Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

Just finished Nayan Chanda's Yale UP-pub, Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers and Warriors Shaped Globalization and it is a stunning tour d'horizon. Outperforms Diamond.

This is what I bumped into at the end:

[as he flies in a jet] Some of the concerns most often articulated about globalization stem from the income inequality between rich and poor and within countries open to the winds of global trade. The interconnectedness that we call globalization has bypassed a huge swath of territory from Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Central and Southwest Asia to South Asia and parts of Southeast Asia as well as parts of the Caribbean. Poorer countries' share of world trade has fallen over the past twenty years.

More than a billion people still live on less than a dollar a day, and most are likely never to have made a phone call or to have traveled beyond the place of birth. Lacking such basic infrastructure as drinking water, primary education, health services, roads, electricity, and ports, nearly two billion people are forgotten and invisible denizens of a world I could not access from my plane. Yet it is this population that presents both a moral and a practical challenge to the developed world. Malnourished and disease-ridden children in Africa and Asia--whose numbers have grown with failing agriculture, stunted in part by the pressure of rich countries' farm subsidies--stare at the glittering West in silent rebuke. To the policymakers of rich countries, they are simply sources of insecurity--from illegal immigration to drug smuggling and crime--and vectors of disease. A Pentagon strategist calls this region the "non-integrating gap," from which new and unconventional security challenges are likely to emerge. The U.S. Defense Department has quietly dispatched dozens of special advisers to hold thousands of exercises in more than a hundred nations to preempt and prepare for such threats [endnote: Thomas P.M. Barnett, The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2004, 107-91.] But the dangers posed by this glaring socioeconomic disparity are more fundamental and long-term. An inability to use the enormous potential that this left-out population represents would not only limit the markets for goods and services that developed and rapidly growing countries generate but would result in stagnant economies and failed states that can only become source of increasing numbers of illegal immigrants and recruits for crime and terrorism.

My quibble is Chanda's placement of the endnote, because the rest of the last long para is also a conceptual lift from my book. He sets me up as diagnostician narrowly focused on security concerns and then presents himself as the broader thinker who considers things more holistically, and given he's obviously read my entire book, that's a bit self-serving.

I am familiar with the temptation: you crank several paras of other people's work and you don't want to put that endnote at the very end, instead giving the illusion that you've seriously extended and improved the analysis. But when that happens, you need to be a little more honest than Chanda was here. Anyone who reads PNM knows I make the same arguments on "winning the peace" and not just looking at "war solely within the context of war," plus my call to "shrink the Gap" cites all the same rationales Chanda appears to so wisely add to my apparently limited analysis (yes, I am often accused of not getting to the "fundamental" nature of the problem and not thinking sufficiently "long term").

Honestly, that kind of omission happens a lot. I write an entire chapter on "System Perturbations" as a new form of crisis and warfare, but that citation often gets lost in follow-on works that clearly feed on my approach.

But this is quibbling and ego-surfing that must be viewed as beneath the visionary (yes, that persona again, although me as just Tom can get annoyed and let it go at that). The big thing is that the vision spreads and gets replicated in a reproducible fashion.

After all, I get criticized for not citing Immanuel Wallerstein's Core v. Periphery even though I see my thoughts and definitions of that breakdown as being diametrically opposed (and derived from a completely different angle)--as in, I say the Core must shrink the Gap to stay wealthy while Wallerstein argues the exact opposite. I also argue the Gap is the Gap because it's weakly connected to the Core while he argues that the Periphery is impoverished primarily from too much connection to the Core. In my mind, then, I turn Wallerstein and his bankrupt Marxism on its head.

So I guess we all fall victim to our own sense of unique arguments, and we all want to seem like we're breaking from the stale past and making things anew. I should have cited Wallerstein in PNM despite my sense of distance. Truth is, I never made the connection mentally until others pointed it out (as pathetic and sloppy as that sounds, and yet, neither did anyone among the thousands I briefed all those hundreds of times, which I guess tells you how much the mil community reads Marxists). Of course, I could have and should have cited tons of other people too (also not mentally connected), but then again, I didn't write an academic tome but a popular book so I tended to cite only recent popular references, like Friedman, Huntington, Fukuyama, Zakaria, Lomborg, Kagan, and so on (actually, I am no slouch in the anal citation department). Then again, you'll never satisfy all the academics and I'm being sort of an academic weanie myself here with such whining.

In the end, I saw myself triangulating between Friedman's economics (he didn't cite Wallerstein either in Lexus and the Olive Tree and I guess I see no reason why he should have) and Huntington's "civilizations," believing Fukuyama's End of History ended any need to apologize to the historically-discredited Marxist BS artists.

Still, very cool to be included in a book of this stature and quality, even as I do wonder about the "thousands of exercises" bit he seems to attribute to me.

Oh damn! Did it again!