The Case Against “Third Worldâ€Before I became involved in development, I was as guilty as anyone else in using the term. I tossed the language around without even considering what it actually meant. But being informed of origins and histories when working in development can be your most valuable asset. One day I asked myself, “Why in the world are we still using this archaic term? The Soviet Union doesn’t even exist anymore.†Thus my research began.
An excellent point to make against the use of the term, was the case made by developmental economist Peter Bauer:
“In the 1980s, economist Peter Bauer offered a competing definition for the term Third World. He claimed that the attachment of Third World status to a particular country was not based on any stable economic or political criteria, and was a mostly arbitrary process. The large diversity of countries that were considered to be part of the Third World, from Indonesia to Afghanistan, ranged widely from economically primitive to economically advanced and from politically non-aligned to Soviet- or Western-leaning. The only characteristic that Bauer found common in all Third World countries was that their governments “demand and receive Western aid†(the giving of which he strongly opposed). Thus, the aggregate term “Third World†was challenged as misleading even during the Cold War period.â€
Mr. Bauer took the case against the term another step by stating that it was never even correct to begin with. The term “third world†was loosely thrown around by politicians and journalists and based entirely on non-measurable characteristics of a nation. The Cold war was a time of political alliances and the three-world system made it easy to characterize who was who in the war effort for the media, politicians and academia.
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