The term “second world” has fallen out of use. It used to mean countries of the socialist world; today I use the phrase to refer to those countries in eastern Europe and central Asia, Latin America, the middle east and southeast Asia which are both rich and poor, developed and underdeveloped, postmodern and pre-modern, cosmopolitan and tribal—all at the same time. This is not a temporary state between third world and first, but a permanent condition in which winners and losers are chosen by collectives like cities and corporations rather than entire states.
I spent most of 2005-07 travelling through over 40 second-world countries, and the message I kept hearing was that each country plans to shape its future its own way, not according to the “Washington consensus” or any other foreign action plan. Kazakh ministers tout the “Kazakh way,” Indian diplomats boast of the “Indian way,” Brazilian officials confidently assert the “Brazilian way.” They all want globalisation, not America, to be their patron. They may all have big internal weaknesses, but they are all players in the new geopolitical marketplace in which Europe and China offer packages of aid, trade and military assistance at least as attractive as the American one. Why align with any one patron when you can play off all sides to get what you want? India’s trade with China is booming, while it gets many of its weapons from Russia and pursues a nuclear deal with the US. Non-alignment is passé; this is the age of multialignment.
There is a vast second world intermediate layer between the first-world core and third-world periphery. In his recent National Interest essay “World Without the West,” Steven Weber pointed to Asian regionalism and new alliance blocs such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. But this is not just about the rise of China and India. It is also a story of oil-producing states around the world, Arab statelets with big sovereign wealth funds and other regional swing states from Brazil to Malaysia. In many ways these “emerging markets” have already emerged; they receive most of the world’s foreign direct investment, hold a majority of its currency reserves, and are rapidly growing consumer markets whose preferences western producers cannot ignore.
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