ABSTRACT
The geographical contradiction of capitalist globalization – contradiction between spatial integration and fragmentation – has developed in three forms expressing the concrete historical-geographical development of the internal contradictions of capitalist accumulation throughout the twentieth century. The geographical contradiction has its origin in the contradiction between the interests of capital as a whole and the conflicting interests of competing factions of capital. The interlocked forms that the geographical contradiction assumed at different moments throughout the twentieth century resulted from the concrete circumstances determining the contradictions of inter-capitalist competition. Thus, each of the three forms became dominant at one time, but they all overlap such that they cannot be separated ontologically or chronologically. We can summarize the three forms of geographical contradiction according to three forms of inter-capitalist competition in the global economy. 1) At the most general level, the fragmentation of global space into “national” (economic) territories, including formal colonies and “spheres of influence,” prevailed in the period of classical imperialism, roughly between 1870 and 1945, and it was determined by the global expansion of, and competition between, national monopolies. Despite the development of multinational corporations and the integration of capital at the international level in the post-war period, the fragmentation of the global economy into national territories and the reliance of competing factions of capital on the power of the state persist. 2) The territorial division underlying global expansion was not confined to the spaces of the rival nation-states and as early as the late nineteenth century, fragmentation could be seen taking place at the supranational, or continental, scale, organized around three regions centered on what would later be referred to as the “global triad” of Western Europe, the US, and Japan (more recently, China has increasingly contested Japan’s dominance in East Asia). The triadic dominance of global capital and the restriction of inter-imperialist rivalry to the three global economic powers, accompanied the development of capital in the post-war period. It remained confined to the territories outside the Communist bloc and, despite competition in the former colonies, inter-capitalist competition was largely confined to dominance in the territories of the competitors. It remains largely so today, despite the entry of new rivals and the further globalization of the world
capitalist economy after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist economies of Eastern Europe. 3) The emergence of the Soviet Union in 1917 removed large territories from the space of capital and, despite several attempts by capital to penetrate the Soviet sphere, capitalist expansion remained confined to the territories of the advanced capitalist countries and the Third World. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union towards the end of the 1980s, but especially during the first Cold War between 1947 and the early 1970s, the apparent dominant form of the geographical contradiction was determined by a binary division of the world into a “contained” Communist bloc and a self-contained (Western) capitalist zone. Inter-capitalist contradictions persisted within the capitalist camp at the same time that the capitalist classes of the US and Western Europe formed alliances against the working classes in the capitalist countries, national liberation and decolonization movements, and the potential spread of socialism in the Third World. The latter, although justified by Cold War imperatives, was relatively independent of it: it was largely a strategy to prevent the development of economies in Third World countries independent of Western capital – a strategy that has its origin in the old colonial division of labor. With the Third Worldization of countries of the former Communist bloc and despite the uneven economic development of Third World countries, the binary division of the world between capitalist and Communist zones transformed increasingly into the old binary division between an advanced global North and a lagging or developing global South. Thus inter-imperialist rivalry among and within the triad in the so-called period of neoliberal globalization intersects with what Amin (2004) has called “the collective imperialism of the triad” or, the neoliberal war on the South.
