Third World politics is facing not a mid-life but a terminal crisis. World developments can no more be looked at from the point of view of superpower rivalries. Just as this paradigm lost its relevance in the post-Cold War era, so did 'Third Worldism', once the reigning ideology of much of the developing world. The dilemma facing the Third World leaders, asserts Ash Narain Roy, is similar to what committed revolutionaries face "without a revolution". The old order has changeth and the new one has not yet been born.

The term 'Third World' is believed to have been coined by a French economist and demographer, Alfred Sauvy, in 1952. Saucy, who had the Third Estate of pre-Revolutionary France in his mind, alluded to "social groups other than the most privileged groups of the day, the clergy and the nobility". Thus was born a term which was used to refer to countries which were different from the countries of Europe and North America (the First World) and the socialist countries of Eastern and Central Europe (the Second World). Mao Zedong tried to give the term another connotation. According to him, the United States and the Soviet Union were the First World, the other developed countries and satellites of the superpowers made up the Second World, while with the exception of Japan the rest of Asia, Africa and Latin America constituted the Third World. China did attend the Bandung conference, but Non-Aligned countries refused to accept china in their fold.

Sauvy's term went on to replace terms like "backward areas", "underdeveloped countries", "societies in transition" and as some UN documents put it. "peripheral countries". The term "third World" gradually became universally accepted. In political terms, Third World referred to countries which were on the margins of the bipolar world, while in economic terms the World Bank used it to denote low-income countries. Essentially, the two were the same. Two reports, one each by Willy Brandt and Julius Nyerere, rejected the term altogether, and preferred the term "South" to refer to developing countries, and "North" as the industrialised nations.


The Third World and its Vision:

Over four billion people, three quarters of all humanity live in the Third World. The primary engine of conflict in international politics may have changed from the East-West to the North-South divide, but the division between the First World and the Third World, despite globalisation, have only further widened. While few Third World countries have graduated into the First World, almost all countries of the Second World have joined the ranks of the developing world. According to Manfred Woechlcke of the Institute for Politics and Economics, of the 6 billion people on the planet by the turn of the century, 2 billion each will be poor and desperately poor. Nearly four-fifths of the population will be living in the Third World.

The Third World countries share several common features. One such feature is their common colonial bondage of the past. While the Latin American States were decolonised in the early part of the 19^th century following the two successful revolutions, the American and the French and the Napoleonic wars, particularly Napoleon's success in the Peninsular War, Afro-Asian decolonisation was entirely a post-war phenomenon. The primary bond that linked Latin American states and the newly decolonised countries of Asia and Africa was their desire to escape from dehumanising poverty and underdevelopment and a yearning for a better quality of life for their citizens. It was this post-colonial surge of nationalism and the attendant emphasis on national sovereignty and self-reliance which became the hallmark of Third Worldism. Common problems of poverty, low productivity, population growth, unemployment, primary product export dependence and international vulnerability bonded them together in their demand for a just world economic order.

Largely bypassed by the modern industrial and technological advance thanks to the foreign rule and colonial politics, these countries developed prior to independence, as dependence of economic, cultural and political centres elsewhere. They were at the dawn of their independence "unindustrialised, illiterate and characterised internally by extreme inequalities of wealth, influence and power between the people and an elite minority".

The Third World assumed importance in the 60s and 70s for a variety of reasons. It had, and continues to have, enormous natural and human resources. It produces most of the world's oil and other raw materials. Without them, the industrialised economies would collapse. The Third world countries embraced development in order to secure not only their independence from colonialism, but to meet rising expectations of material betterment. The experience was not very happy. In fact, it would not be wrong to assume that the "revolution of rising expectations" was aborted even before it could take off. As proponents of the "dependency theory" argue, "the underdevelopment of the periphery is a condition of the development of the centre" and what happens at the end of the periphery is "the development of underdevelopment."

The Third World became a cockpit of wars largely due to superpower rivalries. Poverty, malnutrition and disease, they say, are the ideal breeding grounds for political turmoil. Despair, despotism and cynical superpower opportunism all combined in the Third World to create a festering climate of economic collapse and political turmoil. As George Thomas Kurian says in the preface to the Encyclopaedia of the Third World, "the most significant political and social upheavals of modern time have occurred in the Third World... In many countries the political costs of development have been staggering and have led, in some cases, to the loss of freedom, repression, anarchy and civil war".

The cold statistics of a low per capita income of the Third World countries does not capture the picture of abject poverty and misery facing the marginalised economies. Far from narrowing, the gap in per capita income between the industrial and developing world tripled between 1960 and 1993., from $5,700 to $15,400. Today, the net worth of the world's 538 billionaires is equal to the combined income of 45 per cent of the world's population. According to the World Bank, 30 years ago, the wealthiest 20 per cent of the world's population were about 30 times better off than the poorest 20 per cent. Today, the top bracket is 60 times better off. If current trends continue and are not quickly corrected, economic disparities will move from inequitable to inhuman and from unacceptable to intolerable.


One Planet, Two Worlds:

As a result of the global financial and communication revolution, communities and nation-states appear to have less and less control of their own destinies. As Paul Kennedy maintains, the gap between rich and poor will only further widen as we enter the 21^st century "leading not only to social unrest within developed countries but also to growing North-South tensions, mass migration and environmental damage from which even the 'winners' might not emerge unscathed".

The ever-widening gap between the rich nations of the North and the poor of the South will create a new duality in the world. It will be the central theme of international politics because it will be the single greatest threat to peace and progress in the 21^st century.

While history has caused paralysis of the Third World societies, the developed world is moving in the opposite direction. We have two worlds on the same planet: one world is toiling to stave off hunger, while the other, encompassing the developed North, is chomping at the byte to cross over into cyberspace. Kapuscinski calls it "one world, but two civilisations".

Despite 50 years of decolonisation and attempted development, the gap between the North and South, rich and poor will be greater at the beginning of the next century than at the beginning of the present century. As Kapuscinski says, "American development is so dynamic and creative that, by the beginning of the next century, it will be a completely different world on this same planet. Every day,. America is producing more and more elements of a completely new civilisation which is further and further from the civilisation of the rest of the world". Octavio Paz, too, echoes a similar sentiment when he says, "the US was born rushing into the future. It was and still is, the Republic of the Future, built on an evanescent substance - time. It is, in fact, the perfect expression of modernity".

Max Singer and Aaron Wildavsky make the most eloquent presentation of the one planet, two worlds model. As they say, "the key to understanding the real world is to separate the world in to two parts - one the zone of "peace, wealth and democracy" consisting of Western Europe, the US, Canada, Japan and the Antipodes, and the other comprising the zone of "turmoil, war, and development" which include the former Soviet bloc States and most of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

At the global level, the old saw is still correct. The ratio of average income of the richest in the world to that of the poorest has risen from about 9 to 1 at the end of the 19^th century to at least 60 to 1 today. "Ironically, inequality is growing at a time when the triumph of democracy and open markets was supposed to usher in a new age of freedom and opportunity. In fact, both developments seem to be having the opposite effect""

While the protagonists of globalisation have sought to perpetrate myths like the poor catching up with the rich and growing convergence of rich and poor, in reality the gap in per capita income between the industrial and developing worlds has tripled between 1960 and 1993. The share of the poorest fifth of the world's population in global income has dropped from 2.3 per cent to 1.4 per cent over the past one decade. The proportion taken by the richest fifth, on the other hand, has risen. As James Gustave Speth of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) says, "we are living in a world that has become more polarised economically, both between countries and within them". The 1996 Human Development Report reveals that in 1995, 538 billionaires possessed as much wealth as 45 per cent of the planet's population combined, some 2.3 billion people. By the beginning of the next century, there will be about 6 billion people on the planet - o those, 1 billion will be wealthy, 1 billion will be well provided for, 1 billion will be poor, and 3 billion will be desperately poor.

The uneducated, unemployed, unskilled, unfed and unsatisfied people - the so-called un-people - will not remain silent in the 21^st century. There will be serious questioning of the lifestyle of th3 rich being imposed on the poor as a paradigm of progress. More than 600 million people in 40-odd countries suffer from malnutrition, and lack even basic health care and proper education. The reason? The money which should be spent on these services is being used to repay debt or, in some cases, merely the interest on the debt. Eleven million children die every year from easily treatable diseases because the rich world lacks the will to provide the meagre resources needed to overcome this "preventable tragedy".

The five models of the emerging world discussed above are certainly not exhaustive and some of them are not even mutually exclusive. Despite the nearly entire world espousing liberalism and market reforms, the world politics continues to be complex and no single image or model can adequately explain the shape of things to come in the next century. The world economic growth appears to have followed a cyclic order. The growth economies of yesteryears have become doomed economies of today.

As Mark Twain so wryly advises, "It is best to read the weather forecast before we pray for rain". Yet, when it comes to geopolitics or geoeconomics, the experts are not particularly to be trusted. They have turned out to be little more than "astrologers of power". Who knows whether the Cold War will return? NATO's air strikes against Yugoslavia and the contempt the only superpower of the world has shown towards the UN are indeed ominous. Perhaps a nationalist Russia will join an economically formidable China or some resurgent Third World countries like India to threaten the West, and Japan might shift sides.

Times change, and our perceptions with them. Those who were earlier seen as good guys suddenly look bad; yesterday's bad guys are today's friends. The distorting prism through which foreign policy is often viewed has, in an age of shifting ideologies, demanded much refocusing of belief not only among antagonists but about nations on the periphery. We do not know the 21^st century will bring drastic change in the world order, but we do know the character it will acquire. Our tools for understanding are too crude. One source of insight is the study of complexity, and another is the chaos theory. In both, there is confirmation that dramatic developments often arise from trivial events.