The term Third World originally named military non-alignment, not geography or modes of production

Evidence

Even in this initial mediatic presentation, this tripartite division of the world had nothing to do with modes of production, or with social systems, or even with structures of feeling, as this division would later be conceived by theorists of literature. ‘Third World’ was simply another name for military non-alignment. (Later, when a fully fledged Non-Aligned Movement emerged and the term ‘Third World’ became attached to it more or less permanently, the presence of Tito as one of the moving forces belied its identification with non-Europe; exclusion of numerous countries like Pakistan, which were members of formal alliances, also belied its identification with all of non-Europe; while the inclusion of a whole range of countries from Cuba to Saudi Arabia indicated how merely formal and flexible the notion of alignment had by then become.) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 564

Categorization

• DEFINE: Corrects a common anachronistic reading: Third World as an economic/cultural category began as a purely military-alignment label.
• XREF: Connects to Ahmad’s critique of Said and the homogenizing literary-theoretical Third World in later chapters; also to theories of world-systems and postcolonial categories. — connects to: No current meaning of Third World applies to Bandung Conference — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1262; The term Third World derives from the French Third Estate — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1263; The term ‘Third World’ fuses three distinct meaning-sets. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 81 (+2 more)

Related

• The category ‘Third World’ has polemical but no theoretical status (similarity 0.91)
• The term Third World derives from the French Third Estate (similarity 0.89)
• The term ‘Third World’ fuses three distinct meaning-sets. (similarity 0.87)
• No current meaning of Third World applies to Bandung Conference (similarity 0.85)
• The Western media invented a tripartite world based on military blocs, not production modes. (similarity 0.85)
• The world cannot be compartmentalized into discrete First, Second and Third zones (similarity 0.83)
• The Third World has continually collapsed into competing national units (similarity 0.82)
• The ‘Third World’ term gained legitimacy precisely because both communists and anti-communists deployed it (similarity 0.82)
• Third World Literature emerged only through the mediating archive of Western languages (similarity 0.81)
• The ‘Third World Literature’ category presumed a primordial civilizational difference from the West. (similarity 0.80)
• Third World Literature as a category is built on Western language archives (similarity 0.79)
• The Three Worlds framework erases class and gender difference within nations (similarity 0.79)
• Postcolonial Third World states grew more competitive and fragmented, not unified. (similarity 0.78)
• Three Worlds Theory subordinated mass movements to national-bourgeois states (similarity 0.78)
• Metropolitan theory idealized the singularized Third World as the site of cultural opposition (similarity 0.78)