ABSTRACT
The principal fact about the "Third World,' as the United States and other industrialized countries viewed it, was and is that these countries are underdeveloped, or, euphemistically, "developing" nations. The Third World is a self-defined and self-conscious association of nation-states. The very rise and maturation of the Third World points up the instability and schismatic propensities of this coalition of nations. The complex interrelationships among the nations of the Third World and the First and Second Worlds, in author's terms, represent a playing out on a global scale of issues of inequality and stratification that share more than a few similarities with the inequalities within nations. An essential factor about the international status of Third World nations is that they hold no dependencies. The Third World nations generally have a single metropolitan center, without either middle-sized cities or competing metropolitan centers within their boundaries.
