coined the term in the early 1950s. However, there is also the view that it
should have been translated as ‘Third Force’ because Sauvy seemed to have
in mind the problem of power blocs during the Cold War, and of a Third
Force distinct from the Western bloc and the Eastern bloc. ‘Non-alignment’
in the military and diplomatic spheres is one of the earliest qualities associ-
ated with Third World status (Wolf-Phillips, 1979, 1987; Love, 1980). This
stance was most strikingly represented by the Bandung Conference attended
by the representatives of twenty-nine African and Asian countries in 1955.
Another early idea associated with the Third World conveys solidarity
among developing countries based on their primary producing economic
status, their relative poverty, their dependence on agriculture and their dis-
tinctive forms of economic regime neither modelled on the Eastern bloc of
planned economies nor the Western, free market system. The Third World
was seen to fall outside the first world of the advanced capitalist democra-
cies and the second world of industrially advanced communist countries. As
the British political scientist Samuel Finer pointed out (1970), the Third
World was not just a residual category of states that were neither
liberal–democratic nor communist–totalitarian. It was a significant group-
ing in that its members lay outside Europe, mainly south of the fortieth par-
allel, were mainly agrarian, were much poorer than northern states and had
been subjected either to colonialism or ‘deep diplomatic and economic
penetration by the Western powers’ (Finer, 1974, p. 98).
However, there was an important deviation from this perception of the
world’s economic divisions. China’s Mao Tse-tung produced a very different
categorization in which the USA and the USSR constituted the first world,
Japan, the European countries and Canada constituted the second world,
while Africa, Latin America and most of Asia formed the third world. The
claim being made here was that boththe USA and the USSR were imperial-
istic, with their developed satellites as the second world and the primary pro-
ducing former colonial possessions of the first and second worlds forming
the third world. So the OPEC countries would, despite their wealth, fall into
this third group (Muni, 1979; McCall, 1980, p. 539).
Mao was clearly influenced by current relationships between China and
the USSR, worse at that time than between China and some capitalist states.
From other socialist perspectives, developing countries have been seen as
predominantly dependencies of the major capitalist powers. This led to the
belief that one could only meaningfully talk about two worlds, not three;
one capitalist, one socialist (Griffin and Gurley, 1985; Toye, 1987).
Thirdly there has been the idea of an anti-imperialistalliance against
colonialism, neo-colonialism and racialism. So the Third World stood for
12 Understanding Third World Politics