Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

BOOK REVIEW: "Where Hot Spots Are Headed: 'The J-Curve' by Ian Bremmer," by Daniel Drezner, Wall Street Journal, 1 September 2006,p. W6.

That feeling hit me when I saw this review, but then it disappeared as I read it. Bremmer's book sounds like a good one, just a bit too dependent on one concept to explain the world. It strongly resembles an idea I'm working on regarding failed/fragile/fake states, but I wouldn't try to apply it as widely as he apparently does in this book. In short, I think his J-curve is correct, but in a relatively limited sense.

The J-curve concept basically says the if you're closed as a state, you're relatively stable (the lower-curl lip of the J). If you open yourself up to the outside world, you'll go unstable (the trough of the J) before you rise up the far side of stability+openness function on the stem of the J.

Taken as a generic description of development, which requires a degree of openness to the outside world (unless you can create your own mini-world system as the Sovs did during the Cold War), there's little argument with the stable expressed as a potential--as in, you risk a lot of instability in your political system as you open up to the outside world.

Taken that way, I could argue that Bremmer has simply offered a model to an argument that many, including myself in both my books, have already made in print--i.e., globalization can be a very destabilizing process for certain states, but if you can manage it, the resulting connectedness make you a more stable and peaceful state over time (roger that!).

But expressed as a clear guide to which states will become unstable as part of the opening-up process, it's too deterministic, as the review points out. The right single-party state can traverse the implied trough without falling too deeply into it by combining an internal political rigidity with an internal economic liberation that allows individuals and companies to connect themselves to a global economy without necessarily triggering political unrest. Ultimately, that openness can and will force a commensurate internal political openness (we watch that process unfold now in such previously strong one-party state globalizers like Mexico, South Korea and Japan), but there's no set relationship between the openness and that unfolding internal political dynamic (see China and Singapore).

I guess what I'm saying is that the width of that potential trough isn't easily determined. Successful transition across that implied chasm--without falling down into it--is typically accomplished by strong one-party states. So the openness is achieved without instability but that instability is simply postponed to some later point in the state's political evolution where it can all be handled with relative aplomb (sure, street riots and other spasms of internal instability, but nothing like a civil war). So, in effect, a single-party state strategy allows for a certain level of economic instability on the individual level, while putting off the commensurate individual-level evolution toward political pluralism until such time as the societal economics make that transition less scary--i.e., you've got the makings of a middle class.

But you can see where I'm going here by combining the nation-state level analysis where Bremmer's book seems focused with some sub-national or individual-level analysis: namely, the single-Waltzian level approach is always wanting.

Sometimes a state like Iran, which is definitely a coherent nation-state and not a fake one, opens up dramatically like it did under the Shah, which then triggers internal instability, and the subsequent revolutionary movement pulls the nation back from that openness, so in effect the journey is not a one-way street.

I think the J-curve does apply to fake states with weak governments that are subject to globalization's intense pressures for openness. Not being particularly coherent ethnically, or lacking sufficient internal political-economic openness to establish a strong sense of regime legitimacy among the population, such states can come apart under the right conditions.

This is basically what happened with the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union itself. It also happened to Yugoslavia. In the first two instances, this process unfolded rather peacefully. In the case of Yugoslavia, it triggered secessionist wars.

But notice now how all the resulting consituent parts are naturally gravitating to larger aggregations. Eastern European states have gravitated toward NATO and the EU, as have the resulting Balkan states. Meanwhile, most of the former USSR components find themselves still within a quasi-Russia-centric orbit (save the Baltics) or subject to competing definitions of orbits (like the overlapping interests of the Turks, Russians, Iranians, Indians and Chinese in Central Asia). Until all such successor states find some logical level of integration/aggregation into larger bodies that secure their peace and allow for "safe" openness with the outside world, the chances for small states to get abused by globalization's rapacious impulses is real. That can cause instability, clearly, by simply morphing such states into failed state status (which is almost a tautology on some level, except that the integration process certainly cannot proceed unless adequate centers of regional gravity appear--a real problem for central Africa, for example).

So the J-curve, while expressing some of the dynamic pathways experienced by certain states in the process of being exposed to globalization, is limited as an explanatory/predictive tool because it seems so focused on the level of nation-states, while not taking into account the sub-national and supra-national aspects that drive states toward or away from equilibrium.

China, for example, clearly is a stable nation-state, but less so as a coherent collection of subnational units (there are the booming provinces and the ones left behind) than the far more horizontally networked United States. When the US opens up to the world, it does so both as a stable nation and as a collection of stable states, and that's a big difference. But then there's also the larger regionalizing function of the U.S., which is really simultaneously the center of a North America economic zone of great stability--so much so that all that illegal immigration from Mexico really has little political fallout (yes, a lot of jawboning and legislating, but that's not the same as political instability--not to be confused with Lou Dobb's or Pat Buchanan's verbal/mental instability!).

China, for example, is not well integrated into its region, as Asia itself lacks the sort of continental integration schemes that Europe took two massive civil wars and a lengthy Cold War to finally achieve.

So as I think toward Vol. III, I'm glad Bremmer wrote this book and revealed the limitations of this one theory, which I certainly like as a general explanation of the potential journey from Gap to Core, but which I feel really hasn't yet been realized by anyone other than the states of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, where the J-Curve description pales in explanatory power because it seems so focused on the level of nation-states and that historical process really involved the instability, collapse, and logical reformation of supranational units (both the Warsaw Pact/COMECON and Yugoslavia itself, which yield historically in large part to the better aggregation called the EU).

So as I plot out the ideas/pathways I want to explore in Vol III, I guess I'll be forced, as I was in PNM and BFA, to always stretch my arguments across all three Waltzian levels of system-state-individual to allow for the logical range of variance in my arguments about instability and equilibrium and the range of possible journeys from Gap to Core.

But I definitely need to get this book and use it for what it's worth.

Already it's forced me to rethink my definition of the Core as not just stable nation-states but--in further evolution--a collection of stable supranational aggregations. Now I've made the last point implicitly on repeated occasions in both PNM and BFA by saying that America itself is the oldest and most successful multinational state in history, essentially providing the source code for this era's globalization. By noting that Europe (in the form of the EU) is replicating that journey and suggesting the same pathway is the eventual destiny of Asia (China and India playing the roles of twin towers Germany and France there, with Japan as the UK's role--to include its "special relationship" with distant America), I've basically implied that future development of the Core, including its enlargement, will be achieved in terms of regional units vice nation-states (something I also voiced in BFA when I said that Gap shrinkage would occur in waves or regional chunks, suggesting that Core growth is commensurately driven by supranational integration schemes rather than state-by-state integration).

So here's the additional thing I'm challenged to consider already by reading this review: what are the logical units of integration of the Gap? In BFA, I suggested sequencing schemes involving Latin America v SW Asia, v SE Asia v Africa, but now I think I need to think through more logical clumpings, such as an Africa broken into regional clumpings of a North, East, West, Central and South. If such aggregation is required for regional equilibrium to be reached (after all, did we not do this ourselves with our Civil War way back when, recombining the industrialized North region with the agrarian South region after their individual evolutions had driven them apart--thus making possible the subsequently rapid integration of the West?), then promoting such regional schemes as a hedge against the logic of the J-curve with regard to weak/fake/failed states is more important than how we push individual states toward internal reform.

And when you move toward that notion, are you not challenged to reconsider the conventional wisdom that says global trade schemes are better than regional ones? We've always assumed that regionalization is a lesser good than global trade deals like the Doha Round, but maybe such a mega-deal buys us more Gap problems than it solves?

Think about that.