REMIND ME AGAIN WHY EUROPE’S THE ‘FIRST WORLD’?

ANTHONY R.

Here’s a thought that won’t leave me alone - if all of us, every last Homo sapiens, trace our lineage back to Africa, how did we end up calling Europe and North America the First World and much of Africa the Third? Surely the people who were literally here first should get dibs on that title?

Spoiler - it’s got nothing to do with who’s been around the longest. The whole “First / Second / Third World” thing isn’t ancient wisdom; it’s Cold War filing cabinet nonsense. In the 1950s, French demographer Alfred Sauvy decided to divvy up the globe - the First World was the capitalist, industrial club hanging out with the United States; the Second World was the Soviet communist bloc; and the Third World… that was everyone else. Non-aligned countries. Didn’t matter if you were ancient Egypt or a brand-new state - if you weren’t on Team Capitalism or Team Communism, you got stuck in the “Third” bin.

Over time, the original political meaning fizzled and Third World morphed into a smug shorthand for “poor, underdeveloped, needs saving.” This was handy if you wanted to pretend global inequality was just an accident of history and not the result of centuries of colonisation, resource extraction and enforced trade rules that stacked the deck in favour of guess who? The “First World!” This framing iS problematic. It glosses over colonial history, as if Europe just “happened” to industrialise first, rather than siphoning resources, labour and wealth from the very regions it now designates as “third.”

So now we’re stuck with this linguistic relic that implies a sort of evolutionary ladder, with some countries “ahead” and others “behind,” as if the whole world is in a single race with the same finish line. Spoiler again - it’s not. And the starting gun for Europe’s industrial head start was, in many cases, fired with resources taken from the very nations now labelled “third.”

These days, people try softer labels: Global North / Global South, developed / developing. Slightly less insulting, sure, but still carrying a whiff of “we’re further along than you.” Which, frankly, is rich coming from a species whose collective ancestors all spent their early days in the same patch of African savannah.

So maybe it’s time we drop the numbered worlds entirely. Because if we’re counting chronologically, Africa is not the Third World. It’s not even the First. It’s the Only Original. Everything else is just a sequel.