Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Critiques of the Third World in the 1970s
By the early 1970s, the rather loose combination of political and eco-
nomic features that constituted the Third World had already attracted
criticism. The French socialist Debray (1974: 35) argued that it was a
term imposed from without rather than within, although more devel-
oping nations were beginning to use the term. Anti-developmentalists
consider this to be a critical point in the development process, a time
when the Third World was beginning to recognize its own underdevel-
opment, adopting Western evaluations of its condition. Many other
critics, however, also felt the term was derogatory since it implied
that developing countries occupied third place in a hierarchy of the
three worlds.
The main cause of the doubts that emerged during the 1970s was
related to the growing political and economic fragmentation of the
Third World. Ironically, perhaps the biggest impetus to the break-up
of the Group of 77 non-aligned nations came from within, when the
nations making-up the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries
(OPEC) raised the price of their oil massively in 1973-74, with a sec-
ond wave of price rises in 1979 following the fundamentalist revolu-
tion in Iran. Initially conceived as a political weapon against the West
for its support of Israel, the oil price rise had a much greater effect on
the non-oil-producing countries of the developing world, many of
which were following oil-led industrial and transport development
programmes. The result was a widening income gap between develop-
ing countries.
This was further reinforced by the new international division of
labour in the 1970s in which capital investment - via multinational
corporations and financial institutions - poured out of Europe and
North America in search of industrial investment opportunities in
developing countries. Most of this investment was highly selective
and cheap labour alone was not sufficient to attract investment: good
infrastructure, an educated and adaptable workforce, local invest-
ment funds, docile trade unions and the like were also important. The
result was that investment focused on a handful of developing coun-
tries (specifically, the four Asian tigers, plus Mexico and Brazil) where
GNP per capita began to rise rapidly, further stretching relative eco-
nomic and social contrasts within the Third World.
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