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The terms First
World, Second World, and Third World were used to divide the nations of
Earth into three broad categories. The three terms
did not arise simultaneously. After World War
II, people began to speak of the NATO and Warsaw Pact countries as two major
blocs, often using such terms as the "Western bloc" and the "Eastern bloc". The two
"worlds" were not numbered. It was
eventually pointed out that there were a great many countries that fit into
neither category, and in the 1950s this latter group came to be called the
Third World. It then began
to seem that there ought to be a "First World" and a "Second World". Eventually, it
became common practice to refer to nations within the Western European and
United States' sphere of influence (e.g. the NATO countries) as the First
World. Besides North
America (USA and Canada) and Western Europe, the First World also included
other industrialized capitalist countries such as Japan and some of the
former British colonies, particularly Australia, New Zealand, and South
Africa. There were a
number of countries which did not fit comfortably into this neat definition
of partition, including Switzerland, Sweden, and the Republic of Ireland,
who chose to be neutral. Finland was
under the Soviet Union's sphere of influence but was not communist, nor was
it a member of the Warsaw Pact. Austria was
under the United States' sphere of influence, but in 1955, when the country
became a fully independent republic, it did so under the condition that it
remained neutral. Turkey which
joined NATO in 1952 was not predominantly in Western Europe and was not
industrialized. Spain did not
join NATO until 1982, towards the end of the Cold War and after the death of
the authoritarian dictator Francisco Franco. In recent
years, as many "developing" countries have industrialized, the term Fourth
World has been coined to refer to countries that have lagged behind and
still lack industrial infrastructure. |