The rise of the Third World

The main theme of historical studies is social change. As John Stuart Mill said in 1859 (1974: 136), “The greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history, because the despotism of Custom is complete.” For this reason, more so than for Western self-absorption, the history of countries belonging to the so-called Third World has been studied less. Scientific history and social science in general develop when people perceive that society changes and they want to understand the laws of that social change. Before, with some brilliant exceptions such as that of Ibn Khaldun (1967), historians were simple chroniclers: they limited themselves to telling something that had happened. During the Renaissance, there appeared hints of scientific history or social science. Nicola Machiavelli, and later Giambattista Vico, reflected on change and instability in Italy. But it was the English Revolution that produced the first systematic social scientists: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and, in France, Montesquieu and Voltaire. These new philosophers studied societies precisely because they changed. The French paid such a great deal of attention to Britain because after the seventeenth century British society changed radically and noticeably. This explains our relative ignorance of the history, and in particular the economic history, of the American, African, and part of the Asian continents before the modern period. There is an additional and very elementary cause: many of those peoples have left few written documents and, in numerous cases, none. The Third World, so called (apparently by Alfred Sauvy; Bairoch 1997:

633) because it is neither capitalist nor communist, burst into economic history in the twentieth century. It is an essential part of this century’s revolution. But the expression “Third World” hides a multifarious reality; in addition, there not being today a communist bloc, properly speaking, the term “Third World” has lost whatever little precision it might have had in the past. Here we will employ it simply because it is generally used and understood. The meaning of the expression is not geographic, but economic: it refers to countries with low income per capita, located mostly in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. This economic definition implies, therefore, a fuzzy

and porous boundary between the Third World and the First World, or developed world. According to this definition, many European countries, especially those in southern and eastern Europe, were clearly Third World countries at the beginning of the twentieth century. The majority of the excommunist countries, particularly those in the Balkans, and the recently independent former Soviet republics too would be today in full transition from the Third World to the developed world. On the other hand, a large part of southern Europe is today placed among advanced countries, and the same can be said of Asian countries such as Japan (still semideveloped a century ago), South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. Ireland’s case is similar. It was a colony until after World War I and is now among the most developed countries. Belonging to the Third World is not, therefore, immutable or binding. When we say that these countries burst into history in the twentieth century

we mean, in the first place, that the majority of them emerged as countries, that is, as nations, in the twentieth century, because before that they were in a prenational situation, many of them in colonial or semicolonial situations. This is the case in particular of most African and Middle Eastern countries and of several Asian countries, such as India, Pakistan, and Indonesia. It is not the case of countries in North or South America, even less of China, but it is that of some European countries, such as Yugoslavia (now extinct) or Poland. In the second place, we mean that the demographic weight of the Third World has increased spectacularly during the last century, going from 60 percent to 80 percent of total world population from the beginning to the end of the century. This combination of recent national identity (with representation in the United Nations, where they constitute today an overwhelming majority), fast-growing population, and relative economic stagnation has turned these countries into an exceptionally problematic lot. The emergence of the Third World is an essential part of the Second World Revolution and the main problem inherited by the twenty-first century from the twentieth. The mixture of population growth and economic stagnation constitutes an explosive cocktail. On the nature of this cocktail, on its causes and consequences, there are myriad opinions. It is crucial, however, to find a proper solution to these problems, because the immediate future of 80 percent of the world and in reality, given the close and growing world interconnections, of all humanity depends on it. In this chapter we will try to analyze, perhaps with excessive brevity, but avoiding as much as possible the emotions this subject frequently arouses, the causes and consequences of the quandaries of the Third World.