<fresh page> Chapter 24 A Third World? Norrie MacQueen The membership statistics of the United Nations in the post-1945 decades provide a telling insight into the development of the international system after the Second World War. Fifty-one states signed the United Nations Charter at San Francisco in April 1945. Of these, only three were African and eleven from the Asia-Pacific region (including the Middle East). By 1960 there were 100 members of the UN, with the fifty-two Afro-Asian states constituting a slim majority. Twenty years later the United Nations had 150 members of which ninety-one were either African or Asian-Pacific countries. Africa, with fifty-one member states, now formed the largest regional bloc. Over the period, therefore, the Afro-Asian membership of the UN rose from 27 percent to 61 percent of the total. In these thirty-five years the political power of this group of international actors, largely the product of European decolonization, waxed and waned dramatically. At the mid-point the influence of the so-called “Afro-Asian bloc” was at its zenith and its impact on the international relations of the 1960s was considerable. By the beginning of the 1980s, however, although the group had continued to grow in numerical strength, its diplomatic leverage was rapidly declining. The purpose of this chapter is to trace and account for this trajectory. Our starting point will be to look at the origins of what would come to be known as the “Third World” in the years after 1945. How was the grouping defined? What were its boundaries? How did it expand and how did it first exert its influence on the bipolar structure of world politics during the Cold War? We will then explore the “institutionalization” of the Third World “movement” in world politics through the agency of the Non-Aligned Movement and in its joint ventures within the United Nations system. Finally, we will pose some questions (even if we cannot answer them wholly satisfactorily) about the Third World, so far as such a thing can still be said to exist in its original form, in the post-Cold War era. The Emerging Third World in the 1950s: A Question of Leadership? The first use of the term “Third World” is usually ascribed to the radical French economist Alfred Sauvy, who wrote in 1952 of a “tiers monde.” <1> The expression was used by Sauvy as a deliberate parallel with the social structure of pre-revolutionary France. This consisted of “First and Second Estates” composed of the monarchy, nobility, and clergy, and the “Third Estate,” which included everyone else whether middle class, peasant, or urban poor. Like the Third Estate, Sauvy argued, the “Third World” aspired to a greater and more respected role in an (international) realm hitherto dominated by a privileged minority (of states). As the Cold War deepened during the 1950s the term evolved to take on a different connotation. The expression was increasingly used in a diplomatic sense to describe a “third force” between the “First World” composed of the capitalist West, and the “Second World” of the communist bloc. This political