Second World

• 1. Introduction

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  The Second World was one of three categories that Cold War strategists used to divide all of humanity. At its core sat the Soviet Union, founded in 1922, and around it orbited states from Mongolia to Cuba, from East Germany to Angola. The question the documentary will answer is not just what the Second World was, but how it grew, fractured, shrank, and finally dissolved into something else entirely. Why did Yugoslavia leave the bloc within just a few years of joining? How did a Cold War political term survive the Cold War itself, wearing a completely different meaning? And who, today, might find themselves labeled Second World without ever having had anything to do with the Soviet Union?

• 2. The Three Worlds Model

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  Centrally planned economic systems, single-party states, and medium income levels: these were the markers that identified a country as belonging to the Second World during the Cold War. The Three Worlds Model was built to rank nations not just by wealth but by political gravity. First World countries were capitalist and industrial, retaining influence over parts of the former colonial world. The Second World mirrored them in certain structural ways, but organized production and power along socialist lines. Neither of these two blocs was neutral. Both the First World and the Second World were actively competing for political and economic influence over a third group of countries that had refused to join either side.

• 3. Founding Members and Early Alignments

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  Mongolia's Soviet-backed People's Republic was established in 1924, making it one of the earliest states to enter the Soviet orbit. Yugoslavia followed, aligning with Moscow after World War II, though that relationship collapsed almost immediately: expelled from the Cominform in 1948 following the Tito-Stalin split, Yugoslavia became a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement instead. Bulgaria and Albania both established communist governments in 1946 under Soviet influence, while Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and East Germany joined the bloc between 1947 and 1949. Czechoslovakia's path was particularly abrupt, its communist government arriving through a coup in 1948. East Germany was established as a Soviet-backed state in 1949, its fate then tied to the Berlin Wall that fell four decades later.

• 4. Fractures Within the Bloc

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  Albania's break with Moscow in 1961 was a signal that Soviet loyalty was not permanent. Having established its communist government in 1946 with Soviet backing, Albania pivoted toward China during the Albanian-Soviet split. China itself followed a similar arc: the Chinese Communist Revolution had established the People's Republic in 1949 with Soviet support, but the Sino-Soviet split from the late 1950s ended that alignment by 1961. Romania chose a subtler form of independence, remaining formally in the Warsaw Pact while pursuing an increasingly independent foreign policy from the mid-1960s under Nicolae Ceausescu. North Korea managed an even more careful balance throughout the Cold War, navigating between the USSR and China without fully committing to either. Somalia's story was more dramatic: it signed a Treaty of Friendship with the Soviet Union in 1974, then expelled Soviet advisors and tore up that treaty in 1977 after Moscow backed Ethiopia in the Ogaden War.

• 5. Wider Reach Beyond Europe

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  Egypt received extensive Soviet military and economic aid from the mid-1950s, including during the construction of the Aswan Dam, but was never a Marxist-Leninist state. President Anwar Sadat ended that arrangement by expelling Soviet advisors in 1972 and realigning with the United States. In West Africa, Ahmed Sekou Toure led Guinea toward Moscow after France withdrew all support upon independence in 1958; Guinea provided the USSR with strategic airport and naval access through the mid-1970s. Cuba aligned with the Soviet Union following the Cuban Revolution in 1961 and remained aligned until the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Afghanistan's communist government was established in the 1978 Saur Revolution; the Soviet Union invaded in 1979 and did not withdraw until 1989. Grenada's revolutionary government, established in a 1979 coup, lasted only until October 1983, when an internal power struggle preceded a United States invasion. Thomas Sankara led Burkina Faso with socialist and pan-Africanist policies from 1983 until his assassination in a 1987 coup.

• 6. Collapse and Redefinition

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  By 1989, the Revolutions of that year swept away communist governments in Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, the last of these in the Velvet Revolution. Romania's regime fell in the Romanian Revolution of 1989. East Germany's collapse led directly to German reunification in 1990. The Soviet Union itself dissolved in 1991, ending Soviet alignment everywhere from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Nicaragua, which had transferred power to its electoral opposition in 1990 after the Sandinista government lost the general election that year. With the Soviet Union gone, defining the Second World around Soviet influence or socialism became obsolete. The term did not disappear, however. It shifted meaning, becoming a synonym for middle-income countries, also known as newly industrialized countries. This economic redefinition would now include states such as the Russian Federation, India, Iran, Ukraine, Mexico, Brazil, and South Africa, many of which had never been part of the Soviet bloc at all.

• 7. Criticism and Legacy

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  Sociologists have criticized the three-world theory as crude and relatively outdated in its nominal ordering. Some have substituted the terms "developed", "developing", and "underdeveloped" for global stratification, though those replacements have attracted their own criticism for displaying a colonialist mindset. Despite both rounds of criticism, the three-world theory remains popular in contemporary literature and media. One consequence of that persistence is a semantic instability: the same term can describe either a region's political entities or its people, and the political meaning and the economic meaning no longer point at the same set of countries. The state of Cambodia, reconstituted in 1989 from what had been Vietnamese-backed Kampuchea, eventually came under UN administration and held free elections in 1993, a detail that captures how varied the post-Second World trajectories turned out to be.