The Second World: How Emerging
Powers Are Redefining Global
Competition in the Twenty-first
Century by Parag Khanna
Masterful And Worth A Second Read
In The Second World, scholar Parag Khanna, chosen as one of Esquire’s
75 Most Influential People of the Twenty-First Century, reveals how
America’s future depends on its ability to compete with the European
Union and China to forge relationships with the Second World, the pivotal
regions of Eastern Europe, Central Asia, South America, the Middle East,
and East Asia that are growing in influence and economic strength.
Informed, witty, and armed with a traveler’s intuition for blending into
diverse cultures, Khanna depicts second-world societies from the inside

out, observing how globalization divides them into winners and losers–and
shows how China, Europe, and America use their unique imperial gravities
to pull the second-world countries into their orbits. Along the way, Khanna
explains how Arabism and Islamism compete for the Arab soul, reveals
how Iran and Saudi Arabia play the superpowers against one another,
unmasks Singapore’s inspirational role in East Asia, and psychoanalyzes
the second-world leaders whose decisions are reshaping the balance of
power.
Personal Review: The Second World: How Emerging Powers
Are Redefining Global Competition in the Twenty-first Century
by Parag Khanna
At 341 pages plus 64 pages of notes all in small font, this book is a mule
choker but it's still a condensation of 423 other books (listed in the
bibliography) that also provides a unique point of view - not a regurgitation
but a mastery of and a Gaudi-esque building upon.
While the Economist magazine and the press in general report events in
countries, Khanna concisely articulates the geographic, political and
cultural context that the country faces, the backstory in short, to those
events, while at the same time holding the players accountable for the
results. He covers countries in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East,
Central and Eastern Europe and countries from the former USSR.
The vocabulary in this book is beautiful. Khanna plucks words like ummah
and condottieri from the native trees on which they grow and uses them to
write about both the locale or culture from which they came as well as
applying them to other contexts, collapsing time and space.
Khanna markets himself well by maintaining a blog at
www.paragkhanna.com with links to all his published output whether
interviews, books or videos. For a tapas-sized taste of his writing, try this
article "The Coming Middle Ages" published in McKinsey Quarterly
February 2009. He outlines the shared concepts between the Middle Ages
and our future including the Renaissance idea of a nation-state vs the
Middle Ages concept of the city-state and how these 2 ideas apply to failed
as well as successful nation-states today.
The Second World is masterful and worth a second read.
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