they were. That the term was often used normatively rather than analytically complicates matters further. As Christopher Clapham has pointed out, 'there is no gap so wide as that between those who seek to change the Third World and those who seek merely to understand it'. 2 Those who developed a concept of the Third World around a set of measurable criteria usually relied on identifying material circumstances. As John Goldthorpe put it in his influential The Sociology of the Third World: Disparity and Involvement in 1975, 'if the affluent industrial countries of the modern world are grouped into those of the "West" and those of the "East", . . . then the poor countries constitute a "Third World" whose small command over resources distinguishes them from both'. 3 However, all such attempts to establish a standard measurement of relative poverty that can distinguish

The Geography of Research Funding: Semantics and Beyond

“…Fixed terms, such as the Third world , do not appear at all. The documents and interviews, thus, reflect a societal trend to abandon the Cold War rhetoric of the three worlds—this is parallel to the demise in using the term in academic texts as stated above by Tomlinson (2003). The term Global South appears only eight times in all texts, six times alone in South African documents.…”

“…If we look at the description of former colonies and economically less advanced states, we find that the ways in which these states are described and categorized have changed over the decades. A prominent example is the notion of the Third World which has seen its heydays in the 1970s and 1980s as an analytical and normative terminology (Tomlinson, 2003). The notion of the Third World has been almost completely replaced by that of the Global South or developing countries which bring with them their very own inherent pitfalls (Eckl & Weber, 2007; Mignolo, 2011).…”

Development interventions: science, technology and technical assistance

“…Something similar -though more debatable-happens with references to the 'Third World', a term with political meanings, whose later appropriation as an economic (dis) qualification has been thoroughly problematized. 13 As Nick Cullather has noticed, during the postwar decades development became discursively, practically, and administratively, the only path. 14 Development was promoted both by the Socialist bloc and the West as the only solution to past ills and to present or future alliances.…”

Differentiation Theory and the Global South as a Metageography of International Relations

“…While there was much academic debate on the definition of the Third World, those debates tended to circle around a defined set of problems, uses of the term generally made implicit or explicit reference to those debates, and the lack of a stable definition was commonly perceived as a problem (see Kamrava, 1995). Even authors who conceded that the multitude of political, economic, and other conditions subsumable under the signifier made serious attempts at conceptual precision difficult acknowledged that such attempts were important (Tomlinson, 2003, p. 308). In contrast, discourse on the Global South so far has demonstrated little intent of conceptual ordering, leading critics to disqualify the term as close to worthless for describing the realities of a rapidly changing, if not chaotic, world (Woodard, 2012).…”