William Safire: Return of the phrase from 'Cold War I'
[William Safire winner of the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary, joined The New York Times in 1973 as a political columnist.]
President Bush dispatched Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Tbilisi "to rally the free world in the defense of a free Georgia." Senator John McCain used the same phrase to an audience of veterans: Young democracies under attack "should be able to count on the free world for support and solidarity."
Suddenly the free world - a phrase described in the Oxford English Dictionary as "now chiefly historical" - was back in the current-events vocabulary. Only last year, professor Walter Minot wrote in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that "the Cold War has been over for 15 years. Isn't it about time that journalists stop using a phrase that is outdated, inaccurate, meaningless and politicially deceptive?" The op-ed piece was headlined "Dump 'Free World' in Sea of Dated Words."
It has resurfaced like an angry Moby-Dick, forcing etymologists to ask: When and where did the dormant phrase, now in its roaring comeback, begin? In research for the current edition of my political dictionary, I came across an obscure economics adviser to the Department of Agriculture in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration named Mordecai J.B. Ezekiel.
In October 1941, two months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the possible coiner started a publication named Free World, a project of the Free World Association. Its slogan was "For Victory and for World Organization," and in 1942, Free World merged with the magazine United Nations World.
In that era, the free world was made up of "the Allies": the United States, Britain and any other government in fact or in exile opposing Nazi tyranny, which could be said to include the Soviet Union after its attack by Hitler's forces. A half-dozen years after World War II, Stalinist Russia was no longer in the club; the January 1951 issue of the proceedings of the Academy of Political Science was titled "The Defense of the Free World" (against the aggressive Soviet Union). The phrase was favored by President Dwight Eisenhower. Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev derided it in 1959 with, "The so-called free world constitutes the kingdom of the dollar."
Then the political world was divided into three: the free world, the Communist world and the neutralist third world. That was neat but not quite tidy but the bipolar lineup with room in the middle served a rough rhetorical division during the Cold War, or as it may soon be called, "Cold War I."
With the 1991 collapse of the Communist Soviet Union and the spread of democracy, the two-generation construct of free-third-Communist worlds fell apart. The new free world is made up of not just the Western democracies but also all other countries around the world holding free elections and tolerating persnickety journalists. This largely absorbed the third world. The Communist world was reduced to China, North Korea and Cuba, with the euphemism "authoritarian" applied to countries like Iran, Zimbabwe, Syria and Myanmar. The East-West divide seemed to give way to the embrace of multipolar.
What, then, led to the recent resuscitation of the phrase free world?..
Read entire article at International Herald Tribune
President Bush dispatched Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Tbilisi "to rally the free world in the defense of a free Georgia." Senator John McCain used the same phrase to an audience of veterans: Young democracies under attack "should be able to count on the free world for support and solidarity."
Suddenly the free world - a phrase described in the Oxford English Dictionary as "now chiefly historical" - was back in the current-events vocabulary. Only last year, professor Walter Minot wrote in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that "the Cold War has been over for 15 years. Isn't it about time that journalists stop using a phrase that is outdated, inaccurate, meaningless and politicially deceptive?" The op-ed piece was headlined "Dump 'Free World' in Sea of Dated Words."
It has resurfaced like an angry Moby-Dick, forcing etymologists to ask: When and where did the dormant phrase, now in its roaring comeback, begin? In research for the current edition of my political dictionary, I came across an obscure economics adviser to the Department of Agriculture in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration named Mordecai J.B. Ezekiel.
In October 1941, two months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the possible coiner started a publication named Free World, a project of the Free World Association. Its slogan was "For Victory and for World Organization," and in 1942, Free World merged with the magazine United Nations World.
In that era, the free world was made up of "the Allies": the United States, Britain and any other government in fact or in exile opposing Nazi tyranny, which could be said to include the Soviet Union after its attack by Hitler's forces. A half-dozen years after World War II, Stalinist Russia was no longer in the club; the January 1951 issue of the proceedings of the Academy of Political Science was titled "The Defense of the Free World" (against the aggressive Soviet Union). The phrase was favored by President Dwight Eisenhower. Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev derided it in 1959 with, "The so-called free world constitutes the kingdom of the dollar."
Then the political world was divided into three: the free world, the Communist world and the neutralist third world. That was neat but not quite tidy but the bipolar lineup with room in the middle served a rough rhetorical division during the Cold War, or as it may soon be called, "Cold War I."
With the 1991 collapse of the Communist Soviet Union and the spread of democracy, the two-generation construct of free-third-Communist worlds fell apart. The new free world is made up of not just the Western democracies but also all other countries around the world holding free elections and tolerating persnickety journalists. This largely absorbed the third world. The Communist world was reduced to China, North Korea and Cuba, with the euphemism "authoritarian" applied to countries like Iran, Zimbabwe, Syria and Myanmar. The East-West divide seemed to give way to the embrace of multipolar.
What, then, led to the recent resuscitation of the phrase free world?..