Peter
L.
Berger
THE THIRD WORLD AS A RELIGIOUS IDEA
The phrase "Third World," as referring to the developing
nations, has been the subject of an elaborate game of mirrors. The
origin of the phrase has not been clearly established.
It
was first used
in the late 1940s or early 1950s, probably in France, certainly in
Europe.
It
became a recognized phrase of political rhetoric in
1955 at the conference of Asian and African nations in Bandung,
Indonesia-an event that marked the beginning of the so-called
nonaligned movement. This history in itself already points to an
intriguing aspect of the matter: Here is a phrase coined in the West
that became a slogan precisely for those who wanted to proclaim
their independence from the West. The poignancy of this fact gives
an important clue to the political psychology of the decolonialization
process, as has been noted (often with great bitterness) by writers
and others in Third-World countries. The same poignancy also
begins to disclose the religious undertones of the ideologies under–
lying the term.
Third World.
Tiers Monde. Tercer Mundo.
To Western ears, the
utopian associations of the phrase are audible as intuitive
undertones . (And one should keep in mind that the great majority of
those who speak for the less-developed countries have been educated
in English, French, or Spanish.) One thinks, most directly, of the
prototypical utopian idea of the Western mind, the Third Age of
Joachim di Fiore-the age of the spirit, in which the miseries of
preceding ages will be overcome and in which all men will be
brothers. One also thinks
(a
La russe,
as it were) of the Third Rome.
If
inclined to macabre associations, one may also think of the Third
Reich , itself an idea deeply rooted in J oachimite speculations of the
Middle Ages (such as those about the Emperor Barbarossa, hidden
in his magic mountain, from which he will emerge triumphantly as
novus dux
to restore the glories of the Empire), which was revived in
the 1920s by Moeller van den Bruck, a writer who would have
remained in fully justified obscurity if his fantasy had not been
A briefer version of this article was presented as the Trilling Lecture at Columbia
University in February 1983.
