The Rise and Fall of the Third World: Development, Disillusion and Divergence

Abstract

Previous chapters have suggested that the diversity of industrial capitalist societies is lost to view when they are collectively classified as the ‘first world’. Similarly, while former state socialist societies may have been more uniform than their capitalist industrial counterparts, the idea of their constituting a ‘second world’ also masked important differences between them, differences which tended to widen over time. Countries placed into the ‘third world’ category are more heterogeneous still, and the very concept of a ‘third world’ has been the subject of an extensive and on-going debate since the term was coined in the early 1950s. From the outset, the ‘third world’ was made up of ‘a diverse set of countries, extremely varied in their cultural heritages, with very different historical experiences and marked differences in the patterns of their economies, whatever their common history of subjection to colonialism and their common underdevelopment both as colonies and as independent states’ (Worsley, 1984, p. 306). The definition of the third world as those nations which were not industrialized bestowed upon it the character of ‘a negative unity’ (Worsley, 1984, p. 306), given coherence only by member countries’ shared deficiencies in terms of development indicators. This unity was always likely to break down as the societies which comprised the third world became more diverse, and Harris (1987) has argued that the emergence of the newly industrializing countries heralded ‘the end of the third world’.