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Why ‘Third World’ and why ‘development’? Why Third World? 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’. This is 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. This presumption is both simplistic and pejorative. The use of the term ‘Third World’ is in line with the adoption of the term by many of the countries these entries reference 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. Why ‘Development’? The frequent enclosure of the term ‘development’ in quotation marks is deliberate. While there has, over the past fifty years, been a strong belief among Western ‘development’ specialists that non-Western nations are swiftly metamorphosing into ‘developed’ capitalist nations, I do not consider this either justified or reasonable. This presumption has resulted in policies and practices which assume that the problems encountered in Third World communities are transient by-products of the change process. Rather than dealing with the enormous problems being
created in non-Western communities by ‘development’ policies and practice, the
specialists argue that change should be accelerated. It is assumed that it is
not the policies and practices but the stubbornness of people that is the
problem. As a common expression among evangelical Protestant Christians has it: “It is time to let go and let God”.
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Articles:
Pre-empting Henry Hyde's Nightmare
Global Capitalism: The Exploited Planet, the Torrent of Garbage
and The Warnings
The History and Nature of Capitalism - The Book
- Book Chapters:
- Introduction
- Ideology, The World Economic System and Revitalization Movements
- An Explanation and History of the Emergence of Capitalism
- How Born Again Christians Rescued Capitalism
- The Virtuous Capitalist, The Poor and the Wasteland
- Capitalism and Work: the White Man's Burden
- Capitalism and its Colonies
- Global economic forces, Western realities
- Global Capitalism, Third World Development
- Epilogue – What Drives Western People to Commoditize their World?
- Addendum: We're All Equal! Independence and Exchange
Links: