Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The Emergence of the Third World
in the 1950s and 1960s
The term that has most commonly been employed to refer to spatial
contrasts in development at the global scale is the 'Third World'. As
with the word 'development', the term goes back beyond 1949, although
not much further. The origins of the term were political, largely cen-
tring around the search for a 'third force' or 'third way' as an alternative
to the Communist-Fascist extremes that dominated Europe in the
1930s. In the Cold War politics of the immediate post-war years, this
notion of a third way was revived initially by the French Left, who were
seeking a non-aligned path between Moscow and Washington (Worsley,
1979). It was this concept of non-alignment that was seized upon by
newly independent states in the 1950s - led in particular by India,
Yugoslavia and Egypt - and culminated in the first major conference of
non-aligned nations, which was held in Bandung in Indonesia in 1955.
Indeed, at one point 'Bandungia' appeared to be a possibility for their
collective label.
It was a sociologist, Peter Worsley (1964), who played a major role in
the popularization of the term 'Third World'
,
principally via his topic of
that title. For Worsley the term was essentially political, labelling a
group of nations with a colonial heritage from which they had recently
escaped and to which they had no desire to return under the guise of new
forms of colonialism, or 'neocolonialism'. Nation building was, therefore,
at the heart of the project. For a while in the 1950s and 1960s, this Afro-
Asian bloc attempted to pursue a middle way in international relations.
In economic terms, however, it was a different story. Almost all newly
independent states lacked the capital to sustain their colonial econo-
mies, let alone expand or diversify. Most remained trapped in the pro-
duction of one or two primary commodities, the prices of which were
steadily falling in real terms, unable to expand or improve infrastruc-
ture and their human resources. Once Worsley had identified the com-
mon political origins of the Third World in anti-colonialism and
non-alignment, he cemented this collectively through the assertion that
its current bond was poverty. By the late 1960s the term Third World
was in widespread use, even by its constituent states, in forums such as
the United Nations (Potter et al., 2008). Conceptually, therefore, the
world was firmly divided into three clusters, namely the West, the
Communist bloc and the Third World.
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