The term “Third World” was coined by French demographer Alfred Sauvy in 1952 to describe nations that did not fit into the “West” or “Soviet Bloc.” While it originally referred to social classes, it has come to be associated with economically less developed nations. Some prefer the term “developing nations” to avoid colonialist connotations.
The origin of the term “Third World” had nothing to do with a nation’s economic development, or lack thereof. It was first used in 1952 by a French demographer, Alfred Sauvy. There was no such first or second world at the time, and he coined the phrase to map it to the “states” into which historians used to divide the classes of society. The First Estate was the Church and the King (the monarch, who ruled by divine right, was classified as a religious authority), the Second Estate was the nobility and the Third Estate, roughly speaking, was everyone else, from landed peons to wealthy merchants/traders. The term “Citizen Kane” to refer to printing did not gain general use until the 19th century.
When Sauvy first used the phrase “Third World,” historians, sociologists, and demographers generally thought the world was divided into the “West” and the “Soviet Bloc,” or roughly, the developed nations of Europe and of the Western Hemisphere, and the Soviet Union and those countries in their hegemony or sphere or influence.
Sauvy pointed out that there were a number of nations which did not fit into any of these categories, which had their own programs and needs and, like the Third Estate of the Middle Ages, had to enter their own. Over time, First World has come to mean the developed nations of the West, and Second World is used less often to refer to the so-called “Communist bloc,” now almost entirely disused after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
As it happened, many of Sauvy’s Third World nations were also economically less developed nations. As a result, over time the phrase has generally come to refer to poorer parts of the world, without the social, industrial or technological infrastructure to support higher living standards for the people who lived there. “Second world” now sometimes refers to nations with developing economies, such as Vietnam, but its inherent ambiguity makes it awkward.
Today, some people object to the term applied to a nation, arguing that it has overtones of colonialism and paternalism, the “white man’s burden” of Kipling’s poem. “Less economically developed nations” is often the preferred term, or more optimistically, developing nations. All of this implies that “development” is economic, industrial and/or technological: the intellectual, spiritual or social development of a nation remains untethered by terminology.
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