North

Following the terminology of the Brandt report, 1979, a portmanteau term used to describe the advanced economies, or the more economically developed countries of the First (non-communist) World.

The East-West conflict of the Cold War, with its emphasis on military aspects of security, appeared to give way, during the détente of the 1970s, to disagreements over the material preconditions of security and welfare in which the Soviet Union was regarded as belonging, along with the United States, Japan, and other relatively wealthy and industrialized states like Australia, to a metaphorical North, while the remaining states identified themselves, oppositionally, as the South. Negotiations during the 1970s over issues as diverse as trade, investment, intellectual property, and rights to sea-bed resources were known collectively as the North-South dialogue. By the 1990s the radical simplification of this opposition seemed less apposite because of the rise to wealth of former southern economies such as Taiwan, the acute economic decline experienced by the successor states of the ‘northern’ Soviet empire, and the redundancy of the East-West divide against which the South had originally defined itself.

— Charles Jones