The Idea of the Third World

It is very possible that the "Third World" never existed during the heyday of the ideology of Third-Worldism, for most of the "Third-World" nations in practice tilted to either the "East" or the "West."  Perhaps the only authentically Third-World nation was the Islamic Republic of Iran: neither East nor West, in the sense of neither of the capitalist bloc nor of the socialist bloc¹; and neither Eastern nor Western in its cultural mythology.²

Paradoxical as it may sound, for the first time in history, there may now exist conditions for the birth of the objective correlative for the idea of a "Third World," i.e. independence from hegemony of great powers.

1 Houman A. Sadri, "Trends in the Foreign Policy of Revolutionary Iran," Journal of Third World Studies 15.1 (Spring 1998); and Houman A. Sadri, "An Islamic Perspective on Non-Alignment: Iranian Foreign Policy in Theory and Practice," Journal of Third World Studies 16.2 (Fall 1999).
2 See, for instance, Hamid Dabashi, Iran: A People Interrupted (New York: New Press, 2006) for description of the coexistence of Shi'ism and cosmopolitanism in Iran, rooted in part in reality, in part in Dabashi's dream.