Remember when we used to call most of the global south the Third World? Back then, we also called the U.S.S.R. and it's allies the Second World, and NATO countries the First World.
We don't use those terms much anymore, what with the fall of the Soviet Union having closed the book on the Second World. Our old ideas about defining who's who in the world according to their alignment or lack thereof with capitalism or communism are ancient history. Those out-dated notions have been relegated to the back row of the library, right next to volumes by such once-notables as Thomas A. Harris, M.D. (remember I'm Okay, You're Okay?) and my favorite feminist sexologist, Shere Hite.
That's the Shere Hite of The Hite Report on Female Sexuality who, back in the 1970s, made headlines with research that revealed the crappily low percentages of women having orgasms during what she, to my barely pubescent delight, called "thrusting" coitus. 30+ years later, Shere Hite appeared after listings for a report on the height of the singer Cher, and a mispelled ebay ad for a pair of Nike Hite Top sneakers in a recent google search, and women's orgasms are discussed by the likes of Oprah, whose approach to female sexuality can be summed up in one word: va-jay-jay.
This is how far we've come. It's been three decades. Third World? Ancient history.
Nowadays, people still use the term Third World when what they really mean is broke. I am hesitant to follow in this tradition, but I'm not sure of the alternatives. I despise the terms "less developed" or "developing" as they suggest countries like the U.S. represent some sort of ideal of development. Yes, potable tap water and electricity are great, but do they really have to come with 400 channels of The O'Reilly Factor and The Real Housewives of Orange County? My tenuous hold on sanity depends on my belief that we can do better.
We've established that Third World is a not so useful term. Poor, while descriptive, doesn't really speak to why or how, simply stating what is obvious and yet not entirely true. I mean, not everyone in Mexico is poor, and Mexico is certainly not resource or people poor. The relative poverty of many in Mexico is most immediately a problem of governance and accountability (or lack thereof), and Mexico's weakness in that regard seems a symptom of something a lot more complicated, more rooted in history and politics, than just being "poor."
So, just what do we call the non-NATO aligned, so called developing countries? As you may already have guessed, I have a suggestion. It's far from perfect, but maybe, just maybe it's a way to start a conversation that will lead us somewhere. My conversation starter is "exploited." I know, it's neither clever nor deep. In fact, it's a little blunt, both as a conservation opener and in its lack of precision. But give it chance. What is the country of Senegal, much less the whole of the continent of Africa, if not a country defined, at least in terms of international relations, by a history of exploitation?
Now, let's address that history for a minute. My meager, mostly homemade education addressed two waves of imperialist expansion in the capitalist era. In the first, Spain went after the Americas and Portugal won Brazil in blood-soaked conquests of such deadly effectiveness that nothing since has matched them in sheer mano a mano brutality and scale. Japan alone stood independent and undaunted among Asian powers at the end of the first wave, only succumbing to Admiral Perry in the mid-1800s. This might explain why, during the second wave, what many refer to as the "new imperialism," Japan behaved like such a royal ass.
During this second wave, approximately from the mid-1800s through the early 1900s, the industrial powers of the world, nations like England and later the U.S. and Japan, systematically exploited the less industrialized countries of the world, countries like Haiti, the Philippines, and Mexico, in order to secure the resources, including land, necessary to feed the industrial machine and accumulate wealth. In one of the most stunning examples of hubris and exploitation, the U.S., in 1848, "bought" all of California, Nevada, and Utah, along with parts of Wyoming, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado from Mexico as one of the spoils of the Mexican-American War (what is known in Mexico as the War of North American Invasion). The price the U.S. paid amounted to something like $700 a square mile in today's money.
And if becoming king of the hill wasn't enough, once on top of the colonial food chain these powers were in no position to stop. Having pissed off everyone and her brother, they needed resources to build the military power necessary to stay ahead of the hungry masses of the world, exponentially increasing the drain on the countries whose resources they were exploiting. See how well that word works?
Whether it was gold, uranium, rubber, rice, or slaves, they were able to, in the words of a contemporary U.S. retail giant, get it here, and for less. Funny how that slogan also sums up contemporary relations between north and south. The ridiculously low prices north of the border types pay for products in big box mega-retailers continue to be supported by exploitation, often of southern hemisphere workers to the benefit of northern manufacturing giants, some of which were built by fortunes accumulated through the trans-Atlantic slave trade, just to drive the point a little deeper.
Of course, exploitation of this kind cannot simply be achieved by dint of one country aggressing against another. This is no game of football, with teams competing to achieve goals that produce results for all the winners at the expense of all the losers. To execute exploitation on this grand a scale, the imperial powers had to create a global elite, and establish hierarchies of power and control both within exploited countries and transnationally. That global elite controls national politics and wealth, and metes out privilege and influence such that today's European-descended middle-class Mexicans probably have more in common, at least economically, with middle-class white folk in the U.S. than they do with Mixtec migrants in Mexico and vice versa regarding the relationship between U.S. middle class whites and poor people of color. That's the sticky wicket that makes seeking out solutions so damned complicated.
Some of you will, no doubt, suggest colonies as a potential moniker. Well, if you do I won't be mad at you, but I think people throw around the terms "colony," and various related isms and izations way too much. Why? Well, for one thing, these words are confusing and only truly useful in a very specific historical and political context. For another, not every exploited country was or is technically a colony, and I'm not going to get in the way of efforts to achieve de-colonization by straining the definition in order to dignify the experience of being kicked around, treated like crap, and exploited, like somehow that's not enough.
So I'm sticking with exploited. I know some of you will claim it's an obscure term, polluted by it's use in far too many situations to describe far too many things. Even as far back as 1946, George Orwell decried the use the word as an exercise in political manipulation. But, today, even right wingers throw around the word exploited, as in the manipulatively named anti-choice group, Women Exploited By Abortion. It is evidence, I think, that enough of us know what that word means for it serve as a good opening salvo in a dialogue about what's next in our attempt to create a language of international politics that helps us to more clearly understand what we've done and are doing to each other.
Nowadays, people still use the term Third World when what they really mean is broke. I am hesitant to follow in this tradition, but I'm not sure of the alternatives. I despise the terms "less developed" or "developing" as they suggest countries like the U.S. represent some sort of ideal of development. Yes, potable tap water and electricity are great, but do they really have to come with 400 channels of The O'Reilly Factor and The Real Housewives of Orange County? My tenuous hold on sanity depends on my belief that we can do better.
We've established that Third World is a not so useful term. Poor, while descriptive, doesn't really speak to why or how, simply stating what is obvious and yet not entirely true. I mean, not everyone in Mexico is poor, and Mexico is certainly not resource or people poor. The relative poverty of many in Mexico is most immediately a problem of governance and accountability (or lack thereof), and Mexico's weakness in that regard seems a symptom of something a lot more complicated, more rooted in history and politics, than just being "poor."
So, just what do we call the non-NATO aligned, so called developing countries? As you may already have guessed, I have a suggestion. It's far from perfect, but maybe, just maybe it's a way to start a conversation that will lead us somewhere. My conversation starter is "exploited." I know, it's neither clever nor deep. In fact, it's a little blunt, both as a conservation opener and in its lack of precision. But give it chance. What is the country of Senegal, much less the whole of the continent of Africa, if not a country defined, at least in terms of international relations, by a history of exploitation?
Now, let's address that history for a minute. My meager, mostly homemade education addressed two waves of imperialist expansion in the capitalist era. In the first, Spain went after the Americas and Portugal won Brazil in blood-soaked conquests of such deadly effectiveness that nothing since has matched them in sheer mano a mano brutality and scale. Japan alone stood independent and undaunted among Asian powers at the end of the first wave, only succumbing to Admiral Perry in the mid-1800s. This might explain why, during the second wave, what many refer to as the "new imperialism," Japan behaved like such a royal ass.
During this second wave, approximately from the mid-1800s through the early 1900s, the industrial powers of the world, nations like England and later the U.S. and Japan, systematically exploited the less industrialized countries of the world, countries like Haiti, the Philippines, and Mexico, in order to secure the resources, including land, necessary to feed the industrial machine and accumulate wealth. In one of the most stunning examples of hubris and exploitation, the U.S., in 1848, "bought" all of California, Nevada, and Utah, along with parts of Wyoming, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado from Mexico as one of the spoils of the Mexican-American War (what is known in Mexico as the War of North American Invasion). The price the U.S. paid amounted to something like $700 a square mile in today's money.
And if becoming king of the hill wasn't enough, once on top of the colonial food chain these powers were in no position to stop. Having pissed off everyone and her brother, they needed resources to build the military power necessary to stay ahead of the hungry masses of the world, exponentially increasing the drain on the countries whose resources they were exploiting. See how well that word works?
Whether it was gold, uranium, rubber, rice, or slaves, they were able to, in the words of a contemporary U.S. retail giant, get it here, and for less. Funny how that slogan also sums up contemporary relations between north and south. The ridiculously low prices north of the border types pay for products in big box mega-retailers continue to be supported by exploitation, often of southern hemisphere workers to the benefit of northern manufacturing giants, some of which were built by fortunes accumulated through the trans-Atlantic slave trade, just to drive the point a little deeper.
Of course, exploitation of this kind cannot simply be achieved by dint of one country aggressing against another. This is no game of football, with teams competing to achieve goals that produce results for all the winners at the expense of all the losers. To execute exploitation on this grand a scale, the imperial powers had to create a global elite, and establish hierarchies of power and control both within exploited countries and transnationally. That global elite controls national politics and wealth, and metes out privilege and influence such that today's European-descended middle-class Mexicans probably have more in common, at least economically, with middle-class white folk in the U.S. than they do with Mixtec migrants in Mexico and vice versa regarding the relationship between U.S. middle class whites and poor people of color. That's the sticky wicket that makes seeking out solutions so damned complicated.
Some of you will, no doubt, suggest colonies as a potential moniker. Well, if you do I won't be mad at you, but I think people throw around the terms "colony," and various related isms and izations way too much. Why? Well, for one thing, these words are confusing and only truly useful in a very specific historical and political context. For another, not every exploited country was or is technically a colony, and I'm not going to get in the way of efforts to achieve de-colonization by straining the definition in order to dignify the experience of being kicked around, treated like crap, and exploited, like somehow that's not enough.
So I'm sticking with exploited. I know some of you will claim it's an obscure term, polluted by it's use in far too many situations to describe far too many things. Even as far back as 1946, George Orwell decried the use the word as an exercise in political manipulation. But, today, even right wingers throw around the word exploited, as in the manipulatively named anti-choice group, Women Exploited By Abortion. It is evidence, I think, that enough of us know what that word means for it serve as a good opening salvo in a dialogue about what's next in our attempt to create a language of international politics that helps us to more clearly understand what we've done and are doing to each other.
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