Why they are called "First World" and "Thirld World" countries? Where these terms came from?

Question

Why they are called "First World" and "Thirld World" countries? Where these terms came from?

Answer 1

I've heard the phrase attributed to the French agronomist Rene Dumont, but the most convincing story credits French demographer Alfred Sauvy, who is said to have coined tiers monde in 1952. The archaic tiers is used instead of the modern troisieme to suggest a parallel to tiers etat, the Third Estate, which came into currency during the French Revolution. The Third World is thought to hold a position vis-a-vis the First and Second Worlds (the developed capitalist and Communist countries, respectively) comparable to that of the Third Estate (the commoners) with the First and Second estates, i.e., the clergy and the nobility.

The expression was used at a conference of African and Asian countries in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955 and was the title of a book published by Sauvy's associates in 1956. It became the title of a journal in 1959 and from there passed into general usage in France. Eventually it made the leap into English. There has since been some suggestion that the Third World ought to be subdivided into the Third and Fourth Worlds, the Third consisting of countries that can legitimately be called developing and the Fourth those that are pretty much dead in the water. But the prospective Fourth Worlders have not been embraced this idea with much enthusiasm, for the obvious reason that it makes things sound more desperate than they care to admit.

Answer 2

The term "Third World" was created as an insult.

I believe that the term "Third World" was created as an insult term by a group of ignorant wild-capitalistic (as opposed to progressive modern democratic capitalism of 21st century) entities and corporations to whom everything under "THEY" was "First World" and everything they hated and was poor by their "standards" was intentionally and insultively named as "Third World" (refer to "Trash World"). Also refer to "third sort" or "refused and robbed nations". Perhaps it was done to in some way encourage growth and development in the poor nations. So-called "First World" was known as highly militaristic, highly corporised, somehow industrialised, highly commercialised and highly de-spiritualised countries which have had many colonies in their so-named "Third World" and have been stealing overseas treasures from those countries for ages. The rest of the world to them was "Third World" no matter what. Anything those so-called "First World" countries robbed and stole from was named as "Third World".

According to Nations Online (www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/third_wo... the term First, Second and Third World refers to the post-WWII segregation of the world into those aligned with USA (First World), those aligned to the communists (Second World), and the non-aligned states (Third World). However the terms did not arise simultaneously. It was for the longest time the NATO bloc vs the the Eastern Bloc countries. Then someone pointed out that there was a whole nonb-aligned movement that is neither industrialised-capitalist, not communist-socialist. This was refered to as the third world countries. But there was no attempt to rank-order the NATO & Eastern Bloc. Subsequently, with the crumbling of the Eastern bloc countries, Third world just came to mean poor countries. (And presumably since the Eastern Bloc collapsed there would be no objection to the NATO countries taking the title of "First World".)

As for New World and Old World, these refer to the Americas (new world) and Europe/Africa (old world) in the context of natural science and evolutionary enquiry. So for example you might read about differences between new world and old world monkeys (One difference I recalled was that new world monkeys had prehensile tails (i.e. Spider Monkeys), whereas old world monkeys had sad little limp tails. These had no relation to the idea of Third world countries.