The purpose of this research is to examine the implications of international developments during the 1960s and 1970s that provide evidence of increasing distance between the political and economic priorities and ambitions of the countries of the "First World" and those of the "Third World," in the current period commonly referred to the countries of the North and South. The plan of the research will be to set forth the historical context in which the North and South staked out their sundry positions in recent years, and then to discuss the significance of those positions for an understanding of the current situation and of possible lines of future development.
A desire on the part of less developed countries of the South, which takes in much of Latin America and Africa, as well as some of the Middle East, is to duplicate to a significant degree the prosperity of the developed countries of the North. Bull traces the origins of organized national efforts in this regard to the beginning of the 20th century, when the residue of European colonialism and American expansionism into what was to become the Third World was at its peak. Beside the Cold War rivalry played out internationally through the 1970s, Bull sets the emerging national and (nonwhite) intrinsic identities of post-colonial and anticolonial countries as features of "cohesion of the loose coalition of states and movements to which we refer as the Third World" during the same period (Bull, 1984, p. 221). Meanwhile, by the 1970s, despite the de facto residue of colonialism and imperialism, the history of Europe in such places as Latin America and Africa was giving way to the intrinsic histories and political consciousnesses of the same places. Hence too the juxtaposition of the political economies of what has increasingly been referred to as North and South. A combination of economic and political factors appears to have driven the polarization of power and need in North and So...