Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
much lower than in industrial nations, their economies relied on a few export crops, and farming was at the
subsistence level.
A glance at the following list of countries whose names changed in the years following independence
is revealing. Most are part of what has been traditionally considered the Third World. Many of them also
have the unhappy distinction of still being counted among the world's poorest nations by the United Na-
tions. Of the forty-one nations singled out by the UN as the world's poorest, twenty-eight are in Africa,
another eight are in Asia, four are Pacific Island groups and one is in the Caribbean.
But time and events have combined to make Third World a misused anachronism. From the very begin-
ning, the concept of a monolithic Third World that was somehow separate and different from either East or
West made little sense. In the first place, the notion of nonalignment was a fairly ridiculous one.
More significantly, the third-world label ignored vast differences of culture, religion, and ethnicity. The
impoverished countries of Central America had little in common with sub-Saharan Africa. And what did
equatorial Africa have to do with Afghanistan? To complicate matters, someone at the United Nations in-
troduced the notion of a Fourth World, a term increasingly used to identify the poorest group of nations.
Huge changes in the world's geopolitical alignments have made these labels obsolete. In the first place,
there is no longer a Second World in competition with a First World with which to contrast a “third.” The
fall of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe took care of that distinction.
Equally significant is the rapid economic expansion in many countries that once fit the description of a
Third World country. Singapore of the 1990s is certainly no longer the “poor, strife-ridden, chaotic” island
it was when the phrase was coined. South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong all have robust economies. And
in many other nations, there are growing chasms between rich and poor.
In that sense, the Third World did and does refer to something real, almost a state of being rather than a
definable group of places. Third World still connotes vast social problems such as disease, hunger, and bad
housing. But no group or country enjoys a monopoly on these dubious distinctions. The ills that have come
to be associated with the Third World are present everywhere on the globe. These problems are usually at
their worst in the large cities of Latin America, Asia, and Africa—from Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro to
Cairo, Lagos (Nigeria), and Calcutta. News reports about conditions in the former Soviet Union describe
it as “third world,” and Russia even seeks aid from South Korea. Elsewhere in Europe, Yugoslavia's eth-
nic fighting is as brutal as any “tribal” war in Africa. Even the United States is pocked with third-world
enclaves, either in the inner cities or in rural hamlets, where Americans suffer life expectancies typical of
Bangladesh, and infant mortality rates are worse than those found in many so-called Third World nations.
NAMES: Changing Names in the Twentieth Century
Before the European independence movements of the 1990s transformed the former Iron Curtain countries,
an earlier wave of independence movements shook the world, principally during the 1960s.
In Africa, Asia, and South America, former colonies shook off the vestiges of European and American
control. The result was an extraordinary number of place-name changes, frequently adding to the general
confusion over matters geographic. As independence took hold, the people in these countries, like divorced
women reclaiming their maiden names, shucked off their European-map references and returned to tradi-
tional names to reflect their newfound independence.
Countries that might have been familiar from the maps of the past disappeared in a flurry of rechristen-
ings. The following is a list, by continent, of present-day countries and their dates of independence, along
with their previous—and perhaps more familiar—colonial names. Those nations marked with an asterisk
(*) are listed as among the world's poorest by the United Nations. (A guide to the freshly minted Europe
can be found in Chapter 2.)
 
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