First World

• 1. Introduction

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  First World is a geopolitical label that carries more history than most people realize. It did not begin as a measure of wealth or living standards. It began as a weapon of the Cold War, a way of sorting the globe into camps based on which superpower you stood beside. When Alfred Sauvy, a French demographer, coined the term Third World in 1952, he made the other two labels necessary by contrast. The First World and the Second World snapped into place around a division that already existed but had not yet been named. What does it mean for a country to belong to the First World? And what happens to a label born out of geopolitical rivalry when the rivalry ends? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. The Cold War's Sorting Machine

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  After World War II, the world split into two large geopolitical blocs, one built around capitalism and one built around communism. The United Nations introduced the vocabulary of first, second, third, and fourth worlds in the late 1940s as a way of sorting nations by relative wealth and political character. The first world included the large industrialized, democratic nations. The second world covered modern but communist-controlled states. Most of the rest of the world fell into the third world, and the fourth world was reserved for nations whose people lived on less than one hundred US dollars annually.

  NATO and the Warsaw Pact gave the two blocs their institutional form, organized by the United States and the Soviet Union respectively. Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech marked the moment when the Cold War's division became a public and rhetorical fact, describing the East-West split as so solid it deserved that physical metaphor. Berlin illustrated the tension most vividly: the city was carved into East and West, and the Soviet Union built the Berlin Wall inside it to limit East Berliners' exposure to the capitalist side.

  The NATO members during the Cold War included Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. US-aligned states that sat outside NATO included Israel, Japan, and South Korea. Former British colonies counted as Australia and New Zealand. Neutral but industrialized capitalist countries such as Austria, Ireland, Sweden, and Switzerland rounded out the picture.

• 3. Where the Third World Came From

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  Alfred Sauvy's 1952 coinage was more than a geographer's convenience. He was reaching for an analogy rooted in French history. The three estates of pre-revolutionary France gave him the framework: the nobility, the clergy, and everyone else. Sauvy compared the capitalist First World to the nobility and the communist Second World to the clergy. The Third World, like the third estate, was everybody left outside that privileged arrangement, meaning the unaligned and uninvolved states caught in what he called the East-West Conflict.

  By naming the Third World directly, Sauvy forced the numbering of the other two. The three-world system did not emerge all at once but crystallized once that third category had a name. The Cold War left two superpowers competing for ultimate global supremacy, and the Third World became their arena. The United States tried to establish pro-US regimes there, and the Soviet Union pushed in the same direction for its own interests. Vietnam and Korea became the most prominent examples of that contest, with success measured by whether the country ended up capitalist or communist. Vietnam was eventually communized in full, while only the northern half of Korea remained communist.

• 4. After 1991

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  The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended the Eastern Bloc and with it the clean applicability of the term Second World. The definitions of all three worlds shifted, though they kept their general shape. First World came to refer to any politically stable liberal democracy with strong rule of law, a stable capitalist economy, and a relatively high standard of living. The metrics used to assess membership include GDP, GNP, literacy rate, life expectancy, and the Human Development Index.

  Scholars began proposing their own formulations. John D. Daniels, a past president of the Academy of International Business, defined the First World as consisting of high-income industrial countries. Professor George J. Bryjak defined it as the modern, industrial, capitalist countries of North America and Europe. L. Robert Kohls, former director of training for the US Information Agency and the Meridian International Center in Washington DC, simply used First World and fully developed as synonyms.

  The World Bank offered a more technical sorting mechanism. It classifies countries by gross national income per capita into four categories: high-income, upper-middle-income, lower-middle-income, and low-income economies. High-income economies correspond to what most people mean by First World. The terms themselves, as the source notes, have no official definition today and are considered slightly outdated, even as they remain in widespread use.

• 5. Resources, Footprints, and Disparities

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  Each inhabitant of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan consumes thirty-two times as many resources and produces thirty-two times as much waste as each person in the Third World. That single figure captures the asymmetry at the heart of the First World concept better than any political definition.

  Deaths from water-related illnesses have largely been eliminated in wealthier nations, while they remain a major concern in the developing world. Malaria and tuberculosis, widely treatable in developed countries, still claim many lives in the Third World. Each year 900,000 people die from malaria, and combating the disease accounts for forty percent of health spending in many African countries.

  The Kyoto Protocol, which was finalized in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio, proposed placing the burden of protecting the climate on the United States and other First World countries. Developing countries such as China and India were not required to approve the treaty, largely on the grounds that restricting emissions would restrain their development. China leads the world in total emissions, but its large population keeps its per-capita figure lower than those of more developed nations, a reminder that aggregate and per-capita numbers can tell opposite stories.

• 6. Globalization and the European Union

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  The European Union stands as the most prominent example of First World globalization in institutional form. It is a union of twenty-seven member states covering more than four million square kilometers, with roughly 450 million people. Together, EU members produce almost a third of the world's gross national product, and the member states speak more than twenty-three languages.

  The EU's origins trace back to 1951 and the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community. Like the First World concept itself, it was a product of World War II's aftermath. During the 1990s, the EU concentrated on economic policies: the creation and circulation of the Euro, the creation of the European Monetary Institute, and the opening of the European Central Bank. At the Copenhagen European Council in 1993, the EU agreed that associated countries in Central and Eastern Europe that wished to join could become members, launching what it called the Fifth Enlargement.

  The Copenhagen criteria defined the conditions for entry: stable institutions guaranteeing democracy and the rule of law, a functioning market economy, and the ability to take on the obligations of membership. In a 2007 speech, European Commissioner for External Relations Benita Ferrero-Waldner said that the EU has a crucial role to play in making globalization work properly. At the European Parliament in 2014, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi stated, "We are the ones who can bring civilization to globalization."

• 7. Migration, Outsourcing, and the Pull of the First World

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  Information about the higher living standards of the First World reaches Third World populations through television, commercial advertisements, and foreign visitors. That exposure drives two effects: living standards in some Third World countries rise, and large numbers of people emigrate, both legally and illegally, toward First World countries in pursuit of those standards. This emigration is described as the main contributor to the increasing populations of the US and Europe.

  Outsourcing has worked in a parallel and sometimes contradictory direction. Grossman and Helpman define outsourcing as the subcontracting of an ever-expanding set of activities, ranging from product design to assembly and from research and development to marketing. First World companies move work to lower-cost locations, which raises the skill level of production in those foreign countries even as it can decrease skill levels domestically. Robert Feenstra and Gordon Hanson predict a rise of fifteen to thirty-three percent in inequality among developing countries as a result of competition that includes outsourcing.

  The series of General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade negotiations, and later the World Trade Organization, ended protectionist measures that had slowed global trade. Critics argue that removing those protections mostly benefited developed countries, whose leverage at GATT summits allowed them to push developing and underdeveloped countries to open their economies to Western goods. The International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers announced in 2010 that the first Internationalized Domain Names, covering non-Latin scripts including Chinese, Arabic, and Russian, would become available, opening one small channel through which the information gap between First and Third World populations might narrow.