Less Industrialized Countries

Less industrialized countries are those that are also sometimes called developing countries, and can include emerging economies and failed states. These terms have essentially replaced the older Third World or Global South labels, but there is no strict agreement on the right way to distinguish between the advanced and industrialized nations and the rest of the world. Every framework of vocabulary used for such distinctions presents its own problems, or develops certain connotations that fall out of favor.

The First, Second, and Third World

As the new world order came into focus in the years following World War II, economist Alfred Sauvy coined the term Third World—echoing the Tiers Etat (“Third Estate”), the French commoners who “had nothing and wanted to be something” in the days leading up to the French Revolution—to refer to those nations that were neither U.S.-allied (the First World) or Soviet-allied (the Second World). As the term came into common usage, it was sometimes criticized for a perceived implication that this “third” world was an afterthought, one less important than the first two—when in fact the use of “third” in the term reflected only Sauvy s desire to compare those countries unin-volved with the Cold War to the politically active peasantry. A French writer writing in a French magazine (the August 14, 1952 issue of L'Observateur) for a French audience, he knew his meaning would be understood; as the phrase became adopted and used for decades outside the context of that essay, this “thirdness” came to seem less innocuous.

Though it was true that most of the countries that did not take sides in the Cold War—or at least had not done so in 1952—were less developed and less industrialized, than those of the First and Second World, Sauvy s emphasis was on their political neutrality. In time, that underdevelopedness instead became the key characteristic of anything referred to as “Third World,” to such a degree that after the early 1960s, when Americans became aware of the devastating extent to which poverty had taken hold in parts of their own country, it became fashionable and politically expedient to refer to “Third World living conditions” when describing impoverished neighborhoods or social groups. While understandable, the usage further eroded the usefulness of the “Third World” category in discussions of global politics.

Attempts were made to rejigger the term, though. Hungarian-British economist Peter Bauer, wishing to update the term to reflect the conditions of the world around him in the 1980s, just as Sauvy had written of those conditions in 1952, defined the Third World not as a politically neutral segment of the globe or a political remainder, but as that part of the world that sought Western aid—regardless of the country's political sympathies or economic policies.

The North-South Divide

Another schema sometimes used to discuss the world and its groups of industrialized and less industrialized countries is the “North-South divide,” which reflects the general tendency during the Cold War of the developed countries—the First World and much of the Second—being located in the Northern Hemisphere, while developing countries were in the Southern Hemisphere. This map only works if you ignore New Zealand and Australia, and the fall of the post-Soviet states has further muddied it, but for all its imperfections it is an interesting way to describe the world. Unlike the First/Second/Third World model, [Page 999]it describes not a political allegiance but a state of development.

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