10-29-15
How the French Revolution Gave Birth to the Third World
Rounduptags: French Revolution, Third World, Alfred Sauvy
Four years ago, the president of the World Bank got up before a well-heeled Princeton audience and declared the Third World over.
“If 1989 saw the end of the Second World with Communism’s demise, then 2009 saw the end of what was known as the Third World,” Robert Zoellick announced. Economies were newly rising, power shifting: “North and South, East and West, are now points on a compass, not economic destinies,” he said.
On its face, it was an odd proposition. For starters, Zoellick was about two decades late: Were the meaning of the Third World true to its origins, it should have died when the Cold War did. Then again, the meaning of the Third World has been slippery almost since its conception. Though Zoellick and many others consider the term passé, it lingers — in journals, in books, on the lips of subalterns throughout the world. Maybe that’s because no alternative has as pliable a meaning.
More on that in a moment. But first, some Third World datapoint:
Date of Birth: August 14, 1952
Place of Birth: L’Observateur, a French weekly
Proud Papa: Alfred Sauvy, French demographer and the first director of the Institut National des Etudes Démographique.
Circumstances of Birth: Sauvy wrote a column, “Trois Mondes, Une Planète,” that worried that poor countries would get lost in the Cold War. Engaged in an arms race, the capitalist West and communist East would neglect world hunger, poverty, and disease. And it would be to their peril, he warned. “After all, this Third World — ignored, exploited, scorned like the Third Estate — wants to be something, too.”
Sauvy’s French audience would know that Third Estate allusion. ...
comments powered by Disqus
News
- Josh Hawley Earns F in Early American History
- Does Germany's Holocaust Education Give Cover to Nativism?
- "Car Brain" Has Long Normalized Carnage on the Roads
- Hawley's Use of Fake Patrick Henry Quote a Revealing Error
- Health Researchers Show Segregation 100 Years Ago Harmed Black Health, and Effects Continue Today
- Nelson Lichtenstein on a Half Century of Labor History
- Can America Handle a 250th Anniversary?
- New Research Shows British Industrialization Drew Ironworking Methods from Colonized and Enslaved Jamaicans
- The American Revolution Remains a Hotly Contested Symbolic Field
- Untangling Fact and Fiction in the Story of a Nazi-Era Brothel