The idea of the "Third World" implied that all non-Western and non-Soviet
bloc countries shared the experience of having been objects of the interna-
tional politics conducted by the Western powers in the past. They had been
exploited and impoverished, and as a result were in need of aid to overcome
the handicaps of poor infrastructure, poor communications, and lack of
capital. They were mainly raw material exporters, and they were importers
of manufactured goods. All too often, they had single-crop export econo-
mies subject to continued unequal relationships with the developed coun-
tries. In the 1960s and the 1970s, these countries forged a unity based
largely on these notions, and they directed much of their efforts in interna-
tional politics toward trying to redefine relations between them and the First
World.

It was all rather misleading. As chapter 4 has shown, this emerging Third
World was, in fact, made up of highly dissimilar countries with very differ-
ent historical experiences and geographical settings. The conflicts between
them often burst out in open warfare, or were papered over and blamed on
First World countries. The oil-exporting countries of the Middle East,
which had among the highest per capita incomes in the world, invested
heavily in First World countries (rather than in other Third World coun-
tries). When, in the 1970s, they were able to greatly increase the price of
their oil exports, the countries they hurt most were other Third World
countries that depended on oil imports. Although Third World unity was
based largely on what was viewed as a constantly growing gap between
incomes in Third World countries and those in the First World, at least forty
Third World countries came to have the highest growth rates of any coun-
tries in history in the 1960s and 1970s, while some industrialized more
rapidly than any Western countries had done in the past, and a number
became primarily exporters of industrial goods. On the other hand, some
forty countries in the grouping -- mostly in Africa and South Asia -- were

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