Dividing the World: conflict and inequality in the context of growing global tension

Abstract The central themes in development theory have addressed exclusion of social groups, poverty gaps and strategies to overcome development deficits. In order to perceive the spatial structuring of inequality, concepts defining three separate worlds found ubiquitous appreciation and omnipresent adaptation. Coinciding with the end of the Cold War the ‘endism’ debate also suggested the end of the ‘Third World’. Presently it has become apparent that development theories which have ordered global space into three different worlds are experiencing rejuvenated appreciation. Nevertheless, the recourse towards trichotomising the world is not necessarily stimulated by the same concepts as previously. In the era of globalisation and post-developmentalism concepts favouring nation-states as sole reference points have been challenged and criticised, although the debate about failed states has again drawn attention to those entities. The post-9/11 perception of world order, chaos and conflicts has structured the previously acknowledged limitation of resources and the impossibility of catching-up strategies for developing countries in such a manner that ‘new’ Third World theories point at the exclusion from the developed world of outsiders, by attributing them pre-modern levels of state development and sovereignty. A prominent result of this debate is a perception of ordered space along lines which seemed to have been abandoned some time ago. This paper compares and scrutinises contemporary concepts of dividing the world.

reconsidering structure-related approaches while preserving the cognitive insights gained from postmodern debates and emphasising the political effectiveness and practical application of world division beyond the limits of container thinking. Countries belonging to the top level of the OECD world are experiencing the advantages of transnational activities, investments and trade, it seems. Certain aspects of sovereignty have been transferred to regional bodies. The European Union is the prime example for the surplus gathered from these affiliations. At the lower end of the ranking list the number of so-called 'failed states' is rising. This paper presents the hypothesis that the performance of those states is strongly linked to their sovereignty as nation-states. Although sounding paradoxical at first sight, the reality of countries such as Afghanistan proves the thesis. The activities of regional strongpersons-so-called 'warlords'-and their economic enterprises in all sorts of illicit businesses depend on the sovereign and existing nation-state which provides the arena for their endeavours. The aim of this contribution is to investigate the purpose of world divisions and their functions in a conflictladen environment where an asymmetric approach to the importance of nation-states and their role exists.

World divisions and poverty
Well known classification schemes were created and propagated in order to draw attention to central deficits and disparities between the world's different regions. Early phases of development co-operation typically spatialised and continentalised development gaps between world regions. This was the starting point for container thinking, which assigns overall responsibility and effectiveness to the nation-state. 1 There is also a connection with the promise that catch-up development is possible to reduce global development disparities (see Figure 1).
The Zeitgeist of the late 20th century turnaround, the 'end of [confrontational] history' and the termination of the Cold War, postmodern concepts, the spatial turn: all these are milestones and dividing lines within the development debate on the 'end of the Third World' narrative, 2 heralding the start of a new era and a newly defined relationship between regional blocs, groups of states, development agents and individuals. Today, however, others speak of the 'making of the Third World', 3 and focus on power relations and global domination structures benefiting Western countries. 4 Both post-developmentalist critiques and neoliberal promises of salvation overcome the constraints of the nation-state with regard to economics, communications, politics and society. However, they draw very different conclusions and provide contradicting interpretations. The profit-maximising activities of transnational companies and their fiscal juggling lend reality to the globally extended workbench with world-wide production centres and wide-ranging commodity chains. The world's diversity creates the basis for global patterns of cultural consumption, media exchange and mobility. Time-space compression reconfigures the arena of global trade and activity. 5 Opinions differ as to its impact with regard to reducing development deficits, aggravating contradictions between groups, or narrowing the development divide (see Table 1).
Despite all these de-spatialisations, our daily life and our perceptual world are often influenced by dichotomies and trichotomies that create spatial order and reveal social and regional disparities. A comparison of the 40 worst natural disasters rated by numbers of victims and insurance payments signals a looming global dichotomy in terms of risk to life (see Figure 2). As the recent earthquakes in Pakistan and tornadoes in the USA have confirmed,  inhabitants of wealthy countries have a much higher survival rate than people living in the worst stricken regions. In development research the issue of world division arises when the identification of donors and receivers of aid packages and preferential treatment is considered in the context of development co-operation. Every year the two major international players in development co-operation-the United Nations and the World Bank-classify the world community into three or four groups, respectively. In spite of all the criticism of a purely monetary and market-related parameterisation, the World Bank continues to estimate a country's development level on the basis of its gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and hence to divide the world into three or four groups (see Figure 3). Since the 1990s the UN has attempted to counteract this shortcoming by introducing its own indicator, the Human Development Index (HDI), which takes into account life expectancy, education and purchasing power when measuring development levels. This index also divides the world into three. Many regions are losers in both systems, and everyone knows who the winners are. The data on which the indices are based are constantly modified. In this way mean values for per capita income in power purchasing parities (PPP $) and the HDI are calculated on the basis of nation-state borders and classified according to changing threshold values. Thus areas of subcontinental dimension are identified as deficit regions and targeted for development measures.
So why have the gaps in human standards of living continued to widen, in spite of development co-operation and-according to many-huge transfer programmes designed to eradicate development deficits? Did international co-operation programmes fail to offset such divides and to reduce poverty? At the same time we perceive that poverty is everywhere in our daily lives. Coping with poverty is no longer limited to so-called developing countries; our contemporaries are becoming aware that 'new poverty' is ubiquitous. Poverty is no longer a regional attribute of the 'South': on the contrary, in the post-developmentalist sense it is conceivable everywhere. Globalised living conditions are also characterised by the lack of spill-over from islands of wealth. Income gaps are widening not only among the world's regions but also within nation-states. In 2005 the German federal government presented its second report on poverty and prosperity in Germany. Entitled Lebenslagen in Deutschland, the report includes a definition of poverty that is gaining wide acceptance: whoever earns less than half the average household income counts as poor (currently an estimated 13% of the population). Nevertheless, the federal government differentiates further in global terms: 'The problems of poverty and endangered livelihoods, as well as the polarisation between rich and poor, are much more evident at the international level than in a welfare state such as the Federal Republic of Germany'. 6 For international comparisons the UN use a Human Poverty Index (HPI), which it interprets differently with regard to life expectancy and standard of living in industrialised and developing countries. The index is intended to document poverty trends and the widening of the 'development gap' more FIGURE 3. Regional income disparities and headquarters of Global 1000 companies. accurately and to trace them within the different population groups. The introduction of an HPI-only a few years ago-cannot disguise the fact that poverty remains an age-old and constantly discussed topic. 7 Already in 1857 Karl Marx was accusing the British government of being responsible for debasing the standard of living in India. This was the year of the so-called Sepoy Rising against the East India Company, the first event to rock the relationship between colonisers and colonised. But in terms of per capita income the development gap was much narrower then than it is now (as shown in Figure 1). In the context of theories of capitalism, Rosa Luxemburg denounced the system-immanent power of the expanding gap between poor colonies and imperial powers. The Second World War was followed by the era of development aid. In 1969 Lester Pearson took stock and passed a devastating verdict on achievements to date: that development aid was being misused to promote exports by industrial countries.
Thirty years later Kofi Annan proposed devoting an additional US$40 billion per year to halve poverty in the medium term. Ten years after the end of the Cold War he voiced his disappointment that military spending had not been cut in favour of development aid. Nevertheless, he advocated the introduction of a 'peace dividend' for development. At the turn of the millennium, the UN General Assembly agreed on the 'Millennium Development Goals', the first of which was to reduce poverty. The target was to halve, by 2015, the proportion of people with an income of less than $1 a day. After one-third of this period the interim balance was somewhat meagre. This outcome was discussed at the UN General Assembly in New York in September 2005, but the topic was eclipsed by the debate on UN reform. The same procedure was observed at the 2007 assembly meeting.

Poverty and wealth of nations-from dichotomy to trichotomy
Since Adam Smith's seminal work The Wealth of Nations (1776) there has been a debate on how economic transactions between countries can operate to the benefit of all parties or to their reciprocal disadvantage. Derek Gregory considers that the dichotomy of the world depends not only on regional economic factors but also on the presumed presence or absence of historical depth: 'The conventional metanarrative has Eurocentrism absolutizing time and space by folding two distinctions together: One between 'the West' and the 'non-West' and the other between ''history'' and what Eric Wolf called ''the people without history'''. 8 In allusion to Adam Smith this time-space dichotomy reappears in the late work by the eminent economic historian David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are so Rich and Some so Poor. The old division of the world into East and West no longer makes sense; it is now the gap between rich and poor that matters: These are often styled North and South, because the division is geographic; but a more accurate signifier would be the West and the Rest, because the division is also historic. Here is the greatest single problem and danger facing the world of the Third Millennium. The only other worry that comes close is environmental deterioration, and the two are intimately connected, indeed are one. 9 This sets the framework: development disparities and the limits of ecological compatibility are the key issues for mankind's future. The emergence (or the perception) of growth-induced limits to globalisation ('Grenzen der Globalisierung' 10 ) seems to be the driving force behind the new focus on what is desirable and feasible in international relations strategy. The ecological dimension points to the limited availability of natural resources and encourages many a political advisor to advocate exclusion strategies based on unequal participation in the global community.
So it is not surprising that, after being frowned on for a while, global theories seem to be coming into fashion again. In his study of diverging trends of nation-state development on a global scale, David Landes divides the world into three kinds of nations according to their nutrition and/or food supply (see Table 2). Here a clear-cut division into three worlds is easily suggested as countries are distinguished by their share in global wealth resources. Nevertheless, Landes' argument basically follows a bipolar worldview as he identifies 'the West' as an endangered species that is challenged by the rest of the world.
The present debate offers a further insight. There is a growing fascination and fear linked to the widening development gap (cf Figure 1). The latter is connected with a perceivable turning point in global dominance-wherever it may shift, and assuming it can be pinpointed at all-in view of a prospective 'Asian Age', as the 21st century has been called. Ancient fears are emerging, and retrospective confirmation of 'European exceptionalism' is expected to deliver back-up arguments in the conflict of the 'West against the Rest'. Such ideas are enjoying a certain popularity among political advisers and tie in with the 'clash of civilisations' predictions of a Samuel Huntington and his like-minded colleagues. 11 All these studies share a structural approach, one that delimits and perceives societies primarily at the level of nation-states. Instead of taking into account sociocultural diversity on different spatial levels and increased communication, migration and exchange in world trade, nation-states and regions are being 'homogenised' into entities of standardised cultural properties. Much has been said about the inconsistency of Huntington's concept of civilisations and cultures. The problem is that a homogenisation process-which is intended to create identity inwardly and selectively to emphasise differences outwardly-supports demarcations, thus making them possible and plausible in the first place.

The new three world theories
Given the dramatically changed world after 9/11, global theories coupling development and security have found new supporters. Realising that catchup development is unlikely to be achieved globally in circumstances of limited resource availability, North American and European realist politicians like  Henry Kissinger or Robert Cooper have concluded that a fragmented world with accepted heterogeneities is likely to be the world of the near future (see Table 2). In the face of escalating acts of violence, Kissinger divides global society into a triad consisting of: . the world of the democracies (Europe and America); .
the world of equilibrium (Asia); .
the world in transition (the Middle East and Africa). 12 Marked differences are revealed between the up and coming economies of South and East Asia, on the one hand, and the lagging-behind African societies together with the non-oil-based rentier states of the Middle East, on the other. The latter are the losers of the neoliberal turnaround, with only low, or in many cases even declining, growth rates. 13 Thanks to the threat these regions are assumed to present and the connotations of 'rogue states' and 'axis of evil', links are strengthening between development efforts and security considerations. 14  modern; . pre-modern.
The focal point of his essay on the 'postmodern state' is the survival of what used to be the 'First World', so it is not surprising that some commentators consider his opinions to be those of a European Samuel Huntington. 15 In his follow-up book, The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-first Century he describes his three-world theory in greater detail. 16 In his view relations between the different worlds need to be restructured to allow an agenda that had been taboo since the start of the Third World debate: the resumption of patrimonial relations between the First and Third Worlds. The existing constellation demands a beneficent 'new imperialism' as a response strategy to a terrorism that he labels 'pre-modern'. Cooper considers that a new international world order legitimates authoritarian intervention by a 'new Western imperialism' that could restructure crisis regions such as Afghanistan, Bosnia and Kosovo, while avoiding the US hegemonial approach and rejecting the European integration strategy. He states explicitly: 'It is precisely because of the death of imperialism that we are seeing the emergence of the pre-modern world. Empire and imperialism are words that have become a form of abuse in the postmodern world. Today, there are no colonial powers willing to take on the job, though the opportunities, perhaps even the need for colonisation is as great as it ever was in the nineteenth century.' 17 These opinions-understood as a response to the US unipolar world system-reveal serious contradictions that can easily be linked to the wide development gap: . Has the impossibility of catch-up development for the countries of the 'South' become so fixed in people's minds that the possibility of new exclusions and dependencies seems acceptable? . Do the free trade paradigm and the Washington Consensus apply only to improving life in 'the West', while the rest of the world is degraded to an extended workbench and a cheap sales market? . Are regional developments that fail to conform with Western values merely tolerated, or do they engender an active involvement based on different ethical criteria?
Today's global challenges are riddled with such contradictions. On the one hand, homogenising tendencies-expressed in medial communication, consumption patterns, fashions, but also technological standards, quality control, report systems and administrative regulations-suggest a converging development. On the other hand, the world seems to be drifting apart, as the economic gap and other phenomena are signalling. In the globalised world the states best able to stand their ground are those that combine deregulation and market orientation with the control mechanisms and explicit rules of a constitutional state. In countries practising such measures it may be possible to exploit wasted potential, although there are no guarantees of this as yet, and no past experience to rely on. So-called 'failed states'-where rule is arbitrary, where the state is unable to enforce its laws and does not have a monopoly on the use of force-offer opportunities for criminal activities that are able to profit from globalised forms of exchange and communication. The phenomenon of state collapse is a matter of concern to global players: according to the World Bank there are 30 'low-income countries under stress', whereas Britain's Department for International Development (DFID) identifies 46 'fragile' states. The CIA found only 20 failing states, according to the prestigious journal Foreign Policy, which then presented its own 'Failed States Index' based on 12 criteria. 18 Precisely this image of state collapse has caused the apologist of the 'end of the Third World' to revise his earlier views. With reference to Cooper's concept of sovereignty, Ulrich Menzel exalts Staatlichkeit (statehood) to the classification principle of three worlds: The new First World is the postmodern world of the EU, which practises multilateralism; the new Second World is the modern world of the classical nation-states a`la USA, China, Russia, India, Israel, Brazil etc, who insist on their sovereignty internally and externally and refuse to tolerate any interference in their domestic affairs; the new Third World is the pre-modern world of the new Middle Ages, the weak, collapsing and already collapsed states in Africa south of the Sahara, in Central Asia, or in the Andes region of Latin America. 19 Such views do not stay uncontradicted for long! In the same issue of the journal Peripherie Michael Korbmacher comments: 'Faced with the disappearance of the classical periphery, Menzel presents a new tripartite division of the world . . . Eurocentrism pops up again. In a hair-raising evolutionism Menzel locates social conditions of the globalised present along a line from pre-modernity via modernity to postmodernity. European modernity provides a role model of succeeding development.' 20 In Menzel categories and classifications come into conflict with each other, raising the question of whether this is a result of arbitrariness or a relapse into the thought patterns of classical modernisation theory. A complicated and complex world needs a lot of explaining and interpretation. Rigourous categories and obvious ordering and power-related hierarchies may provide welcome help. At any rate the theory debate remains diversified. Depending on the cognitive interest involved, the focus is on perspectives structuring the political-economic divisions of the world, while at the same time individual and collective action are investigated when the focus is on the options available to the various actors in a power-filled world. However, opinions continue to differ about the possibilities and limits of catch-up development, in turn affecting proposed strategies to overcome poverty.

Mounting regional tensions
The widening development gap is an omnipresent and well documented trend. At the same time, international organisations are committed to overcoming inequalities. Remembering the successful development model practised in the Federal Republic of Germany after the Second World War, some have called for a 'Global Marshall Plan' 21 and for the European Union to take the lead in implementing it.
Under the auspices of the United Nations a Report on the World Social Situation 2005, subtitled The Inequality Predicament was published in August 2005. The root of this inequality lies in the fact that eighty per cent of the world's gross domestic product belongs to the 1 billion people living in the developed world; the remaining 20 per cent is shared by the 5 billion people living in developing countries . . . Ignoring inequality in the pursuit of development is perilous. Focusing exclusively on economic growth and income generation as a development strategy is ineffective, as it leads to the accumulation of wealth by a few and deepens the poverty of many; such an approach does not acknowledge the intergenerational transmission of poverty. 22

DIVIDING THE WORLD
The report also notes that: 'Asymmetric globalization is an important source of rising inequality' and links this to four major factors: . Development asymmetries are the result of globalisation and to the lack of explicit poverty reduction policies in governmental and non-governmental development strategies. . Poverty groups should be guaranteed access to assets and opportunities. . Access to regular and adequate employment is essential. . So is the social integration of marginalised groups.
A 'peace dividend' seemed possible 10 years ago, when disarmament was considered expedient world-wide.These prospects have vanished; indeed, the reverse is partly the case. Military spending is rising throughout the world and, in comparison, much less is being spent on development. Although it is widely recognised that there is a connection between security, peace and development, intentions do not seem to have been translated into action. So the chasm between rich and poor will continue to widen. At the actor level and at the nation-state level the dimensions of the inequality and poverty challenge are still underestimated. The basic questions about inequality and the diagnosis of the development gap remain the same. The progression of the debate has to prove whether new answers and strategies can be expected.