"Free World" is a Cold War-era term often used to describe countries that were not in the sphere of influence of, or allied with communist states, particularly the Soviet Union or the People's Republic of China. It is often used interchangeably with "First World".
The term usually refers to countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, France, West Germany, and organizations such as the European Union and NATO. In addition, the "Free World" occasionally includes the Commonwealth realms, Japan, Israel, and India.
Authoritarian and dictatorial states were also included in the "Free World", provided that they were either capitalistic or anti-communist. Notable examples include Spain under Francisco Franco, apartheid-era South Africa, and Greece under the military junta of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Read more about Free World: Origins, Recent Usage, Criticism, "Leader of The Free World", In Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the words free world, free and/or world:
“By intervening in the Vietnamese struggle the United States was attempting to fit its global strategies into a world of hillocks and hamlets, to reduce its majestic concerns for the containment of communism and the security of the Free World to a dimension where governments rose and fell as a result of arguments between two colonels’ wives.”
—Frances Fitzgerald (b. 1940)
“What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy.”
—bell hooks (b. c. 1955)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)