What term do you all think fits best for the countries that are economically developed, have governments that are stable democracies, and largely respect human rights? The specific countries I’m including are New Zealand. Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, most of Europe (details as below), Canada, Argentina, Chile, and the United States.
There’s various terms that come to mind for this grouping, but none of them seem entirely accurate. Developed doesn’t work, since that would include socially repressive wealthy nations like Saudi Arabia. The West doesn’t work because that would presumably exclude Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and maybe Australia and New Zealand or Chile and Argentina depending on how literal one wants to be. The First world would limit the term to those countries that were aligned with the US during the Cold War.
For Europe I’m including Ukraine, excluding Russia, Serbia, and the Vatican, and have Hungary and Turkey as edge cases. The US might have edged close to questionable towards the end of Trump’s term, mostly because of 1/6/2021. Israel is also an edge case. I mention these edge cases more for sake of clarity as to what criteria I’m looking for rather than getting into a debate about how closely a particular country meets the criteria (AKA I don’t want to turn this into a debate on how free the United States is).
Please move to IMHO if it fits better there, but I think the topic fits well here.
The Economist Democracy Index, concerned with political freedom and civil liberties, simply distinguishes between full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes, and authoritarian regimes using a number of weighted factors. The United States and Israel are classified as “flawed democracies”; countries like Japan and New Zealand are “full democracies”. Russia and Saudi Arabia are authoritarian, of course.
First, I want to quibble about Ukraine. It gets and deserves sympathy and support, but it really is a quite corrupt country, on par with Serbia, Georgia. Were it not for the war, we’d never consider them close to being admitted in the EU*.
As for the OP in itself. I find that when the need arises to be very specific, as in writing a paper/article, saying OECD-countries works pretty well.
You might be surprised to find Colombia and Costa Rica there (the newest members). Click on the country you’re interested in to find out how they got into the club.
OECD is mostly economic criteria, and weaker on civic parameters, but still matches pretty well what you’re looking for.
*I think we were too hasty in admitting Bulgaria and Romania (not in the OECD) into the EU as well, but that’s for another thread.
I think “First World” works, as long as you recognize that the lines have shifted some over time. Ukraine used to be Second World. Now it’s First World.
As I understand it, Zelenskyy was already well underway on cleaning up a lot of that, before other current events started stealing all the headlines.
Part of your problem, that others have already alluded to, is that you’re trying to lump two concepts into one term.
First, there’s the democratic nature of government & respect for human rights, etc… Think of that as the X axis of a graph.
Second, there’s the economic and technological development of a country. Think of that as the Y axis.
You’re asking for basically countries that would fall in the first quadrant (upper right) of that graph, while countries like Saudi Arabia would fall in the upper left somewhere as something of an outlier, because I imagine that if you plotted countries according to where they fall on that graph, they’d trend along a 45 degree line from lower left to upper right somewhere.
I can’t really think of any liberal democracies that aren’t also economically and technologically developed- maybe somewhere like Costa Rica would qualify?
India prior to Modi would probably qualify. If we go further back in history, some of those other countries I listed were liberal democracies before becoming fully economically developed. Japan in the 1950s. South Korea in the 1980s.