Great Powers

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  Last, there’s a demographic frontier that typically needs settling in most postcolonial developing economies. Most Western businessmen will tell you that when dealing with China, you need to reach down past the generation of businessmen who were raised under Communism and work instead with the generation that has never known the premarket system. Economist George Ayittey makes similar arguments concerning Africa’s “hippo” and “cheetah” generations. “Hippo” refers to the first postcolonial generations who’ve wasted the past several decades trying to prove modernity could be grafted onto a “dysfunctional” peasant-based economy that Ayittey argues wasn’t broken until they taxed it to death and ruined the local democratic traditions of the village and the political-economic role of the chiefs, whose main job was the allocation of land. The “cheetah” generation, as Ayittey describes it, represents Africa’s new hope:

  They do not relate to the old colonialist paradigm, the slave trade, nor Africa’s post-colonial nationalist leaders. . . . The cheetahs know that many current leaders are hopelessly corrupt, and that their governments are ridiculously rotten and commit flagrant human rights violations. They brook no nonsense about corruption, inefficiency, ineptitude, incompetence, or buffoonery. They understand and stress transparency, accountability, human rights, and good governance. They do not have the stomach for colonial-era politics. In fact, they were not even born in that era. As such, they do not make excuses for or seek to explain away government failures in terms of colonialism and the slave trade. Unencumbered by the old shibboleths over colonialism, imperialism, and other external adversaries, they can analyze issues with remarkable clarity and objectivity.

  Circling back to my original point of locating bodies and knowledge in the natural frontier-integrators of our age: Being so removed from those experiences, historically speaking, the average Western businessman will walk around Africa noting the bad infrastructure, the weak governments, the harsh soil and climate, and so on, and he’ll see a tough place to do business. But put your average Chinese or Indian entrepreneur in that same picture and he sees a business climate not that different from the one he’s already mastered back home. So if push comes to shove and the choice is a Western nonprofit organization or a greedy Chinese business, I’ll go with the latter every time, trusting the Africans to look out for themselves.

  America’s grand strategy of shrinking the Gap and making globalization truly global should be about nothing more than encouraging and facilitating New Core Asia’s natural desire to replicate itself inside developing economies. So yes, press China over Darfur, but make sure China stays in Sudan—unless you want that fake state to be America’s problem alone.

  THE INESCAPABLE REALIGNMENT: REMAPPING FAKE STATES

  Since I’ve already displayed the gall to combine Jeffrey Sachs’s pro-aid thinking with William Easterly’s famous skepticism, let me now try to tie Easterly’s thinking on “artificial states” with economist Paul Collier’s work on the “bottom billion,” or the roughly one billion Gap residents who are falling ever farther behind as globalization seems to be connecting everyone else. This bottom billion must command our attention, because the states where they live represent much of the workload that America and its allies will face in the coming decades.

  Easterly’s research on artificial states, first published in 2006, finds that postcolonial states with more straight-line borders experience less political stability and economic success than postcolonial states with squiggly natural borders. If your country’s borders are squiggly lines on the map, it’s probably because they conform to some natural geographic delineator, or perhaps past wars bent them according to tribal boundaries. Conversely, if your borders are straight, some colonial power probably drew them. The colonial power’s reasons were typically nefarious: dividing ethnic groups to create permanently unhappy minority groups in fake states ruled by competing tribes. The resulting regimes were thus kept weak by their inability to effectively control their own national territory, leaving them dependent on their colonial patrons. The Middle East, anchored by fake state Iraq (Kurds, Shia, Sunni slapped together by the Brits), is just the tip of this iceberg. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin did a similar number on Central Asia, creating five states that all ended up with substantial minorities linking them to neighboring states: Kazakhstan was tied to Russia; Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan were made forever vulnerable to Uzbekistan’s revanchist dreams.

  Taken together with Collier’s bottom billion, or that share of the global economy that did not take off with the rest in rising connectivity over the past two decades, we find ourselves deep inside that part of the world that I call the Non-Integrated Gap. While the rising demands of the 3 billion new capitalists seem to have fostered all sorts of positive economic opportunity across the periphery regions of the Gap, these are the truly “trapped” populations.

  Collier says that fifty-eight countries make up the bottom billion, whose populations, as a result of divergence from emerging economies, now earn a mere one-fifth in income compared with those recent globalizers. Most are located in the interior of Africa and Central Asia. As such, virtually all can be considered the victims of colonial mapmakers, for none of the states in which they reside can be considered real or natural. Indeed, Collier argues that there is simply no logical reason why there should be any landlocked African nations. Only one percent of the Functioning Core’s population suffers the odd combination of being landlocked and resource-poor, whereas almost one-third of Africa endures this illogical fate: “Another way of saying this is that other than in Africa, areas that are far from the coast and don’t have resources simply don’t become countries.”

  As the former director of research for the World Bank puts it:

  The countries now at the bottom are distinctive not just in being the poorest but also in having failed to grow. They are not following the development path of most other nations; they are adrift. . . . Many of these countries are not just falling behind, they are falling apart.

  Why should we care?

  As Easterly pointed out in his magnificent book The White Man’s Burden, former colonies that score high on partitioned peoples consistently score low on things like democracy, government services, rule of law, lack of corruption, infant longevity, literacy, and clean water. Check enough of those unsavory boxes, and you are a failed state. Such states are easy prey for transnational terrorist groups. Good example? Check out al Qaeda’s permanent addresses over the years: Sudan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The first is ripe to split into its northern and southern halves (with western Sudan suffering genocide amid militia warfare), while the latter pair is linked by yet another British border that no local tribes recognize, much less respect. Then there’s Africa, where America is setting up its new regional combatant command. According to Easterly’s research, 80 percent of its borders correspond unnaturally to latitudinal and longitudinal lines, as if some colonial master took a ruler to a map. Sadly, Africa’s record on ethnic violence in the post-Cold War era is all too familiar.

  Now that they’re past the period in which outside superpowers fought proxy wars through client states, those fake states are free to fight among themselves in nearly infinite combinations. The result? A Holocaust’s worth of violent deaths, most of them in interior, landlocked Africa. Now, this horrible truth has certainly never stirred us to action in the past. These were just a lot of dark-skinned people dying in a galaxy far, far away . . . until 9/11 reminded us that such distant pain can be transmitted across the global body politic by those still willing to fight and kill and die to preserve their cherished identities in the face of this historic process we call globalization.

  Here’s the inescapable reality I think we need to get our arms around as a nation: The United States, as long as it remains a global military superpower, is going to be drawn into a lot of these fake states over the next couple of decades as globalization continues its astonishingly rapid advance. For whenever the global economy effective
ly penetrates these straight-line borders, somebody on the inside wants the equivalent of a national divorce, or worse, wants back payments from some neighbors who they think have been stealing them blind over the years (usually because the former colonial power decided to give them land belonging to somebody else). Those who make the first move are typically the most ambitious and capable: Examples are the Slovenes and Croatians in now defunct Yugoslavia, the Kurds in increasingly federated Iraq, or province Santa Cruz’s threatened departure from Bolivia. Other times the dispossessed simply rise up in spontaneous mass violence in response to the right kind of political trigger, as in Kenya’s disputed 2007 election (where every tribe seemed to turn on the dominant Kikuyu) or Rwanda’s 1994 genocidal fit of rage (Hutu on Tutsi), whose origins can arguably be traced all the way back to the Versailles Treaty of 1919, in which the Belgians took custody from Germany and thereupon placed the minority Tutsi in privileged control.

  So what should our goals be? First, as needed, the world’s great powers must collectively intervene militarily to prevent or tamp down ethnic conflict. Second, we should make comprehensive efforts to stabilize the affected regions economically, providing what quick connectivity we can to the global economy. If applied prophylactically, either approach can preempt mass violence, as dozens of British marines courageously proved in Sierra Leone in 1999. Third, we must steer all players toward the long-term goal of political reintegration once economic stabilization takes root. Done well, borders need not change even as national economies are comprehensively recast. None of this will come easily or quickly. Indeed, we are looking at the work of one or more generations. But this burden, which will be borne by powers both East and West, is inescapable.

  Let me remind you that America has some experience in this regard. Whenever I make this explanation in my brief, I use a slide that builds the map of the contiguous forty-eight states progressively, at first showing the original thirteen colonies, which are half squiggly-lined (the Atlantic coast) but a bit straight-lined here and there, especially in New England. These horizontal straight lines were drawn by European crowns, starting at the coast and simply moving westward, with no regard for who might be living there. Naturally, that led to some mass violence down the road. Then I show the audience the trans-Appalachian west, a historical term denoting the then frontier states between the original thirteen and the Mississippi River. These are far more squiggly-lined primarily on the basis of two major rivers, the Mississippi and the Ohio. The main exception is the exceptionally straight-lined Tennessee, which was broken off from North Carolina’s original westward claim. Then I show the trans-Mississippi Western states, most of which came into being after the American Civil War. Check out a map sometime, because it’s a stunning change from what came before. All the Western states are incredibly straight-lined. Did any of these lines correspond to the Native Americans living there? Absolutely not. Those lines were drawn in Washington, and—again—periodic mass violence ensued. My point is this: The faster America grew, the straighter the lines became and the more violence ensued from stubborn, indigenous insurgencies, whose warriors ended up suffering mass extermination in some instances but more often suffered mass relocations to the worst bits of remaining real estate Washington could find, which currently constitute over 500 independent nations inside these United States. So don’t tell me we don’t know how to do ethnic sanctuaries or that we can’t imagine what brings a society to the point of ethnic cleansing.

  Look deep into our own history and you will find every evil and every virtue currently on display in globalization, because everything I needed to know about globalization I learned in American history.

  My argument is that when the economies of Easterly’s fake states open themselves up to globalization’s scary makeover, there’s also the great chance they’ll succumb to its disintegrating impulses. And the greatest conundrum comes in realizing that the bottom billion, once well exposed to globalization, are likely to face just such centrifugal forces, and that the most likely agent of such connectivity, China, presently has a profound aversion to all the isms likely to unfold: extremism, terrorism, separatism (the founding “fears” of China’s Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Central Asia, a region full of fake states and bottom-billion dwellers). If there is one area where U.S.-Chinese strategic dialogue should concentrate intensely, it is on this difficult point. Otherwise, we’re likely to find ourselves at loggerheads with the Chinese over such failed/ failing states, even as we agree on the collective security dangers such countries pose. The answer is simple: The United States and China need to target the bottom billion for preemptive nation-building and “external” improvements that better link them to globalization’s networks.

  Such a grand strategic approach would logically include somehow binding these landlocked states into economic “corridor” packages that link them to coastal states. In Central Asia, this means a corridor that connects the region both westward, through the Black Sea (thus countering Russia in the Caucasus), and southward, through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean (along with India’s booming middle class). In Africa, we’re talking about radial-style corridors that connect landlocked countries to the major ports. In combination, then, such a grand strategic vision would kill two birds with one stone: connecting the bottom billion while improving the security situation in the two great regions into which the radical Islamic impulse spreads from its center of gravity in the Middle East.

  But here are three inescapable realities Americans must face: (1) globalization will continue to fracture fake states and thus birth new, weak ones; (2) the most likely agents of globalization’s connectivity will come from the East, not the West; and (3) our grand strategy needs to consist of getting in front of these powerful forces—not to stem their impact but to shape the ultimate outcomes.

  Or we can hope that Brad and Angelina adopt the entire Gap on their own.

  THE BETTER NORMAL: RACING TO THE BOTTOM OF THE PYRAMID

  Globalization is often described as a “race to the bottom”—as in, to the lowest price or the least protection for workers and the environment. All of these statements are both relevant and untrue. They’re untrue because there’s a clear correlation between high levels of globalization connectivity and high wages, good regulatory regimes, and better protection of the environment, as well as an undeniable correlation between low connectivity and the worst abuses in each case. What globalization tends to do upon arrival is temporarily make a bad situation somewhat worse, followed by recovery. Why? Once the chimera of zero-sum development is discarded, the locals realize quickly how improving their rules and husbanding their resources will pay off handsomely in income growth. But that only says that the contact phase of globalization’s deep penetration is incredibly crucial to alerting the culture to the true possibilities at hand—other than redistribution, separatism, and payback for past inter-tribal abuse. It also says to America that our partnership with Asia’s agents of globalizing connectivity is paramount to any grand strategy of making globalization truly global in a manner that’s beneficial to the overall security order and sustainable in an environmental sense.

  One of the best thinkers along these lines is University of Michigan economist C. K. Prahalad, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at a Pentagon-sponsored workshop of experts who had come to together to discuss ideas of postconflict development tasks a few years back. Prahalad’s description in The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid is fascinating on many levels. First, he alerts us to the growing reality that most Core corporations cannot eke out that much more profit in increasingly saturated home markets, and instead need to consider the “fortune” of disposable income that’s being amassed at lower socioeconomic levels, inside both New Core emerging markets and Gap developing economies, thanks to globalization’s advance.

  Second, Prahalad reminds us that this is really a back-to-the-future outcome for most Old Core corporations, who long ago were themselves start-ups during similar
socioeconomic conditions (i.e., frontier-integration periods inside their own economies, like the settling of the American West) and grew primarily because they were innovative at selling to the bottom of the pyramid, meaning low-income-to-lower-middle-class families who needed great value for their money and couldn’t afford your standard large purchase. An example the professor likes to use in his talks is the Singer sewing machine company. Back when it began, the company faced the problem of trying to sell a valuable machine to people who couldn’t afford it outright. Selling to the top of the pyramid, or rich people, made little sense, because they used tailors. So how to get a do-it-yourself machine in the hands of people who truly needed it? The equivalent of a reverse micro-loan otherwise known as the installment plan. How to get the product in front of “media-dark” populations? That’s called the door-to-door or traveling salesman.

  Third and most important to American grand strategy is that selling to the bottom of the pyramid is a highly effective means of generating middle-class growth (in effect, changing the pyramid to a diamond) and thus a key component to facilitating democracy inside the Gap. By tapping into this “latent market for goods and services,” we trigger individual-level demands for improved “transaction governance capacity” by the state. You want better national governmental institutions? Make local governments demand it. You want better local government? Trigger economic transaction rates among the populace, who in turn demand it. In short, good governments are not imposed from above but demanded from below. Despite the many myths of how our country and its political system were constructed one afternoon in Philadelphia and designed near-perfectly from the start, this is essentially how our American System was built over the decades: economic transactions demanding more powerful and more efficient government. This long-term process was typically sped up during times of war (the Civil War and especially World War II) and national crisis (Great Depression, early Cold War, the sixties), but at its core always remained a demand and not a supply function. We got bigger and better government when we needed it and trimmed it back when we needed that as well.