Third World first meant politically unaligned, not poor
When the French demographer Alfred Sauvy wrote of a third world in 1952, he was echoing the Third Estate of pre-revolutionary France: ignored and exploited commoners who wanted to be something. The label described countries outside both Cold War blocs. Only later did it slide into a shorthand, often derogatory, for poverty.
In the Cold War scheme, the First World meant the United States and its allies, the Second the Soviet Union and its partners, and the Third everyone who stayed out of both camps. Strictly, it was a political category. Sauvy chose the old French word tiers rather than the modern troisième precisely to recall the Third Estate that faced the clergy and nobility. The idea may already have circulated at an Asian conference in New Delhi in 1947.
The fit was never neat. Neutral but prosperous European states such as Sweden, Switzerland and Ireland rarely called themselves Third World, while Cuba, firmly in the Eastern bloc, often got the label. Mao Zedong offered a rival Three Worlds Theory after China's split with Moscow, lumping the two superpowers together as the First World and placing both China and India in a Third World of exploited nations; Deng Xiaoping presented it at the UN in 1974. In the 1980s the economist Peter Bauer argued the category was essentially arbitrary, since the only trait its members shared was that their governments asked for and received Western aid.
Because most of these countries were former colonies facing nation-building for the first time, and many were poor, the term drifted into economic meaning. By the late 1960s it stood for much of Africa, Asia and Latin America, marked by low incomes and life expectancy, and became a target for aid. W. W. Rostow's five stages of growth cast take-off as the hurdle these economies were struggling to clear. Both superpowers courted unaligned states with money and weapons.
Since the end of the Cold War, terms such as developing countries and the Global South have largely replaced it, and it is widely seen as outdated or impolite. Some scholars describe a Great Convergence from the late 1980s, when most such countries grew faster than rich ones.
Source: Third World
