The Rhetoric of Underdevelopment

A potted history of what we call poor countries

Sergio Corrieri walks the streets of Havana in Memories of Underdevelopment.

“If I took you and blindfolded you and took you to LaGuardia Airport in New York, you must think I must be in some Third World country.”

— Joe Biden, 2014.

“Underdeveloped”, “developing”, “emerging markets”—it’s remarkable how much of the economic history of the last century can be seen just in the words we use to describe global poverty.

Here’s the frequency of these three words for “poor country” in print books, from Google n-grams:

“Underdeveloped country” was the most common term in the era of early decolonization, up till the 1960s. The more positive “developing country” took over in the optimistic 1960s, Kennedy’s Decade of Development. It remained dominant for forty years, even as the notion that African and Latin American countries were progressing economically became harder and harder to justify. (East Asia, of course, was the bright spot that truly deserved the label.)

This changed in the fat years of the 1990s. As the Chinese Miracle gathered steam, fueling a global commodity markets boom, “emerging market” took off: now there was money to be made. In the mid 2000s, “emerging markets” even threatened to overtake “developing countries”, until the disappointment of the financial crisis. China grew so successfully it graduated into its own category; elsewhere, promised markets largely failed to emerge.

What of the poor countries as a whole? What do we call this bloc?

The dominant term of art for most of the 20th century was the “Third World”—a 1952 coinage of the French demographer Alfred Sauvy, in conscious reference to Abbe Sieyés’s revolutionary pamphlet “What is the Third Estate?”.

Far from an anti-colonialist, Sauvy conceived of the “Third World” in opposition to American notions of “underdevelopment”, hoping that old colonial powers like France might make the “vital investments” that would shepherd their development.¹ Though Sauvy’s original intentions were forgotten, the “Third World” caught on as a term, peaking somewhere in the mid 1980s—the height of the confrontation between the capitalist First and communist Second Worlds, but also (perhaps more significantly) the age of Live Aid and “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”. As the levels on the graph show, more than any other term here, Third World has a claim to being a household word.

But, much like being “homeless”, the stigma of poverty soon transformed a neutral term into a pejorative. “Third World” is now what Americans say when the airport bathroom leaks, or when the 08:15 at Penn Station is late, or when it’s people in Kansas and not Kinshasa who are bleeding out while waiting to see a doctor.

If the Google n-grams data (which ends in 2022) is any guide, Global South is quickly becoming the new polite term of art. Here’s Joe Biden stumbling over this semantic shift in a 2023 speech in Hanoi:

THE PRESIDENT: We talked about what we talked about at the conference overall. We talked about stability. We talked about making sure that the Third World — the — excuse me — “Third World” — the — the — the Southern Hemisphere had access to change, it had access —

Global South, by the way, is a 1969 invention of Carl Oglesby, American academic and one-time president of the Students for a Democratic Society. It fits neatly into the dependency theory of Prebisch and Singer and notions of solidarity between the poor countries of the world. At root, it reflects the common left-academic hope that terminology can reshape thought, that the right word can shock us back into collective action.

The jury is still out on “Global South”—as Joe Biden just demonstrated, there’s some general confusion about if Southernness is about economics or geography. But it is certainly true that terminology can create its own reality—at least when it is backed by the force of states.

Over the last decade, until at least 2018, the use of “BRICS” has risen steadily alongside “Global South”. The acronym “BRIC” (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) was originally coined by Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill for a November 2001 research report identifying promising growing economies. Brazil and Russia’s foreign ministers picked up on the term, and the BRIC countries started to meet on the margins of the UN General Assembly. The first formal BRIC meeting was held in Russia in 2009; and in 2010, the “S” for South Africa was tacked on after a formal invitation by China, presumably to give the body some African representation.

“Do they know it’s Christmas?“ — BRICS leaders in 2016.

BRICS, of course, is almost entirely a diplomatic invention: very little unites these countries, other than the fact that China would like to hold them close. But China’s inclusion of South Africa is telling. Even as China’s GDP has steadily climbed up the global rankings, Xi Jinping has been careful to position China in solidarity with the poor countries: in his words, “China has been and will always be a developing country (发展中国家, fazhanzhong guojia)”. This embrace of the “developing” label stands in a stark contrast with the rhetoric of American politicians, for whom “developing countries” serve mostly as useful metaphors for shoddy infrastructure like LaGuardia—or, in the extreme, “shithole” places to openly detest.

The LaGuardia-Africa parallel is particularly apt. We live in a world of appalling inequality, where the 20 million people served by LaGuardia collectively earn more than the 1.2 billion people who live in all of Sub-Saharan Africa:²

I’m deeply sympathetic to the view that words should emphasize the dignity and humanity of the people they are describing. Better still, we should use their words for themselves—in this sense, BRICS (for all its faults) may be the most vital and apt term here.

But the brutal truth is that words reflect power much more than they can reshape it. The inequalities in the map above are far beyond the power of any terminological reshuffling; eventually the stigma of poverty always catches up. Without transformative economic growth in Africa, South Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere, “Global South” will likely assume its place alongside “developing” and “Third World”—as an easy put-down from the mouths of the rich.

1. E. Palieraki (17 Jan 2023): “The Origins of the ‘Third World’: Alfred Sauvy and the Birth of a Key Global Post-War Concept”, Global Intellectual History, DOI: 10.1080/23801883.2023.2166558

2. Okay, fine, Newark and JFK as well.