Sphere of what?

  

I have often used the concept “sphere of interest”. When I talk about dividing the world between the big powers or rather their overlords or triumvirs, the term must be nuanced considerably. We can differentiate between several types or levels or fields of interest. At least these four could be mentioned:

 

1} Sphere of economic interest.

This involves markets, investments, outsourcing of production, division of labour, exchange of raw materials etc. For a given superpower or its leader, a such sphere presently can encompass large parts of the world.

 

2} Sphere of IT infrastructure.

Partly also of IT software and hardware.

 

3} Sphere of political dominance.

 This ranges from political influence to outright overlordship.

 

4} Sphere of military presence.

 

Clearly, the geographical size of the spheres decreases from 1} to 4}. Both the spheres of economy and IT can be large. Depending on the degree of decoupling or derisking, the spheres of these types can overlap considerably, e.g. a country in South America can be economically interesting for both the United States and China. Obviously, such overlapping is not the case for the spheres of political overrule and military presence.

 

Many conflicts between big powers arise from disputes over the demarkations or borders between the sphere of interest in these four fields. As said in the previous post, it could bring a certain stability if the small and medium size countries in important parts of the world are distributed between the superpowers, and this happens along clearly defined demarkation lines, agreed upon by these powers.

 

As we have at least four fields, there must be agreement on a division line in each. Unless the decoupling is total, the spheres in the four fields should not coincide geographically. In this case the borders between the resulting super-spheres would be almost impossible to agree upon. Because one country is a part of the economic sphere of one power it does not have to be also politically dominated.

 

To conclude, in order to stabilise the globe, it can be divided into spheres on several levels, e.g. economy, IT, politics and military, and the demarkation lines between these spheres, i.e. which countries “belong to” which of the major players can be different on each level.