June 24, 2025 • 49 mins
James and Andrew discuss different ways of splitting up the world, and what they tell us about the way their proponents see the world.
Sources/Links:
Rome: https://europe.factsanddetails.com/article/entry-1087.html
China: Rome, China, and the Barbarians Ethnographic Traditions and the Transformation of Empires by Randolph B. Ford
European Colonialism: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1mf71b8.7?seq=1
Edward Said - Orientalism
Benedict Anderson - Imagined Communities
John Lewis Gaddis - The Cold War: A New History Samuel Huntington - Clash of Civilisations
Immanuel Wallerstein - The Modern World System
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/elia-j-ayoub-the-periphery-has-no-time-for-binaries
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
All the media.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Hello, and welcome to it could happen here. I'm here
once again.
Speaker 3 (00:09):
With it's James again.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Free to talk to you again, James.
Speaker 3 (00:13):
Yeah, likewise glad to be here.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
You know, I spend a lot of time thinking about
the world and how it works and all that jazz,
and I assume you do as well.
Speaker 4 (00:22):
I do, yeah, yeah, increasingly worrying about the word.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Yeah, this place, this home is quite the puzzle. And
much like a puzzle, it has been carved up and
divided in so many different ways, sliced, labeled, ranked, and
measured from all kinds of different angles. And that's really
what I'm interested in talking about today, the different ways
that we try to explain the differences we see on
(00:48):
the global stage. So going from the concept of civilized
and primitive, to the East and West binary, to the
imagined communities called nations, the clash of quote unquoteizations, to
the concept of first, second, and third worlds, to the
development spectrum, to the global North and global cell, then
finally to the core and the periphery. So we have
(01:09):
a lot of ground to cover in this episode.
Speaker 4 (01:11):
Yeah, I really like this stuff, like as a historian,
like we're always kind of forced into certain divisions, right,
Like even when you apply to you with your funding, right,
like you're normally in like a geographical area, or like
you're trying to shoehorn something that's just interesting into one
(01:32):
of these boxes that gets funding. And I think like
often that impacts like how we see the world, So
we have to write with that goal.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Absolutely, absolutely, I find the way that we approach the
telling of history so fascinating And in another life maybe
I would have been a historian.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
I never I can recommend it. Yeah, yeah, it's I
enjoy the doing of history. It's the doing of academia
that I don't enjoy so much.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
So I suppose as historian, I'm going to ask you
a discomforting question. Great, would you consider yourself civilized or primitive?
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (02:08):
That's a fun one.
Speaker 4 (02:11):
I don't know, Like, I don't like that binary because
I think it's it's a value statement, right, And I think,
like James Scott talks about this, Actually, this is a
really interesting I've had this. James Scott right talks about
the idea of people who exist outside of the state
being labeled as primitive by the state. It's in the
(02:31):
art of not being governed, and that that's the sort
of the narrative there. The inherent message is that the
state is the final and superior form of human organizing
and people who have chosen to exist outside it are
not because they chose to, but because they haven't made
it there yet. And of course Scott problematized that suggests
it maybe it's a choice, not a failure to accede
(02:53):
to that civilization. And it's a concept that like young
Burmese fighters have goed.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
Back to me. I don't think they're aware of James C.
Speaker 4 (03:02):
Scott if I'm being honest, but they they will say
to me, like when, because when they left the cities
to live with the ethnic revolutionary organizations there, they had
always been told that the reason those people lived outside
of the Burmese state was because they were primitive, violent.
But then they came to live and fight alongside them,
and they were like, no, these are a family. They
(03:24):
were brothers and sisters and siblings, and like they want
the same thing as us, Like they're not primitive, they
just don't want the state. So I guess in that sense,
I would want to be labeled as primitive too. I
think the primitive people are doing cool shit and then
the civilized people are not.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Yeah. Yeah, I mean that's one of I think one
of the one during global binaries, one of the oldest.
You know, you'd hear that sign, that kind of juxtaposition
or civilized and primitive or civilized and barbarians. Yeah, you know,
in ancient role you see that distinction between the civilized
Roman citizens and the barberia and other.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
And in that instance, and in a lot of instances
as used as this ideological tool just a superiority, definitely.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (04:10):
Like I think we have to be really careful as
his story about these assumptions that we make. It'says we'll
have to make a lot of assumptions about revolutions too,
And I would wager that I've attended more revolutions and
many of my academic colleagues, and I think many of
those are grounded in the truths that people accept as
truths without ever testing them. And like, I think this
(04:31):
sort of civilized barbarian one, it's kind of the same
like that.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Yeah, it's a classic one. I mean, do you know
where the word barbaria and even comes from?
Speaker 3 (04:38):
Isn't it the language?
Speaker 4 (04:39):
Thing?
Speaker 3 (04:40):
Like, because I didn't speak is it Latin? They were
just going like bar Ba, is that right?
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Yeah, it's because of what you know, Rome did did
this all the time, where they just borrowed whole sale
from what the Greeks were doing. Yeah, so in Greek
Barbaros meant anyone who did not speak Greek. Okay, that's
the rum, and just kind of took that and expanded
as he to talk about anybody who wasn't on their
whole wave of urban planning and you know, coudified legal systems,
(05:07):
the philosophy, the education they are to all of that stuff.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Yeah, the Barbarians didn't have those those refinements, right, Yeah,
you know, but of course the relationship between the tours
is not so simple, right because the later on in
Roman history, as you'd know, Barbarians quote unquote, were incorporated
slowly into the state and became very useful armies and
(05:32):
a reserve full of labor and all these different things
for what Roman was trying to do with the expartnership.
Speaker 4 (05:37):
Yeah, and luckily contemporary American right has been very normal
about that and it isn't using that for like it's
sort of eugenic eugenic agenda right.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Now, yeah, very very much eugenics vibes these days.
Speaker 4 (05:50):
Yeah, where my father lives is right on the border
between England and Scotland and you can visit Hadrian's Wall.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
I rode my bike all along it a couple of
years ago.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Oh ask.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (06:01):
It's like a fun edge of empire kind of thought experiment,
like you beyond this line of the barbarians or uncivilized
people today, it's like unremarkable, you know, like like it's
literally it.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
It keeps some people sheep in their fields at points
along like.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
A yeah, yeah, exactly, Yeah, like some stones kind of
piled on top of each other and it's kind of
an unremarkable novelty. But it's funny to think that at
one point there was this binary world, right, and they
felt that they the outside was so dangerous to them
that they had to provide a physical barrier, something we're
(06:37):
still doing.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
Indeed, and as we're speaking of walls, by the way,
this reminds me of another major empire where this sort
of dichotomy was a curtain. You know, it wasn't just
taking place in the Mediterranean build you had and of
course ancient China, this whole identity constructed around these moral
and cultural and political ideals. Had the whole Confucianism Taoism
(07:02):
a legalist thought or shape and what it meant to be,
you know, conducting yourself properly and in a civilized manner.
And so those who did not ascribe to those ideals
would have been people who were labeled barbarians.
Speaker 3 (07:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Often the people on the other side of the Great Wall.
Speaker 4 (07:19):
Yeah we are the United States is literally doing the
exact same thing, right, Like it's we're building a giant
wall and labeling other ring the people on the other
side of it.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Yeah, you definitely see the genealogy there. Yeah, but I
think there's a closer genealogy we could draw upon for
that particular reference though, which is how later European empires
would appropriate the Roman civilized barbarian binary to justify their assimilation,
extermination and colonialism.
Speaker 4 (07:50):
Definitely one of the things I like to do, even
with you know, the United States and it's in formal empire, right,
Like I love to show my students cartoons, like political cartoons,
like there's one of the White Man's Burden, which like
distill you know, sometimes the patriots worth a thousand words,
(08:11):
but it distills that whole binary so well in a
way that seems like repugnant to most of my students today.
I guess, I don't know, maybe maybe folks are moving
back that way, but like the imagery and the distinction
between the way or even like Lewis and Clark when
they're addressing the indigenous people they meet and calling them children,
(08:34):
right like like this this binary distinction is so it's
so apparent, and like, I don't know, it seems so outlandish,
I think to most folks today maybe, But then we
do similar things, I guess in uh, you know it
just in a slightly more subtle way sometimes.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Yeah, exactly. I mean when you look at what was
taking place with the Enlightenment and that whole developments of
this particular order, it steeped in these particular values with
the European culture was the ideal standard, and everything that
did not measure up to that standard was barbarical, primative.
It's just that has never really gone away, you know,
(09:14):
and it continues to be used to justify the domination
of Western powers, particularly in the way that they've instilled
these European norms and practices across the world. When it
comes to things like relation to the land when it
comes to things like the divisions between people, between genders,
(09:35):
all these things, all these attitudes that are now so widespread,
originated from in part, this elevation of one above the other.
And speaking of I mentioned the word western there, and
that's really another way that we've sort of maintained this
(09:56):
binary in a different court of paint. It's not quite
the same. So there's this sort of lingering framework of
the notion of the East and the West. Right in
the ancient times, it was China versus Rome. These days
it's probably China versus America. Yeah, China really is that old?
Speaker 3 (10:19):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (10:19):
Yeah, yeah, And okay, this is probably a very probably
very gen z reference for me to make. But I
don't know if you've seen these edits circulated on social
media of the Chinese president Chi chen Ping going like
buzzer Beijing, and there's like a whole bunch of like
(10:40):
skyscrapers and like like hardcore like electronic music edited to
show like all these advanced ones, and people in the
comments are saying things like be China do nothing win.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
I I have not seen those.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Yeah, yeah, that's definitely dating me a little bit in
terms of my social media diet. But yeah, just seeing
the dynamic between China, or between the East and the West,
the Orient and the occident, to use an older term,
it's just another way that we've created this sort of
(11:17):
boundary between people that either on one side or the other,
there's a necessary tension between the two. You know. This
concept of the orient and Orientalism is something that it
would side identified famously as something that was constructed by
the West as an exotic, irrational, decadent, and dangerous place.
(11:40):
And so that whole dualistic narrative was then put into
the imperial project to Legitimizeie domination and to position the
East as a passive subject without a voice of their
own and constant need of Western intervention and guidance. So
this West becomes this sort of stage for modernity and
science and region and progress, this whole idea of the
(12:01):
protagonist of history and the orients the East. They're the primitive,
I guess side of that binary. Although unlike the civilized
primitive binary or civilized barbarian binary of old I think
while there could have been racial components to it in
the past, this one is more explicitly racial and geographic
(12:24):
in its division, because I mean in ancient room, anybody
could essentially become a Roman citizen. You know, it wasn't
necessarily racially, you know, pure area and sense that a
lot of new Nazis and stuff today like to look
back at that period as you had a quieter diversity
of phenotypes in the Roman Empire. Yeah, but you know,
(12:47):
when you come to this orient and occident dichotomy, it's
very much racialized. You know, a lot of times when
people talk about the Western world, it really tends to
be I guess a more politically correct way of saying
the white wood. Yes, at least in my observation.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
Yeah, yeah, definitely, that's often the subtext.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Because I mean that's something I've always struggled with pinning
down right, because why isn't Brazil considered part of the West?
You know, why isn't Mexico considered part of the West?
Speaker 3 (13:15):
Right? What are we west of? Like?
Speaker 4 (13:18):
Like what it's not even it's not the western hemisphere
like as you say.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Yeah, I mean Western say is more straightforward, but is
it because there are too many colored people? Yeah, in
Mexico and in Brazil.
Speaker 4 (13:30):
It seems to be right, Like it's not even countries
strongly either from Western Europe was strongly impacted by settler
colonialism from Western Europe, because the entirety of Latin America
is impact.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
And they should be included, but they're not.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
That they're not.
Speaker 4 (13:45):
Yeah, yeah, and it yeah, it's I've always struggled with
that one, other than get neoliberal capitalists white countries, it's
it's what people don't want to say.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
And Japan sometimes yeah, yeah, Japan, strangely enough, yeah, yeah,
an member of the club.
Speaker 4 (14:03):
Yeah, or like sometimes also not Spain. This is a
particular like bug Bury guess of Spanish history.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Really, I don't think I've seen that one.
Speaker 4 (14:10):
Yeah, for years, like literally you would be excluded from
European history, like like Africa starts at the Pyrenees.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
It's a sort of phrase that that's hilarious.
Speaker 4 (14:21):
Yeah, Like I guess it compounded because Spain was so
isolated under Franco. Right, but like yeah, this they called
it the black legend that like Spain does not belong
to Europe and and it's not again it's racialized, right,
it's because Spain had this exchange with the Muslim world, right,
and like that that culture deeply impacted Spanish culture, and
(14:43):
even after the Conquista, it's like it's like, you know,
the French historians were just like, nah, you guys are tainted,
like you you don't get to come back.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
It's kind of a similar sitribution with the territories the
former Artsman Empire as well, technically part to Europe and
yet you know, maligned in some way. Yeah, yeah, a
little less than Still, it's like y'all have too much,
too much Turkish to watch Muslim influence.
Speaker 4 (15:11):
You'all got a Yeah, you need like a thousand years
to decompress before we let you back in.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Yeah. I mean, honestly, if the Pope wasn't based in Italy,
I'm sure Italy would have a similar dynamic. I mean,
Italy is a recent construction right in terms of as
a country. Ye, but only look at the two Sicilies,
for example, that was under North African rule for a
significant period of its history. But let me not get
(15:49):
too far off track. One day. One more tangent, and
that is I'm far from being a dentist by any means,
or a maurist or anything of that show. But there
is something to be said for the way that the
East of the Orient has been sidelined, marginalized to treat
(16:12):
it us lesser than for so long, and now they're
at a point where their geopolitical sway has to be respected. Yeah,
I'm not a rooting for them by any means. I'm
not one of those people is like, yeah, multipolar world.
I would rather we have no poles, you know, as
an anarchist.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
Yeah, yeah, I do know what you mean.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
But it's like it's a bit of shodding for it,
I guess.
Speaker 4 (16:37):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is, you know, ironic in a
but yeah, not necessarily in a good way. Like I've
just seen Jijienping meeting with Minan Plang, the dictator of
me and mar today, and I'm like, I'm not excited
for that pole of the world.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
Not at all, not at all. Yeah. I feel the
same way about the way that the Sahel Federation has
kind of kicked out France. I'm like, yeah, stickets of France,
but also military hunters, you.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
Know, yeah, yeah, like the rebranded Wagner Core now.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Like yeah, and the collaboration close collaborations Russia. But you know,
a lot of this thing is really a lot of
these relationships, these geopidical relationships are so opportunistic. It's all
opportunists on yeah, end of the day, they don't really
they're not really necessarily guided by principles.
Speaker 4 (17:31):
Yeah, Like the difference I guess between like, for instance,
I you know, I've been thinking a lot about anarchist
at war, right, and people go and fight in other
people's to depend other people, right, like like the people
who went to Rajava to fight, people who went to
Miama to fight. Like there's a difference between doing something
out of a sense of solidarity and doing something out
of root opportunism, and like that always shows itself in
(17:53):
the end.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
Yeah, I mean the work groups of involvement in Africa
is the most blatant capitalist tra vun opportunism.
Speaker 4 (18:03):
These people are not there for the anti colonials that
are like standing with the oppressed peoples of the world. Yeah, yeah,
like watching the Battle of Algiers and setting off to
immediately liberate the people of.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
Africa literal mercenaries, right yeah. Yeah, But getting back onto
the main topic, talking about all these ways we divvy
up the world. Out of the linguistic and cultural and
geographical differences that we observe around us, came this concept
of nations, right, nation as an idea also came out
(18:38):
of the European imagine nation. It's commonly defined and it's
USA worldwide today, But it's commonly defined as a large
community of people who share common identity, often through language, culture, history,
and sometimes ethnicity, then who usually inhabit a specific geographic
territory with its own political organization. The comminations without states
(18:58):
as simply a culturalmmunity force. People feel a collective long
and then share that snee. But nations are as we know,
mostly tied up with states today, hence nation being used
as a synonym for country.
Speaker 3 (19:10):
Yeah, this is one of my bug bears.
Speaker 4 (19:13):
I guess is an academic like I tried to develop
this concept of Catalan nationalism that like at the time
was inherently anti fascist. I think I was trying to
be like, it ain't now like this it's a very
Catalan right now. And yeah, I do still find it
hard when people say nation is the the state, especially Americans, Like,
(19:33):
it's very hard, right because state is like a subset
of the state here, like the sort of military division
of the federal state. So it can be hard to
explain those differences.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
And as you mentioned, this sort of way that that
Catalan nationalism has shifted. Really, I think gets to the
whole weakness of the nation idea. So Benick Anderson famously
called nations imaginedmmunities because the community exists as a collective fantasy.
(20:04):
You know, they imagine a deep comradeship with people who
they've never met. Yeah, and this fantasy has boundaries not
just about who is included, but also famously who is excluded.
And this fantasy is not necessarily something that is automatic
or natural as we tend to see it today. But
it's really the rise of things like print capitalism, with
(20:25):
the mass production of books and newspapers, and that's what
really shaped the standardization and formalization of these imagined communities,
through the creation of like common cultural reference and a
shared sense of history. Yeah. And then of course you
had the nation idea of further being developed by liberal
(20:46):
revolutions and through the shared experience of colonial rule. You know,
we're subject populations with mobilized nationalism to claim self determination.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
Yeah, definitely like it.
Speaker 4 (20:58):
I'm sure I'm trying to remember borrowed this from someone,
but the idea of like identity entrepreneurs is what I like.
Like it's when religion loses its claim on universal truth,
specifically in Europe. That's like a market for identity that
is open. And the creation of nations is like, to
(21:18):
my mind, like a bourgeois project, right Like, it's an
entrepreneurial endeavor that they seek to create something, a benefit
from it and like it. Yet to a degree that
turned against them, it's still an entrepreneurial endeavor, right Like. Still,
you could be creating a nation which wants to kick
France out of Morocco, right that that nation may not
(21:40):
have space for everyone who inhabits that territory of Morocco.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
Like, it's still it's a sort of for some people.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
Construct absolutely absolutely, I think the elite intellectual current of
a nationalist movements can go under stated. You know, oftentimes
what stirs up the masses toward that specific direction, because
I mean, the masses will revolt against their conditions, but
what sort of directs it in that national independence direction?
(22:09):
And this concept of nation is tends to be that
sort of you lead into actual current. I often look
at the history of and Tobago as a reference point.
See that's where I come from. The whole process of
nation building is always ongoing, and we are in a
position where there's an effort, there's a very strong efforts
to both push for a nation building but also recognize
(22:32):
our divergent pasts, you know, because we have this sort
of almost equal in population Indo Trinadian and Afro Trianadian populations,
and then a mixed population as well, and then you
have some Chinese and Syria and Lebanese and Venezuela and
and Filipino and all these different groups come into Trinidad,
and because of that colonial past, their tensions is between
(22:56):
those groups and things are still play out to this day.
But while tensions are played out, there's also an effort
to construct a unity through an allegiance to the nation
of Trinan Tobago to create a sense of national identity,
and as a very young country, it's still quite difficult
to do. I can imagine, especially in the United States,
(23:19):
it might have been a similar situation where you have
all these different European populations and different populations from around
the world who are in the US and there hasn't
quite yet been a fully built up American identity yet,
and so a lot of those tensions are still kind
of playing out, and so it takes a couple of
generations for there to be a sense of American identity
(23:39):
that arises out of that. Yeah, definitely turnedad being one
a younger colony and two only recently becoming independent in
nineteen sixty two, it hasn't had enough time yet to,
I suppose, develop that patriotism that America is so known for.
And so you still see a lot of people who
continue to have allegiance to the ancestry, to the heritage,
(24:03):
even before they have any sort of sense of connection
to the country. Concept of truingad.
Speaker 4 (24:09):
Yeah, the American would have interesting because the people who
did the American Revolution might often call themselves English right like.
And it's this kind of post hoc nationalism that has applied,
right like, they did begin constructing a nation, but after
they after they gained the apparatus of the state, right like.
(24:30):
And sometimes they'll talk about their freedoms in terms of
English freedoms, which they themselves are not granted, right that
they don't have the same freedoms as English people in
England when they are a British colony. This concept of
freedom they will elucidate like it, and like so much
of it is based on like English common law, right,
they didn't necessarily see themselves as distinct. That comes later.
(24:51):
And like the US one is interesting because they have
to develop this kind of civic nationalism much. I guess
France does that two of course, but like France, probably
the og there. But like this idea, like you've subscribed
to these ideas. Therefore you're an American because they're like this,
this nation constructed by people from all over Europe. For
(25:13):
the most part, the phrasing is universal, but the implementation
is not. Right, it's also a country where people own
other people.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Yeah, yeah, I think I mean, like I was saying earlier,
it does help in our struggle for autonomy and independence
from cluding on rule to have this construct the nation, right,
but it also obscures a lot of the real material
divisions in society, you know between the with in class
and the elites. And so you have this national identity
(25:42):
that is constructed by intellectual and you know, economic elites,
and it's overlaid onto a population that does not really
have us see in that construction. And so these nationalist
projects will try to downplay or suppress differences in conflicts
and as part of why nationalism so often lends itself
(26:06):
to fascist well, because fascism is an outgrowth of this
idea of nation where they promote this vision of national
unity and stifle class conflict and create a collusion of
classes that push us aside of people who don't fit
within their concept of the nation.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (26:26):
Yeah, I often think, like when I'm talking to my
undergrads about nation, like the most distinct where I can say,
is like the salient we through both space and time, right,
Like it's the people you identify with, it's the us,
And fascism weaponizes us against the rest of humanity or
against us mostly like against escapegoat group who become them, right,
(26:48):
and then like the nation is for us, the state
is for us, it's not for them. Thus they must
be exterminated exactly. Is an obvious outgrowth of nationalism.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Hence xenophobia, hence anti semitism, anti blackness, anti indigeneity, all
these prejudices. I mean, And that's the thing about nationalism.
It's not necessarily consistent because you'll say, all people from
this land, you know, we should desay to be united,
except for those people who are also from this land.
They don't get to come, you know, they are perpetual outsiders.
(27:21):
They don't share the true culture. They'ren't part of our destiny.
So even if they're legally citizens or legally a long
term residents, or they haven't residents there for a long
time the entire lives generations, or if the case may be,
they don't count. They're outside forever.
Speaker 4 (27:37):
Yeah, yeah, they can never assent to like a sort
of higher status of being one of us. British people
like to mobilize this one a lot, right, Like you
can be British.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
But you can never be English.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (27:51):
I forget who coined that coined the phrase cricket nationalism,
but it's just particularly kind of ridiculous, Like, oh, if
if there's a Test match between Britain and Pakistan and
Britain and Trinidad Tobago, who do you support? Like is that,
like are you really going to make that the core
of your national identity? Like the cene qua non of
being British is like which flag you take to the
(28:15):
cricket match, Like it's particularly ridiculous and if it doesn't
reflect exclusion, right, people aren't taking their flags to the
cricket match because like that's the core of the entity.
They're just like, yeah, well kind of I get treated
differently because of my ethnic boundary, like makeup right ethnic presentation.
(28:35):
So I guess you guys don't like me, so like
they'll be funny when we kick your ass cricket, like
it's the cause of arrow points in the wrong direction.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
I guess I can imagine I will not be bringing
any flags to any cricket match because I don't attend
cricket matches. I'm not too big of a fan of cricket.
Speaker 3 (28:55):
I can't be doing it.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
Stick to my football, and I say football in the
international sense.
Speaker 4 (29:00):
Good, yeah, yeah, I can't stand around long enough to
play cricket, to be honest.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
As we're talking about national liberation, these struggles often took
place in the context of the Cold War, right, which
is where we get this other sense of this other
framework for divving up the world now. Growing up, I
was always told that, you know, tran Tobago is a
third World country. I had a social studies textbook, and
I taught first world, second world, third world. But I
(29:26):
didn't teach first world, second world, third world in the
context of the Cold War, because I grew up in
a post Cold War world, and these terms came from
the Cool War but persisted after the Cold War. So
what happened, I was taught we are third world because
we are still developing. We're not at that intermediate stage
development where we could say that the second world, and
(29:47):
we're not at that first world level of development like America, right,
And that's a smaller side for me. But I've always
found it mildly irritating when I see people use this
famous social media catchphrase or America is a third World
country in a Gucci belt.
Speaker 3 (30:08):
I haven't seen now on the yet. That's annoying.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
I'm sure you've seen similar sentiments, this idea, Oh, America's
third world, American slid world.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
Yeah, I have.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
Like, it's just annoying to me yet. So one, it
completely divorces the concert of the third world from its
actual origins and to it. Also, I think reflects that
kind of a blindness to what's happened in the rest
of the world, in the countries that are actually considered
the third world, and the difference is between them, you know,
for everything that we can express frustrations about in the US,
(30:40):
anybody in the third world, I think, and I've when
I when I've visited the US. I've seen it from
my own eyes. You know, there's still things there that
Americans might take for granted that are just not that
would never be taken for granted in other contexts. And
I see, of course the division see in America's version
(31:01):
of the First World versus you know, some of the
European Social Democracy's version of the First World. So I
get that frustration, you know, the lack of free health
care and that kind of thing, investment in infrastructure and
all that. But let me just get into the background
behind the tomb. Right as we step into the Cool War,
(31:29):
you have this concept of the three world model that
came after World War Two. The pre war status cool
was over and you had new conflicts on the horizon.
And so the film First World originally described the capitalist
block led by the United States and Western Europe, where
capitalist markets, liberal democracy, and economic progress was celebrated. And
(31:52):
then you had the Second World block, which referred to
the communist bloc led by the Soviet Union, where what
I would consider state and centrally planned economies shape their societies.
So in the First World they had countries like the US, Australia,
Africa today might be shocking you know, Iran was even
considered part of the First World Block during the Cool War.
(32:16):
That might be shockinged now because when we think of
some of these countries like, oh, those are Third World countries.
Those are undeveloped countries. They aren't at the developed level
of the West yet. But in the context in which
the three World model originated, these were countries that explicitly
aligned themselves with the policies of the United States and
its allies as capitalist nations against the Soviet Bloc. And
(32:40):
the Soviet Bloc you had, of course, countries like China
and Vietnam, Laos, Ethiopia, Yemen, Huba, all these different countries
align themselves explicitly with the Soviet Union. Then the Third
World and where the third will concept came in was
with all the countries that stood against picking aside. Yeah,
(33:05):
a lot of these were former colonies and nations that
chose not to side completely with either and to this
whole concept, this whole idea of the non aligned movement.
It really kicked off thanks to the joining of the
Indian Prime Minister, the Kenaian President, the Indonesian President, and
the President of the United Arab Republic alongside Yugoslavia, and
(33:27):
so all these countries who all had very different economic
arrange ones. Yugoslavia famously was kind of doing its own thing,
compared to a lot of the other countries associated with socialism,
India and Ghana, they were also kind of doing their
own thing, kind of a mix Trancebagos also considered part
of the non aligned movement. And so these classifications at
(33:52):
the time, these were geopolitical and all political ideologies, not
necessarily economic development. So technically speaking, the term shouldn't even
be relevant US today. I mean, the Cold War of
the twentieth century is over. But over time the narrative
began to twist. You know, so because you didn't pick
a side, you didn't pick the red team or the
(34:12):
blue team, you didn't pick the first will of the
Second World, this narrative developed where or you didn't pick
a side, you're politically independent, so you're poor, you're chaotic,
you're a failed state, all these different things. And of
course there were incidents in part influenced of course by
state actors in the US and state actors in the
(34:33):
Soviet client block would have contributed to this outcome. But
over time you get this sense of or the third
world is failure. All these states were trying different paths
of development, different approaches to governance from either of the
two camps, mixed hybrid approaches, but in the end this
(34:54):
just got them stuck with the label of underdevelopment and
at having them being seen as last. Now today people
don't use food world as much as they use developing,
at least in you know, the more above board discourse.
But that division also has its own implications, right, the
(35:14):
developed countries versus the developing countries. It's kind of a
softer sorts of version of the same thing.
Speaker 3 (35:21):
Yeah, it's kind of gentler, Yeah, the same shit.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
What those terms do implicitly, it's like, you know what,
you're fish in water, so you can't recognize water. It's
hard to recognize these things, these ideological impulses when we're
submerged in them. If you take a step back, you realize, oh,
these terms developed and developing they have very heavy implications.
And the implication is that there's a single linear path
(35:47):
to progress modeled after Western capitalism, that all societies are
progressing towards through industrialization, through consumerism, through the ALMIGHTYGP growth
and so development of your your underdevelopment becomes a tool
of intervention. It becomes a way to mask imperial interests
with the sort of the nair of oh, we're just
(36:08):
kind of helping you out.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
You know.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
It's like we move from your savage you're a primitive,
so you're just not developed yet. But theory will help
you out. And that's how you get the whole sort
of IMF and World Bank introductions of models of debts
and policy conditions and metrics and all these different things
to sort of shape these countries into client states, states
(36:33):
that can be used to further Western development. The Cold
War is technically over now, as I said, so I
suppose we've reached the end of history, as the famous
saying goes, but not exactly. In the early nineteen nineties,
Samuel Huntington came up with a thesis to explain the
(36:54):
conflicts that we define the post Cold War world and
as we entered into the twenty fifth century, and so
he argued that the future of global conflict would not
be defined by competing ideologies or economic systems, but by
cultural fault lines. In his nineteen ninety three article in
Foreign Affairs, which Lates expanded into his nineteen ninety six
book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the
(37:16):
World Order, Huntington predicted that the primary source of conflict
in a new era would be between distinct civilizations. His
model would have pointed to clashes between the West and
other groups Islamic nations, the Confucian East, and of course
set up this sense that the West is this pinnacle
of rationality and modernity, and all these others are in
competition with the fantastic, amazing West. And I always like
(37:40):
to call out some of these strange ways that he
has divided the world. Right, So sub Saharan Africa is
all grouped up into the African camp, all of North Africa,
the Middle East, into West Asia, all of that is
considered part of the Islamic civilization. Forget all the different
between any of them. By the way, Indonesia it's also
(38:02):
part of the Islamic block. You have the Sinic or
the Confucian block that includes China, both Koreas, Taiwan, and Vietnam,
except for the parts of China that are under the
Buddhist camp, such as Tibet. So Tibet is kind of
carved up on its own as its own camp. Mongolia
(38:23):
is also under the Buddhist camp. Thailand and all these
others in Southeast Asia considered part of the Buddhist camp.
Speaker 3 (38:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (38:31):
And then you have the Latin American block, which is
everybody part of Latin America and even people who are
not technically Latin America and are kind of swept in there.
And I'm going to be a by the base of
the map that I saw on the Wikipedia article on
this subject.
Speaker 3 (38:45):
Ye, I found that map.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
Now, it's some very bizarre divisions and ways to cut
up this world. They have the Western world versus the
Orthodox world, which includes Kazakhstan and Greece and Ukraine and
Russia all under that civilizational banner. Yeah. The Philippines is
(39:06):
somehow part Islamic, part Western, and part Sinic. It's a
very unusual blend.
Speaker 3 (39:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (39:14):
And then he's just got like Japan it's just hanging
out there by itself.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, especially pan It's kind
of it's a one thing. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (39:23):
It just literally says Japanese. I've forgotten about that. And
then he goes on to freak out about like the
like Latin world as he sees it, like fucking dividing
the United States, right, Like in his his is it
called like who we are or where we are or something?
His book about migration in the United States. M it
(39:44):
was after clash of civilizations he wrote this book about
like how the like I think I don't quite remember
how he terms it, Like does he use Latino or
Hispanic or something else, but like that that that population
increasing in the United States will like divide the to
day too, too fundamentally opposed civilizations.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
Yeah, yeah, he has some interesting compulsions. Yeah, and unfortunately
his thesis found its voice following the events of nine
to eleven partitions and media. These people were taking his
ideas to kind of justify the war and terror that
would unfold. It also creates sort of cultural device that
(40:27):
settle into place at home will not create, but shape
those cultural divides as you create the sense of oh,
if there's if we're experiencing a clash of civilizations right now,
then this flood couldn't quote of people from another civilization
is a threat to the invasion. It's something that needs
to be targeted and fought against. And so in a sense,
(40:49):
his class civilizations is kind of a repackaging of a
lot of the binaries and divisions we've spoken about before.
You have elements of nationalism, you have elements of civilized
versus warber, the evelements of East and West, the Cold
War dichotomies. All of that kind of comes together in
this neat package. Finally, we enter the twenty first century,
(41:12):
and they are two very popular ways that we now
categorize the world. People tend to use the phrases Global
North and Global South as a softer or more politically
correct alternative to develop developing or foods in third world.
It's considered less loaded, more neutral sounding, and it's originally
popularized via UN frameworks and the brand line, which is
(41:35):
done in nineteen eighty, which drew a literal line across
the globe, separating the wealthier North from the poorer South.
To be clear, though, despite the geographical language, it's not
literally about hemispheres. Australia is considered part of the Global
North and Mongolia is considered part of the Global South.
But generally speak in the global salth refus to the
(41:55):
post Coulnar regions and the global North refus the wealthy,
industrialized trees of the world. To me, again, it's not
really a flawless framework. It has all the same binaries
and smoothing over of complexities of internal class divides between
for example, ritually it's in the global South and poor
communities in the North. It gives impression that entire countries
(42:18):
share unified class experience, I think. I think it also
has the potential to obscure inequality between South South relations.
So yes, two countries may both be a part of
the Global South, but there could be a massive power
differential between them that you know, sets them up for
interventions and equal treaties and also sort of different sorts
(42:41):
of medline. For example, Saudi Arabia, at least in one
map that I saw, is considered part of the Global South.
But as we know, Saudi Arabia is famous first medland
across Africa and the Middle East. It's interventions, it's financing
of the conflicts across the region. Now I get why
(43:04):
the term is used. It creates a sense of shared struggle,
especially in anti imperialist and climate justice spaces. But I
think it has weaknesses, you know, and how we constructlidarity.
Speaker 3 (43:15):
On that basis, yeah, very much too.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
Yeah. And the other and final system that I wanted
to mention that has gained popularity these days. Is world
systems theory, which is actually older than class civilizations. It
came out of Immanuel Wallastein's work during the Cold War,
and he kind of stood out and said that he
was rejecting the three world system and the simplistic country
by country development models. Instead he created this world systems
(43:41):
theory that saw capitalism as a single global system, not
a patchwork of individual national economies. So the focuses on
labor roles, on commodity flows, and on power concentration. And
I think in an even more globalized world it makes
the most sense to the wallaceteine. They have three differ
and zones of the global economy. You have the core,
(44:03):
which as you know, have strong states, financial capital, tech
heavy industries controlled with global institutions, and they tend to
exploit the labor and resources of the periphery, while exports
and high value goods and debt structures, and the periphery
of the countries that tend to have weaker institutions, extractive
or career economies, reliance and export and raw materials, debt
(44:27):
defendency and structural adjustment policies, and they often dump in
grounds for pollution waste and arms from the global North.
The semi periphery are then considered under his model, the
countries that mediates between the core and the periphery. These
are industrializing economies with mixed labor and capital exports. They
sometimes exploit others while being exploited themselves, and these include
(44:50):
countries like Brazil, India, Mexico, Turkey, and South Africa. And
they tend to save as the buffers as stabilize the
system while chasing core status. I think this model is
very dynamic. It could be more dynamic, but it does
have the capacity to highlight the systemic interdependence of this
glocal system, that one region's wealth is contingent on another's dispossession.
(45:16):
It makes it very useful for understanding that, you know,
poverty is not something that just happens, it's nan is
very clearly structured and developed by the wealth of the North.
And I think also with the corporate free model, you
see the sense of a one way flow where value
and labor goes from the periphery to the core. But
(45:36):
there is another direction that flow goes right because the
migrants from the periphree they go to the core. They
fill precurious rules and core economy is like care work
and agriculture and logistics, and so they almost become an
important periphery within the core, and their absence from the
periphree also deprives the periphree. Hence the phenomenon of brain drain,
(45:59):
where people are sipher the way as label and the
and the educated population tends to leave, you know, their
countries of origin. But I'm saying it's not just a
one way flow, because you also have that sense of
diaspora and diasporic networks that kind of reverse the flow.
Remittances for some countries can be a significant chunk of
their national income. I think the Philippines is a classic
(46:22):
example of this. Some of the Caribbean countries, either historically
or presently, we're very dependent on remittances from their diasporic
populations sending money back home. Lebanon is another example of
Salvador is another example. They become a key part of
the national GDP. That sort of relationship of my creatia. Yeah,
(46:44):
but I think what I want to do with this
corporate free model or this corefree SEMIPI free model is
expanded and one of the ways that I found very
useful to do so comes from fellow podcaster shout out
to Elia j Ayube. Yeah, I read it. Article of
is that was on the anarchist libraries called the periphery
(47:04):
has no time for binaries. This very crucial point, and
I quote, we are as peripheral to the global soult
regimes crushing us as they are perceived to be by
the Western think tanks and foreign ministers who view their
imagined space as the center of the world. China and
Russia and Iran are peripheral to the West, and any
and all activists in China and Russia and Iran are
(47:26):
peripheral to their governments. So I kind of like this
sense of not just looking on the country level, but
looking at particular populations, populations within countries the relationships between them,
bringing in that class dynamic Yeah, routine populations more prominently.
Speaker 4 (47:42):
Yeah, Like if you look at the like the example
I'm familiar with, relate like the Cold We could look
at Kurdistan or Mienma, right, there are ethnic groups within
that country that are subject to colonialism by the core
groups within that country, right, like asad Arab belt for
the Bama majority, using classic colonial divide and rule tactics
(48:04):
right now against the hinder in the MMR. And like,
I think it doesn't make sense to see that whole
country is peripheral, right, Like that binary doesn't function when
like the salient colonial violence happening, especially in the MMA,
is happening within the ANMA, but it doesn't make any
less salient. And like the experience in colonialism is still violent.
(48:29):
And if we only use this state level binary, we
will totally miss.
Speaker 2 (48:35):
That exactly exactly, And I think it's important to be clear.
Obviously I've rejected a lot of these frameworks in covering them.
You won't see me using the civilized primitive binary anytime soon.
But some of these concepts can be useful. You know.
They do shape the way that we view the world,
(48:55):
how we see ourselves the imperfect, of course, but because
they're trying to map on reality and reality is a
shifting beast. But I think it's good to have some
sense of or some language to understand the inequality and
podynamics present in the world. So we can reclaim these
free mooks, so we can reject them. You know, we
could use them for solidarity or for division. But the
(49:17):
question I want to leave us with the wrap of
this episode is how do we build a world where
these divisions are no longer descriptive or relevant? And that's
all I have for today? Or power to all the people. Peace.
Speaker 1 (49:36):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
All the media.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Hello, and welcome to it could happen here. I'm here
once again.
Speaker 3 (00:09):
With it's James again.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Free to talk to you again, James.
Speaker 3 (00:13):
Yeah, likewise glad to be here.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
You know, I spend a lot of time thinking about
the world and how it works and all that jazz,
and I assume you do as well.
Speaker 4 (00:22):
I do, yeah, yeah, increasingly worrying about the word.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Yeah, this place, this home is quite the puzzle. And
much like a puzzle, it has been carved up and
divided in so many different ways, sliced, labeled, ranked, and
measured from all kinds of different angles. And that's really
what I'm interested in talking about today, the different ways
that we try to explain the differences we see on
(00:48):
the global stage. So going from the concept of civilized
and primitive, to the East and West binary, to the
imagined communities called nations, the clash of quote unquoteizations, to
the concept of first, second, and third worlds, to the
development spectrum, to the global North and global cell, then
finally to the core and the periphery. So we have
(01:09):
a lot of ground to cover in this episode.
Speaker 4 (01:11):
Yeah, I really like this stuff, like as a historian,
like we're always kind of forced into certain divisions, right,
Like even when you apply to you with your funding, right,
like you're normally in like a geographical area, or like
you're trying to shoehorn something that's just interesting into one
(01:32):
of these boxes that gets funding. And I think like
often that impacts like how we see the world, So
we have to write with that goal.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Absolutely, absolutely, I find the way that we approach the
telling of history so fascinating And in another life maybe
I would have been a historian.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
I never I can recommend it. Yeah, yeah, it's I
enjoy the doing of history. It's the doing of academia
that I don't enjoy so much.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
So I suppose as historian, I'm going to ask you
a discomforting question. Great, would you consider yourself civilized or primitive?
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (02:08):
That's a fun one.
Speaker 4 (02:11):
I don't know, Like, I don't like that binary because
I think it's it's a value statement, right, And I think,
like James Scott talks about this, Actually, this is a
really interesting I've had this. James Scott right talks about
the idea of people who exist outside of the state
being labeled as primitive by the state. It's in the
(02:31):
art of not being governed, and that that's the sort
of the narrative there. The inherent message is that the
state is the final and superior form of human organizing
and people who have chosen to exist outside it are
not because they chose to, but because they haven't made
it there yet. And of course Scott problematized that suggests
it maybe it's a choice, not a failure to accede
(02:53):
to that civilization. And it's a concept that like young
Burmese fighters have goed.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
Back to me. I don't think they're aware of James C.
Speaker 4 (03:02):
Scott if I'm being honest, but they they will say
to me, like when, because when they left the cities
to live with the ethnic revolutionary organizations there, they had
always been told that the reason those people lived outside
of the Burmese state was because they were primitive, violent.
But then they came to live and fight alongside them,
and they were like, no, these are a family. They
(03:24):
were brothers and sisters and siblings, and like they want
the same thing as us, Like they're not primitive, they
just don't want the state. So I guess in that sense,
I would want to be labeled as primitive too. I
think the primitive people are doing cool shit and then
the civilized people are not.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Yeah. Yeah, I mean that's one of I think one
of the one during global binaries, one of the oldest.
You know, you'd hear that sign, that kind of juxtaposition
or civilized and primitive or civilized and barbarians. Yeah, you know,
in ancient role you see that distinction between the civilized
Roman citizens and the barberia and other.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
And in that instance, and in a lot of instances
as used as this ideological tool just a superiority, definitely.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (04:10):
Like I think we have to be really careful as
his story about these assumptions that we make. It'says we'll
have to make a lot of assumptions about revolutions too,
And I would wager that I've attended more revolutions and
many of my academic colleagues, and I think many of
those are grounded in the truths that people accept as
truths without ever testing them. And like, I think this
(04:31):
sort of civilized barbarian one, it's kind of the same
like that.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Yeah, it's a classic one. I mean, do you know
where the word barbaria and even comes from?
Speaker 3 (04:38):
Isn't it the language?
Speaker 4 (04:39):
Thing?
Speaker 3 (04:40):
Like, because I didn't speak is it Latin? They were
just going like bar Ba, is that right?
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Yeah, it's because of what you know, Rome did did
this all the time, where they just borrowed whole sale
from what the Greeks were doing. Yeah, so in Greek
Barbaros meant anyone who did not speak Greek. Okay, that's
the rum, and just kind of took that and expanded
as he to talk about anybody who wasn't on their
whole wave of urban planning and you know, coudified legal systems,
(05:07):
the philosophy, the education they are to all of that stuff.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Yeah, the Barbarians didn't have those those refinements, right, Yeah,
you know, but of course the relationship between the tours
is not so simple, right because the later on in
Roman history, as you'd know, Barbarians quote unquote, were incorporated
slowly into the state and became very useful armies and
(05:32):
a reserve full of labor and all these different things
for what Roman was trying to do with the expartnership.
Speaker 4 (05:37):
Yeah, and luckily contemporary American right has been very normal
about that and it isn't using that for like it's
sort of eugenic eugenic agenda right.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
Now, yeah, very very much eugenics vibes these days.
Speaker 4 (05:50):
Yeah, where my father lives is right on the border
between England and Scotland and you can visit Hadrian's Wall.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
I rode my bike all along it a couple of
years ago.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Oh ask.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (06:01):
It's like a fun edge of empire kind of thought experiment,
like you beyond this line of the barbarians or uncivilized
people today, it's like unremarkable, you know, like like it's
literally it.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
It keeps some people sheep in their fields at points
along like.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
A yeah, yeah, exactly, Yeah, like some stones kind of
piled on top of each other and it's kind of
an unremarkable novelty. But it's funny to think that at
one point there was this binary world, right, and they
felt that they the outside was so dangerous to them
that they had to provide a physical barrier, something we're
(06:37):
still doing.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
Indeed, and as we're speaking of walls, by the way,
this reminds me of another major empire where this sort
of dichotomy was a curtain. You know, it wasn't just
taking place in the Mediterranean build you had and of
course ancient China, this whole identity constructed around these moral
and cultural and political ideals. Had the whole Confucianism Taoism
(07:02):
a legalist thought or shape and what it meant to be,
you know, conducting yourself properly and in a civilized manner.
And so those who did not ascribe to those ideals
would have been people who were labeled barbarians.
Speaker 3 (07:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Often the people on the other side of the Great Wall.
Speaker 4 (07:19):
Yeah we are the United States is literally doing the
exact same thing, right, Like it's we're building a giant
wall and labeling other ring the people on the other
side of it.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Yeah, you definitely see the genealogy there. Yeah, but I
think there's a closer genealogy we could draw upon for
that particular reference though, which is how later European empires
would appropriate the Roman civilized barbarian binary to justify their assimilation,
extermination and colonialism.
Speaker 4 (07:50):
Definitely one of the things I like to do, even
with you know, the United States and it's in formal empire, right,
Like I love to show my students cartoons, like political cartoons,
like there's one of the White Man's Burden, which like
distill you know, sometimes the patriots worth a thousand words,
(08:11):
but it distills that whole binary so well in a
way that seems like repugnant to most of my students today.
I guess, I don't know, maybe maybe folks are moving
back that way, but like the imagery and the distinction
between the way or even like Lewis and Clark when
they're addressing the indigenous people they meet and calling them children,
(08:34):
right like like this this binary distinction is so it's
so apparent, and like, I don't know, it seems so outlandish,
I think to most folks today maybe, But then we
do similar things, I guess in uh, you know it
just in a slightly more subtle way sometimes.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Yeah, exactly. I mean when you look at what was
taking place with the Enlightenment and that whole developments of
this particular order, it steeped in these particular values with
the European culture was the ideal standard, and everything that
did not measure up to that standard was barbarical, primative.
It's just that has never really gone away, you know,
(09:14):
and it continues to be used to justify the domination
of Western powers, particularly in the way that they've instilled
these European norms and practices across the world. When it
comes to things like relation to the land when it
comes to things like the divisions between people, between genders,
(09:35):
all these things, all these attitudes that are now so widespread,
originated from in part, this elevation of one above the other.
And speaking of I mentioned the word western there, and
that's really another way that we've sort of maintained this
(09:56):
binary in a different court of paint. It's not quite
the same. So there's this sort of lingering framework of
the notion of the East and the West. Right in
the ancient times, it was China versus Rome. These days
it's probably China versus America. Yeah, China really is that old?
Speaker 3 (10:19):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (10:19):
Yeah, yeah, And okay, this is probably a very probably
very gen z reference for me to make. But I
don't know if you've seen these edits circulated on social
media of the Chinese president Chi chen Ping going like
buzzer Beijing, and there's like a whole bunch of like
(10:40):
skyscrapers and like like hardcore like electronic music edited to
show like all these advanced ones, and people in the
comments are saying things like be China do nothing win.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
I I have not seen those.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Yeah, yeah, that's definitely dating me a little bit in
terms of my social media diet. But yeah, just seeing
the dynamic between China, or between the East and the West,
the Orient and the occident, to use an older term,
it's just another way that we've created this sort of
(11:17):
boundary between people that either on one side or the other,
there's a necessary tension between the two. You know. This
concept of the orient and Orientalism is something that it
would side identified famously as something that was constructed by
the West as an exotic, irrational, decadent, and dangerous place.
(11:40):
And so that whole dualistic narrative was then put into
the imperial project to Legitimizeie domination and to position the
East as a passive subject without a voice of their
own and constant need of Western intervention and guidance. So
this West becomes this sort of stage for modernity and
science and region and progress, this whole idea of the
(12:01):
protagonist of history and the orients the East. They're the primitive,
I guess side of that binary. Although unlike the civilized
primitive binary or civilized barbarian binary of old I think
while there could have been racial components to it in
the past, this one is more explicitly racial and geographic
(12:24):
in its division, because I mean in ancient room, anybody
could essentially become a Roman citizen. You know, it wasn't
necessarily racially, you know, pure area and sense that a
lot of new Nazis and stuff today like to look
back at that period as you had a quieter diversity
of phenotypes in the Roman Empire. Yeah, but you know,
(12:47):
when you come to this orient and occident dichotomy, it's
very much racialized. You know, a lot of times when
people talk about the Western world, it really tends to
be I guess a more politically correct way of saying
the white wood. Yes, at least in my observation.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
Yeah, yeah, definitely, that's often the subtext.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Because I mean that's something I've always struggled with pinning
down right, because why isn't Brazil considered part of the West?
You know, why isn't Mexico considered part of the West?
Speaker 3 (13:15):
Right? What are we west of? Like?
Speaker 4 (13:18):
Like what it's not even it's not the western hemisphere
like as you say.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Yeah, I mean Western say is more straightforward, but is
it because there are too many colored people? Yeah, in
Mexico and in Brazil.
Speaker 4 (13:30):
It seems to be right, Like it's not even countries
strongly either from Western Europe was strongly impacted by settler
colonialism from Western Europe, because the entirety of Latin America
is impact.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
And they should be included, but they're not.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
That they're not.
Speaker 4 (13:45):
Yeah, yeah, and it yeah, it's I've always struggled with
that one, other than get neoliberal capitalists white countries, it's
it's what people don't want to say.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
And Japan sometimes yeah, yeah, Japan, strangely enough, yeah, yeah,
an member of the club.
Speaker 4 (14:03):
Yeah, or like sometimes also not Spain. This is a
particular like bug Bury guess of Spanish history.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Really, I don't think I've seen that one.
Speaker 4 (14:10):
Yeah, for years, like literally you would be excluded from
European history, like like Africa starts at the Pyrenees.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
It's a sort of phrase that that's hilarious.
Speaker 4 (14:21):
Yeah, Like I guess it compounded because Spain was so
isolated under Franco. Right, but like yeah, this they called
it the black legend that like Spain does not belong
to Europe and and it's not again it's racialized, right,
it's because Spain had this exchange with the Muslim world, right,
and like that that culture deeply impacted Spanish culture, and
(14:43):
even after the Conquista, it's like it's like, you know,
the French historians were just like, nah, you guys are tainted,
like you you don't get to come back.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
It's kind of a similar sitribution with the territories the
former Artsman Empire as well, technically part to Europe and
yet you know, maligned in some way. Yeah, yeah, a
little less than Still, it's like y'all have too much,
too much Turkish to watch Muslim influence.
Speaker 4 (15:11):
You'all got a Yeah, you need like a thousand years
to decompress before we let you back in.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Yeah. I mean, honestly, if the Pope wasn't based in Italy,
I'm sure Italy would have a similar dynamic. I mean,
Italy is a recent construction right in terms of as
a country. Ye, but only look at the two Sicilies,
for example, that was under North African rule for a
significant period of its history. But let me not get
(15:49):
too far off track. One day. One more tangent, and
that is I'm far from being a dentist by any means,
or a maurist or anything of that show. But there
is something to be said for the way that the
East of the Orient has been sidelined, marginalized to treat
(16:12):
it us lesser than for so long, and now they're
at a point where their geopolitical sway has to be respected. Yeah,
I'm not a rooting for them by any means. I'm
not one of those people is like, yeah, multipolar world.
I would rather we have no poles, you know, as
an anarchist.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
Yeah, yeah, I do know what you mean.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
But it's like it's a bit of shodding for it,
I guess.
Speaker 4 (16:37):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is, you know, ironic in a
but yeah, not necessarily in a good way. Like I've
just seen Jijienping meeting with Minan Plang, the dictator of
me and mar today, and I'm like, I'm not excited
for that pole of the world.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
Not at all, not at all. Yeah. I feel the
same way about the way that the Sahel Federation has
kind of kicked out France. I'm like, yeah, stickets of France,
but also military hunters, you.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
Know, yeah, yeah, like the rebranded Wagner Core now.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Like yeah, and the collaboration close collaborations Russia. But you know,
a lot of this thing is really a lot of
these relationships, these geopidical relationships are so opportunistic. It's all
opportunists on yeah, end of the day, they don't really
they're not really necessarily guided by principles.
Speaker 4 (17:31):
Yeah, Like the difference I guess between like, for instance,
I you know, I've been thinking a lot about anarchist
at war, right, and people go and fight in other
people's to depend other people, right, like like the people
who went to Rajava to fight, people who went to
Miama to fight. Like there's a difference between doing something
out of a sense of solidarity and doing something out
of root opportunism, and like that always shows itself in
(17:53):
the end.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
Yeah, I mean the work groups of involvement in Africa
is the most blatant capitalist tra vun opportunism.
Speaker 4 (18:03):
These people are not there for the anti colonials that
are like standing with the oppressed peoples of the world. Yeah, yeah,
like watching the Battle of Algiers and setting off to
immediately liberate the people of.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
Africa literal mercenaries, right yeah. Yeah, But getting back onto
the main topic, talking about all these ways we divvy
up the world. Out of the linguistic and cultural and
geographical differences that we observe around us, came this concept
of nations, right, nation as an idea also came out
(18:38):
of the European imagine nation. It's commonly defined and it's
USA worldwide today, But it's commonly defined as a large
community of people who share common identity, often through language, culture, history,
and sometimes ethnicity, then who usually inhabit a specific geographic
territory with its own political organization. The comminations without states
(18:58):
as simply a culturalmmunity force. People feel a collective long
and then share that snee. But nations are as we know,
mostly tied up with states today, hence nation being used
as a synonym for country.
Speaker 3 (19:10):
Yeah, this is one of my bug bears.
Speaker 4 (19:13):
I guess is an academic like I tried to develop
this concept of Catalan nationalism that like at the time
was inherently anti fascist. I think I was trying to
be like, it ain't now like this it's a very
Catalan right now. And yeah, I do still find it
hard when people say nation is the the state, especially Americans, Like,
(19:33):
it's very hard, right because state is like a subset
of the state here, like the sort of military division
of the federal state. So it can be hard to
explain those differences.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
And as you mentioned, this sort of way that that
Catalan nationalism has shifted. Really, I think gets to the
whole weakness of the nation idea. So Benick Anderson famously
called nations imaginedmmunities because the community exists as a collective fantasy.
(20:04):
You know, they imagine a deep comradeship with people who
they've never met. Yeah, and this fantasy has boundaries not
just about who is included, but also famously who is excluded.
And this fantasy is not necessarily something that is automatic
or natural as we tend to see it today. But
it's really the rise of things like print capitalism, with
(20:25):
the mass production of books and newspapers, and that's what
really shaped the standardization and formalization of these imagined communities,
through the creation of like common cultural reference and a
shared sense of history. Yeah. And then of course you
had the nation idea of further being developed by liberal
(20:46):
revolutions and through the shared experience of colonial rule. You know,
we're subject populations with mobilized nationalism to claim self determination.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
Yeah, definitely like it.
Speaker 4 (20:58):
I'm sure I'm trying to remember borrowed this from someone,
but the idea of like identity entrepreneurs is what I like.
Like it's when religion loses its claim on universal truth,
specifically in Europe. That's like a market for identity that
is open. And the creation of nations is like, to
(21:18):
my mind, like a bourgeois project, right Like, it's an
entrepreneurial endeavor that they seek to create something, a benefit
from it and like it. Yet to a degree that
turned against them, it's still an entrepreneurial endeavor, right Like. Still,
you could be creating a nation which wants to kick
France out of Morocco, right that that nation may not
(21:40):
have space for everyone who inhabits that territory of Morocco.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
Like, it's still it's a sort of for some people.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
Construct absolutely absolutely, I think the elite intellectual current of
a nationalist movements can go under stated. You know, oftentimes
what stirs up the masses toward that specific direction, because
I mean, the masses will revolt against their conditions, but
what sort of directs it in that national independence direction?
(22:09):
And this concept of nation is tends to be that
sort of you lead into actual current. I often look
at the history of and Tobago as a reference point.
See that's where I come from. The whole process of
nation building is always ongoing, and we are in a
position where there's an effort, there's a very strong efforts
to both push for a nation building but also recognize
(22:32):
our divergent pasts, you know, because we have this sort
of almost equal in population Indo Trinadian and Afro Trianadian populations,
and then a mixed population as well, and then you
have some Chinese and Syria and Lebanese and Venezuela and
and Filipino and all these different groups come into Trinidad,
and because of that colonial past, their tensions is between
(22:56):
those groups and things are still play out to this day.
But while tensions are played out, there's also an effort
to construct a unity through an allegiance to the nation
of Trinan Tobago to create a sense of national identity,
and as a very young country, it's still quite difficult
to do. I can imagine, especially in the United States,
(23:19):
it might have been a similar situation where you have
all these different European populations and different populations from around
the world who are in the US and there hasn't
quite yet been a fully built up American identity yet,
and so a lot of those tensions are still kind
of playing out, and so it takes a couple of
generations for there to be a sense of American identity
(23:39):
that arises out of that. Yeah, definitely turnedad being one
a younger colony and two only recently becoming independent in
nineteen sixty two, it hasn't had enough time yet to,
I suppose, develop that patriotism that America is so known for.
And so you still see a lot of people who
continue to have allegiance to the ancestry, to the heritage,
(24:03):
even before they have any sort of sense of connection
to the country. Concept of truingad.
Speaker 4 (24:09):
Yeah, the American would have interesting because the people who
did the American Revolution might often call themselves English right like.
And it's this kind of post hoc nationalism that has applied,
right like, they did begin constructing a nation, but after
they after they gained the apparatus of the state, right like.
(24:30):
And sometimes they'll talk about their freedoms in terms of
English freedoms, which they themselves are not granted, right that
they don't have the same freedoms as English people in
England when they are a British colony. This concept of
freedom they will elucidate like it, and like so much
of it is based on like English common law, right,
they didn't necessarily see themselves as distinct. That comes later.
(24:51):
And like the US one is interesting because they have
to develop this kind of civic nationalism much. I guess
France does that two of course, but like France, probably
the og there. But like this idea, like you've subscribed
to these ideas. Therefore you're an American because they're like this,
this nation constructed by people from all over Europe. For
(25:13):
the most part, the phrasing is universal, but the implementation
is not. Right, it's also a country where people own
other people.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Yeah, yeah, I think I mean, like I was saying earlier,
it does help in our struggle for autonomy and independence
from cluding on rule to have this construct the nation, right,
but it also obscures a lot of the real material
divisions in society, you know between the with in class
and the elites. And so you have this national identity
(25:42):
that is constructed by intellectual and you know, economic elites,
and it's overlaid onto a population that does not really
have us see in that construction. And so these nationalist
projects will try to downplay or suppress differences in conflicts
and as part of why nationalism so often lends itself
(26:06):
to fascist well, because fascism is an outgrowth of this
idea of nation where they promote this vision of national
unity and stifle class conflict and create a collusion of
classes that push us aside of people who don't fit
within their concept of the nation.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (26:26):
Yeah, I often think, like when I'm talking to my
undergrads about nation, like the most distinct where I can say,
is like the salient we through both space and time, right,
Like it's the people you identify with, it's the us,
And fascism weaponizes us against the rest of humanity or
against us mostly like against escapegoat group who become them, right,
(26:48):
and then like the nation is for us, the state
is for us, it's not for them. Thus they must
be exterminated exactly. Is an obvious outgrowth of nationalism.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Hence xenophobia, hence anti semitism, anti blackness, anti indigeneity, all
these prejudices. I mean, And that's the thing about nationalism.
It's not necessarily consistent because you'll say, all people from
this land, you know, we should desay to be united,
except for those people who are also from this land.
They don't get to come, you know, they are perpetual outsiders.
(27:21):
They don't share the true culture. They'ren't part of our destiny.
So even if they're legally citizens or legally a long
term residents, or they haven't residents there for a long
time the entire lives generations, or if the case may be,
they don't count. They're outside forever.
Speaker 4 (27:37):
Yeah, yeah, they can never assent to like a sort
of higher status of being one of us. British people
like to mobilize this one a lot, right, Like you
can be British.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
But you can never be English.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (27:51):
I forget who coined that coined the phrase cricket nationalism,
but it's just particularly kind of ridiculous, Like, oh, if
if there's a Test match between Britain and Pakistan and
Britain and Trinidad Tobago, who do you support? Like is that,
like are you really going to make that the core
of your national identity? Like the cene qua non of
being British is like which flag you take to the
(28:15):
cricket match, Like it's particularly ridiculous and if it doesn't
reflect exclusion, right, people aren't taking their flags to the
cricket match because like that's the core of the entity.
They're just like, yeah, well kind of I get treated
differently because of my ethnic boundary, like makeup right ethnic presentation.
(28:35):
So I guess you guys don't like me, so like
they'll be funny when we kick your ass cricket, like
it's the cause of arrow points in the wrong direction.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
I guess I can imagine I will not be bringing
any flags to any cricket match because I don't attend
cricket matches. I'm not too big of a fan of cricket.
Speaker 3 (28:55):
I can't be doing it.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
Stick to my football, and I say football in the
international sense.
Speaker 4 (29:00):
Good, yeah, yeah, I can't stand around long enough to
play cricket, to be honest.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
As we're talking about national liberation, these struggles often took
place in the context of the Cold War, right, which
is where we get this other sense of this other
framework for divving up the world now. Growing up, I
was always told that, you know, tran Tobago is a
third World country. I had a social studies textbook, and
I taught first world, second world, third world. But I
(29:26):
didn't teach first world, second world, third world in the
context of the Cold War, because I grew up in
a post Cold War world, and these terms came from
the Cool War but persisted after the Cold War. So
what happened, I was taught we are third world because
we are still developing. We're not at that intermediate stage
development where we could say that the second world, and
(29:47):
we're not at that first world level of development like America, right,
And that's a smaller side for me. But I've always
found it mildly irritating when I see people use this
famous social media catchphrase or America is a third World
country in a Gucci belt.
Speaker 3 (30:08):
I haven't seen now on the yet. That's annoying.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
I'm sure you've seen similar sentiments, this idea, Oh, America's
third world, American slid world.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
Yeah, I have.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
Like, it's just annoying to me yet. So one, it
completely divorces the concert of the third world from its
actual origins and to it. Also, I think reflects that
kind of a blindness to what's happened in the rest
of the world, in the countries that are actually considered
the third world, and the difference is between them, you know,
for everything that we can express frustrations about in the US,
(30:40):
anybody in the third world, I think, and I've when
I when I've visited the US. I've seen it from
my own eyes. You know, there's still things there that
Americans might take for granted that are just not that
would never be taken for granted in other contexts. And
I see, of course the division see in America's version
(31:01):
of the First World versus you know, some of the
European Social Democracy's version of the First World. So I
get that frustration, you know, the lack of free health
care and that kind of thing, investment in infrastructure and
all that. But let me just get into the background
behind the tomb. Right as we step into the Cool War,
(31:29):
you have this concept of the three world model that
came after World War Two. The pre war status cool
was over and you had new conflicts on the horizon.
And so the film First World originally described the capitalist
block led by the United States and Western Europe, where
capitalist markets, liberal democracy, and economic progress was celebrated. And
(31:52):
then you had the Second World block, which referred to
the communist bloc led by the Soviet Union, where what
I would consider state and centrally planned economies shape their societies.
So in the First World they had countries like the US, Australia,
Africa today might be shocking you know, Iran was even
considered part of the First World Block during the Cool War.
(32:16):
That might be shockinged now because when we think of
some of these countries like, oh, those are Third World countries.
Those are undeveloped countries. They aren't at the developed level
of the West yet. But in the context in which
the three World model originated, these were countries that explicitly
aligned themselves with the policies of the United States and
its allies as capitalist nations against the Soviet Bloc. And
(32:40):
the Soviet Bloc you had, of course, countries like China
and Vietnam, Laos, Ethiopia, Yemen, Huba, all these different countries
align themselves explicitly with the Soviet Union. Then the Third
World and where the third will concept came in was
with all the countries that stood against picking aside. Yeah,
(33:05):
a lot of these were former colonies and nations that
chose not to side completely with either and to this
whole concept, this whole idea of the non aligned movement.
It really kicked off thanks to the joining of the
Indian Prime Minister, the Kenaian President, the Indonesian President, and
the President of the United Arab Republic alongside Yugoslavia, and
(33:27):
so all these countries who all had very different economic
arrange ones. Yugoslavia famously was kind of doing its own thing,
compared to a lot of the other countries associated with socialism,
India and Ghana, they were also kind of doing their
own thing, kind of a mix Trancebagos also considered part
of the non aligned movement. And so these classifications at
(33:52):
the time, these were geopolitical and all political ideologies, not
necessarily economic development. So technically speaking, the term shouldn't even
be relevant US today. I mean, the Cold War of
the twentieth century is over. But over time the narrative
began to twist. You know, so because you didn't pick
a side, you didn't pick the red team or the
(34:12):
blue team, you didn't pick the first will of the
Second World, this narrative developed where or you didn't pick
a side, you're politically independent, so you're poor, you're chaotic,
you're a failed state, all these different things. And of
course there were incidents in part influenced of course by
state actors in the US and state actors in the
(34:33):
Soviet client block would have contributed to this outcome. But
over time you get this sense of or the third
world is failure. All these states were trying different paths
of development, different approaches to governance from either of the
two camps, mixed hybrid approaches, but in the end this
(34:54):
just got them stuck with the label of underdevelopment and
at having them being seen as last. Now today people
don't use food world as much as they use developing,
at least in you know, the more above board discourse.
But that division also has its own implications, right, the
(35:14):
developed countries versus the developing countries. It's kind of a
softer sorts of version of the same thing.
Speaker 3 (35:21):
Yeah, it's kind of gentler, Yeah, the same shit.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
What those terms do implicitly, it's like, you know what,
you're fish in water, so you can't recognize water. It's
hard to recognize these things, these ideological impulses when we're
submerged in them. If you take a step back, you realize, oh,
these terms developed and developing they have very heavy implications.
And the implication is that there's a single linear path
(35:47):
to progress modeled after Western capitalism, that all societies are
progressing towards through industrialization, through consumerism, through the ALMIGHTYGP growth
and so development of your your underdevelopment becomes a tool
of intervention. It becomes a way to mask imperial interests
with the sort of the nair of oh, we're just
(36:08):
kind of helping you out.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
You know.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
It's like we move from your savage you're a primitive,
so you're just not developed yet. But theory will help
you out. And that's how you get the whole sort
of IMF and World Bank introductions of models of debts
and policy conditions and metrics and all these different things
to sort of shape these countries into client states, states
(36:33):
that can be used to further Western development. The Cold
War is technically over now, as I said, so I
suppose we've reached the end of history, as the famous
saying goes, but not exactly. In the early nineteen nineties,
Samuel Huntington came up with a thesis to explain the
(36:54):
conflicts that we define the post Cold War world and
as we entered into the twenty fifth century, and so
he argued that the future of global conflict would not
be defined by competing ideologies or economic systems, but by
cultural fault lines. In his nineteen ninety three article in
Foreign Affairs, which Lates expanded into his nineteen ninety six
book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the
(37:16):
World Order, Huntington predicted that the primary source of conflict
in a new era would be between distinct civilizations. His
model would have pointed to clashes between the West and
other groups Islamic nations, the Confucian East, and of course
set up this sense that the West is this pinnacle
of rationality and modernity, and all these others are in
competition with the fantastic, amazing West. And I always like
(37:40):
to call out some of these strange ways that he
has divided the world. Right, So sub Saharan Africa is
all grouped up into the African camp, all of North Africa,
the Middle East, into West Asia, all of that is
considered part of the Islamic civilization. Forget all the different
between any of them. By the way, Indonesia it's also
(38:02):
part of the Islamic block. You have the Sinic or
the Confucian block that includes China, both Koreas, Taiwan, and Vietnam,
except for the parts of China that are under the
Buddhist camp, such as Tibet. So Tibet is kind of
carved up on its own as its own camp. Mongolia
(38:23):
is also under the Buddhist camp. Thailand and all these
others in Southeast Asia considered part of the Buddhist camp.
Speaker 3 (38:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (38:31):
And then you have the Latin American block, which is
everybody part of Latin America and even people who are
not technically Latin America and are kind of swept in there.
And I'm going to be a by the base of
the map that I saw on the Wikipedia article on
this subject.
Speaker 3 (38:45):
Ye, I found that map.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
Now, it's some very bizarre divisions and ways to cut
up this world. They have the Western world versus the
Orthodox world, which includes Kazakhstan and Greece and Ukraine and
Russia all under that civilizational banner. Yeah. The Philippines is
(39:06):
somehow part Islamic, part Western, and part Sinic. It's a
very unusual blend.
Speaker 3 (39:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (39:14):
And then he's just got like Japan it's just hanging
out there by itself.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, especially pan It's kind
of it's a one thing. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (39:23):
It just literally says Japanese. I've forgotten about that. And
then he goes on to freak out about like the
like Latin world as he sees it, like fucking dividing
the United States, right, Like in his his is it
called like who we are or where we are or something?
His book about migration in the United States. M it
(39:44):
was after clash of civilizations he wrote this book about
like how the like I think I don't quite remember
how he terms it, Like does he use Latino or
Hispanic or something else, but like that that that population
increasing in the United States will like divide the to
day too, too fundamentally opposed civilizations.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
Yeah, yeah, he has some interesting compulsions. Yeah, and unfortunately
his thesis found its voice following the events of nine
to eleven partitions and media. These people were taking his
ideas to kind of justify the war and terror that
would unfold. It also creates sort of cultural device that
(40:27):
settle into place at home will not create, but shape
those cultural divides as you create the sense of oh,
if there's if we're experiencing a clash of civilizations right now,
then this flood couldn't quote of people from another civilization
is a threat to the invasion. It's something that needs
to be targeted and fought against. And so in a sense,
(40:49):
his class civilizations is kind of a repackaging of a
lot of the binaries and divisions we've spoken about before.
You have elements of nationalism, you have elements of civilized
versus warber, the evelements of East and West, the Cold
War dichotomies. All of that kind of comes together in
this neat package. Finally, we enter the twenty first century,
(41:12):
and they are two very popular ways that we now
categorize the world. People tend to use the phrases Global
North and Global South as a softer or more politically
correct alternative to develop developing or foods in third world.
It's considered less loaded, more neutral sounding, and it's originally
popularized via UN frameworks and the brand line, which is
(41:35):
done in nineteen eighty, which drew a literal line across
the globe, separating the wealthier North from the poorer South.
To be clear, though, despite the geographical language, it's not
literally about hemispheres. Australia is considered part of the Global
North and Mongolia is considered part of the Global South.
But generally speak in the global salth refus to the
(41:55):
post Coulnar regions and the global North refus the wealthy,
industrialized trees of the world. To me, again, it's not
really a flawless framework. It has all the same binaries
and smoothing over of complexities of internal class divides between
for example, ritually it's in the global South and poor
communities in the North. It gives impression that entire countries
(42:18):
share unified class experience, I think. I think it also
has the potential to obscure inequality between South South relations.
So yes, two countries may both be a part of
the Global South, but there could be a massive power
differential between them that you know, sets them up for
interventions and equal treaties and also sort of different sorts
(42:41):
of medline. For example, Saudi Arabia, at least in one
map that I saw, is considered part of the Global South.
But as we know, Saudi Arabia is famous first medland
across Africa and the Middle East. It's interventions, it's financing
of the conflicts across the region. Now I get why
(43:04):
the term is used. It creates a sense of shared struggle,
especially in anti imperialist and climate justice spaces. But I
think it has weaknesses, you know, and how we constructlidarity.
Speaker 3 (43:15):
On that basis, yeah, very much too.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
Yeah. And the other and final system that I wanted
to mention that has gained popularity these days. Is world
systems theory, which is actually older than class civilizations. It
came out of Immanuel Wallastein's work during the Cold War,
and he kind of stood out and said that he
was rejecting the three world system and the simplistic country
by country development models. Instead he created this world systems
(43:41):
theory that saw capitalism as a single global system, not
a patchwork of individual national economies. So the focuses on
labor roles, on commodity flows, and on power concentration. And
I think in an even more globalized world it makes
the most sense to the wallaceteine. They have three differ
and zones of the global economy. You have the core,
(44:03):
which as you know, have strong states, financial capital, tech
heavy industries controlled with global institutions, and they tend to
exploit the labor and resources of the periphery, while exports
and high value goods and debt structures, and the periphery
of the countries that tend to have weaker institutions, extractive
or career economies, reliance and export and raw materials, debt
(44:27):
defendency and structural adjustment policies, and they often dump in
grounds for pollution waste and arms from the global North.
The semi periphery are then considered under his model, the
countries that mediates between the core and the periphery. These
are industrializing economies with mixed labor and capital exports. They
sometimes exploit others while being exploited themselves, and these include
(44:50):
countries like Brazil, India, Mexico, Turkey, and South Africa. And
they tend to save as the buffers as stabilize the
system while chasing core status. I think this model is
very dynamic. It could be more dynamic, but it does
have the capacity to highlight the systemic interdependence of this
glocal system, that one region's wealth is contingent on another's dispossession.
(45:16):
It makes it very useful for understanding that, you know,
poverty is not something that just happens, it's nan is
very clearly structured and developed by the wealth of the North.
And I think also with the corporate free model, you
see the sense of a one way flow where value
and labor goes from the periphery to the core. But
(45:36):
there is another direction that flow goes right because the
migrants from the periphree they go to the core. They
fill precurious rules and core economy is like care work
and agriculture and logistics, and so they almost become an
important periphery within the core, and their absence from the
periphree also deprives the periphree. Hence the phenomenon of brain drain,
(45:59):
where people are sipher the way as label and the
and the educated population tends to leave, you know, their
countries of origin. But I'm saying it's not just a
one way flow, because you also have that sense of
diaspora and diasporic networks that kind of reverse the flow.
Remittances for some countries can be a significant chunk of
their national income. I think the Philippines is a classic
(46:22):
example of this. Some of the Caribbean countries, either historically
or presently, we're very dependent on remittances from their diasporic
populations sending money back home. Lebanon is another example of
Salvador is another example. They become a key part of
the national GDP. That sort of relationship of my creatia. Yeah,
(46:44):
but I think what I want to do with this
corporate free model or this corefree SEMIPI free model is
expanded and one of the ways that I found very
useful to do so comes from fellow podcaster shout out
to Elia j Ayube. Yeah, I read it. Article of
is that was on the anarchist libraries called the periphery
(47:04):
has no time for binaries. This very crucial point, and
I quote, we are as peripheral to the global soult
regimes crushing us as they are perceived to be by
the Western think tanks and foreign ministers who view their
imagined space as the center of the world. China and
Russia and Iran are peripheral to the West, and any
and all activists in China and Russia and Iran are
(47:26):
peripheral to their governments. So I kind of like this
sense of not just looking on the country level, but
looking at particular populations, populations within countries the relationships between them,
bringing in that class dynamic Yeah, routine populations more prominently.
Speaker 4 (47:42):
Yeah, Like if you look at the like the example
I'm familiar with, relate like the Cold We could look
at Kurdistan or Mienma, right, there are ethnic groups within
that country that are subject to colonialism by the core
groups within that country, right, like asad Arab belt for
the Bama majority, using classic colonial divide and rule tactics
(48:04):
right now against the hinder in the MMR. And like,
I think it doesn't make sense to see that whole
country is peripheral, right, Like that binary doesn't function when
like the salient colonial violence happening, especially in the MMA,
is happening within the ANMA, but it doesn't make any
less salient. And like the experience in colonialism is still violent.
(48:29):
And if we only use this state level binary, we
will totally miss.
Speaker 2 (48:35):
That exactly exactly, And I think it's important to be clear.
Obviously I've rejected a lot of these frameworks in covering them.
You won't see me using the civilized primitive binary anytime soon.
But some of these concepts can be useful. You know.
They do shape the way that we view the world,
(48:55):
how we see ourselves the imperfect, of course, but because
they're trying to map on reality and reality is a
shifting beast. But I think it's good to have some
sense of or some language to understand the inequality and
podynamics present in the world. So we can reclaim these
free mooks, so we can reject them. You know, we
could use them for solidarity or for division. But the
(49:17):
question I want to leave us with the wrap of
this episode is how do we build a world where
these divisions are no longer descriptive or relevant? And that's
all I have for today? Or power to all the people. Peace.
Speaker 1 (49:36):
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Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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