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Concept
Second World
Summary
The Second World is one of the "Three Worlds" formed by the global political landscape of the Cold War, as it grouped together those countries that were aligned with the Eastern Bloc of the Soviet Union. This grouping was directly opposed to the First World, which similarly grouped together those countries that were aligned with the Western Bloc of the United States. It included communist states that were originally under the Soviet sphere of influence, though some eventually broke away from the Soviet ideology (e.g., Yugoslavia's split and China's split) to develop their own path as socialist states while retaining their communist governments. Most communist states remained under Soviet influence until the Revolutions of 1989. In 1991, upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union, only five communist states remained: China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam. Though the terms "First World" and "Third World" continue to see present-day relevance in colloquial speech, albeit with a repurposed definition, the term "Second World" is obsolete outside of a Cold War context.
The concept of "Second World" was a construct of the Cold War and the term is still largely used to describe former communist countries that are between poverty and prosperity, many of which are now capitalist states, such as Eastern Europe. Subsequently, the actual meaning of the terms "First World", "Second World," and "Third World" changed from being based on political ideology to an economic definition. The three-world theory has been criticized as crude and relatively outdated for its nominal ordering, and some sociologists have instead used the words "developed", "developing", and "underdeveloped" as replacement terms for global stratification (which have been criticized as displaying a colonialist mindset); nevertheless, the three-world theory is still popular in contemporary literature and media. This might also cause semantic variation of the term between describing a region's political entities and its people.
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