Staying PC.

Picture this. You’re at a party, surrounded by pretentious university students.

Clutching your warm Corona, you cringe as you hear discussion of the “Third World”.

Wouldn’t the term “developing country” be more appropriate? This person is surely a Eurocentric pig who deserves to be run down in their own BMW.

Calm down. Before you earn yourself an assault charge in the name of political correctness think about the term “Third World”.

My hippie Year One teacher used Third World in relation to skinny African children and "shameful debt". But the term can be traced from the French Revolution in 1789. There were three social classes, the First, Second and Third Estates. What united the Third Estate is that most of the people in it had little or no wealth and yet were forced to pay disproportionately high taxes to the other Estates. They became the instigators of the revolution.

Alred Sauvy first used the term in a global sense at the end of World War II when he saw many nations as dispossessed, stating in L’Observateur, "...because at the end this ignored, exploited, scorned Third World like the Third Estate, wants to become something too".

The term was also used by the Non-Alligned Movement during the Cold War. They were mainly ex colonies that did not want to side with the East or West.

Eventually Third World became a way to describe countries with economic commonalities: lower levels of industrialization, greater poverty and less access to life’s necessities and comforts.

So why would using the term make you an asshole?

Mainly because grouping countries together based on levels of industrialization ignores differences between these places in other areas. For instance, Cambodia and Tanzania are both classed as Third World or Least Developed Countries (LDCs), but they have completely different historical backgrounds, cultural traditions and language situations.

Another argument against using the term is that the Third World also exists inside the First World, and vice versa. There is poverty in abundance within Australia if you look closely enough. And in most countries there are also groups of affluent and wealthy people.

First, Second and Third Worlds can exist in one location. India isn’t all Slumdog Millionaire. It can be divided into three distinct worlds:

1. An underdeveloped agrarian/semi-urban population of approximately 350 million

2. A developing industrial population of 100 million

3. A developed middle class of nearly 400 million

So I’ve just told you why NOT to use “Third World”.

Now, here is why you can:

You can define a country as Third World in terms of oppression by combination of race, class, gender and nation.

Recognising that oppression exists in a country is not implying a particular kind of development or industrialization as the solution. It just confirms that people within this country are struggling for empowerment, whether that be economic, political or spiritual.

According to this definition, Australia could be classed as Third World in about 16 million different ways.

So next time you’re at that party, become a pretentious uni student yourself by quoting this amazing post.

I can picture it now.

“Ya know what,” you drunkenly slur, “Australia is a Third World country in about 16 million ways, and I’m going to tell you why …”