The Gulf states aren't like the other Northern countries - they have almost no industry to speak of. They're oil exporters. That makes for a domestic social structure and a relation to the global economy that's completely different from the rich industrial countries.
Japan has had a rough 15 years of it, but they're hardly paying "big- time."
[WS:] The bottom line is that "neat" categories developed during the Cold War period (1st, 2nd and 3rd world, East-West, North-South, etc. ) - factually inaccurate to begin with, but dove-tailing the political geography of the time - are so out of sync with reality that are unusable in any political discourse save the most crude and oblivious to reality political diatribes.
The reality is a multi-polar world in which countries fall into different economic political alignments and power relations - sometimes dominant, sometimes subordinate, sometimes lateral. I think that it has always been the case, even during the Cold War, but those empirical subtleties were swept under the rug of the dominant political narrative of the tine - the titanic struggle between good and evil (see my piece "Beneath the Veil of Market Rationality: Cognitive Lumping and Splitting in Narratives of Economic Development," in: Graham Kinloch and Raj Mohan (eds.), _Ideology and the Social Sciences,_ Greenwood Press, 2000.) Which country played which part depended, of course, on who was telling the narrative.
This coherent, if inaccurate, vision of the world order was one of the main casualties of the end of the Cold War. However, many people miss that neat categorization, because even if factually inaccurate, it served as a handy heuristic device to define political positions and struggles at home. It was, in that sense, like the medieval division between heaven, purgatory and hell portrayed ad nauseam in the paintings of the era. Although the empirical aspect of these spheres was highly elusive and murky at the very least, if not altogether unreal, it gave the mortals a clear sense of direction on which side they were on this earth and where they were heading vis a vis other people.
I think that many people have problems navigating in a multipolar world with multiple shades of grey and no clear-cut colors. They seek clear cut, binary or tripartite categorization schemes, at the same time being painfully aware of the glaring shortcomings of such categorizations (as evidenced, inter alia, by Liza's posting.)
My own solution to this dilemma is to abstain from clear-cut binary or tripartite categorizations, and the conceptual apparatus that goes with it, as much as possible, but that solution is not without problems. First, general categories are an integral part of human cognition, and people naturally fall into them at one point or another, whether they want it or not. If this process of falling into different categories is not controlled by some kind of "master narrative" (such as the struggle between "good" and "evil" countries during the Cold War) - inconsistencies and internal contradictions are almost inevitable. Needless to add that such inconsistencies will be eagerly exploited by ideologues and detractors bound to kill the messenger together with his message.
Second, there is the problem of communication - most people (regardless of their education level) are more likely to impose their own interpretative framework on a message discarding everything that does not fit that framework, instead of making the effort of reconstructing the framework used by the messenger. As a result, a nuanced message trying to avoid simplistic schematic views of the world will nonetheless be forced into such schematic views by others, thereby forcing the messengers to either "taking sides" or altogether drooping out of the conversation.
That is, btw, one of the reason that I miss a modern version of the socialist "master narrative" that I mentioned on this list not long ago. It would make my "conversational life" much easier.
Wojtek