I am not about to start a quixotic quest to tilt with all of the strawmen spawned by Fed X’s commentary on Barnett. With this commitment in mind, I want to try to address a tangential issue that arose while reading his post (and its comment thread).

The issue regards terminology. It is incoherent to mix the “first world, second world, third world” construct with Barnett’s “Core-Gap” construct. The former was a description of the Cold War environment and the latter is an attempt to describe our current global environment. This distinction has been blurred because during the 1990s, terms like “third world” came to be used as a vague label for regions that were poor, exploited and undeveloped, while “first world” came to be used as a label for wealthy, modernized and (depending upon one’s political stripes) exploiting regions. The original definitions of these terms (First World = US & Allies, Second World = USSR, satellites and allies, Third World = everyone in between) were no longer valid, yet we kept using them based upon the associations each term had accumulated over the course of the Cold War. Thus, Somalia was still third world, while the EU, Japan and the US were still first world. This vocabulary drift continued, mirroring the larger strategic drift in US policy. Messy issues like “how do we label India and China?” couldn’t be addressed due to the outdated nature of the vocabulary.

Barnett’s Core-Gap vocabulary, then, is an attempt to update our labels to reflect our current world. We may disagree on how to accurately describe our world, but we must agree that our currently environment is different from our old. This means that even if we disagree on everything else, we must agree that reverting to old labels is sloppy and counter-productive.

On an utterly unrelated note, in case anyone is actually keeping track, it may be a few more days until I resume my normal (admittedly sporadic) posting rate.