THE BORDER BETWEEN CORE AND PERIPHERY:
GEOGRAPHICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF THE WORLD SYSTEM
ALBERTO VANOLO
Draft; final version in Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie (2010), vol. 101, n. 1, pp. 26-36.
ABSTRACT
Geographical metaphors such as centre-periphery or First-Second-Third World are widely used to describe the world economic system. This paper discusses the role of metaphors in geographical representations and proposes some guidelines for the analysis and classification. This methodology is then applied to a sample of well known textual metaphors used to describe the world economic scenario, including ideas of a First-Second-Third World, North-South, core-periphery, Global Triad, global network, flat and fluid world. The classification is linked to the debates originating such metaphors, and it will be used in order to propose some concluding remarks on the possibility of development of new geographical metaphors.
Key words: World system, metaphors, representations, North-South, centre-periphery, Third World
INTRODUCTION
Geographic descriptions of the world make use of various metaphors: expressions such as centre-periphery, North-South, or First-Second-Third World have the power to describe quickly and intuitively the spatial organisation of the global capitalist system. Considering the wide circulation of these metageographies (i.e. concepts and partitions of the world; Lewis & Wigen 1997), they play a fundamental role in the building of our personal geographical imageries; using the language of Baudrillard (1983), hyper-realities (representations) are often more determining than ‘hard facts’ in influencing our actions. On the other hand, these stereotyped images are not just causes of certain spatial practices (the choice of where to make a tourist trip, for example), but also manifestations and symptoms of a deep ‘space of representation’ (Lefebvre 1974) embracing a broad set of codes and predispositions.
The purpose of this paper is, first of all, to propose a classification of the main metaphors used in order to describe the world economic scenario. Such a classification will refer to the nature of the metaphorical discourses and, most of all, to the debates originating them, on the basis of the hypothesis, discussed in the next paragraph, that metaphors and representations reproduce and reflect the perspectives, ideologies and the ‘political unconscious’ of the cultural framework producing them. Such a classification will then be used in order to propose some conclusive reflections on the possibilities and opportunities to develop new representations of the world, which is definitely one of the goals of geography.
The analysis will begin with a theoretical discussion on the role of metaphors in geography, followed by a brief overview of the main metaphors used for the representation of the world system, linked to the
debates that produced and validated them. Then some conclusive remarks will be proposed on the basis of a comparison of the ways these metaphors address the general problem of establishing boundaries between geographical categories.
METAPHORS IN GEOGRAPHY
In recent decades, many theoretical reflections have emphasised that social science analysis (and science in general) is rooted in rhetoric (see, for example, McCloskey 1985; Smith 1996). This line of thinking is part of a general post-structuralist argument: every theory or analysis is conveyed through discourses, namely, subjective, partial, and political representations. In the words of Barnes and Duncan (1992, p. 2), ‘the notion that writing mirrors the world is untenable’.
The debate on the role of subjectivity in geography (Harvey1969),on the concept of ‘reality’ and ‘hard facts’ (or ‘lumps’) in epistemological terms (Rorty 1992), and on the extensive use of metaphors to represent and interpret theories and concepts (Gibbs 1999) is broad and will not be extensively reviewed here. What will be useful here is to state that every geographical discourse, in a more or less explicit way, reveals a metaphorical nature. In an explicit way, it refers to the use of analogies to describe reality (France is a hexagon); in an implicit way, even the use of a theory in order to understand reality implies, in a certain sense, the building up of a metaphorical discourse based on analogies (Barnes & Duncan 1992).
Applying such a framework, it is clear that the word ‘metaphor’ will be used here in its broad sense, not just reflecting a specific rhetorical trope or a language property, but a general characteristic of human reasoning (Massen and Weingart 2000; Urry 2000). Maps, texts (from descriptions to simple labels) and models could all be thought of as geographical metaphors. To use a more geographical language, they could be viewed as culturally learned ways of looking at places, not as ‘mirrors’ of the territory. In fact, use of a metaphor involves more than establishing univocal relations between two elements of a discourse. This is certainly its most obvious meaning, as in the case of saying that ‘Italy is a boot’; the peninsula is like a boot in shape, and the function of this metaphor is basically pedagogic. However, it should not be thought that metaphors propose truthful claims or describe literal characteristics of the world (Rorty 1992). By their very nature, metaphors are not cognitive, because they lie outside agreed-upon canons of meaning. The function and effectiveness of a metaphor cannot be traced to its meaning, because metaphors are often patently absurd to make us stop, think, and search for analogies, but to its use (Barnes 1991).
In this sense, any analysis of a metaphor must be embedded in a discourse (McCloskey 1985). For example, consider the sentence ‘France is a hexagon’: is it true when compared to hard facts? Basically, we can consider this statement to be true for certain aims and discourses, and probably not for a cartographer. It is a representation, dealing with an approximation (Shields 1991). The metaphor may be considered ‘true’ (or, in a strict sense, useful) in certain circumstances, for a certain audience, and for specific reasons and purposes; moreover, such a metaphor carries with it deep values and perceptions, such as ideas of ‘perfection’, ‘harmony’, and ‘national unity’ (Smith 1969). With this symbolisminmind, this geographical image was widely used by the French Gaullist party in the 1960s. Metaphors reveal much about the social context, the institutional setting, and the historical circumstance where they took form; such a framework is certainly dynamic because concepts evolve within (ever evolving) discourses.
The case just discussed opens an important perspective: metaphors play a major role in political rhetoric. Kelly (2001) discusses how, on the one hand, they may create a commonality of purpose and understanding
among the political elite, and on the other, they provide a way of explaining political issues to the mass of population (see also Dühr 2007). In this sense, for example, the ‘Third World’ metaphor easily communicates a problem which is quite complex to describe – that of the spatial divides in the distribution of development.
Rather than thinking about ‘true’ or ‘false’ metaphors, in the field of geography it is more useful to operate other distinctions. A first one may refer to the kind of classification of knowledge proposed by the metaphor; more specifically we have two categories. First, metaphors imposing oppositional (or dichotomist, binary) reasoning are those based on a ‘is-a’ or ‘is not-a’ logic of classification (see Cloke & Johnston 2005); this is the case of the sentence ‘Europe and America are the imperialistic core of the world’: it is possible to distinguish between the core and all the rest (i.e. anon-core, dominated periphery). Conceptually different are the metaphors implying a paradigmatic reasoning, namely, describing the territory on the basis of several characteristics without assuming partitions (i.e. regionalisations) of the world (for example, describing a certain land in terms of an industrial desert because of factory relocalisation).
Second, it is possible to distinguish between ‘living’ and ‘dead’ metaphors (Rorty 1992). When a metaphor is first used in a discourse, it stimulates interest and reflections on its analogies with hard facts; the ‘contextual’ nature of the metaphor is evident. However, with time and use, metaphors become systematised, unpacked and grounded, becoming equivalent to literal statements. For example, when I say that I am ‘down’, it is immediately evident that I feel ‘depressed’, without any further reasoning about the analogies embedded within this spatial metaphor. The metaphor has become ‘dead’ and its initial hermeneutical function has come to an end. However, a dead metaphor is not necessarily a disappearing one; on the contrary, it is now fully part of the language. In other words, many metaphors we still use today do not stimulate the creation of knowledge or a deeper understanding of phenomenon (the hermeneutic function of a metaphor), but are ‘frozen’, acting as simple ‘marks’ or ‘labels’ for determinate concepts. This consideration is important in order to emphasise the complex relationship between concept and discourse: not only are geographical metaphors generated within the framework of differing debates (revealing much about the arguments and perspectives at the basis of such discourses), but debates evolve over time, implicitly imposing new meanings to old concepts; a typical example is the abovementioned passage going from a ‘living’ to a ‘dead’ metaphor, but, in the next paragraph, we will see other cases (as in the passage moving from the positive to the negative connotation of the idea of a ‘Global Triad’).
In the following section, this theoretical frame work will be used in order to build up methodological guidelines to classify the geographical metaphors. First, it is useful to distinguish their function: while some assume just a pedagogic-descriptive function (even operating as simple denominative ‘marks’, without stimulating the search for analogies of the development of a meaningful imaginary), others play a hermeneutic or creative role, promoting the explanation of complex geographical ideas or even the creation of new knowledge. Second, it is also interesting to try to distinguish metaphors on the basis of their oppositional or paradigmatic logic with reference to the organisation and representation of geographical knowledge, and of their ‘living’ or ‘dead’ nature, on the basis of their ‘interactive’ nature, that is to what degree the use of the metaphor still implies today the search for analogies between the two domains.
A sample of metaphors – The object of this analysis refers to metaphors related to the world economic scenario. Synthetic and easy-to-communicate metaphors, such as the ‘North and South’ spatial distribution of development, are representational exercises implying the definition of boundaries between different concepts (namely the ‘developed’ and the ‘undeveloped’). These involve much oversimplification and subjective interpretation: just to cite an example, it is curious that the same organisation, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), classifies the four Asian Tigers as ‘developing’ in its annual international finance statistics, but as ‘advanced economies’ in the world economic outlook.
Certainly there are so many metaphors referring to the world economic system that a full survey would be impossible. The analysis proposed here will focus on a partial sample, based on the use of spatial metaphors in articles in major geographical journals. In detail, a research (in titles and abstracts, from January 1998 to May 2008) has been carried out with reference to the five geographical journals with higher impact factor in 2006 (as reported in the Journal Citation Report 2007), namely, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (impact factor 3.50), Progress in Human Geography (3.44), Global Environmental Change (2.60), Journal of Economic Geography (2.56) and Annals of the Association of American Geographers (2.14). It has to be noted that Global Environmental Change does not offer specific descriptions of the world economic scenario in any article, and therefore the journal has been excluded from the survey. The result has been a sample of 66 cases of use of textual metaphors in order to describe specific features (or spatialisations) of the global economic scenario: by far, the most popular ones refer to the idea of a ‘First-Second-Third’ World (31.8% of cases) and to the description of the world in terms of ‘global networks’ (22.7%); less diffused are ideas of a core (or centre)-periphery divide (15.2%) and of a North-South one (10.6%). Finally, the world system has been described a few times in terms of Western (and implicitly Western) partition (6.1%) and of a juxtaposition between industrialised and non-industrialised countries (6.1%). It has to be noted that the West-East dichotomy, in the strict sense, has been used much more in articles, but here has been considered just in those cases explicitly referring to the description of the economic scenario. Finally, sporadically, the global economy has been described as taking advantage of the ‘Global Triad’ metaphor (in three cases out of 66) and in terms of a ‘fluid’ or a ‘flat’ world (in one case each).
In the following, a classification of these metaphors, linked to the debates that have produced them, will be presented in a sort of ‘short history’ of the representations of the world economic system.
Third World and North-South – In the wake of the Second World War, and after the experience of the Marshall Plan in assisting the recovery of Europe, several economists with direct experience in multilateral institutions turned their attention to the question of economic development in the ‘Third World’: to quote some well known names, there were Hirshmann, Lewis, Rostow. Although such authors proposed different models and approaches, they shared an interest in ‘growth’, intended above all in terms of ‘industrialisation’(often emphasizing ideas of ‘stages’ of modernisation) based on the ‘hidden development potential’ of the ‘less developed’ countries. An interesting question, in the perspective of this paper, refers to the geographical metaphors used to develop such modernisation debates.
The division into three worlds is probably the most used spatial metaphor in the building of these discourses. It originally used to refer to a political regionalisation of the world, representing the division between the West, the Soviet bloc, and the ‘non-aligned countries’ – echoing the French Revolution’s Third Estate – the entry into self-consciousness of which was marked by the 1955 Bandung conference. With the
fall of the Soviet bloc and therefore of the ‘Second World’, the political dimension fell out of the metaphor’s domain, and in many discourses ‘Third’ became a synonym of ‘underdeveloped’ (Power 2003). A conceptually similar dichotomist spatialisation of the world economic scenario is included in the North-South metaphor, the popularity of which is connected mostly to the publication of the Brandt report, which proposed – on the front cover – the famous ‘Brandt line’ (Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues 1980).
The development of these metaphors occurred mostly in the period from the 1950s to the 1970s. Even if some doubts exist about the dating of these concepts, the term Third World was probably introduced in France by Alfred Sauvy in 1952. The geographical debate on this concept grew strongly throughout that period, for example with the milestone works of Yves Lacoste (1965), together with a growing social and political sensitivity towards the development question, attested to by the great popular consensus raised by the Brandt report and fully developed by the end of the 1970s (Strange 1981). In the general geographical debate, post-modernist critiques were still far ahead in the future, and it can be reasonably stated that these metaphors are entirely the result of a modernisation stance. The expression ‘industrialised countries’, used as a synonym of ‘non-Third World’, testifies to a strong trust in, or at least emphasis on, science, modernity and linear interpretations of the world. This becomes obvious from looking at the Brandt report, which stresses development paradigms that were strongly criticised in subsequent years, such as the industrialisation and import substitution approaches and the ‘helping’ moral role of the ‘North’. In this sense, it can be hypothesized that metaphors such as ‘North-South’ or ‘industrialised-non-industrialised’ belong to the same family of metaphors as ‘ThirdWorld’, which can be called modernist-oppositional metaphors, because the inner logic behind these geographical images is to define a geographical conceptual boundary between two rough categories: the modern world and the ‘rest’ (Lewis & Wigen 1997). A relevant difference between the two metaphors is that ‘Third World’ may be considered as a creative metaphor, proposing the association with the third estate (at least in its original formulation, now probably such a function is dead), while ‘North’ and ‘South’ are just denominative marks, designating a divide in the world scenario conceptually similar to ‘rich-poor’. This is not to say that these ‘simple’ marks are politically neutral: for example, it is interesting to notice that the use of the expression ‘South of the world’, if considered literally, overlaps a complex socio-economic phenomenon (the development) with a geographical invariant (the localisation in the meridional hemisphere) communicating implicitly a message of ineluctability with respect to the problem of development.
Core and periphery – The core-periphery metaphor (applied on a global scale) refers to the unequal distribution of power in economy, society and polity, stressing the domination/dependency relations between different regions of the world. The explanation on the nature of these unequal relations has been often referred to the structure of the circulation of surplus and to economic flows in general, particularly in the Marxist development debate, occurring mainly from the 1960s to the 1980s and linked to authors such as Frank (1967), who proposed the metaphor in the variant of the satellite-metropolis relations. Because it was developed in a structuralist scientific framework, the core-periphery approach, in contrast to the modernist-oppositional versions, stresses the relational dimension of the spatial organisation of the economic scenario, which is the uneven power structure (and consequent polarisation) reproducing differentiations in the economic role of the territories. This is evident in the work of Wallerstein (1974), who is certainly one of the pillars of this theoretical approach. Although the ‘Third World’ debate originally relied on analysis of the specific intrinsic characteristics of underdevelopment, especially poverty, as the common denominator of these territories (see Lacoste’s 1965 attempt to find the ‘boundaries’ of the Third World), in the core-periphery metaphor, the emphasis is on the role and position of such areas in the world economy,
emphasising other dimensions rather than the simple ‘rich-poor’ dichotomy, and therefore operating as a hermeneutic-creative metaphor: the building of analogies between the economic marginality of some territories and the idea of ‘periphery’ in a core-periphery dialectic strongly nurtured the idea of the need to investigate the spatial interactions between geographical regions (and not just the mere historical evolution of ‘stages’ of development) in order to explain the ‘underdevelopment’ phenomenon. Of course, the dichotomist nature of the spatial representation of the world is still present, in the sense that we define a ‘periphery’ in opposition to a ‘core’ on the basis of the relations between the two, even if, in this case, the values and perspectives are oriented to celebrate the periphery. In this sense, we may classify this hermeneutical metaphor as critical-oppositional.
It has to be noticed that the breakthrough debate on post-modernism has brought about outstanding critiques of the use of the previously mentioned conceptual categories and of oppositional metaphors in general. It is easy to argue that the metaphor of a ‘Third’ world, coming implicitly after the First and the Second worlds, maintains a Western-oriented, Eurocentric ‘political unconscious’ (Jameson 1995; Skelton & Allen 1999). In the case of the core-periphery metaphor, the periphery is defined on the basis of its marginality with regard to a pre-defined ‘centre’, often perpetuating the ‘West-rest’ binary classification. Many studies, such as those of Said (1978), opened our minds to less ‘univocal’ interpretations of world structures, and many, in this sense, criticised the use of expressions such as Third World or less developed countries in favour of alternatives such as Global South, emerging world, or alternative development, assuming nevertheless similar metageographical spatial visions of development and underdevelopment (Hettne 1990; Potter et al. 2004). In any case, the older metaphors are still in use, probably because of their ‘dead’ nature; ‘ThirdWorld’ is not really a metaphor implying similarities and analogies, but is now a concept per se, equated with the literal, and directly evoking a specific imagery. This is probably one reason why even more recent debates, such as those about globalisation, sustainable development, or development ‘from below’ (curious use of a spatial metaphor) have been carried out to a large extent using these widely criticized metaphors.
The Triad and the global network –The popular metaphor of the ‘Global Triad’ saw the light in a different period, the 1980s, and in the framework of a different debate, characterized by a growing interest in globalisation and in the role of geography. Although a certain popular rhetoric celebrating the end of distance and the spread of homogeneity and ‘flatness’ flourished in non-geographical debates, many analyses emphasised the persistence of specific and distinctive spatial economic patterns. The Triad, an idea promulgated by the work of Ohmae (1985), includes North America, Western Europe and Japan, a space sharing common characteristics (the global consumer, the Western cultural and political attitude) different from the rest of the world. The work of Ohmae has little connection with geography or development studies, focusing rather on business practices, and in his works the term Triad is sometimes used as a synonym of ‘the OECD countries’. The Triad represents the economically relevant world; all the rest is meaningful only in relative terms, as the destination of industrial relocations, investments and transnational strategies. The Triad metaphor is somehow similar to the idea of the ‘core’, but reveals different symbolisms, ideologies and conceptual borders and proposes not one ‘centre’, but three. At the same time, the three centres are becoming one (a single global market), and this is good in the eyes of economic actors. Of course, this was the original position of Ohmae; surprisingly, today the Triad metaphor is often used critically, denouncing the strong accumulation of economic power in the three pillars (Carroué 2004). In terms of classification, this metaphor may be considered as creative (in order to question in which sense
some territories belong to the same Triad) and, in general, dichotomist, implying a Triad-non Triad partition of the world in the geographic imaginary.
Nevertheless, many discourses on economic globalisation, stressing the opening of strategic horizons of enterprises and the growing interaction between different spaces and geographical scales, accompanied, particularly during the 1990s, the rise of different geographical images tied to the network metaphor (see, among others, Dicken 2007). As is well known, a geographical network is a spatial structure made of nodes, representing particular places or specific localised entities, which are tied by one or more specific types of relationship, such as industrial connections, financial exchanges, friendships or airline routes. According to Castells (1996), networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies, and much has been written on the interpretation of the global scenario in such terms, for example in order to explain intra and inter-firm relations. This powerful metaphor plays a paradigmatic metaphorical role, supporting a number of conceptions of geography in terms of relational spatiality: a space far less related to territorial properties, but to the effects of spatial and temporal exposure and connectivity (Amin 2002; see also Boggs & Rantist 2003). This kind of attitude to the interpretation of space is testified in the way this metaphor has been applied at the world level, for example describing the urban structures in terms of technological, infrastructural, industrial global linkages (Sassen 2002). On a symbolic field, the network metaphor evokes ideas of democracy and participation, a sort of opposition to ‘old’ hierarchical logics1 – despite the fact that
certainly network structures may assume more pyramidal shapes.
An important feature of the network metaphor is that it enables a way to conceive space in relation to the object(s) and/or processes being considered in space and time (Jones 2005): this is a major transformation with respect to previous metaphorical representation of space. In this sense, the network perspective has critically expressed traditional territorial/regional perspectives (as the modernist metaphors of a ‘Third world’ or a ‘Global South’) which conceptualise regions in terms of meeting places of economic, cultural and political fields (poor, non-aligned and marginal areas).
The flat and the liquid world – Today, the globalisation debate emphasises more and more the idea that conceptual categories are blurred and confused, and that there are no more rigid divides between categories of countries (for example, ‘investors’ and ‘recipients of investments’, or ‘exporters of raw materials’ and ‘exporters of manufactured goods’). Such ideas seem to lead to two possible outcomes in the world of metaphors: on the one hand, oversimplified images of a world without boundaries, and on the other hand, an implicit admission of the impossibility of producing a conceptual map of the world economy. The first typology includes the paradigmatic metaphor of the flat world proposed by Friedman (2005), which evokes an image of order and simplicity. Friedman’s world is not flat in the sense of uniform and isotropic; simply put, new technologies and new possibilities of development and empowerment for persons and companies are flattening the competitive field, placing them in direct and open competition. In this sense, the ‘flat world’ metaphor shows overlap and conformance with the ‘network’ metaphor, in terms, for example, of evoking ideas of ‘democracy’ and ‘wide interconnection’; but it also reveals sensitive differences, particularly that networks are not necessarily ‘flat’ and in this sense Friedman’s idea is more simplified and immediate. And, moreover, the ‘flat world’ metaphor is used in order to support specific 1 Of course, network structures may assume pyramidal shapes, and polycentrism is not in opposition with hierarchy, but as discussed by Wigley (2001), the rhetoric of networks often stresses ideas of democracy, speed and openness.
arguments and perspectives not necessarily linked to the network idea: the world, according to Friedman’s vision, is becoming relationship-free, and every economic transaction is contested globally, so that proximity relations are becoming less relevant, and the political and theoretical implications of this position strongly emphasise the neo-liberal thesis, stressing the many possibilities offered by the ‘flat’ world to overcome the problems of the ‘round’ one. Despite many critical comments from academics (Leamer 2007), this metaphor is gaining much ground and is very much ‘alive’, considering that Friedman’s book has been on the New York Times best-seller list and was ranked number 1 on Amazon on 21 February, 2006.
Conceptually opposite is the idea of the fluid world proposed by Urry (2002), also known in the variant form of the liquid world (Bauman 2000). Many global flows, for example those involving the movement of people, information, objects, money, and images, are uneven and fragmented, heterogeneous and unpredictable, without a well-defined point of arrival or departure, and without a constant speed. In social terms, this means that society is becoming more and more fragile and volatile, and concepts such as community, religion, and economy are becoming more elusive. In geographical terms, world structures are becoming less evident, less embedded, and more formless. For example, the liquid metaphor has been used by Turner (2003, p. 9) with respect to the theme of international relations, describing a ‘liquid sovereignty where there is no fixed body of power’. The construction of this paradigmatic metaphor lies in the most recent philosophical debates, which began as critiques of the ‘old’ post-modern arguments (Lee 2006), stressing the intrinsic impossibility of defining any geographical boundaries which describe the spatial dimensions of development.
INTERPRETATION: A PROBLEM OF BORDERS
The evolution of and competition between the various metaphors describing the world system may be read as a dialectic between different ways of drawing borders between development patterns, namely, diverse spatialisations of development (Newman 2006). The usefulness of these metaphors – as well as their limits – may be thought of as their effectiveness in defining boundaries between spatial categories, building up a mental imagery which supports the organisation of geographical knowledge within the framework of the various arguments and debates considered here.
Modernist approaches use the most basic logic: the search for a geographical boundary between structural characteristics of countries. Most cartographical representations are impressively similar in placing these borders: the Rio Bravo, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Amur River divided the poor from the rich in geographical imagery for many years.
Critical approaches, such as the idea of a Global Triad, changed in many ways the theoretical and methodological perspectives used to detect these boundaries, but never modified significantly their location on the map. In particular, a metageography of continents seemed to persist, namely, the idea of ‘natural’ boundaries between North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. Excluding the specific case of Asia (with the ‘anomaly’ of Japan and the Asian Tigers) and that of the countries of the former Soviet Union, it is not rare to associate an entire continent fully with a specific label in the dialectic between developed (or central) and underdeveloped (or peripheral) regions, suggesting a strong internal coherence in a definition of conceptual classes such as ‘underdeveloped Africa’ or ‘imperialistic Europe’, and further supporting the idea of ‘homogeneity’ inside the ‘black box’ of development (or underdevelopment; Grant & Agnew 1996) or, in the case of critical metaphors, a strong homogeneity in the kind of relations that exist between these typologies.
Today, many theoretical contributions and empirical studies bear witness to how the ‘old’ rigid boundaries – consider, for example, the Mediterranean Sea – have lost significance, replaced by various development gradients (frontiers). For example, offshore industrial phenomena tend to confuse the categories of developed (intended as industrialised) and underdeveloped (non-industrialised); enterprise functions are more and more located in the South, while Europe and North America have forms of poverty, power and exclusion which elsewhere (in Asia, Africa or Latin America) would be designated as symptoms of underdevelopment (Sidaway 2007). Such a crisis of the attempt to describe development patterns in terms of identification of different ‘regions’ may be testified by the progressive centrality, during recent decades, of paradigmatic and non-dichotomist metaphors, as in the cases of the ideas of a networked, flat or fluid world. Particularly, in this framework, the ‘flat’ and the ‘fluid’ world metaphors assume paradoxically a similar perspective, implicitly denying the possibility of drawing spatial boundaries, in one case evoking the simple image of a planet without any borders, and in the other describing a hyper-complex world with a certain degree of internal disorder.
A possible framework for interpreting the crisis of oppositional-regional metaphorical images refers to the problem of placing boundaries in a scenario where analogies between the metaphors discussed have ceased to exist. The Third World used to be something conceptually different from the periphery, but the supposed physical boundaries were the same, namely, a hypothetical line separating the South from the North. This means that there used to be in the past(the world of the 1950s and 1960s) arelevant correlation between the role of a territory in the global scenario, the level of wealth or poverty of the inhabitants, the technology implemented in the industrial structure, and the degree of specialisation in the industrial sector: in this sense, the ‘region’ intended as a meeting place between the fields of economy, culture and politics (Jones2005) worked fine: basically, most of the ‘Third World’ countries were ‘poor’, sharing a peripheral role in the international division of labour and presenting similar demographic and economic structures2.
Oppositional metaphors were oversimplified from the beginning, but they used to work considerably better some decades ago, while now things work differently. Poor countries are often highly industrialised; India is strategic from the standpoint of the international division of labour, but about one-third of the economically active population lives ‘below’ the UN poverty line. The idea of a fluid (and hybrid) world seems to be coherent with these transformations, but it lacks evocative power in the field of geographical knowledge. Dichotomy and binary reasoning are in fact fundamental concepts in Western cultures, because they allow easy definition of ‘us’ and the ‘other’, playing thereby the function of a ‘cosmology’, a more emotionally powerful understanding of world geography than that presented by cartography or other ‘scientific’ tools (Stallybrass & White 1986; Shields 1991). Third World, periphery and Triad define the ‘other’ and suggest easy partitioning of the Earth into regions, permitting places to be descriptively compared and contrasted in terms of their similarities and differences (Gregy & Lindhardt 1994). Nevertheless, it is worth emphasising other perils implicit in these representations, namely, the promotion of visions ‘deprived of geography’. As discussed by Massey (2005), geographical spaces have not to be conceived as ‘time slices’ of history (i.e. images and spatial properties in a given historical moment), but as a dynamic juxtaposition of events and people with their specific trajectories and evolutions. This is an important note: ‘old’ oppositional representations of the world, based on an dichotomist logic, defined spatial relations in terms of negativity, of distinguishing from, conceiving heterogeneity (spatial variety, the object of geography) in relation to internal disruption and incoherence rather than as a positive multiplicity of trajectories, producing a sort of 2 And, of course, another element of correlation pushes the idea of internal coherence in the conceptual category of ‘developing regions’: the localisation in the Southern hemisphere.
‘imagination from the inside’ (Massey 2005, p. 51). World regions, instead of being viewed as different societies facing each other at the same time, are thus differentiated and caricaturised, and then represented statically, promoting also an idea of impossibility with respect to the possibility of modifying this economic and political framework. The well known idea that space is a constantly developing social construction (and therefore that future is ‘open’) is absent in these geographical conceptions. Consider, for example, those discourses on globalisation convincing us of its ineluctability, a ‘sleight of hand in terms of the conceptualization of space and time’ (Massey 2005,p.5). It says that African states are not really different from ‘us’, having their own trajectories and, potentially, different futures. They are not recognized as coeval others: they are merely at an earlier stage of development (with evident analogies with modernist debates), ‘turning geography into history and space into time’. Although the flat-world metaphor evidently falls into this trap, the difficulty of classifying a networked space and, even more difficult, a fluid one (both paradigmatic metaphors) is evident. These metaphors are tricky to implement operationally. However, hierarchical binary schemes are dangerous: trying to define something on the basis of what it is not – not developed, not belonging to the core, not industrialised– implies a politically conservative perspective. For example, if we define as ‘developed’ the Western consumer society, then probably we assume development as something impossible to extend to the whole world because of ecological limits of the planet; why keep classifying the world according to an ‘non-achievable’ goal?
Certainly, in discussing these conclusions it is not my intention to neglect a vocabulary of ‘living’ and ‘dead’ metaphors now consolidated in popular and academic debates, but to propose some critical reflections on their use and function as well as to stress the relevance of the analysis of the co-evolution of geographical metaphors and discourses: representations not only reflect reality, but they help to constitute reality, and the evolution of metaphors to describe the world’s economic scene may be fruitfully interpreted in terms of the dialect and the tension between different ‘rival geographies’ and different approaches to geographical analysis (Smith & Godlewska 1994). Moreover, I intend to emphasise the necessity to attempt to introduce and experiment, in our analysis, other and new metaphors, able to stimulate, in the scientific community, that research for interpretations and analogies on the basis of the ‘interactive’ nature of the more beneficial metaphors. Considering the discussion proposed by Jones (2005), concerning the compatibilities (and not the mutual exclusivity) between networked and territorial (i.e. regional) perspectives of space, the attempt to describe the world economic scenario, for example, may fit into this framework, combining the metaphors of fluidity and networks, imagining the nodes of global economic interaction as complex territorial systems deriving from co-evolutive process between the environment (in many ways a ‘static’ element) and a (fluid) society. Similar experiments may take on a certain role in terms of political emancipation3: considering that our discourses convey meanings to our worlds, shaping our possibility of
action, it is possible that the massive and sometimes unconscious use of stereotyped metaphors may strongly undermine the revolutionary power of new ideas.
Acknowledgements
This research was mostly developed during my stay in Paris I – Sorbonne and Géographie-cités lab in Paris, and I would like to sincerely thank Nadine Cattan for her irreplaceable and sincere support. On the Italian side, I have to thank Egidio Dansero and Giuseppe Dematteis for their precious reading.
3 It should be noted that, in the framework of different discourses and theoretical elaborations, this idea is very coherent with Soja’s concept of Thirdspace (1996).
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