Blog on Capitalism

In all posts to this blog site the term ‘Third World’ is used as short-hand for those countries to which the term originally referred during the ‘Cold War’.  We consider it preferable to such terms as ‘Developing’, ‘Under-developed’ and ‘Less-developed’ worlds or  ‘Global South’. 

The term ‘Global South’ makes less sense than the anachronistic term ‘Third World’, which, originally, referred to those countries which chose to attempt to remain ‘non-aligned’ in the international confrontation between competing Western secondary ideologies.

Terms which reference these countries as ‘developing’ or ‘less developed’ judge them against Western standards and imply that they are  in the process of transforming from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’  states. We consider this presumption to be both simplistic and pejorative.

Our use of the term ‘Third World’ is in line with the adoption of the term by many of the countries we are referencing through its use. As the site Nations-On-Line puts it:

Today the term is often used to describe the developing countries of Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania. Many poorer nations adopted the term to describe themselves.