You hear it all the time: “third-world countries,” or “that’s a first-world problem.” But you hardly ever hear about the second world. And oddly enough, even though the whole idea of categorizing nations as first-, second-, and third-world hasn’t been around all that long, today’s phrases have already shifted in meaning from their original usage.
The terms originated in a 1952 article in L’Observateur: “Ce Tiers-Monde, ignoré, exploité, mprisé comme le Tiers-État,” which means in English “That Third World, ignored, exploited, scorned, like the Third Estate.” There wasn’t, in the first iteration, a first- or second-world; just the third. And although it was related to economic conditions, it mostly referred to political connections.
In 1952 the Cold War was raging (shivering?), and many nations were allied with one side or the other. But there were also unaligned countries, many of them in Africa and South America, and at the time those were the ones labelled the “third world.” It wasn’t originally an economic category; it was just a coincidence that the third world nations that weren’t aligned with the US or the USSR were also far less developed. Well okay, it probably wasn’t entirely coincidence, but the point is that “third world” at first referred to cold war alliances.
It took until 1967 for anybody to call the US-aligned nations — which tended to be highly developed and generally capitalistic — the “first world.” Although the next step seems obvious, it wasn’t until 1974 that the USSR-aligned nations — highly developed, although maybe not quite as much (although in some ways more so) and generally more economically socialist — were first termed the “second world”.
By now that particular cold war is long gone. The terms remain, though. “First world” now only means highly developed and “third world” only means undeveloped. As for “second world”? I guess it just goes to show that two’s company; three’s a crowd.
