3rd of 3 blogs which may be The real sons of PNM: A neat trio of posts
T.M. Lutas - Flit(tm) @ http://www.snappingturtle.net/jmc/tmblog/archives/004646.html
July 21, 2004
Barnett's Implicit Villains
In The Pentagon's New Map something always bothered me about the disconnection of the Gap states. They are so weak that unanimous efforts by Core states could never be resisted. The Gap leadership that thrives on disconnection could never maintain that state alone. They had to have something helping them out. The Iraq sanctions regime and subsequent Coalition of the Willing invasion brings the dark secret out into the open. The disconnectors in the Gap have allies in the Core, allies that command power and respect in the highest diplomatic and economic councils.
No Gap country is entirely disconnected. After all, the Great Leader must have access to first class health care, toys and gee gaws that his own society cannot produce, and above all weapons to maintain his security against his own people and his neighbors. That requires trade and with it, connectivity.
But the connectivity threads must be kept spider web thin and must not be a path that just anyone can walk down. No, trade is done in barter, with huge bribes and outlandish commissions, or in unsavory items such as addictive drugs, banned weapons, and human flesh. The people who provide the connectivity must, as much as possible, be unsavory types that will show the worst of the outside world to those who they come in contact with, providing a justification for their country's isolation.
The power brokers who do the major deals and pocket so much money from these spider web connections also know that they are on an impressive gravy train that will continue as long as general connectivity does not come to that society. They must maintain their position in the Core and never actually admit that they are in favor of maintaining disconnectedness but they do and they are.
In Eastern Europe, when the wall came down, whoever had invested in the east bloc countries as the only western presence in their field were largely swept aside. The popular western cigarettes, the popular drinks, all of that market share swiftly disappeared in an avalanche of new competition offering better quality, lower prices, or even just variety.
The same dynamic will happen in every country that is pulled into the Core from the Gap. A certain class of politicians and traders will have their economic interests in the place devastated and they will be tempted to lobby against intervention, against reform, because they only see their short term interests and don't really care about the pathologies that spill out of the Gap.
Update: Iraq now points out how business interests that were highly invested in the old system are still causing mischief where they can.
COMMENTARY: That is a neat extension of the material that I had always wondered about how best to express, but never got around to in PNM. Hard to believe, but even at 150k, I was constantly fretting about how to get out of this G.D. paragraph without triggering another 2k in text! So the PNM's absurd ambition in trying to explain just about everything meant that even at this serious length, the book remains an outline of sorts. The "implicit villains" argument here is one I did not get to in the book, perhaps because I feared sounding too neo-Marxist and once you go down that road you can find yourself turning into Immanuel Wallerstein or worse. But I think T.M. nails the description on the head.
Now I'm waiting for the subsequent nails on the anti-globalization movement within the Core and those Gap-like ghettos that still exist within the Core. The former is what drives a lot of outright rejection of my arguments ("Barnett acts like making globalization safe for corporations to ruin the world is a good thing!"), but the latter is what gets me a lot of interesting emails from mayors, governors, and anyone who deals with inner cities, like one I just got from an academic who said PNM gave him a whole new perspective on the role of historic black colleges in "connecting" the African-American community to economic opportunity in this country.