The term Third World emerged in the 1950s when many thinkers, journalists, and politicians viewed Africa, Asia, and Latin America as a single entity, different from both the capitalist, industrialized “First World” and the Communist, industrialized “Second World.” The Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union reinforced this “three-bloc” perspective, which staked out separate camps for the superpowers and created a third general category for everyone else. Despite differences in history and culture, most so-called Third World countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America were poor and economically underdeveloped — meaning less industrialized — during the Cold War era, and thus are also referred to as “nonindustrial” or “industrializing” nations. They also shared many characteristics that encouraged the development of a common consciousness about their marginalization and ideologies for defining their future.

The roots of many liberation movements in these countries went back well before the Second World War and often as far back as the nineteenth century. In the 1920s and 1930s colonial powers dampened these movements through repression and limited reforms. After the Second World War weakened the colonial powers, nationalist movements in the colonies became more insistent. As nations fought against colonial rule, their quest for liberation took many forms. Economically, they pursued national industrialization and development to end dependence on industrialized nations. Politically, they sought alliances within the industrializing world to avoid the neocolonial influences of more powerful nations. Intellectually, they reacted against the white supremacism prevalent not just in Nazi Germany, but also among European colonial powers and the United States.

Liberation movements that arose in former colonies worldwide proposed an alternative, anti-imperial and antiracist worldview as they responded to historic injustices and to the structures of the Cold War order. As countries faced intense pressure to align themselves ideologically and economically with either the United States or the Soviet Union, few could resist the pressure or the incentives those powers brought to bear. But it is helpful for us to think of the world after 1945 not as one divided between East and West, between the Soviet Union and the United States, but as a world of societies pulled in many different directions at the same time. This world was shaped by radical revolutions, reform movements, and conservative reactions. The possibilities for change seemed immense.

Nonindustrialized nations tried to operate independently from the two superpowers in a variety of ways. In 1955 leaders of twenty-nine recently independent nations in Asia and Africa met in Bandung, Indonesia, to create a framework for political and economic cooperation to help them emerge from colonialism without having to resubordinate their nations either to their former colonizers or to pressures from the Cold War superpowers. The participants outlined principles for rejecting pressure from the superpowers and supporting decolonization. In 1961 nations participating in the Bandung Conference met in Yugoslavia, where Marxists who had come to power in the struggle against Nazi Germany zealously guarded their independence from the Soviet Union, to form a Non-Aligned Nations Movement.