In the period after World War II, many commentators spoke of three worlds, or styles of development: the first world consisted of the wealthy capitalist, democratic countries of Western Europe and the United States; the second world of Russia and its eastern European allies, with their Communist Party states; and the third world of poorer nations, such as Islamic and African countries, just emerging from colonization and now seeking their appropriate place in the world.

Today the term "third world" is frequently used with a negative, and much resented, connotation to designate poor, technologically backward, inefficiently organized nations. When the term first came to be used in the 1950s, however, it carried more inspirational connotations.

In the first wave of decolonization following World War II, newly independent nations emerged into a world bitterly and expensively polarized into two hostile, belligerent blocs. The United States mobilized a group of Western European nations, which were mostly wealthy or in the process of regaining their wealth after the war, following primarily capitalist free-market economic principles, and practicing democratic politics.

The USSR mobilized an opposing group of nations in Eastern Europe; these were less wealthy but possessed the basic material necessities of life under an economy commended by the state, which was ruled by the Communist Party. These two blocs, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact, respectively, confronted each other, heavily armed and actively competing in developing and testing nuclear weapons and delivery systems. They competed, too, for the support and alliance of the newly independent nations.

Many of the newly independent nations, however, advocated a third alternative, a "third world." Many wished to be non-aligned, to avoid taking sides. They felt that Europe and America put little value on human life, as two world wars had demonstrated. They urged disarmament, especially nuclear disarmament. At a time when the first two worlds were locked in an arms race to build first the atomic bomb, then the hydrogen bomb, and ever more powerful rockets to launch them.

They advocated state investment in such basic human needs as food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and small, "appropriate" scale technology, often through international assistance, rather than in the purchase of weapons.

With independence, each of these former colonies entered the United Nations, changing the size and complexion of that organization. Although race was not usually mentioned overtly in third world advocacy, almost all members of the "third world" were people of color, while the overwhelming majority of both first and second world groups were white. In 1955, third world representatives convened by Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-70) of Egypt, and Marshal Tito (1892-1980) of Yugoslavia met at Bandung, Indonesia, to launch their collective entry into international politics.

Some first and second world leaders, especially the America Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (1888-1959), saw these third world positions as immoral refusals to take sides in what they regarded as the great ideological, quasi-religious struggles of the Cold War. But, generally, in the 1950s the term "third world" had a positive connotation.

The French academic Alfred Sauvy claimed to have coined the term as a parallel to the Third Estate in the French Revolution, which claimed to represent the vast majority of the nation that up to then had been ruled only by the first and second estates of clergy and nobility. The French journal of international economic and political development, Cahiers du Tiers Monde ("Journal of the Third World"), established in 1956, also chose its title as a proud call to a new global order.

Source From: The World's History, Spodek, 2001

© 2004 by C.R. Hamilton