From Three Worlds to Globalization: Economic Restructuring, Democratization and Cultural Change in a Global Context

Abstract

The expectation that in the modern world societies would follow convergent paths of development has not by and large been borne out by events in the post-Second World War period. The widening gap between rich and poor nations is merely the most stark expression of the more general phenomenon of continued difference and divergence both between modern capitalist, former state socialist and underdeveloped countries and also among members of each of these three ‘worlds’. As was seen in Chapter 4, within the first world of modern capitalist societies Esping-Andersen (1990) found it possible to identify three distinct welfare-state regimes, while Chapter 5 recorded the variety of routes out of state socialism which have been followed, and Chapter 6 highlighted the fragmentation of the ‘third world’ as the newly industrializing countries parted company with their poorer neighbours in the South. Yet behind these divergent trajectories lie certain common forces which link the various paths together. It has been noted already in Chapter 6 that dependency theory emphasized the link between the development of some parts of the world with the underdevelopment of other areas, and several writers have continued to advance this line of argument. Mies, for example, suggests that ‘we cannot treat the “First” and “Third” world as separate entities, but have to identify the relations that exist between the two’, and she goes on to claim that underdevelopment results from the way in which ‘the rich and powerful Western industrial countries are getting more and more “overdeveloped”‘ (1986, p. 39).