The Semantics Of Third World
By S.Faizi
04 December,
2008
Countercurrents.org
An Australian cricketer’s disparaging remark about India as a Third World country and the rebukes it has elicited in India and Pakistan offers a long overdue opportunity to debate the use of the expression Third World so that this term of prejudice and disdain could be banished. The rejoinders’ claim that India is not a ‘Third World’ country and assumption that some other countries are the Third World, is, however, rather under-informed.
While the Australian cricketer’s remark meaning that certain
kind of facilities are universally absent in the so called Third World
(since they are inferior as the statement assumes), reflects his ill-informed
world view, I would rather leave him alone in his ghetto of misinformation
and prejudice and focus on the irrationality and prejudice that the
phrase Third World has come to represent.
The term is used to denote countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America, having a lower level of economic development. The international discourse on development issues regards India as part of the so called Third World, in fact as a leader. The media, academic institutions and the civil society organizations across the world, India included, unhesitantly use this phrase of prejudice. If a country that hosts the largest number of poor and illiterates in the world and unfailingly finds its place in the tail part of the international human development index is not part of the so called Third World, then which country is? The issue is not whether India is part of ‘Third World’ but whether the phrase itself is acceptable or not.
It was a little known French demographer Alfred Sauvy who first used the phrase Third World (Tiers Monde), more than half a century ago, interestingly, to imply a somewhat radical meaning. Paraphrasing the Third Estate, an expression used to represent the exploited masses in the pre-revolution France, Sauvy warned the west of the prospect of the exploited Third World raising up against them as the French masses did against the regime of the aristocracy and clergy.
The expression
has, however, come to acquire a meaning of prejudice and contempt,
a term for the west to represent the Other, the global South. The
west, including its outposts like Australia, seeks to define itself
to its populace through the cultural dichotomy of ‘west’
and ‘Third World.’
If one wants to divide the world, then the South would form the first
world, not a third. All the early human civilizations were in the
South. It was in the South that all the great religions of humanity
originated and developed. West’s own religion reached there
from across the Mediterranean. When Christianity was carving its niche
in Palestine, Egypt, Ethiopia and even in India, it had a fugitive
life in Europe, for nearly three hundred years!
In terms of resources, there is no element of doubt as to which part
of the world is rich. Seventy five percent of the global biodiversity
is in Asia, Africa and Latin America. One hectare of rain forest in
Kerala holds as many species as the entire fauna and flora of the
whole country of Denmark. More than eighty percent of the mineral
wealth of the world is located in the South. Further, although the
tiny western Europe is the most overcrowded region in the world, the
overwhelming majority of humanity lives in the global South. In terms
of size, despite the lies spread by the western map, the South forms
two thirds of the earth’s land surface. And yet, the South is
only the third world!
When the capitalist West and socialist eastern Europe existed as mutually antagonistic power blocs, ‘Third World’ gained currency to describe the great number of developing countries that did not directly align with any of the two power blocs. For the colonial mind, the poor and the marginalized are the last to count, hence they were happy to describe the developing economies as the Third World, and the developing world, where cultural products are the most pervasive import, unquestioningly started using this term of prejudice. In a rare moment of courage, I.K. Gujaral, India’s then Prime Minister, gave the west a taste of its own medicine when he described the UK as a ‘Third rate country’ while addressing a meeting in Cairo where he was on an official visit in 1997. ‘Third World’ and ‘third rate country’ carry similar linguistic meanings. Yet UK’s Foreign Office protested and Mr. Gujaral, quite expected of an India politician, virtually apologized for his statement.
The cultural bastardization that colonialism had engineered has made
us readily accept words impregnated with prejudice. We use the term
‘Mongolian Syndrome’ uncritically, without ever wondering
why albinism is not called ‘European Syndrome’. We have
never questioned the derisive usage ‘Banana republic’
either. And for that matter, we have not expressed amazement at the
proposition that Europe is a continent while it is actually a subcontinetal
part of Asia, as Arnold Toynbee had said and any child looking at
a world map would tell. Orientalism and eurocentricism have been the
most potent weapons of imperialism in the long run.
The countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America could be collectively described as the South, or the Global South, discarding the contemptuous ‘Third World’. The United Nations uses the phraseology ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ nations. However, this would be accurate only when used in the full form i.e. ‘industrially developed/developing nations’. For, a nation that is industrially less developed, may be well developed in other areas of human endeavour such as culture and distributive justice.
‘Non-Aligned World’ is another matter-of-fact description of the Southern countries. While the Capitalist World is aligned economically, politically and militarily, the South remains largely non-aligned. Non-aligned World has a meaning independent of the Non-Aligned Movement, which unfortunately is withering with some of its key members, including India, succumbing to the pressures of the new world order.
Indoctrination
to colonial culture and values is not so easy to shake off. Introducing
The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon's classic narrative of the
French genocide in Algeria , Jean Paul Sartre told fellow Europeans,
‘The Third World sees us through the scars of their wounds’.
Though this unusually great European soul was not exactly accurate;
our wounds have not been healed to have scars.
(Author introduction: ecologist specializing in international environmental
policy, based at Thiruvananthapuram, India) [email protected]
