Redefining the Third World for a New Millennium: An Aching Towards Subjectivity

Abstract

How might we redefine the Third World? Of French origin, the term was probably adapted from the class order of pre-revolutionary France. The Third Estate rose and overthrew the monarchical, aristocratic and clerical order. In such parliaments as the French king convened, the Third Estate sat to the far left. Thus, even today, the terms ‘left wing’ and ‘Third World’ depict those who maintain an agenda of victimisation, and rebellion to the point of revolution. For a time in the post-Second World War years, revolutions swept over the Third World. Now, in the later decades of the century, with the exception of the Iranian revolution, the image is one largely of victimisation—what dependency theorists have called immiseration of the Third World. It is an object in someone else’s grander command of the world as a whole; it is deprived of initiative; it is not the free subject that might claim its due, after first having conceived freely what its due might be. This, however, is more resonant of a reductionism than a general truth. The Third World—if such a term, although in general usage, can be accepted at all—is multifarious. Taking the general usage at face value, and looking at the Third World as something ‘found’—that is, able to be discerned by artefacts and their measurements, we find not one Third World but, in the most basic taxonomies, five: