First World is used less, but is no less useful as a term, than the commonly found Third World, which describes the underdeveloped nations of Africa, Asia and Latin America. The First World consists of the Western European and North American countries which experienced the Industrial Revolution, plus Japan, Australia and New Zealand: in effect, the advanced industrial powers of the period before the First World War. The Second World used to refer to the communist bloc, much of it by now as industrialized as the First World, but on the basis of a different blueprint for economic organization.
Membership of the Third World is therefore defined more by the dates at which political independence was achieved and economic growth started than by the actual level of economic development, although in much of the Third World this is in fact extremely low. The classification is very crude, and throws up many anomalies. Can Argentina, for example, be classified as a Third World country when it has much the same level of economic development as New Zealand, and was politically independent earlier? Did Russia move from being a First World nation to the Second World simply because of its political change in 1917, and did it move back again in 1991? Like all simple classifications in politics or political science, this one needs to be used very cautiously, but it is certainly a convenient portmanteau term. In an era when globalization has become enormously important, perhaps even more in analysis and theory than in reality, it may be that categorizations such as this will come to have even less utility than in the past.
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