“The first and second worlds are being reunited into something which has no name yet, nor a number,” wrote the sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf back in 1990. “Perhaps it will just be the world.” Or perhaps not! The United States, China and the European Union seem to be forming an irritable triplet: no one of them can dominate either of the other two. They may make common cause, but it is just as likely that they will compete for control. And the places where they will compete have been labeled, by the New America Foundation analyst Parag Khanna, the second world.

The second world used to mean the Soviet Union and its dependencies. Khanna has appropriated it (in his coming book of the same name) for countries that have substantial economies but do not belong to the Big Three. Turkey, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Algeria, Russia, possibly India and South Africa — it’s the most successful members of the old nonaligned movement, more or less, plus resource barons, and when you add them all up it amounts to a good chunk of the world. The U.S., the E.U. and China court them — even depend on them — for vital resources and to adjust their own balance of power. ...

For the complete review of Parag Khanna's forthcoming book The Second World, please follow this link.