Notwithstanding their lack of industry and peculiar social structures (unlike the rest of the North or the South for that matter), the Gulf states (both as oil exporters and petrodollar recyclers), as well as China, are more deeply integrated into political economy of the North than many of the marginal European states whose fates don't matter much to the rest of the North or the World. It seems to me to be crucial to understand the precise politico-economic relation among the USA, China, and the Gulf states in the current conjuncture.
> Japan has had a rough 15 years of it, but they're hardly paying "big-
> time."
The main price that Japan pays is renunciation of ever having its own foreign policy.
On 2/6/07, Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:
> BTW, speaking of the great difficulty of generalizing across the poorer
> countries (or across countries period for that matter)
It sure is difficult to generalize across more than one thing, but that's neither here nor there. What could we generalize across great social differences and economic inequalities that existed from area to area inside the former Soviet Union? Cultural and economic differences and inequalities across internal geographic boundaries inside the former Soviet Union, let alone the former Eastern bloc, were probably larger than those inside Western Europe today, and yet the Soviet Union was a singular political actor on the world stage in a way that "Europe" (Old Europe + New Europe . . . perhaps Turkey in the future, though that is increasingly unlikely) is not yet and may never become.
Analytically, you can slice the world any way you like, depending on yardsticks. But the question is whether you can make your slice of the world, made up of various components you group into your slice, act together and achieve what you want to achieve.
In this sense, the North has been a more politically coherent category than the South, just as the capitalist class has been a more politically coherent category than the working class. The dominant (the North, capital, etc.) make it difficult for the subordinate (the South, labor, etc.) to act together. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>