Haiti and the Outer Periphery of the World-System

In Haiti: Trapped in the Outer Periphery, his third book devoted to Haiti, Robert Fatton once again advances the frontiers of theory to explain the country’s seeming inability to promote some level of economic development to overcome its grotesque class inequalities, the acute poverty of the majority of its population, and its intractable social polarization. To that end, he deploys the concept of the “outer periphery,” which he derives from Immanuel Wallerstein’s tripartite theory of the capitalist world-system, made up of core, semiperipheral, and peripheral zones. It may be useful, then, to situate Fatton’s concept of the outer periphery in the context of that theory, which he argues does not fully explain countries like Haiti.

Since it emerged in the sixteenth century, the world-system has constituted a single international division of labor with different zones characterized by different class structures and modes of labor control—wage labor and advanced skilled production in the core areas, unskilled agricultural and minimum- and nonwage-labor production in the periphery, and a combination of corelike and periphery-like production relations and infrastructures of production in the semiperiphery. The unequal relations among the different zones have led to the development of strong states in the core areas and relatively weaker states in the peripheral zones. This has had two consequences: First, the capitalists in each zone, including the foreign firms operating there, have appropriated the surplus-value produced by their workers. Second, in the trade relations between the more developed core, the less developed semiperiphery, and the even more underdeveloped periphery, the core countries have appropriated the surplus produced for the world market through unequal exchange to the disadvantage of the latter two zones. This polarization has obviously created tensions and even discontent and discord between core and peripheral countries. One of the important functions of the semiperipheral states has been to deflect those tensions by showing the peripheral zones that they, too, could compete more successfully and be better off in the world economy (16–18; see also Wallerstein, 1974: 349–350). This means, then, that despite its enduring hierarchy, in which the core Western European countries have maintained their dominant positions, with the United States subsequently joining their ranks and becoming hegemonic, the positions of states in the world-system are not fixed but subject to change depending on the ability of their dominant classes and their states to preserve, strengthen, or lose their competitiveness in the world economy.

It is on the basis of these characteristics, specifically the nature of the state and the entrenched productive structures, class relations, and social inequalities within and among different countries in the world-system, that Fatton develops his theory of the outer periphery. Although he sees Haiti as the paradigmatic case of the outer periphery (Chapter 4), he makes it clear that states such as Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Mali, and East Timor also belong in that zone. “States in this conceptual zone are marked by zero-sum politics and profound social inequalities, which are aggravated by an environment of scarcity and poverty. Not surprisingly, most people in the outer peripheral states sorely lack the sense of belonging to a community of equals, of being full citizens” (14). For Fatton, the outer periphery is a zone of extra-cheap labor, extreme inequalities, high levels of unemployment, and extreme class and social polarization that lies at the “lower end of the production process with wages that barely assure the biological reproduction of the individual worker, let alone his or her household” (26). And while slippage from peripheral to outer peripheral status results in part from the configuration of domestic social forces, it is also the product of the “interaction between imperial actors and indigenous collaborators resulting in an opportunistic convergence of interests that explains the outer periphery’s obvious dependence on the core” (26).

From the standpoint of world-system theory, then, Fatton offers one of the clearest and most convincing arguments for the addition of this extra zone of the capitalist world-system and Haiti’s descent into it by focusing on the correlation between the policies of the imperial states (those of the United States and the international financial institutions) and the weakness and compliance of the successive governments of Haiti since the fall of the Duvalier regime in 1986 and the “transition to democracy.” Among other effects, these policies have led to Haiti’s becoming a haven for nongovernmental organizations (often referred to as “the Republic of the NGOs”), a devastating agricultural crisis that caused serious food insecurity, the reinforcement of the zero-sum political system (in which government officials use the state as a source of personal enrichment), continued foreign interference in Haiti’s politics, and the use of Haiti as an export-oriented enclave for extra-cheap labor (123). As he puts it: “Because of its comprador nature and urban bias, Haiti’s ruling class has hardly opposed the policies of the international community” and their detrimental effects on the economy. “The bourgeoisie has no national project apart from accepting dependence on outside forces for its own political survival and material well-being” (172).

A possible way out of this dilemma, Fatton suggests, could be found in pursuing a vigorous agrarian reform that prioritizes food security and production for the domestic market. This model might not lead to high levels of economic growth but would do much to diminish poverty and food insecurity for the majority of the population. However, it “would not serve the interests of the ruling urban comprador coalition that benefits from the maintenance of the current import-export economy” based on extra-cheap labor (170–171), and therefore Haiti is likely to remain “trapped in the outer periphery” for the foreseeable future.

The use of this new concept has enabled Fatton to offer a trenchant analysis of the causes and consequences of Haiti’s position in the lowest echelon of the capitalist world-system, but his analysis raises an important question about the concept itself. As he has shown, the descent into the outer periphery by formerly peripheral countries like Haiti results from the interaction between domestic actors (the business and political classes) and the imperial powers to which they are subservient and whose policies they embrace despite their detrimental effects. The existence of the outer periphery as a source of extra-cheap labor for foreign investors and their domestic collaborators is clearly advantageous to them, but is the outer periphery a permanent and essential substratum of the world-system, as the periphery is for Wallerstein? Put differently, if the countries that Fatton identifies as belonging to the outer periphery were to pursue reforms that allowed them to climb back into the periphery, what effect would this have on the functioning of the world-system? Or does he envision that the outer peripheral countries must, as Wallerstein (2006: 29) has argued for the peripheral countries, simply “accept the lot that has been given to them”?