Facts on File - Encyclopedia of World History Vol 6 - The Contemporary World - 1950 to the Present
Third World/Global South
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most powerful nation was a useful ally Her realism also showed in her conciliatory relationship toward mikhail gorbachev, the last ruler of the Soviet Union She recognized the importance of the reforms that he advocated in changing the nature of communism in his powerful country and the flexibility that he showed outside the Soviet Union Unlike Reagan, she was not so entranced with Gorbachev as to propose mutual nuclear disarmament, but she did think the Soviet leader was somebody with whom she could “do business.” In her last years as prime minister Thatcher blundered politically, which gave an opening to her numerous enemies within the Conservative Party In her biggest mistake, she proposed a reform of local government finance widely denounced as an unfair poll tax Except for the well-off, nearly all households would pay more than they had in the past Perhaps because she was preparing for war against Iraq in alliance with the United States,Thatcher paid insufficient attention to the political situation at home She also erred by making provocatively anti–European Union remarks that caused her foreign secretary to resign One of her old enemies, a former defense secretary, challenged Thatcher for the party leadership in late 1990 When she failed to win on the first ballot, she withdrew and threw her support to one of her loyalists, John Major After Major became Conservative Party leader and prime minister, Thatcher quickly alienated her one-time favorite Calling herself a “good back-seat driver,” she interfered too much, undermining the new prime minister’s authority In retirement Thatcher took a nonhereditary peerage (baroness Thatcher of Kesteven) that made her a member of the House of Lords She also wrote her memoirs She outraged public opinion by visiting the former Chilean dictator augusto pinochet while he was under house arrest in Britain Most people believed that he was guilty of torturing and murdering opponents in his home country By the first years of the 21st century, Thatcher’s physical and mental health began to fail She rarely made public appearances and no longer gave speeches Her husband died in 2003, and her children sometimes proved to be an embarrassment Her son, Mark, became involved in an abortive coup against an African government Her daughter, Carol, appeared on a widely viewed and undignified “reality” television program According to her, Thatcher suffered from a form of dementia that destroyed her short-term memory Further reading: Green, E H H Thatcher London: Hodder Arnold, 2006; Letwin, Shirley Robin The Anatomy Third World/Global South 421 of Thatcherism New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1993; Reitan, Earl A The Thatcher Revolution Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003; Seldon, Anthony, and Daniel Collings Britain Under Thatcher New York: Longman, 1999; Thatcher, Margaret The Path to Power New York: HarperCollins, 1995 David M Fahey Third World/Global South The term Third World applies to those nations in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Western Hemisphere that mostly secured independence from the imperial powers after world war ii In the cold war construct the First World, dominated by the United States, also included Western Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan These nations were wealthy, highly industrialized, urban, largely secular, democratic, and had capitalist economies The Second World consisted of the Soviet bloc, dominated by the Soviet Union These nations were industrialized but not as wealthy as the First World; they were secular, authoritarian, and had socialist economics The Third World nations, consisting of two-thirds of the world’s population, were poor, rural, and agrarian, with traditional societies After the breakup of the Soviet bloc and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the terms no longer applied and because most of the nations of the Third World were south of the equator the term Global South came to be used as a collective label for these nations The gap between rich and poor nations grew in the 20th century As the Indian prime minister jawaharlal nehru commented, “The poor have to run fast just to keep up.” Third World countries were caught in a cycle of poverty, with low incomes and low production After independence many became dictatorships and attempted to improve their economies, usually unsuccessfully, by adopting socialist systems on the Soviet state capitalist model Economists often referred to the poor developing nations as low-GDP (low Gross Domestic Product) countries, meaning they produced little in the way of goods and services Countries in the Global South adopted a wide variety of methods to break out of the cycle of poverty In China Mao Zedong led a socialist revolution and mobilized the masses, but only with privatization after his death did the Chinese economy begin to take off India, the world’s most populous democracy, adopted a capitalist approach; India also successfully applied the technology of the green revolution, the use of