LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Third World: United States
built 607 days ago
The most misguided justification for America's attachment to right-wing Third World states lies in the realm of politics and ideology. Proponents assume an underlying ideological affinity between authoritarian systems and Western democracies. They insist that while rightist regimes may be repressive, such governments are natural U.S. allies in the struggle against world communism. Conversely, revolutionary leftist movements are "totalitarian" in origin and constitute accretions to the power of that global menace.
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The Third World's economies are distorted by dependence upon exportation of primary products, to the First and Second worlds, in return for finished products. After liberation from colonial rule in the 1950s - 1970s, many Third World nations were illiterate, over-populated, and politically unstable. This was particularly true of Africa, where nation-states were artificially created by European colonial powers in order to control populations by imposing local, minority-rule governments, indifferent to local social and cultural reality.
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The flip side of Washington's promiscuous enthusiasm for right-wing autocrats is an equally pervasive hostility toward leftist Third World regimes and insurgent movements. There have been occasional exceptions to this rule throughout the cold war era. For example, the United States developed a cordial relationship with communist Yugoslavia after Premier Josef Tito broke with the Soviet Union in 1948. A similar process occurred during the early 1970s, when the Nixon administration engineered a rapprochement with China, ending more than two decades of frigid hostility. These achievements are instructive and should have demonstrated to American policymakers that it is possible for the United States to coexist with Marxist regimes. But that lesson has not been learned, and such incidents of enlightenment stand as graphic exceptions to an other- wise dreary record.
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This might seem like a classic example of the Third World struggling to catch up with the First. After all, people in the United States and Europe have been using ATM cards and the Internet for years to perform the simple banking tasks Das is only now able to do. But look again: The technology used to bring slum-dwellers like Das their first bank accounts is so advanced that it isn't available to even the most tech-savvy Americans - at least not yet.
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When people talk about the poorest countries of the world, they often refer to them with the general term Third World, and they think everybody knows what they are talking about. But when you ask them if there is a Third World, what about a Second or a First World, you almost always get an evasive answer. Other people even try to use the terms as a ranking scheme for the state of development of countries, with the First world on top, followed by the Second world and so on, that's perfect - nonsense.
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During the Cold War there were a number of countries which did not fit comfortably into the neat definition of First, Second, and Third Worlds. These included Switzerland, Sweden, and the Republic of Ireland, which chose to be neutral. Finland was under the Soviet Union's sphere of influece but was not communist, nor was it a member of the Warsaw Pact. Austria was under the United States' sphere of influence, but in 1955, when the country again became a fully independent republic, it did so under the condition that it remained neutral. None of these countries would have been defined as third world despite their non (or marginally) aligned status.
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