File:The Western World on the eve of the third millennium 2560px png.png

English: Countries part of what was recognized as the Western World on the eve of the third millennium. Many other countries were otherwise "westernized", however. Countries such as Papua New Guinea, Philippines, and Kenya for example, were very westernized yet not recognized as integral parts of the West as they did not share the very same socio-political or cultural attributes of the West.

Note: the Western World was part of a classifying construct of civilizations used during the second millennium (and popularized by S. Huntington's 1996 depiction), withdrawn from common usage approximately in the decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the September 2001 event. Its hystorical development was rooted in Western European's modern era, on its 500-years global colonialism and 150-years industrialization (both ended with the World Wars and the birth of neocolonial practices). Nowadays, the World Bank economies classification based on four income groups replaced this older classification of civilizations. What was the Western world by the end of the second millennium, is now much broadly identified with the World Bank high-income group.