The second world

Parag Khanna, a young scholar of international affairs, sets out to explain a twenty-first-century world that earlier grand theories have failed to capture. His central argument is that the era of American primacy has given way to a geopolitical marketplace, in which the European Union and China vie with the United States to define global order according to their own preferences. The contest matters most in the Second World, a group of strategically pivotal regions spanning Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and East Asia. Khanna examines this terrain through the recent histories of less-covered countries such as Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Colombia, Libya, Vietnam and Malaysia. He argues that the resources of these nations will help decide the fate of the three superpowers, even as their own futures remain unsettled, caught between the hope of joining the First World and the danger of sliding into the Third.

Writing with a wry, street-level sensibility and a traveler's ability to move among different cultures, Khanna combines extensive research with first-hand reporting. He looks at Second World societies from the inside, tracing how globalization sorts populations into winners and losers across political, economic and cultural lines. He also shows how China, Europe and the United States exert their own kinds of imperial pull to draw these countries into their orbits. Along the way he considers the rivalry between Arabism and Islamism over the Arab world, the way Iran and Saudi Arabia maneuver between the great powers, Singapore's example in East Asia, and the psychology of the second-world leaders whose choices are reshaping the balance of power. Khanna's underlying aim is to show how to think like a country.

Khanna contends that globalization has become the main arena of geopolitical competition, and that the United States itself could slip into the Second World unless it renews itself and rethinks its role. The book is framed as a successor in scope and ambition to Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man and Samuel P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.