INSIDE THE MONOLITH : Third World Diversity : Nations: With the prosperity of Southeast Asia, the concept of a monolithic Third World is dead. But the poverty in the developing world remains.

WASHINGTON â€”  In May this year, I flew from Damascus, Syria, to Ankara, Turkey--about 500 miles. Damascus had been its usual self: lovely and absorbing, but hot, overcrowded, ramshackle, dusty, the bazaar teeming with people, water-sellers plying for business. Some meetings were canceled; for others, we waited around aimlessly until the small hours. At the airport, we found that our reservations had mysteriously disappeared. Nobody seemed to know why. Nobody cared.

We arrived in Ankara in the late afternoon. I had been there before--but either in the summer, when the Anatolian plain that Ankara sits on is baked dry; or in winter, when a bitter wind howls over it and snowdrifts blacken in the air. But in the spring, the countryside on the way in from the airport seemed almost Bavarian. Neat farmhouses, with red roofs, were set in green fields. In the city, Ataturk Boulevard, the main drag, was probably as busy as anything in Damascus. But everything in its place and ordered, nothing more so than the uniformed guards outside the ministries. Appointments were kept; elevators worked. Above all, there was an indefinable sense of purpose and dash about the place that Damascus could not approach.

Contrasts like this are obvious when flying between any two cities in the developing world. Compare the airport at Barbados, spick and span, with that an hour or so north in the Dominican Republic, where the lights and air conditioning are likely to be out. Even among countries whose social and political characteristics are meant to be the same, short flights can span a world. I remember once flying from the airport in Nairobi, Kenya, where one official had demanded a bribe, and another tried to confiscate my camera, to Harare, Zimbabwe, where the immigration people possessed the stern rectitude of Prussians.

These short journeys in time and space--excluding such changes seen when traveling from Monrovia, say, to Hong Kong--are the best way of understanding one of the great developments of modern times. The Third World is dead. At least, it is dead in the way it seemed to exist in the 1960s and 1970s--as a unified entity in the poor “South� that challenged and pricked the conscience of the rich “North.�

That idea has always been too simplistic. Was China, a desperately poor country but a nuclear power, ever part of the Third World? But how much more difficult it is to characterize the world now. The little dragons of East Asia have living standards on the level of the poorest European countries--in 1988, according to World Bank figures, Hong Kong and Singapore had a higher per capita gross national product than Spain, Ireland, Portugal or Greece.

By the same measure, South Korea was nudging the living standards of southern Europe. Some poor countries have ambitions to become regional powers--India, for example, sending troops to Sri Lanka or the Maldives; Turkey, a willing partner in the military operation in the gulf. Others--Mexico, for example--scrupulously avoid all hint of muscle-flexing outside their frontiers.

The collapse of communist economies is similarly forcing us to rethink the neat categories nations were once put into. In the Soviet Union, lines form for bread; meat, it seems, has become a luxury. One analyst has said that, in crude numbers, more people in India--where the per capita GNP is about $340--live a “First World� life than in the Soviet Union.

The collapse of communism has had another impact on the Third World--beyond the fact that some ex-communist countries have joined it. Obsessed with their own problems, the ex-communist countries have turned inward, and stopped making common cause with the poor countries in excoriating the rich. This has had a profound effect--it has completed a process of removing a burden of guilt from those living in rich countries.

This burden always weighed heavier on Europeans--particularly the French and British--than on Americans. Americans were just cultural imperialists, following the Coca Cola sign to the ends of the earth; Europeans were the real thing, and that was shameful. And so the act of “freeing� the colonies was the start of a great release. But the release from guilt was not complete until the 1980s. It was not complete until it was clear that some countries of the Third World, at least, could thrive, until the moral and economic bankruptcy of those countries’ communist allies was revealed.

The great difficulty is: Now that the rich North has lost its sense of guilt about the poor South--now that it knows that some “Third World� countries can be military giants, and others have become economic rivals--it is easy to make a new mistake that would be a mirror image of the old one. It is tempting, in other words, to think that all the developing world has the confidence of Turkey or the drive of Singapore. That just isn’t so.

That point is one that should have been realized by the world’s finance ministers and bankers, who assembled in Washington last week for the annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. They spent so much time munching canapes that, with luck, they could turn from the tray in distaste when offered more smoked salmon on the flight home. In which case, they could spend the time reading the World Bank’s annual World Development Report, which this year focuses on poverty.

The starting point of the report is the divergence in economic performance in the developing world. In the 1980s, GNP in East Asia grew by a wild 6.7%, in South Asia by 3.2%. In sub-Saharan Africa, GNP actually fell by 2.2% in the 1980s. There are now African countries with living standards no higher than they were in the 1950s. Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 11% of the developing world’s population, but for 16% of its poor--those with less than $370 a year. And this will get worse.

Making some optimistic assumptions about the future of the world economy (like sustained growth in the rich world of 3% a year), the number of those in poverty in sub-Saharan Africa is projected to increase from 180 million in 1985 to 265 million in 2000--when its total share of world poverty will have doubled. These, remember, are optimistic projections. If everything went right in the world economy--if commodity prices firmed, if the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was successfully completed, if interest rates were lowered--this part of Africa might see its living standards just about remain as they are now. But “might� is the operative word

So is it time to feel guilty again? It is easy to see why we should not. We know that some countries have done well, and we know that not all aid has worked. We know some African governments have wasted such assistance as they have been given, and that plenty of South American oligarchs stole it. We know that other governments have been corrupt; that they have kept farm prices low and hence encouraged a drift to poverty in the cities; that they have spent too much on weapons and on industrial plants now rusting in the sun.

But simply saying that God helps those who help themselves--the answer of those released from guilt--cannot be enough. The World Bank is surely right to argue that the failure of some aid programs to reduce poverty in the past cannot be an excuse for doing nothing in the future. The report points out that the sheer volume of aid could be increased at little cost to the rich world. If all rich countries gave 0.7% of their GNP in aid, $144 billion would be available for disbursement each year--more than twice the amount now.

The test would then be to appreciate that the developing world requires sensitivity to the fact the conditions differ markedly in different countries. Ideally, aid should be concentrated on the poorest, and on those countries that have programs in place to help the poorest. Money should go to relieve poverty; to rural health programs, to aid primary-school enrollment, to encourage rural development, provide access to small amounts of credit and make useful technology accessible.

The Third World as a simple all-embracing concept may have died, and the developed world’s sense of guilt may have died with it. But poor countries and poor people remain; their poverty is not always their own fault, and their way out of poverty not always within their own capabilities. It would be a tragedy if--while shopping in Ankara or sunbathing in Barbados--the rich decided poverty and despair were a thing of the past.