Is the ‘Third World’ obsolete?
This essay was originally written as an undergraduate essay for the ‘Global Inequality’ module of the International Politics course at Aberystwyth University. The introduction has been changed to make it less academic and to reflect the purpose of publishing the essay on the internet. I hate introductions and normally write them last.
Shoutout to Professor Mustapha Kamal Pasha, fantastic lecturer and all-round great bloke.
When reading articles or watching international news, you may have heard the term ‘Third World’ thrown around to describe one country or another. What does that term mean? Where does it come from? What relationship does it have with terms like ‘developed countries’, and are these terms accurate or relevant to the modern world? This essay should serve as a useful introduction to the origins of the terms used to describe economic differences between countries, the assumptions inherent in them, and whether they are still useful as descriptors.
The term ‘Third World’ originated during the Cold War, when French academic Alfred Sauvy used it to describe those countries that were not aligned with either the USA (that being the First World) or the USSR (the Second World).[1] As the majority of the countries in the Non-Aligned movement were poorer, post-colonial nations this became a general term to refer to poorer nations usually in the global South, despite the fact that many in the strict partisan definition of ‘Third World’ were actually reasonably prosperous and in the north, such as Sweden. This would suggest that the term is indeed obsolete, as it refers to international alignments and power blocs that no longer exist. It may have acquired another popular meaning, but it could be argued that as academics we should seek to use precise language — many words have one popular meaning in common use and a separate, precise academic meaning or are avoided entirely as colloquialisms.
However, the term ‘Third World’ has another history of use in theoretical and political works in the terms that it is commonly used in the English language. The Maoist ‘Three Worlds Theory’ divides the world in the following way:
The First World is made up of the assertive superpowers exerting their power over the others — at the time, the USA and USSR; the Second World is made up of those more prosperous countries that are still beholden to the more powerful in terms of foreign and economic policy and so on — such as post-imperial Britain, or Japan, or other countries of a similar level. The Third World, then, is made up of those countries which are the powerless, exploited nations of the world in Africa, Asia and South America.[2]
In this usage, the term ‘Third World’ is not obsolete. Though the USSR is gone, this hierarchy of relations still exists. The USA exerts hegemonic power across the world, regularly interfering in smaller countries such as Libya in 2011, Honduras in 2009[3], Venezuela, and countless others. Many within and without the USA see China as a rising competitor but it has not achieved the same ability to project power as of yet. Mid-ranking countries such as the UK are still sovereign states with relative independence of action, and some like France in Africa still interfere in former colonial holdings[4], but they also rely on multinational organisations such as NATO or the European Union in order to have influence on the world stage or provide for their defence (much of which is still reliant on the US). Despite the growth in wealth and power for some ‘Third World’ countries like Brazil, the majority of nations in that category are still poor, still beholden to the IMF, to transnational corporations, and to US power.
Here we must turn towards other methods of describing these countries and address some of the unspoken assumptions in the way these nations are talked about, even in this essay so far.
The WTO refers to ‘developing countries’ as making up the majority of the nations in its membership, contrasted with the ‘developed nations’. [5]We must ask, ‘developing towards what?’ What makes ‘developed countries’ developed? There is a finality to the word which implies a completion — ‘developing’ refers to a situation or a work in progress; ‘developed’, being past-tense, refers to something already done, a point beyond which there is nowhere else to go.
Is this true? Has a country where hundreds of thousands go bankrupt because they cannot afford treatment for preventable diseases reached the pinnacle of human socio-political advancement[6]? Is a country where the role of head of state is hereditary and dates from anywhere between 312 or 953 years ago complete in its development[7]? Women[8] or members of marginalized social/caste groups[9] facing routine violence might take umbrage with the idea their country has no higher state to reach.
Organisations and theorists have got around this issue of semantics by referring instead to ‘MEDCs’ — ‘More Economically Developed Countries’ contrasted with ‘Less Economically Developed Countries’ or ‘Least Developed Countries’.[10] The terminology is not supposed to imply value judgements or issues around political structure, but rather, supposedly objective measures such as degree of industrialization; how much of the economy is service-based; level of Gross Domestic Product and Gross National Product; level of infrastructure and so on. Crucial to the argument of this essay is the fact that this definition rates a country as less developed if its economy is based on agriculture or raw material extraction for export.
This method of sorting countries is also flawed, and its flaws are connected to the aforementioned assumptions in this essay. Above, nations were referred to as ‘poor’ or ‘poorer’. There is a glaring problem with this, however: these nations are not poor. Afghanistan (no. 116 on the Credit Suisse list of countries by wealth)[11] has over a trillion dollars in mineral reserves.[12] Chile (no. 40) has the second greatest lithium production in the world.[13] The Democratic Republic of Congo (no. 106) is awash with diamonds, rubber, copper, gold, uranium, and oil, all sitting underneath rich fertile soil.[14]
Saying that these nations are ‘developing’ or ‘less developed’ implies that they are progressing along a predetermined path at a lesser speed than the ‘more developed’ countries. Using statistical measures for each state and comparing them rather than clarifying the reasons for those differences actually obscures them. Knowing how a country is tells us nothing about why a country is that way. Nigeria is not lower in the rankings of wealth than the UK because they have not yet got around to building more miles of railways per capita. Mali did not forget to build factories and industrialise; Vietnam is not lagging behind France because they have not yet opened enough offices. Certainly, the origin of sub-Saharan Africa’s economic ‘maldevelopment’ is not down to the ‘lower average IQ’ some pseudo-scientific ‘researchers’ claim.[15]
No; as Michael Parenti argues, these countries are not poor, they are not under-developed; they are over-exploited.[16] Afghanistan has faced sabotage, support for incredibly reactionary religious elements, then outright war for decades. When Chile attempted to follow its own democratic path of ‘development’ — i.e. improving quality of life for its people — in the 1970s, it faced a CIA-backed coup that lead to a dictatorship which enriched a powerful few while impoverishing the population. The DRC presented some hope after gaining independence in the late 1950s, yet the Belgians who had ravaged the country since 1885 were threatened by Pan-Africanist president Patrice Lumumba’s attempts to make Congolese national wealth work for the Congolese. As a result, they sponsored his overthrow and oversaw his execution by firing squad in 1961.[17] Since then the DRC has been an apocalyptic battleground; the site of what has been called ‘Africa’s World War’.[18] This brutal conflict has not stopped western-based trans-national corporations profiting off its mineral wealth along with the warlords, however — in fact, it has guaranteed that they do.
As for Nigeria, Nigerians may be far more ready for Nigeria to ‘develop’ than products of the so-called developed countries are. Unfortunately, when they attempt to organize into unions in order to improve their working conditions and pay (their quality of life), they face attacks by mercenaries to break their strikes at best, outright assassination at worst, paid for by the Shell oil company.[19] The post-colonial history of Mali has seen plenty of French interference, while the story of Vietnam’s outrageous treatment at the hands of the French and then the US, whose bombing campaign littered the country with unexploded ordinance, destroyed acres upon acres of productive lands, dispersed carcinogenic materials into the air, water and soil, and killed millions of Vietnamese people is well known.
These examples only cover the past 70 years, whereas the explanation for the power and wealth differentials between the MEDCs and the others has its roots centuries in the past. Over centuries, European powers ruthlessly stripped countries elsewhere in the world, specially in Africa, of their material wealth, their indigenous cultures and political structures, and often their very people as in the case of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. By the time of independence, as few as 2% of people in the Portuguese colonies were literate.[20] This was due to no lack of inherent ability on the part of the colonial subjects but rather the policy of killing those who tried to learn independently as potential troublemakers, while restricting education to the pliant few necessary for some levels of administration that could not be filled by imported labour from the home nation. Colonial powers routinely built highly limited infrastructure, for example a railway that would link a mine to a port on the coast but leave the rest of the country unserved. This meant that when these countries achieved independence, they had a weak basis for an educated civil society or specialized skilled and/or mental labour and an economy focused towards material or cash crop export. This demonstrates why rating a country as ‘less developed’ on the basis of material or agriculture-focused economy is severely limited. These countries were not advancing slowly along a trajectory of development; rather they were deliberately built to be focused on those aspects of the economy as an end in itself. In simple terms, their potential was deliberately hobbled — a niche was selected for them by decision makers in London, Lisbon or Brussels.
This problem is not limited to history. One could accept the historical maldevelopment of the Third World and then still say that future progress along the lines of the MEDCs is likely, making the classifications legitimate. The reason this does not work is because one of the criteria for being a ‘developed’ nation is having a post-industrial service economy. This raises serious questions as to how these countries can have economies where actually producing physical objects is only a small part. They can have these economies because the resource extraction, processing, and production of more complex goods further down the chain has shifted to the ‘LEDCs’. Western democracies are facing some level of upheaval in part because reliable manufacturing jobs have left these countries to places where Western military power and the influence of TNCs has made the world safe for capitalism — the strikebreaking, undermining of democracy, and assassination mentioned earlier. MEDCs exist as MEDCs with service economies because other countries are handling agriculture and industry. These other countries cannot move to service economies as things stand now, because then the global economy would be faced with the problem of finding people to actually make the things people need to live (and work service jobs). Development in terms of GDP and standard of living would mean a rise in costs of doing business and lower profit margins for the corporations who control production in these nations, which is of course unacceptable.
Therefore, the expressions ‘developing countries’, ‘developed countries’, ‘MEDCs’ and ‘LEDCs’ are inadequate at best, actively misleading at worst.
There is one other common phrase worth discussing at this point before making the final case for ‘the Third World’. ‘Global South’ is becoming more popular as a descriptor, yet it can be argued that it is also inadequate as it is a somewhat neutral term based merely on geography. It is true that richer countries are weighted towards the north and those in the south tend to be poorer, but this is not due to where they sit in relation to the equator (the reasons have already been discussed in this essay). It can serve as a sensitive way to refer to those countries inhabited by people with darker skin relative to Europeans, and racism indeed played a role as an ideological justification for the exploitation of the countries referenced, but again it does not strike at the heart of the issue.
To conclude, ‘Third World’, when used in the context of and with knowledge of its history to refer to ‘LEDCs’ as they truly are, is a useful term. We must ask why there is a desire to move away from use of ‘the Third World’. Is it because the term does not reflect the reality of the world? If this were so, then the same argument would apply to any potential replacement term; as we have seen, no proposed term directly describes the reality of a complex world. However, these terms serve as useful shorthands when talking about complex subjects. How does using ‘the Third World’ enable us to think about the state of the world? It sums up, in a single phrase, the relationship that exists between one part of the world and the other. It expresses the observable fact that there are those countries who exploit and those countries that are exploited. We should always be skeptical of attempts to move away from this way of looking at the world as they can obfuscate the power relationships that exist — as with the case of referring to these countries as developing, or underdeveloped, or less economically developed, where the explanation for why these countries are the way they are is put on those countries themselves. Their condition is expressed as something inherent in these countries, as a descriptor of the countries themselves, not the relationship between those countries and others or the true reasons for the states they find themselves in. It makes it appear as though those countries are like runners in a race who are just not fast enough, were just not bright enough, or were just not strong enough. It is missing the fact that these racers have had their legs tied by those standing on the victory podium at the end.
If we decide that ‘Third World’ has no place in modern discourse, then we should abandon any other euphemistic, economistic academic term and refer exactly to what we mean — exploited countries.
Footnotes:
[1] Leonard, T. (2006), ‘Third World’ in Encyclopedia of the Developing World. 3. pp. 1542–3 London: Taylor & Francis (but we all know I got this from Wikipedia)
[2] Mao, Z. (1974), On The Question of the Differentiation of the Three Worlds Available at: https://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv10n1/mao.htm (Accessed 11/12/2019)
[3] Weisbrot, M. (2014), ‘Hard choices: Hillary Clinton admits role in Honduran coup aftermath’, Al Jazeera 29 September 2014, Available at: http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/9/hillary-clinton-honduraslatinamericaforeignpolicy.html (Accessed 11/12/2019)
[4]Koutonin, M. R. (2014), ‘France/Afrique : 14 African Countries Forced by France to Pay Colonial Tax For the Benefits of Slavery and Colonization’, Mediapart, 30 January 2014 Available at: https://blogs.mediapart.fr/jecmaus/blog/300114/franceafrique-14-african-countries-forced-france-pay-colonial-tax-benefits-slavery-and-colonization (accessed 11/12/2019)
[5] WTO, Who are the developing nations? Available at: https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/devel_e/d1who_e.htm (Accessed 11/12/2019)
[6] Himmelstein et al. (2005), ‘Illness and Injury as Contributors to Bankruptcy’, in MarketWatch February 2005, p. 5–64 Available at: http://pnhp.org/PDF_files/MedicalBankruptcy.pdf (Accessed 11/12/2019)
[7] UK, referring to Act of Union and Battle of Hastings
[8] BBC, Shiori Ito: Japan’s attitudes to allegations of sexual violence are locked in the past Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3z44Njyr5wzm3wbVMGZ7tFr/shiori-ito-japan-s-attitudes-to-allegations-of-sexual-violence-are-locked-in-the-past (accessed 11/12/2019)
[9] BBC News (2015), Japan’s Hidden Caste of Untouchables Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-34615972 (Accessed 11/12/2019)
[10] UNDP (2018), Human Development Indices and Indicators: 2018 Statistical Update Available at: http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/2018_human_development_statistical_update.pdf (Accessed 11/12/2019)
[11] Credit Suisse (2019), Global Wealth Report Available at: https://www.credit-suisse.com/about-us/en/reports-research/global-wealth-report.html (Accessed 11/12/2019)
[12] Wilson, L. (2010), ‘$1 Trillion Motherlode of Lithium and Gold Discovered in Afghanistan’, Mining.com Available at: https://www.mining.com/1-trillion-motherlode-of-lithium-and-gold-discovered-in-afghanistan/ (Accessed 11/12/2019)
[13] Sherwood, D. (2019) ‘Chile, once world’s lithium leader, loses ground to rivals’, Reuters Available at: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-chile-lithium-analysis/chile-once-the-worlds-lithium-leader-loses-ground-to-rivals-idUSKCN1T00DM (Accessed 11/12/2019)
[14] BBC News (2014), DR Congo: Cursed by its mineral wealth Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24396390 (Accessed 11/12/2019)
[15] I will not legitimize these charlatans by a direct reference, even ‘mining.com’ holds more value as an academic source
[16] Parenti, M. (1989), The Sword and The Dollar, New York: St. Martin’s Press
[17] Zeilig, L. (2015), Lumumba: Africa’s Lost Leader, London: Haus Publishing
[18] Prunier, G. (2011), Africa’s World War: Congo, The Rwandan Genocide and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe, New York: Oxford University Press
[19] Summers, H. (2017), ‘Amnesty seeks criminal inquiry into Shell over alleged complicity in murder and torture in Nigeria’, The Guardian 28 Nov 2017 Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/nov/28/amnesty-seeks-criminal-inquiry-into-shell-over-alleged-complicity-in-murder-and-torture-in-nigeria (Accessed 11/12/2019) (and this is just one example)
[20] Marks, S. (2002), The Ebbing of European Ascendancy: An International History of the World 1914–1945, New York: Oxford University Press