Gerard Horgan

 

Resources & Development (IL5011)

Dr. Peter Carey.

 

 

Essay Title: “There is no relationship more problematic or contentious than that posed by those hundreds of millions of human beings lumped together with the term Third World” (Shiva Niapaul 1985, p.9). Discuss.

 

Paper Synopsis: This paper sets out to analyse Shiva Niapaul’s comment in as much detail as is permitted given the confines of this essay. It outlines the main issues for both proponents and opponents to the term Third World. Additionally, it examines the history behind the formation of the term and of the emergence of the Third World as a political force.

Moreover the essay engages with the theoretical discourse, which has played a major role in popularising the term Third World.  Finally, the essay examines a number of related terms to the term Third World to see if they provide an acceptable alternative to one that is supposedly so problematic and contentious.

 

Total Word Count: 3453.

 

The discourse around the term Third World has produced some quite divergent views. Some regard it as an irrelevant and obsolete term, which no longer serves any meaningful purpose in today’s world. Other commentators reject this vehemently; they argue that the term is both useful and valid. It becomes readily apparent that the term Third World is indeed, a source of contention. The purpose of this essay is to examine the debate over this term. It outlines, what some see as the inaccuracies and imprecisions of the term, however, it will also illustrate the importance of its continued usage.

The historical origins of the term Third World, its genesis and how it came to gain such worldwide acceptance, are examined. From this juncture, the essay focuses on modernisation theory, dependency theory and world-system theory all of which have featured prominently throughout the theoretical discourse regarding the Third World. Additionally, the term is juxtaposed with synonyms that have gained popularity in recent years. The essay illustrates, to paraphrase Winston Churchill’s comment on democracy that “it is the worst term apart from all the others”.[1]

             Critics of the term Third World, such as Nigel Harris, argue that it is devoid of any real meaning. Harris believes that it is essentially defunct and should be done away with altogether. Mark Berger states, “the idea of a Third World serves primarily to generate both a dubious homogeneity within its shifting boundaries and an analytically irrelevant distinction between Third and First Worlds.”[2] Peter Bauer finds the term patronising and condescending as it presents the Third World as a “uniform and stagnant mass devoid of distinctive character…. denying those individuals and societies which comprise the Third World of their identity, character, personality and responsibility.”[3]

             Brian Smith highlights the fact that the Third World has changed almost beyond the point of recognition and that therefore the term is “increasingly unacceptable to commentators from both North and South.”[4] According to Johan Gatting, the term “alludes to third class, third rate and which is only marginally acceptable in the biblical sense of the last becoming first”.[5] Rodinson states it even more implicitly “there is no homogenous ‘hungry universe’ that constitutes the ‘Third World’.”[6]

            Despite these arguments, there are those who still think it important to employ the term Third World in order to “preserve and convey the values associated with it.”[7] S.D Muni views the term as being both a ‘sound’ concept and a flexible resilient category, which implies neither “inferior values nor some lower numerical order but rather a set of specific characteristics that are unique in more than one way to the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.”[8]

Paul Harrison takes an evenhanded approach to the term. He firstly acknowledges its shortcomings. He states:

The ‘First World’ was the Capitalist West; the ‘Second World’ was the Communist Bloc; the ‘Third World’ defined in relation to these two, encompassed everything else…. Now the Communist bloc is neither communist nor a bloc…. The Third World is no longer third and is no longer a clearly identifiable grouping of nations.[9]

 

However, he argues that if we stop using or abandon the term Third World then “there is a risk that we shall weaken our awareness, our concern and our action.”[10]

These contrasting viewpoints raise a number of questions: Is it correct to herald the demise of the Third World as a force in the world today? Should we composing an epitaph or a new epithet for the Third World?[11] Does the term Third World have any continued relevance? Or is simply too problematic and contentious a term to be of any use? Or as Trevor Murtagh inquires, “is it anachronistic and serves no purpose or will it prove more advantageous to remain as a form of collective grouping under the banner of a ‘Third World’ in the international arena?”[12] Before these questions are addressed a brief look at the history of the how the term came to gain such popularity in the international arena is required.

Alfred Sauvy, the French demographer and economic historian, is the one accredited with having coined the term Third World in ‘Le Nouvel Observature’ in 1952. Sauvy drew a direct comparison between the exclusion of the Third Estate in French political history and the exclusion and isolation of the Third World by the First World (Western Capitalism) and Second World (Eastern Communism). The onset of the Cold War and the subsequent division of the world in to two armed camps placed pressure on many nations to declare themselves ideologically for one side or another. The emergence of a ‘Third Force’ or ‘Third Way’ seemed to offer an alternative to the two dominant world ideologies.

            The proponents of this world force were drawn primarily from countries that were emerging on to the world arena as newly independent nations. They shared a common history in that they had all at one stage or another been former colonies. Samuel E. Finer states:

The Third World was not just a residual category of states that were neither liberal-democratic nor communist-totalitarian. It was a significant grouping in that its members lay outside the Europe mainly south of the fortieth parallel, were mainly agrarian, were much poorer than Northern states and had been subjected to colonialism or deep diplomatic and economic penetration by the West.[13]

 

 It was thought that their shared experiences would unite these quite disparate countries into a credible force to counter the bipolar world, which so typified the Cold War era. The ‘world’ that the Third World referred to consisted of “a hundred states in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean. Their combined population of four billion accounted for 75% of the world’s total population, while its territories covered nearly 70% of the world’s land area.”[14]

The term Third World emerged out of the academic corridors of the world’s universities to be articulated by proponents such as Nasser of Egypt, Nehru of India, Tito of Yugoslavia and Sukarno of Indonesia. When Sukarno was asked, what can we do? he replied, “ We can inject the voice of reason into world affairs”.[15] However, they sought to do much more than that. The Bandung conference in Indonesia in 1955 and the subsequent emergence of the non- aligned movement (NAM), and later of the Group of 77 (G77) led many to hope that the Third World could be presented as a force on the world stage.

The hope and aspiration around this time was encapsulated in Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon wrote “for Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, we must set foot a new man”.[16] Through NAM and G77 the Third World “gradually established a collective identity and emerged as a significant political force in the global arena”.[17] These two groups sought to redress what they saw as the inequalities inherent in the global capitalist system. This system had by and large been established by the US and UK at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 which founded the major world institutions that came to dominant the rest of the twentieth century. These included the IMF, World Bank, GATT and the UN.

            Third World countries viewed these institutions with suspicion, as they believed that they operated merely to reinforce Western, and in particular US global hegemony. NAM and G77 scored some notable successes however by and large they were short-lived.[18] The 1980’s, with its economic crises, saw the fragile political alliances within the Third World fragment and evaporate. This, coupled with the demise of the Soviet Union, prompted some to talk of the end of the Third World while others like Francis Fukuyama wrote of ‘The End of History’[19]

                        In tandem with the many real political developments was the emergence of a Third World discourse. The Third World was seen as poor, underdeveloped, and backward. There was a feeling among many in the West that these countries needed to catch up. This could best be achieved through industrialisation and economic growth. This idea was encapsulated in modernisation theory. This theory maintained that if countries followed a Western path of development then all their woes, socially, economically and politically would be taken care of.[20] Martinussen points out  that “in the literature of the 1950’s and 1960’s there was a tendency to look at developing countries as so fundamentally similar that it was deemed reasonable to generalise about them as one type of society”.[21]

Unfortunately, modernisation theory, in practice, did not succeed in dramatically improving the lot of those in the Third World. In fact, it has been accused of doing the exact opposite. The South Commission stated that “uncritical imitation of the Western models led to a failure to benefit from the South’s reserves…. it led more generally to greater inequalities, unplanned and usually chaotic urbanisation…. increased import demand, combined with lagging export capacity and much environmental damage.”[22]

The failure of modernisation theory led theorists such as Andre Gunder Frank, Theotorio Dos Santos and F.H.Cardoso to challenge many of the assumptions associated with modernisation theory.[23] Frank’s theory of the development of underdevelopment states, “countries with the closet links to the industrialised countries were proportionally least developed.”[24] The dependency theorists argued that the “underdevelopment present in Third World societies was not an original state but was something, which had been created as a condition of development…the influence of the theory therefore helped to popularise the term Third World.”[25]

However, dependency theory was found to be inadequate on a number of fronts. It failed to account for the rapid and successful development in the newly industrialised countries (NIC’s) in Southeast Asia. This fatally undermined a theory that“ provided the basis not simply for unity among Third World states but for the very idea of the Third World itself.”[26] It has also been criticised for emphasising external economic forces to the detriment of other factors such as the role of politics within developing nations.[27] Nevertheless, dependency theory provided a useful conceptual framework from which other theorists, like Samir Amin and more importantly Immanuel Wallerstein, were able to draw on and develop.

Wallerstein’s world-system theory emphasises the role a country plays within the capitalist world system. Berger states, “Wallerstein’s project rests on the assumption that a particular country’s internal development may only be ‘understood’ with reference to the position it plays in the modern world system as a whole.”[28] Wallerstein developed Frank’s ideas on the metropolis and satellite to come up with the concepts of core, periphery, semi-periphery and external.[29] World system theory also highlights the importance of history.[30] Wallerstein’s thesis would seem to confound those who say that the term Third World is defunct given the collapse of the former Communist Bloc. If one was to go along with his theory then the framework within which the Third World operates predates the 20^th Century by some four to five hundred years.

            Perhaps, it is the combination of the elements of history and peripherality, which make the term Third World as viable today as it was fifty years ago. It links back to Sauvy’s original meaning of countries being outside the great power blocs. Clapham argues that what distinguishes the Third World is its peripherality, “economic peripherality has meant separation from and subordination to the dominant industrial economies which have developed especially in North America and Europe…it ties the economy to the global system”.[31]

 Naturally there exist critics of this thesis. Anthony Giddens argues that the Third World societies are not a world apart but are very much connected to the industrial societies. He maintains that this is set to continue as globalisation accelerates into the next century strengthening the economic ties between nations.[32] Berger makes an interesting point when he states:

For any of those concerned with economic development, a relatively homogenous ‘Third World’ continues to exist and this ‘Third World’ is still evaluated in terms of its ability or lack of ability to advance towards a degree and type of economic development similar to the first world.[33]

 

            Following on from the importance of the economic debate is the idea of the Third World being a homogenised group of poor nations. It is argued that the Third World no longer constitutes such homogeneity. Shiva Naipaul states:

The idea of a ‘Third World’, despite its congenial simplicity, is too shadowy to be of any use… all poverty may look alike from a comfortable armchair, may seem susceptible to the same remedies, nothing could be further from the truth.[34]

 

It is also argued that the term Third World ignores or obscures the huge diversity in wealth both between and within such countries. Meier writes, “to talk of poverty ridden people in Least Developed Countries (LDC’s) might act as a form of mystification deflecting attention away from internal stratification: poor countries do not exist entirely of poor people, great disparities exist”.[35]It must be acknowledged that even the poorest countries have its share of millionaires comparable in many ways to those living in the West.

             The existence of elites, within Third World countries, is often cited as an example of where the term Third World fails to adequately convey the reality within Third World societies. The presence of such elites challenges the assumption that all peoples within the Third World are universally poor. Berger states, “elites in the Third World societies often appear to have more in common with Western elites than with their own dispossessed masses.”[36] One example would be Brazil where the richest 20% earns 64.2% of the national income and the income ratio of the top to the lowest fifth if the population was 26 to 1.[37] Such statistics lead some to denounce the term Third World “ as mystification designed to conceal dependency and exploitation, as well as a device allowing rulers of Third world countries to present a common interest between themselves and the masses to disguise their own interests with metropolitan interests.[38]

The growing disparity among states, such as Bangladesh and the NIC’s, has further undermined the term Third World. Nigel Harris argues that “the NIC’s and the majority of the low income countries had as little in common with each other as each had with the more developed countries”.[39]Cammack argues that the “varying trajectories of different counties and regions within the Third World over the last fifty year…have called into question the usefulness of the blanket term ‘Third World’ to cover developing nations, if they are assumed to be uniformly poor and underdeveloped.”[40] The World Bank distinguishes between rich, the middle poor and the poorest countries referring to them as Least Developed Countries (LDC’s), prompting some to say that we now have to contend with a Fourth World.

            Yet, there are those who counter this by saying that the problems, which characterised those countries within the Third World during the post-war period, are to be found today. One of these problems is the debt issue. All through the 1980s right up to present day this diverse but seemingly cohesive band of countries are as “ locked into a vicious circle of mounting debt, falling export values, pressure to export to earn foreign capital and dependence on foreign aid and loans, as they were in the decades following political independence”.[41] In 1990 Third World debt stood at approximately $1.3 trillion equivalent to 44% of its total GNP. Brazil owes $155 billion, Mexico $197 billion and Argentina $57 billion.[42] Linked to this is Bauer’s argument that the only thing the Third World has in common is that they request and receive aid, he writes, “the Third World is the creation of foreign aid: without foreign aid there is no Third World”.[43] Peter Worsley maintains that the Third World is the world of poor countries and that “their poverty was the outcome of a more fundamental identity: that they had all been colonised.”[44]

            Those at loggerheads with the term Third World point to the internal contradictions and conflicts within this diverse group of countries. The evidence of deep division within the Third World significantly reduces the credibility of any notions of solidarity.[45]  State interests among Third World countries are increasingly regional orientated, often without regard for the common good. Some examples would include the Central American Common Market and most particularly the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which “was doing more damage to the economies of poor countries than the developed.”[46]

Furthermore, the emergence of a strongly anti-communist group of Asian states such as: Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines brought an end to the Third World as a coherent voting block in the UN. In 1979, the more industrialised countries of the Third World vetoed a code of conduct for multinational corporations that the less industrialised Third World States wanted.[47]

             The range of internecine conflicts is another example where this idea of Third World solidarity breaks down. The conflict between China and Vietnam was of particular significance as the Maoist interpretation was one that placed China at the heart of the Third World. In fact the preamble of the 1975 constitution forbids China from ever becoming a superpower. Conflicts in Africa and Latin America has resulted in a huge loss of life some estimates put it as high as 25 million.

             A number of terms have entered the lexicon in an attempt to encapsulate exactly what it is we are talking about when we refer to the Third World. Theses synonyms include North/South, rich and poor countries, developing states, LDC’S, the Underdeveloped World, and Core and Periphery.  However, they are as contentious and problematic as the term Third World. Simpson astutely observes:

The situation has been further complicated by the current usage of the terms North and South. To anyone with any degree of geographical fastidiousness they are terms, which can only be regretted when India and China are located in the South and Australia and New Zealand in the North

 

 He goes on, “the American political scientist Bruce Russett has likened the search for an all purpose region to that of an alchemist trying to find a universal solvent[48]

Another writer noted that terms like ‘Low Income Countries’ and ‘Least Developed Countries’ are cold, clinical and euphemistic, which carry little more than a descriptive, statistical meaning.[49] Christopher Clapham with a touch of English humour no doubt states, “I have chosen to use the term ‘Third World’ not because of its meaning, but because of its meaninglessness. Its alternatives all carry conceptual overtones which are even more misleading, in that they imply positive elements of commonality rather than a simply negative residual category.”[50]Moreover, Clapham indicates that terms such as ‘developed’, ‘underdeveloped’ and ‘developing’, have led to “conceptual confusion and misleading generalisation.”[51]

As we have seen through the course of the essay the term Third World is both contentious and problematic. Shiva Naipaul wrote that the Third World is a “form of bloodless universality that robs individuals and societies of their particularity.”[52] However, analytical, the term Third World allows an awareness of a group of states that do share a common identity in terms of their history under colonial rule. Hadjor noted, “we cannot change the history which produced the Third World; and we cannot change the Third World without some awareness of this history. That is the strength of this term.”[53]

Shiva Naipaul’s comment, in relation to the term Third World, is symbolic of the extent to which many commentators find it both inaccurate and irrelevant. Nevertheless, it must be realised that hardly any field of study arrives at straightforward, all encompassing phraseology that satisfies everybody. Kofi Buenor Hadjor, in writing of the vocabulary of the Third World, describes it in terms of a battlefield of conflicting meaning. Moreover, he states, “we have been unable to enter this battlefield without beginning to use a term whose history and present are problematic and conflictive- the term Third World.”[54]

The term as we have seen is not perfect, it has its flaws, however, it still retains an importance that far outweighs any other term to date. The term Third World remains a powerful symbol of common purpose and of a shared historical legacy, which should not be readily dismissed as out of date or irrelevant. What distinguishes what you see in Cairo from what you see in Lisbon is their history. The Third World states are all haunted by the same historical legacy, which is the basic reason why we should continue to distinguish between the Third World and the rest of the globe. [55] Instead of doing away with the term altogether perhaps we should ‘reconceptualise’ it so as to take into consideration the economic, social, political and cultural diversity that is such a feature of the Third World. .

 

Bibliography

 

• Allen, Tim and Thomas, Alan (Eds.), Poverty and Development in the 1990s. Oxford University Press, 1992.

 

• Bauer, Peter T. Equality in the Third World and Economic Delusion. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1981.

 

• Bayliss, A and Renegger, N.J. (eds.), Dilemmas of world politics: International issues in a changing world. New York: Clarendon Press, 1992.

 

• Berger, Mark T.“The End of the Third World.” Third World Quarterly 15, no. 2 (1994).

 

• Cammack, Paul A. and Pool, David. Third world politics: a comparative introduction. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988.

 

• Clapham, Christopher. Third world politics: an introduction. London: Routledge, 1988.

 

• Fanon, Franz. The Wretched of the Earth. Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1961, C. Farrington (tr.).

 

• Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History.” The Public Interest, Summer, 1989.

 

• Giddens, Anthony. Sociology. 2^nd edt. Cambridge: Polity, 1993.

 

• Hadjor, Kofi Buenor. Dictionary of Third World terms, London: Penguin Books, 1993.

 

• Handelman, Howard. The challenge of Third World development, 2^nd edt., London: Prentice-Hall International, 2000.

 

• Harris, Nigel. The end of the Third World: Newly Industrializing Countries and the Decline of an Ideology. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990.

 

• Harrison, Paul. Inside the third world: the anatomy of poverty. 3^rd edt. London: Penguin, 1993.

 

• Krasner, Stephen D. Structural Conflict: The Third World Against Global Liberalism. University of California Press: Berkley, 1985.

 

• Martinussen, John.Society, State, and Market: A Guide to Competing Theories of Development. London: Zed Books, 1997.

 

• Manor, James. (ed.), Rethinking Third World Politics. London: Longman, 1991.

 

• Muni, S. D. “The Third World: concept and controversy.” Third World Quarterly 1, no.3, April 1979.

 

• Murtagh, Trevor. “Third World: Outmoded concept or valid term?” University of Limerick, Political and Economic Review, May 1999.

 

• Naipaul, Shiva. “A Thousand Million Men.” The Spectator, 18 May 1985.

 

• Simpson, Edward S. The developing world: an introduction. 2^nd edt. New York: Longman Scientific & Technical, 1994.

 

• Smith, Brian C. Understanding third world politics: theories of political change and development. London: Macmillan, 1996.

 

• The] South Commission. The Challenge to the South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

 

• Toye, J. Dilemmas of Development: Reflections on the counter Revolution in Development Theory and Policy. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987.

 

• World Development Report. Investing in Health. New York: Oxford University Press for the World Bank, 1993.

 

•  Worsley, Peter.The Third World. Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1967.