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The Meaning of the *Third World'

'i Alfred Sauvy, a French demographer, coined the term Third World in a t'amous 1952 article about the et't'ects i of the Cold War on international relations and economic development: the First World was the West, a world of i democratic political institutions and capitalist economies; the Second World was the Soviet sphere, committed to i socialist institutions; and the Third World was everybody else-the world of European colonies and t'ormer colonies, i marhed by the history of imperialism. i Though commonly used between the 1950s and the 1980s, the term Third World is less t'requently encountered i in the present. B. R. Tomlinson, a British economic historian, examines the ways in which the concept was rooted i in the ideological world of the Cold \Mar, as he looks t'or new vocabulary to tell the history of globalization in the i contemporary world.

Alfred Sauvy, "Three Worlds, One Planet" (1952)

[MHitr]U'i[:;i*ii"; about their coexistence, etc., forgetting too often that there is a third world . . . the collectivity called, in the style of the

United Nations, the under-developed countries....

*** Unfortunately, the struggle for the

possession of the third world does not allow the two others to simply pursue their own path, believing it to be obvi- ously the best, the "true" way. The Cold War has curious consequences: over there, a morbid fear of espionage has pushed them to the most ferocious iso- lation. With us, it has caused a halt in social evolution. What good is it to trou- ble ourselves or deprive ourselves, at a moment when the fear of communism is

holding back those who would like to go further [on the path to equality]? Why should we consider any social reforms at

all wh,en the progressive majority is split?

. . .Why worry about it, since there is no

opposition?

ln this way, any evolution toward the

distant future has been halted in both

camps, and this obstacle has one cause: the costs of war.

lvleanwhile . . . the under-developed nations, the third world, have entered into a new phase. Certain medical techniques have now been introduced suddenly for a simple reason: they are cheap. . . . For a few pennies the life of a man can be prolonged for several years. Because of this, these countries now have the mortality that we had in 1914 and the birthrate that we had in the eighteenth century. Certainly, this has resulted in economic improvement,

lower infant mortality, better productiv-

ity of adults, etc. Nevertheless, it is easy to see how this demographic increase must be accompanied by important investments in order to adapt the con- tainer to what it must contain. NoW these vital investments cost much more

than 68 francs per person. They crash right into the financial wall imposed by the Cold War. The result is eloquent: the

millennial cycle of life and death contin-

ues to turn, but it isa*cycle of poverty.

Since the preparation for war is pri- ority number 1, secondary concerns such

as world hunger will only attention enough to avoid an that might compromise our first But when one remembers the

errors that conservatives have ted so many times, we can only

Americans to play with the fire

anger. . They have not clearly that under-developed nations of a type might evolve more readily

a communist regime than toward

cratic capitalism. One might conso

self, if one,were so inclined, by poi to the greater advance of the fact remains undeniable. And in the glare of its own vitality, the world, even in the absence of any

solidarity, might notice this slow,

ible, humble and ferocious, push

life. Because in the end, this exploited Third World, as the Third Estate [in the French tion], wants to be something.

Source: Alfred Sauvy, "Trois mondes, une plandte," L'Observateur 14 (August 1 This translation, by Joshua Cole, comes a French reprint in Vingtiime Siicle, no.12 (October-December 1986): 8'l -83.

I0t4 CHAPTER 29 A World without Walls: Globalization and the West

i I

I I

mediocre confidence in the ability of ffi

I

B. R. Tomlinson, "Whclt Was the ThirdWorld?" (2003)

Il:]j:f:ffl*]:{T cultures of manY Parts of the world in the second half of the twentieth century. . . . Like other collective descrip-

tions 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.

economists in the 1950s and 1960s had suggested that the Poverty of non-

western economies was the result of

low levels of savings and investment, and that these problems could best be

resolved by increasing external influence

over them to help local 6lites modern-

ize their societies (in other words, make

them more like those of the West) bY

providing technology and education to

increase productivity and output'

To many radical critics, these ideas,

and the U.S. government's develoP- ment policies that flowed from them,

seemed to mask a narrow Political agenda that sought to justify the domi-

nance of free-market capitalism as a model and mechanism for economic, social and cultural development

'One

powerful reaction to this agenda was

to argue that dependence on the West

had distorted the economic and social

conditions of non-western societies, leading to a common of histori-

cal change in phery of the wor ld

about by "a situation

the economY of certain coun-

the process of understanding the inter-

action between the local and the global'

To write the history of the "Rest," as well

as of the West, we need now to move

on, and to construct new narratives of

global history that go beyond the mod-

els of coherent and distinct communi-

ties, nations and states, arranged into

hierarchies of material achievement and

cultural power, and underpinned by uni-

versal institutional ideals of participatory

democracy and free markets, that domi-

nated thinking about international and

local systems in the world for much of

the nineteenth and twentieth centuries'

Source: B. R. Tomlinson, "What Was the Third

World?" Journal of Conftmporary History 38, no 2

(April 2003): 307-21.

Questions for AnalYsis

1. ln SauvY's argument, what do the "under-develoPed nations" have in

common? Does Tomlinson agree?

2. Sauvy calls for the First World to invest in the Third World to prevent

an explosion of anger' What possible

difficulties with this solution does

Tomlinson identifY?

3. How do Sauvy and Tomlinson see the

relationshiP between the Cold War

and the problem o{ understanding the

"Third World?"

Those who develoPed a concePt of

the Third World around a set of measur-

able criteria usually relied on identifying

material circumstances. . . . However, all

such attempts to establish a standard measurement of relative poverty that

can distinguish various parts of the world

from each other run into considerable

difficulties. lt has often been argued that

the various countries of Asia, Africa and

Latin America (notto mention the Pacific

islands and elsewhere) differ greatly

in their size, political ideologies, social

structures, economic performance, cul-

tural backgrounds and historical experi-

ences. These differences exist not si

between Third World but

within them as well. There rich and

[and hence their social and political

structures] is conditioned by the devel-

opment and expansion of another econ-

omy to which the former is subjected "

*** The history of imperialism has been

immensely important in shaping our view of the modern world, both from the

top down and from the bottom uP, but

the phenomenon was also historically

specific, and represents only one stage in

IN

poor people, em powered citizens,

and disem-

found inside all

states and societies in the world'

It was over broad issues of economic

development that the fiercest battles

for the concePt of the Third World were fought. Orthodox development

Liquid Modernity? The Flow oJ Money, Ideas' and Peoples I r0l5