The Origins of the ‘Third World’: Alfred Sauvy and the Birth of a Key Global Post-War Concept

Abstract

In 1952, French demographer Alfred Sauvy coined the term ‘Third World’, a neologism that expanded globally and became a key category of post-war thought. After the term's decline in the 1980s, decolonial studies and the new Cold War historiography revisited it, using it to ‘provincialize’ Cold War history. Although these approaches rightly note the Third World's historical importance as a concept, they neglect its genesis. This article contends that we cannot fully grasp the concept's global success without tracing it back to Sauvy's initial semantically rich conceptualisation. First, Sauvy gave the concept a hybrid political and scientific content, allowing both activists and social scientists to adopt the term. Second, Sauvy associated the ‘Third World’ with other key Cold War concepts (anticolonial revolution; underdevelopment; third way), which successfully expressed contemporary concerns. This article sheds light on an apparent paradox: although Sauvy was a French pro-colonialist, he developed a concept that underscored the agency of the ‘wretched of the earth’, enabling anti-colonial activists to appropriate the concept. However, Sauvy presented the Third World as a protagonist of post-war revolution in order to oppose the US notion of ‘underdevelopment’, which depicted ‘underdeveloped’ nations as the passive victims of colonial powers.