Third World & After

by Ian Birchall, New Left Review

The Third World ascended like a sky-rocket—and fell like the proverbial stick. [1] Invented by Alfred Sauvy in 1952, in an article in L’Observateur entitled ‘Three Worlds, One Planet’, the termtiers monde became central to the discourse of the European left (including this journal) by the 1960s. While the long post-war boom seemed to have taken the fight out of the metropolitan working class, revolutions from China to Cuba, and national liberation struggles from Algeria to Vietnam, inspired a new generation. Hồ Chí Minh and Che Guevara became heroes, and the writings of Frantz Fanon and Régis Debray were eagerly studied. Yet by the end of the seventies the news from Pol Pot’s Cambodia had crushed the illusions of the sixties generation; the advances of globalization seemed to make the very notion of a ‘Third World’ obsolete. Today the term is considered outdated and derogatory.