[Peace-discuss] Fwd: [SRRTAC-L:17167] Fwd: United States: the slide to disorder [LeMonde Dipl.]

[Al Kagan]

FYI

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Mark Rosenzweig <iskra at earthlink.net>
> Date: July 12, 2005 9:09:32 PM CDT
> To: SRRT Action Council <srrtac-l at ala.org>
> Subject: [SRRTAC-L:17167] Fwd: United States: the slide to disorder 
> [LeMonde Dipl.]
> Reply-To: iskra at earthlink.net
>
> The following piece is a provocative 'tour de force'.A sweeping 
> analysis, compact in argument yet expansive in scope, with much to 
> think about.
> I urge you to read it.
> Mark Rosenzweig
>>
>> Le Monde diplomatique
>>    -----------------------------------------
>> July 2005
>> Sequel to globalisation
>>
>> United States: the slide to disorder
>> ___________________________
>>
>> The unilateralism of the United States - economic, commercial
>> and military - is at odds with the multilateral reality of
>> today's world. US politics of military supremacy contradicts its
>> sacred principle of free markets. Will this be a turning point
>> of history, like the one that marked the end of the first phase
>> of capitalist globalisation, which lasted from 1880 to 1914?
>>
>> by Philip S Golub
>> ___________________________________________________________
>>
>> LATE 20th-century globalisation, understood as the
>> unification of the world economy under a neoliberal model,
>> appears exhausted. The symptoms are manifold: imperialist
>> wars, rising nationalism, aggravated trade conflicts within
>> and without the capitalist core, global social turbulence.
>> Underlying all these are deep structural imbalances in the
>> world economy and a universal widening of social inequalities
>> within and between nations (1).
>>
>> These disintegrative trends are weakening, and may end up
>> tearing apart, the schemes of interstate cooperation and the
>> regimes of global governance that underpin the world
>> capitalist order. They highlight the contradiction between
>> the transnational character of capitalist expansion and the
>> segmentation of the modern interstate system along national
>> lines.
>>
>>  That contradiction proved fatal to the first wave of
>> globalisation brought about by western colonial expansion in the
>> late 19th century, when nationalism and militarism combined to
>> wreck the British-centred international economic order and
>> shatter the long post-1815 European peace. The rise of a strong
>> militarised German state, and intensified inter-imperialist
>> rivalries, challenged and ultimately overcame the ability of
>> Britain to hold the centre. Economic liberalism and free trade,
>> the dominant models of the mid-19th century, weakened from the
>> 1880s on, came crashing down when Wilhelmian Germany made a
>> direct bid for European hegemony in 1914. The first phase of
>> western globalisation under British auspices ended in a sea of
>> blood.
>>
>> In his famous account of the collapse of liberalism, the
>> subsequent rise of fascism and the outbreak of another world war,
>> Karl Polanyi (2) suggested that transnational capitalist
>> cooperation, embodied by pan-European networks of high finance
>> whose functional role was to avert general wars, had ultimately
>> succumbed to national power politics: "Power had precedence over
>> profit. However closely their realms interpenetrated, ultimately
>> it was war that laid down the law to business." Despite the high
>> degree of European economic integration in the latter part of the
>> 19th century, the webs of capitalist interdependence were swept
>> away in the rising nationalist wave.
>>
>> That wave, generated by the ravages of the self-adjusting market,
>> culminated in fascism. As a general phenomenon, fascism, which
>> crushed liberalism and socialism, was a deadly pathological
>> "solution to the impasse reached by liberal capitalism . . . a
>> reform of market economy achieved at the price of the extirpation
>> of all democratic institutions", according to Polanyi (3).
>> Society, he wrote, "took measures to protect itself" from the
>> "self-adjusting market . . . an institution that could not exist
>> for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural
>> substance of society". It did so by opting for strong militarised
>> states that unified society behind and beneath the state.
>>
>> Though history is not an eternal return of the same, Polanyi's
>> hypothesis is a useful frame for reading the impasses of our
>> times. Powerful disintegrative forces have been unleashed,
>> threatening the edifice of the contemporary liberal order. At the
>> level of society, intensified social resistance is reflected in
>> the emergence of a global democratic movement of social
>> transformation - but also in authoritarian rightwing populism. At
>> the level of state power, the most telling reaction, which has
>> accelerated disintegration, has been the spectacular revival of
>> nationalism in China, Russia, Japan, Europe (4) and elsewhere. In
>> the United States, the core state of the global capitalist
>> system, nationalism has taken a particularly exacerbated form:
>> imperialism.
>>
>> Soft power'
>>
>> This renationalisation of world politics marks the end of the
>> liberal, post-cold war, interlude. During the late 1980s and the
>> 1990s it was widely assumed that the emergence of a global
>> village (the compression of time and space due to the information
>> revolution), the transnationalisation of capital and the creation
>> of global horizontal production networks were redistributing
>> power from public to private actors, leading to a "withering away
>> of the modern territorial state as the primary locus of world
>> power" (5).
>>
>> Liberal democratic theorists argued that we had entered a
>> postmodern period in which the nation state was being challenged
>> from below by newly empowered networks of civil society, and from
>> above by autonomous globalised markets. Insofar as the
>> interdependence generated by global markets and transnational
>> actors constrained the belligerent impulses of the modern nation
>> state, this implied that soft power was supplanting hard power as
>> the dominant grammar of world politics. The spectrum of liberal
>> democratic opinion ranged from institutionalists, who advocated
>> and foresaw reinforced interstate cooperation, to commercial
>> pacifists, who envisaged a long democratic peace based on
>> deepening economic interdependence and convergence.
>>
>> From a social democratic perspective, Jürgen Habermas advanced
>> the argument that "a favourable constellation of forces" was
>> emerging that might finally realise the Aufklärung
>> [Enlightenment] project of a Kantian peace that was based on a
>> "cosmopolitical conception of law" transcending international law
>> (6).
>>
>> Further to the left, neo-Marxist theorists, analysing the
>> transnationalisation of capital, the reconfiguration of the state
>> and new forms of global governance, questioned whether
>> imperialism was still a useful category of analysis. Drawing on
>> Karl Kautsky's 1914 thesis on ultra-imperialism, which postulated
>> that inter-imperialist rivalries driven by the monopolistic
>> drives of the nation state and national cartels could be
>> transcended through capitalist cooperation, a number of
>> intellectuals argued in the 1990s that late capitalism had
>> ushered in a post-imperialist age (7). The evidence for this was
>> the formation of a transnational capitalist class with global
>> interests and a common awareness of those interests as
>> transcending territorially bound national agendas (8). Classical
>> imperialism, or the drive for monopoly of competing expansionist
>> nation states, was not sustainable in an interdependent
>> globalised capitalist system governed by supra-state institutions
>> reflecting the common interests of the new class.
>>
>> At the end of the 1990s Tony Negri and Michael Hardt gave global
>> currency to a slightly modified version of this hypothesis by
>> making the meta-historical claim in Empire (9) that contemporary
>> empire is not "a weak echo of modern imperialisms but a
>> fundamentally new form of rule". Empire, in their view, had cut
>> its umbilical cord to the nation state and was no longer
>> territorially bound: with no political centre, the new global
>> imperium was the expression of the geometric set of relations of
>> power and domination generated by globalised markets at all
>> levels of social life. In contrast to the vertical and
>> concentrated systems of domination of past European empires,
>> power in the new globalised configuration is diffuse,
>> de-concentrated and horizontal. This, in turn, is leading to new
>> transnational forms of resistance by decentralised networks
>> (which Negri calls "the mulitudes"). Empire so defined becomes a
>> global realm without limits and without name.
>>
>> In different ways these perspectives all suggested an epochal
>> shift away from the power maximisation strategies of the modern
>> nation-state, to a postmodern, post-national condition of
>> globality. However, just as these concepts were being formulated,
>> corrosive forces were secretly at work on the fragile foundations
>> of the liberal capitalist world order. These are now clearly
>> apparent.
>>
>> Disruption from the US
>>
>> The primary disruptive force has come from the US, which, under
>> President George Bush, has been striving for global monopoly.
>> This is ironic - the US was the driver and the main beneficiary
>> of the global free market and capitalist integration in the
>> 1990s. Indeed, globalisation enhanced US autonomy, the
>> "increasing mobility of information, finance and goods and
>> services frees the American government of constraints while
>> putting everyone else under tighter constraints" (10).
>>
>> However, the recent assertion of a "robust nationalism", as
>> Samuel Huntington approvingly calls the new US ethos, has
>> fundamentally altered the grammar and trajectory of world
>> politics: liberal globalisation and interdependence have been
>> superseded by naked imperial power politics. Just as the late
>> 19th-century expansion of the free market was centred in London,
>> underpinned by a political order and held together by
>> transnational networks with a vested interest in peace in Europe
>> (11), the pursuit of 20th-century globalisation requires the
>> continued commitment of the US to a system of institutionalised
>> interstate cooperation and liberal regimes of global
>> governance.
>>
>> Yet unlike Britain, which lost control, the US has chosen to
>> wreck the global system. As Stanley Hoffmann puts it: "The US may
>> want to return to pre-1914 conditions . . . or else, the US,
>> seeing itself as the guardian of world order, would leave
>> restraints on other states standing, and reserve to itself the
>> right to select those restraints of international law and
>> institutions that serve its interests and to reject all the
>> others." The dramatic implication in both cases is that the US is
>> deconstructing the frameworks of multilateral cooperation that
>> were designed after 1945 to introduce "some order and moderation
>> into the jungle of traditional international conflicts" (12).
>>
>> This choice reflects the preferences and interests of the
>> national imperialist bloc of forces that crystallised on the
>> right during the late cold war and came to power in 2000. This
>> national bloc, as the Gramscian international relations scholar
>> Stephen Gill suggests, is historically "associated with the
>> security complex, declining protectionist industries, and
>> geopolitical thinkers of the realist per-suasion" (13). It
>> differentiates itself from the more cosmopolitan
>> transnationalised forces within US society, notably "corporate
>> interests which are more global [who] need continued access to
>> the markets and capital of other countries [and whose] identity
>> of interests with the territorial US is less clear cut". The
>> latter, like their 19th-century counterparts, are capitalists of
>> the high seas (in the words of Fernand Braudel), whose interests,
>> indeed whose existence, depends on webs of transnational
>> cooperation.
>>
>> While the Clinton administration's composition and policies
>> reflected, at least in part, the interests of this thin but
>> influential cosmopolitan class, the contemporary right-wing power
>> elite is centred in the military-industrial complex, which is the
>> least autonomous and most nationalist part of the US political
>> economy. The least autonomous because it is fused in the state
>> and the most nationalist because it seeks by nature to maximise
>> national power. These elite formations both call upon broad
>> social bases: as the geographic dispersion of the 2004 elections
>> neatly showed, the social base of the liberal internationalists
>> is concentrated in densely populated, internationalised coastal
>> urban areas, while the primary popular base of nationalism and
>> militarism is found in rural areas, among the white lower, and
>> lower middle, classes in the heartland.
>>
>> This sociological distinction is reflected in differences of
>> outlook and policy. The Clinton team attempted to shift the
>> institutional balance of government towards the Treasury
>> Department and focused primarily on promoting the comparative
>> advantages of the most internationalised parts of the US economy
>> in the newly globalised market. In stark contrast, the Bush
>> administration has been exclusively committed from the start to
>> enhancing US hard power and mobilising the US armed forces to
>> establish a disciplinary world order under monopolistic control.
>> Condoleezza Rice made clear before the 2000 elections that the
>> bloc of forces behind Bush intended to free itself from "an
>> illusory international community" and overturn the liberal
>> paradigm by shifting US policy from the hesitant internationalism
>> of the 1990s to nationalism, power politics and war (14).
>>
>> There were three major steps in the formation of the national
>> imperialist bloc. The first was the partially successful effort
>> by radical cold warriors to undermine East-West détente in the
>> mid-1970s (15). This effort was kept in check by the need to
>> maintain cold war international alliances. Any attempt to assert
>> unilateral advantage would have threatened western unity, already
>> shaken by the Vietnam war. The second was the conservative
>> revol-ution and the renewed attempt to assert primacy through
>> military mobilisation, foreign policy and trade unilateralism,
>> under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. The third was the fusion,
>> during the 1990s, of neo-conservatism and Bible-belt militarism,
>> expressed in the new right's takeover in Congress in 1994.
>>
>> US Congress campaign
>>
>> This led to the campaign by Congress to dismantle the UN and
>> expand US autonomy at the expense of all other states. We should
>> recall that, during the 1990s, Congress, often supported by the
>> Pentagon, refused to pay UN dues, imposed unilateral economic
>> sanctions against 35 UN member states, passed extraterritorial
>> legislation infringing international law, and refused to ratify
>> crucial international conventions and arms control treaties
>> (notably the Ottawa convention banning the production, trade and
>> use of anti-personnel land mines of 1997 and the comprehensive
>> test ban treaty.) Though it ratified the chemical weapons
>> convention in 1997, Congress inserted exemptions that effectively
>> undermined the convention. Then, in early 2001, the Bush
>> administration repudiated the Kyoto protocol, signed by Clinton,
>> rejected a draft UN programme of action to control the trade in
>> small arms and light weapons, blocked efforts to add a
>> verification protocol to the biological weapons convention and
>> simply dumped the ABM treaty.
>>
>> The campaign culminated in 2003 with the war in Iraq. Today,
>> despite the patent failure of that imperial venture - a
>> "catastrophic success" in Bush's own words - and an unprecedented
>> crisis of legitimacy, the administration is continuing down the
>> monopolistic path. This is manifest in a number of areas (16),
>> but is most notable in the deepening US quest for absolute and
>> endless military supremacy. The two most salient features of the
>> effort are the administration's commitment to develop
>> miniaturised nuclear weapons and the soon to be announced Global
>> Strike space strategy, whose objective is to "establish and
>> maintain space superiority" by obtaining the ability "to destroy
>> command centres or missile bases anywhere in the world" from
>> space.
>>
>> Both efforts are directly continuous with the doctrine of
>> perpetual strategic supremacy outlined in the White House's
>> National Security Strategy (2002) and Rice's earlier advocacy of
>> a reconfiguration of the US armed forces to "meet decisively the
>> emergence of any hostile military power . . . and to deal
>> decisively with rogue regimes and the threat of hostile powers".
>> Both threaten global stability, the first by stimulating nuclear
>> proliferation, and the second by initiating a new arms race in
>> space. In the administration's apparent calculus, China and
>> Russia, now seen (after a brief cooperative interlude related to
>> the global war on terror) as future regional and global rivals
>> will have to choose either to follow and divert scarce resources
>> from the domestic economy to military expenditures, or consent to
>> potential US strategic supremacy.
>>
>> Seeking monopoly is of course the polar opposite of
>> interdependence. Since the US is the systemic centre of the
>> global capitalist system, the shift to militarism is having
>> global effects, some obvious, some insidious. The disruptive
>> effects are spilling over into the world economy. Structural
>> imbalances in the international economic system are translating
>> into protectionist outcomes, economic competition taking the
>> classical form of increasingly bitter currency and trade wars
>> between rival countries and blocs.
>>
>> But monopoly in a plural world is an illusory quest. While the US
>> is the leading state in the international system, it is ensnared
>> in webs of dependence of its own making: US patterns of
>> consumption and living standards, while helping to maintain Asian
>> economic activity, require the absorption of ever larger volumes
>> of world savings, currently 80%. Over time this will prove
>> unsustainable.
>>
>> The formal and informal transnational webs of capitalist
>> cooperation and the supra-state regulatory institutions of
>> globalised capitalism constructed or reinforced during the 1980s
>> and 1990s are proving unable to hold the system together. Since
>> there is no transnational political authority to halt or reverse
>> the disintegrative trend, we are sliding towards disorder.
>> ________________________________________________________
>>
>> * Philip S Golub is a lecturer in international relations at the
>> University of Paris VIII and the Institut d'études politiques,
>> Paris
>>
>> (1) With the sole exception of east Asia, whose economic rise is
>> due to historic circumstances unrelated to globalisation, the
>> North-South divide has widened. See the UNDP annual report 1999.
>> The differential between richest and poorest countries rose from
>> 30 to 1 in 1960 to 74 to 1 in 1997.
>>
>> (2) Karl Polany, The Great Transformation, Beacon Press, Boston,
>> 1957.
>>
>> (3) In The Anatomy of Fascism, Alfred Knopf, New York, 2004,
>> Robert Paxton suggests that fascism was not "anti-modern" but the
>> expression of an "alternate modernity": "a technically advanced
>> society in which modernity's strains and visions had been
>> smothered by fascism's powers of integration and control".
>>
>> (4) In the form of large, rightwing xenophobic movements and
>> parties and governments, such as Silvio Berlusconi's in Italy,
>> which fortunately confirms Marx's adage that history repeats
>> itself first as tragedy, then as farce.
>>
>> (5) Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, Verso, 1994.
>>
>> (6) Jürgen Habermas, La paix perpétuelle, le bicentenaire d'une
>> idée kantienne, Les editions du Cerf, Paris, 1996.
>>
>> (7)See Carl Parrini's article, "The age of ultra-imperialism" in
>> "Imperialism: a useful category of historical analysis?", Radical
>> History Review no 57, Duke University Press, 1993.
>>
>> (8) Kees Van Der Pijl, Transnational Classes and International
>> Relations, Routledge, London 1999.
>>
>> (9) Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Exils Editeur,
>> Paris, 2000.
>>
>> (10) Robert Wade, "The American empire and its limits", Destin
>> Working Papers, no 02-22, London School of Economics, 2002.
>> Philip S Golub and Noëlle Burgi, "The states we are still in", Le
>> Monde diplomatique, English language edition, April 2000.
>>
>> (11) Liberalism and peace were confined to Europe. European
>> expansion in the rest of the world was coercive, achieved through
>> colonial conquest.
>>
>> (12) Stanley Hoffman, "American goes backward", New York Review
>> of Books, 12 June 2003.
>>
>> (13) Stephen Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral
>> Commission, Cambridge Studies, CUP, 1990.
>>
>> (14) Condoleezza Rice, "Promoting the national i nterest",
>> Foreign Affairs, vol 79, no 1, January/February 2000.
>>
>> (15) Philip S Golub, "United States: inventing demons", Le Monde
>> diplomatique, English language edition, March 2003.
>>
>> (16) The US appears to be engaged in clandestine operations in
>> Iran and Syria to obtain regime change. See Seymour Hersh, "The
>> coming wars", New Yorker, 24 January 2005.
>>
>>                                           Original text in English
>> ________________________________________________________
>>
>> ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © 1997-2005 Le Monde diplomatique
>>
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>
> --
> MARK C ROSENZWEIG
>
>

Al Kagan
Africana Unit, Room 328
University of Illinois Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61820
USA

tel. 217-333-6519
fax 217-333-2214
akagan at uiuc.edu
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