some, large parts of the developing world have been, and are still being disadvantaged
by the process of globalization (Amin, 2001). Resistance is consequently growing
against the social, religious and economic influences of the West, particularly
amongst Muslim and African nations. Parts of the Muslin world visibly resist the
growing global homogenisation, while sections of Africa accentuate the continent’s
need to find its own ‘auto-centeredness’, its own cultural version of an African
‘renaissance’ (Geyer, 2002; Tsheola, 2002; Sihlongonyane, 2001; Kaya, 2001).
In the original global division of labour, manufacturing was concentrated in the
core regions of the world while the periphery was lagging behind. Up until the 1960s,
core-peripheral relationships were largely exploitative - the North providing
manufactured products to the South in exchange for primary products. Towards the
end of the 1960s globalization entered a new phase. During this period of regional
restructuring economic changes were brought about by global shifts in manufacturing.
While the North maintained an advanced form of global corporate dominance
(Graham, et al., 1988), production processes were selectively moved from high labour
cost core areas to low-wage countries with quality labour and good infrastructure
(Frobel et al., 1980; O’Loughlin, 1989). This resulted in a new international division
of labour, the dispersion of production processes from core areas to what Wallerstein
(1974) calls semi-peripheral areas, causing the replication of core labour markets in
such peripheral regions (Sassen, 1991). In the process the global economic space
was transformed, from the original First, Second and Third World divide to one where
distinct areas of growth in the Third World can be distinguished from the lagging
Third World.
Since the 1990s, the world has witnessed yet another wave of spatial economic
changes. After the demise of the Soviet Block, a new arrangement of political
economic associations evolved. The mixture of post- and neo-colonial relationships
that were forged during the 1960s, which resulted in what appeared to be a
fragmented arrangement of economic relationships between core and peripheral
regions (Poon, 1997), are now becoming a more organized arrangement of economic
super blocks. On the one hand there are the more-or-less clearly defined core-
peripheral divisions of the Pacific Rim centring around Japan, the Americas around
the United States, and Central and Western Europe around the Anglo-Franco-German
core (Emmerij, 1992; Vernon, 1996; Lipietz, 1997). On the other hand, a new
underlying strategic residual force seems to be emerging, causing (members of) the
Russian Federation, the Middle East/North African bloc and Central Asia, to be
slowly gravitating towards one another. Links between the potential members of this
emerging block are still tentative, very loose and unstructured. Some associations are
of a historic political, religious, and/or cultural nature, others are based on similar
resources and natural conditions, and others on strategic global geo-political interests.
In the process a new global division is being created. It consists of: (i) the core
regions in the North that contain most of the head quarters of enterprises with a global
reach, (ii) the inner periphery consisting of the newly industrialized countries of South
East Asia and the ‘near-industrialized’ or ‘transitional’ economies of Central and
Eastern Europe, Latin America, and China, and (iii) the outer periphery. The latter,
which consists of ‘middle and low’ income countries (Arnold, 1997) can be loosely
subdivided into three groups: (i) Third World countries such as South Africa and
Botswana, (ii) Fourth World countries such as Ghana, Tanzania, Zambia, and Uganda,
and (iii) the Fifth World countries such as Liberia, Somalia, Sudan, Zaire, and