The End of the Third World

Book excerpt: The end of the Cold War has changed all the parameters of our world and not least of these is the relationship between the rich, developed North and the poor, developing South. Without the compulsions of the Cold War and the need for its two sides to seek allies in the South, the Third World will now find itself increasingly marginalised by a West which only sees it as a series of depressed trading partners to be managed or ignored depending upon circumstances now completely beyond the South's control while the West itself appears to have lost both its purpose and its way as the former communist bloc disintegrates.