There are first world nations and third world countries but I never heard of anything other that a second-class citizen.
Are there second-world countries?
Who are they? What are qualifications for first and second world status?
Well, before someone goes nuts about this being answered already, which seems highly possible for a question like this, I’ll give it a whirl.
The way I learned it, first world countries are highly developed and have decent economies, overnment, blah blah blah. I’m not sure if there are exact specifications or if there ever were.
Third world are undeveloped countires usually with crappy economies, governments, etc…
Second world would be Communist countires. Everything runs okay but its because the government regulates it all.
Nowadays, people don’t use first/second/third world anymore. It developed, undeveloped, or Communist.
A First World country would be countries allied with the US.
A Second World country would be a country belonging to the old Soviet bloc of countries.
It was this bi-polar geopolitical setup back in the 60’s that led to the term Third World country. All the term originally meant was countries that were generally non-aligned with either the Soviet Union or the US.
However, since most of these types of countries tended to be incredibly poor countries the term ‘Third World’ country became synonymous with being poor.
Given today’s geopolitical makeup I’m not certain First World and Second World countries really have any meaning but the term Third World country has stuck as a synonym for poor, non-industrialized societies.
I win. Maybe not for accuracy since Whack-a-Mole’s reply makes more sense historically but speed baby.
So is it safe to say that there are no current 2nd world countries. Or rather that there are none left over from the 60’s, other than Cuba or China? - and even then some would say that they are 3rd world countries.
Well, North Korea, but that’s about as close to “third world” as you can get.
Damn…scooped by a chicken ;)!
Anyway…
In the sense of the original definition of the term (as denoting a political affiliation) then no, there are not really any second world countires left.
China has actually been denoted as a third world country in the past. Remember, second world meant allied with the former Soviet Union…not just that you were communist. China and the Soviet Union really did not get along with each other (among other issues they actually practiced different brands of communism and weren’t really compatible with each other). Some would argue that the Soviets viewed China as threat on par with the US (and today even more so).
If you use the definitions that derived from the original meanings of the terms denoting your economic place in the world then you can probably continue to use the terms…third world certainly is. However, like mothman manyh people would be confused by this usage of second world ro first world so stick with developed and under-developed (ala Poland…industrial but not quite in the same league with the developed nations).
Well, just to echo what the others said:
I took a Geography class in college that was entitled “Geography of Third World Nations”. The first day of class the professor spent the day explaining how this term was wrong, and entirely misleading to anyone familiar with the proper definition.
The short version was that an author (the specifics and etymology of this is probably a Cecil question) came up with the terms First, Second and Third World as labels for the US Western Democracies, Eastern Communist Bloc, and everyone else respectively. Today this term almost exclusively refers to poor African nations, and occasionally to poor, underdeveloped nations as a whole including countries such as Bangladesh. However under the original meaning nations like Sri Lanka, Brunei and United Arab Emerites are also Third World countries, these nations are per capita the richest nations in the world I beleive.
So to answer your OP question, yes there once was a “second class world citizen” but the term was never intended to imply a quality of life like you seem to be thinking. The first, second, and third worlds aren’t parallel to upper, middle and lower classes one might describe people as.
I’d say that it is safe to say that there are no longer any second world countries, but in the same token you could argue that there aren’t any first or third world countries either. The three distinctions were made to divide countries with like gonvernmental philosophies (in the first and second cases, anyways). One might argue that without the diametric philosophies neither definition has any basis any more. Similar to the concept if there is no evil, how can there be good? The two definitions rely on one another to describe themselves. Same holds true for First and Second world countries. In short, when the cold war ended, all three terms ceased to hold meaning.
We must have had the same class…
The writer in question was a marxist named Frantz Fanon from Martinique.
(No, I didn’t really remember that but I remembered enough to make checking easy.)
Unca Cece has covered this somewhere. The author used an old-fashioned (French) term for “third” because he wanted to say that the Third World today has the same position as the Third Estate, the peasants, had in pre-Revolutionary France, i.e. both were kept poor because the First and Second Worlds/Estates benefitted from the arrangement and had the power to preserve the status quo.
According to this site:
I love this message board. 
See, I always thought it was Old World, New World, and Third World. Then Sting made me feel guilty about the whole topic (“One world is enough … for all of us” and so on), so I just stopped thinking about it.
Thanks, Dopers!
oh, and to add to the confusion, there are also fourth-world nations, which are basically internationally unrecognized nations. See here for a more eloquent explanation.
curwin, how dare you check my off-the-cuff, incorrect facts!