Origins and History

Abstract

When the victorious allies created the United Nations in 1945 they saw it as an instrument to be used to maintain the status quo; they did not expect that it would become the champion of the rights of all people to have a voice in running the world. That, however, is what happened, and the entity of the Third World came to represent the voice of the poorest, the hitherto dispossessed. The Third World emerged out of years of exploitation and, as much as anything, arose out of frustrations with the world’s power structures. It was the stark realities of a Cold War confrontation backed by nuclear weapons with all their potentially frightful consequences for mankind that led Pandit Nehru and other leaders to turn to a ‘Third Force’ concept in the 1950s. The claim of the powerful that they know best how to solve the world’s problems is always, ultimately, backed by their capacity to use force to obtain their ends, and though the conventional wisdom condemns such an approach in theory, in reality we have hardly begun to move away from a situation in which the North ‘knows’ how the world ought to conduct its affairs and is prepared to help the South only on sufferance and only when it behaves as the North requires.