The First World is the developed world. Includes countries like US, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand.
The Second World was the Communist world led by the USSR. With the demise of the USSR and the communist block, there is no longer an official Second World designation, although Russia, China, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia still have “communist” governments.
The Third World is the underdeveloped world – agrarian, rural and poor. Third World is a term originally used to distinguish those nations that neither aligned with the West nor with the East during the Cold War. These countries are also known as the Global South, developing countries, and the least developed countries in academic circles. Development workers also call them the two-thirds world and The South. Some dislike the term developing countries as it implies that industrialization is the only way forward, while they believe it is not necessarily the most beneficial. Many “third world” countries are located in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. They are often nations that were colonized by another nation in the past.
The populations of third world countries are generally very poor but with high birth rates. In general, they are not as industrialized or technologically advanced as the first world. The majority of the countries in the world fit this classification.
The term “third world” was coined by economist Alfred Sauvy in an article in the French magazine L’Observateur of August 14, 1952. It was a deliberate reference to the “Third Estate” of the French Revolution. Tiers monde means the third world in French. The term gained widespread popularity during the Cold War when many poorer nations adopted the category to describe themselves as neither being aligned with NATO or the USSR, but instead composing a non-aligned “third world” (in this context, the term “First World” was generally understood to mean the United States and its allies in the Cold War, which would have made the East bloc the “Second World” by default; however, the latter term was seldom actually used).
Leading members of this original “Third World” movement were Yugoslavia, India, and Egypt. Many third world countries believed they could successfully court both the communist and capitalist nations of the world, and develop key economic partnerships without necessarily falling under their direct influence.
In practice, this plan did not work out quite so well; many third world nations were exploited or undermined by the two superpowers who feared these supposedly neutral nations were in danger of falling into alignment with the enemy.
After World War II, the First and Second Worlds struggled to expand their respective spheres of influence to the Third World. The militaries and intelligence services of the United States and the Soviet Union worked both secretly and overtly to influence Third World governments, with mixed success.
The dependency theory suggests that multinational corporations and organizations such as the IMF and World Bank have contributed to making third world countries dependent on first world countries for economic survival. The theory states that this dependence is self-maintaining because the economic systems tend to benefit first world countries and corporations.
Scholars also question whether the idea of development is biased in favor of Western thought. They debate whether population growth is the main source of problems in the third world or if the problems are more complex and thorny than that. Policymakers disagree on how much involvement first world countries should have in the third world and whether third world debts should be cancelled. The issues are complicated by the stereotypes of what the third world and first world countries are like.
People in the first world, for example, often describe third world countries as underdeveloped, overpopulated, and oppressed. Third world people are sometimes portrayed as uneducated, helpless, or backwards. Modern scholarship has taken steps to make academic discourse more conscious of the differences not only between the first world and the third world but also among the countries and people of each category. During the Cold War, there were a number of countries which did not fit comfortably into the neat definition of First, Second, and Third Worlds. These included Switzerland, Sweden, and the Republic of Ireland, which chose to be neutral.
Finland was under the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence but was not communist, nor was it a member of the Warsaw Pact. Austria was under the United States’ sphere of influence, but in 1955, when the country again became a fully independent republic, it did so under the condition that it remained neutral. None of these countries would have been defined as the third world despite their non-(or marginally) aligned status.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The term Second World largely fell out of use and the meaning of First World includes all developed countries. While the term Third World has become a neologism for the least developed countries.
