American Policy in the Third World, 1947–87

Abstract

The two superpowers which emerged from the wreckage of the old, Europe-dominated world order in 1945 did not agree on much. One matter that they did have in common was almost equal ideological stakes in the further dismantling of the former European control over what had been until 1939 vast and seemingly secure colonial empires — British, French, Dutch, Belgian and Portuguese — in Asia and Africa. At the time, the notion that those enormous areas of the globe, along with Latin America, could be lumped together and given a common identity as the ‘Third World’ was still some years in the future. The term became current, by translation from the French ‘Tiers Monde’ ¹ round about 1951 or 1952, by which time the superpowers’ rivalry was an established condition. The neat, misleading simplification which divided the society of states into the West, the Communist bloc, and the Third World (in which their contest would be played out) proved so irresistibly convenient that it came to be universally used, though it was always mostly counter-productive to good understanding. The Third World has never been ‘all of a piece’, as the name seems to imply. In fact the societies lumped together under that heading differ from each other at least as much as the West differs from the Communist bloc, perhaps more. Nevertheless, mankind requires simplifications, and the effort to resist that one is at least temporarily a lost cause.