tdaxp

"The Pentagon's New Map," by Thomas Barnett, Esquire, March 2003, http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/published/pentagonsnewmap.htm.

"Immanuel Wallerstein," Wikipedia, last updated 20 October 2005, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Wallerstein.

When I first heard Dr. Barnett I immediately remembered the very Leftist A Short History of the Future, which described states struggling to enter the Core. Fortunately, Prof's seminar on Marxism clarified some things for me (as well as giving me some interesting ideas!)

Barnett and Wallerstein: Seperated At Birth?

The capitalist world-system is, however, far from homogeneous in cultural, political, and economical terms--instead characterised by fundamental differences in civilizational development, accumulation of political power and capital. Contrary to affirmative theories of modernization and capitalism, Wallerstein does not conceive of these differences as mere residues or irregularities that can and will be overcome as the system as a whole evolves. Much more, a lasting division of the world in core, semi-periphery and periphery is an inherent feature of the world-system. Areas which have so far remained outside the reach of the world-system, enter it at the stage of periphery. There is a fundamental and institutionally stabilized division of labour between core and periphery: While the core has a high level of technological development and manufactures complex products, the role of the periphery is to supply raw materials, agricultural products and cheap labour for the expanding agents of the core. Economic exchange between core and periphery takes places on unequal terms: The periphery is forced to sell its products at low prices, but has to buy the core's products at comparatively high prices, an unequal state which, once established, tends to stabilize itself due to inherent, quasi-deterministic constraints. The statuses of core and periphery are not, however, mutually exclusive and fixed to certain geographic areas; instead, they are relative to each other and shifting: There is a zone called semi-periphery, which acts as a periphery to the core, and a core to the periphery. At the end of the 20th century, this zone would comprise, e.g., Eastern Europe, China, Brazil. As Naomi Klein has recently demonstrated with the example of "sweat shops" in developed countries, peripheral, semi-peripheral and core zones can also co-exist very closely in the same geographic area.

But just as important as “getting them where they live” is stopping the ability of these terrorist networks to access the Core via the “seam states” that lie along the Gap’s bloody boundaries. It is along this seam that the Core will seek to suppress bad things coming out of the Gap. Which are some of these classic seam states? Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Morocco, Algeria, Greece, Turkey, Pakistan, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia come readily to mind. But the U.S. will not be the only Core state working this issue. For example, Russia has its own war on terrorism in the Caucasus, China is working its western border with more vigor, and Australia was recently energized (or was it cowed?) by the Bali bombing.

And the similarities don't end there... Dr. Thomas Barnett and Dr. Immanuel Wallerstein publish electronically!

Visually:

Two World-System Thinkers