The crisis of the globalist project & the new economics of George W. Bush
08/07/2003
- Opinión
(Prepared for the McPlanet Conference, Berlin, June 27, 2003. The
original version of this piece will appear in the Fall issue of New
Labor Forum.)
"Capitalism constantly erodes man and woman's being-in-nature
(creature) and being-in-society (citizen) and, even as it drains them
of life energy as workers, it moulds their consciousness around one
role: that of consume r. Capitalism has many "laws of motion," but
one of the most destructive as far as the environment goes is Say's
law, which is that supply creates its own demand. Capitalism is a
demand-creating machine that transforms li ving nature into dead
commodities, natural wealth into dead capital." Walden Bello,
McPlanet Conference, Berlin, 27-29 June 2003
I would like to thank the Heinrich Boll Foundation, ATTAC Germany,
and all the other organizers of this conference for inviting me to
this very important meeting. What I would like to do in this
introductory talk is to d iscuss the key elements of the global
conjuncture. I would like to paint, in broad strokes, the global
political and economic context in which we must situate our
environmental activism.
Let me begin by taking you back to1995, the year the World Trade
Organization was born. The offspring of eight years of negotiations,
the WTO was hailed in the establishment press as the gem of global
economic governance in the era of globalization. The nearly 20
trade agreements that underpinned the WTO were presented as
comprising a set of multilateral rules that would eliminate power
and coercion from trade relations by subjecting bo th the powerful
and the weak to a common set of rules backed by an effective
enforcement apparatus. The WTO was a landmark, declared George Soros,
because it was the only supranational body to which the world's most
power ful economy, United States, would submit itself. In the WTO, it
was claimed, the powerful United States and lowly Rwanda had exactly
the same number of votes: one.
Triumphalism was the note sounded during the First Ministerial of the
WTO in Singapore in November 1996, with the WTO, International
Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank issuing their famous
declaration saying that the task of the future was the challenge now
lay in making their policies of global trade, finance, and
development "coherent" so as to lay the basis for global prosperity.
THE CRISIS OF THE GLOBALIST PROJECT
By the beginning of 2003, the triumphalism was gone. As the fifth
Ministerial of the WTO approaches, the organization is in gridlock.
A new agreement on agriculture is nowhere in sight as the US and the
European Union s toutly defend their multibillion dollar subsidies.
Brussels is on the verge of imposing sanctions on Washington for
maintaining tax breaks for exporters that have been found to be in
violation of WTO rules, while Washing ton has threatened to file a
case with the WTO against the EU's de facto moratorium against
genetically modified foods. Developing countries, some once hopeful
that the WTO would in fact bring more equity to global trade ,
unanimously agree that most of what they have reaped from WTO
membership are costs, not benefits. They are dead set against
opening their markets any further, except under coercion and
intimidation. Instead of heraldi ng a new round of global trade
liberalization, the Cancun ministerial is likely to announce a
stalemate.
The context for understanding this stalemate at the WTO is the crisis
of the globalist project--the main achievement of which was the
establishment of the WTO--and the emergence of unilateralism as the
main feature of US foreign policy.
But first, some notes on globalization and the globalist project.
Globalization is the accelerated integration of capital, production,
and markets globally, a process driven by the logic of corporate
profitability.
Globalization has had two phases: the first lasting from the early
19th century till the outbreak of the First World War in 1914; the
second from the early 1980s until today. The intervening period was
marked by the domi nance of national capitalist economies
characterized by a significant degree of state intervention and an
international economy with strong constraints on trade and capital
flows. These domestic and international constra ints on the market,
which were produced by the dynamics of class conflict internally and
inter-capitalist competition internationally, were portrayed by the
neoliberals as having caused distortions that collectively accou nted
for the stagnation of the capitalist economies and the global economy
in the late seventies and early eighties.
As in the first phase of globalization, the second phase was marked
by the coming to hegemony of the ideology of neoliberalism, which
focused on "liberating the market" via accelerated privatization,
deregulation, and tra de liberalization. There were, broadly, two
versions of neoliberal ideology-a "hard" Thatcher-Reagan version and
a "soft" Blair-Soros version (globalization with "safety nets.)" But
underlying both approaches was unleas hing market forces and removing
or eroding constraints imposed on transnational firms by labor, the
state, and society.
THREE MOMENTS OF THE CRISIS OF GLOBALIZATION
There have been three moments in the deepening crisis of the
globalist project. The first was the Asian financial crisis of 1997.
This event, which laid low the proud "tigers" of East Asia, revealed
that one of the key t enets of the globalization-the liberalization
of the capital account to promote freer flows of capital, especially
finance or speculative capital -- could be profoundly destabilizing.
The Asian financial crisis was, in f act, shown to be merely the
latest of at least eight major financial crises since the
liberalization of global financial flows began in the late seventies.
How profoundly destabilizing capital market liberalization coul d be
was shown when, in just a few weeks' time, one million people in
Thailand and 21 million in Indonesia were pushed below the poverty
line.
The Asian financial crisis was the "Stalingrad" of the IMF, the prime
global agent of liberalized capital flows. Its record in the
ambitious enterprise of subjecting some 100 developing and
transitional economies to "str uctural adjustment" was revisited, and
facts that had been pointed out by such agencies as the United
Nations Development Program (UNDP) and United Nations Conference on
Trade and Development (UNCTAD) as early as the late eighties now
assumed the status of realities. Structural adjustment programs
designed to accelerate deregulation, trade liberalization, and
privatization had almost everywhere institutionalized stagnation,
worsened poverty, and increased inequality.
A paradigm is really in crisis when its best practitioners desert it,
as Thomas Kuhn pointed out in his classic The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions, and something akin to what happened during the crisis of
the Coperni can paradigm in physics occurred in neoclassical
economics shortly after the Asian financial crisis, with key
intellectuals leaving the fold--among them Jeffrey Sachs, noted
earlier for his advocacy of "free market" shoc k treatment in
Eastern Europe in the early 1990s; Joseph Stiglitz, former chief
economist of the World Bank; Columbia Professor Jagdish Bhagwati, who
called for global controls on capital flows; and financier George
Soros , who condemned the lack of controls in the global financial
system that had enriched him.
The second moment of the crisis of the globalist project was the
collapse of the third ministerial of the WTO in Seattle in December
1999. Seattle was the fatal intersection of three streams of
discontent and conflict th at had been building for sometime:
- Developing countries resented the inequities of the Uruguay Round
agreements that they felt compelled to sign in 1995.
- Massive popular opposition to the WTO emerged globally from myriad
sectors of global civil society, including farmers, fisherfolk, labor
unionists, and environmentalists. By posing a threat to the well
being of each se ctor in many of its agreements, the WTO managed to
unite global civil society against it.
- There were unresolved trade conflicts between the EU and the US,
especially in agriculture, which had been simply been papered over by
the Uruguay Round agreement.
These three volatile elements combined to create the explosion in
Seattle, with the developing countries rebelling against Northern
diktat at the Seattle Convention Center, 50,000 people massing
militantly in the streets, and differences preventing the EU and US
from acting in concert to salvage the ministerial. In a moment of
lucidity right after the Seattle debacle, British Secretary of State
Stephen Byers captured the essence of the crisis: "[T]he WTO will
not be able to continue in its present form. There has to be
fundamental and radical change in order for it to meet the needs and
aspirations of all 134 of its members."
The third moment of the crisis was the collapse of the stock market
and the end of the Clinton boom. This was not just the bursting of
the bubble but a rude reassertion of the classical capitalist crisis
of overproductio n, the main manifestation of which was massive
overcapacity. Prior to the crash, corporate profits in the US had
not grown since 1997. This was related to overcapacity in the
industrial sector, the most glaring example being seen in the
troubled telecommunications sector, where only 2.5 per cent of
installed capacity globally was being utilized. The stagnation of
the real economy led to capital being shifted to the financial
sector, re sulting in the dizzying rise in share values. But since
profitability in the financial sector cannot deviate too far from the
profitability of the real economy, a collapse of stock values was
inevitable, and this occurre d in March 2001, leading to the
prolonged stagnation and the onset of deflation.
There is probably a broader structural reason for the length of the
current stagnation or deflation and its constant teetering at the
edge of recession. This may be, as a number of economists have
stated, that we are at the tail end of the famous "Kondratieff
Cycle." Advanced by the Russian economist Nikolai Kondratieff, this
theory suggests that the progress of global capitalism is marked not
only by short-term business cycles but also by long-term
"supercycles." Kondratieff cycles are roughly fifty to sixty-year
long waves. The upward curve of the Kondratieff cycle is marked by
the intensive exploitation of new technologies, followed by a crest
as technological exploitation matures, then a downward curve as the
old technologies produce diminishing returns while new technologies
are still in an experimental stage in terms of profitable
exploitation, and finally a tro ugh or prolonged deflationary period.
The trough of the last wave was in the 1930s and 1940s, a period
marked by the Great Depression and World War II. The ascent of the
current wave began in the 1950s and the crest was reached in the
1980s and 1990s. The pro fitable exploitation of the postwar advances
in the key energy, automobile, petrochemical, and manufacturing
industries ended while that of information technology was still at a
relatively early stage. From this perspecti ve, the "New Economy" of
the late 1990s was not a transcendence of the business cycle, as many
economists believed it to be, but the last glorious phase of the
current supercycle before the descent into prolonged deflatio n. In
other words, the uniqueness of the current conjuncture lies in the
fact that the downward curve of the current short-term cycle
coincides with the move into descent of the Kondratieff supercycle.
To use the words o f another famous economist, Joseph Schumpeter, the
global economy appears to be headed for a prolonged period of
"creative destruction."
ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS AND CAPITALIST LEGITIMACY
I have been talking about moments or conjunctural crystallizations of
the crisis of the globalization project. These moments were
manifestations of fundamental conflicts or contradictions that were
unfolding unevenly ove r time. A central smoldering contradiction
was that between globalization and the environment. I would now want
to devote a few words to how the environmental crisis has proven to
be a central factor unravelling the leg itimacy of the globalization
project, indeed of capitalism as a mode of economic organization
itself.
Both before and after the World Summit on Environment and Development
in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the sense was that while the world
environmental situation was worsening, consciousness of this fact was
leading to the crea tion of the global institutional and legal
mechanisms to deal with the problem. The Rio Summit's agreeing on
Agenda 21, a global program for environmental improvement that would
have counterpart country programs, seemed to mark a major step
forward in terms of global cooperation.
The late eighties and early nineties were, moreover, a period when a
number of multilateral environmental agreements were inked and
appeared to be making headway in reversing the global environmental
crisis, like the Mont real Protocol putting controls on the
production of CFCs to preserve ozone layer, and the CITES Treaty
putting tough controls on trade in endangered species. Also, with
the coming to power of Bill Clinton and Al Gore in 1992, an
environmentally correct administration seemed to be in place.
Several moves stalemated this process.
First, the establishment of the WTO. As Ralph Nader put it, the WTO
placed corporate trade "uber alles," meaning practically all
dimensions of economic and social life except for national security.
In other words, laws protecting natural resources and the environment
needed to be changed if they were seen as imposing standards that
were seen as unfair to foreign trading interests. In a series of
landmark cases-the tuna-dolphin case bet ween the US and Mexico, the
turtle-shrimp controversy pitting the US and Asian countries-it
seemed that national environmental laws were being subordinated to
free trade. The thrust seemed to be to bring environmental pr
otections in different countries to the lowest common denominator
rather than to bring them up to the highest standards.
Second, the aggressive push by corporations to exploit advanced food
technology and biotechnology alarmed environmentalists and
citizenries all over. The EU's ban on hormone-treated beef from the
US--enacted in response to popular demand in Europe-- continued
despite the WTO's viewing it as illegal. Likewise, genetic
modifications in agricultural production coupled with resistance to
ecolabelling on the part of US firms such as Monsanto triggered a
consumer backlash in Europe and other parts of the world, with the
precautionary principle being invoked as a powerful weapon against
the US corporations' criterion of "solid science." Also, the
aggressive effort by US biotech firms to extend patenting to life
forms and to seeds led to strong resistance by farmers' groups,
consumer groups, and environmentalists to what was denounced as the
"privatization" of the aeons-long i nteraction between nature and
communities.
Third, the strong resistance of the US industrial sector to
acknowledge the fact of global warming, at a time when the speed of
the melting of the polar ice caps was accelerating, was perceived as
a brazen attempt to put profits ahead of the common interest. This
perception could only be reinforced by the successful corporate
effort to stalemate a collective global effort to effectively deal
with global warming during the Clinton administ ration and finally to
kill it when the Bush administration refused to sign and ratify the
already weak Kyoto Protocol on climate change.
The aggressive anti-environmental posture of US corporations was one
of the factors that led to a great distrust of business even within
the United States, with 72 per cent of Americans surveyed by Business
Week in 2000 s aying that business "has too much power over their
lives," leading the country's prime business weekly to warn:
"Corporate America, ignore these trends at your peril."
At the same time, developing countries felt that the US was using
environmental arguments to slow down their development with its
position that the greenhouse gas emissions of developing countries
needed to be also subjec t to substantially the same restrictions
imposed on the developed countries before Washington would sign the
Kyoto Accord. Indeed, such suspicions were not unfounded, since Bush
administration people were targeting China , whose rapid development
was seen as a strategic threat to the US. Environmentalism was being
deployed in the US's effort to maintain its geo-economic,
geopolitical edge.
By the early 2000s, then, the global consensus represented by the Rio
Summit had unraveled, and it all but collapsed under the massive
corporate greenwashing campaign that was unleashed at the World
Summit on Sustainable Development (also known as Rio+10) in
Johannesburg in September 2002. "Sustainable development," a vision
that attempted to reconcile economic growth with ecological stability
fell by the wayside, and Herman Daly's apoca lyptic image of an
economic system marked by hyper-growth outstripping in record time an
ecological system created over aeons seemed closer to realization as
US, European, and Japanese capital worked closely with a pollut ion-
friendly government to make high-growth China both the workshop and
wastebasket of the world.
A few years ago, many agreed with economist Herman Daly that
ecological deterioration is due to the inexorable drive of the man-
made system of production to fill with geometric speed the limited
space created over eons by nature. From this perspective, slower
growth and lower rates of consumption were the key to environmental
stabilization, and this could be achieved through policy choices
supported by the public.
Increasingly, this analysis is giving way to the more radical view
that the main culprit is an unchecked capitalist mode of production
that unceasingly transforms nature's bounty into commodities and
incessantly creates n ew demands. Capitalism constantly erodes man
and woman's being-in-nature (creature) and being-in-society (citizen)
and, even as it drains them of life energy as workers, it moulds
their consciousness around one role: that of consumer. Capitalism
has many "laws of motion," but one of the most destructive as far as
the environment goes is Say's law, which is that supply creates its
own demand. Capitalism is a demand-creating machine that transforms
living nature into dead commodities, natural wealth into dead
capital.
Environmentalism, in short, has regained its radical edge over the
past decade, moving the critique of globalization to a critique of
the dynamics of capitalism itself.
THE NEW ECONOMICS OF THE GEORGE W. BUSH
The interlocking crises of globalization, neoliberalism, capitalist
legitimacy, and overproduction provide the context for understanding
the economic policies of the Bush administration, notably its
unilateralist thrust.
The globalist corporate project expressed the common interest of the
global capitalist elites in expanding the world economy and their
fundamental dependence on one another. However, globalization did
not eliminate competition among the national elites. In fact, the
ruling elites of the US and Europe had factions that were more
nationalist in character as well as more tied for their survival and
prosperity to the state, such as the mil itary-industrial complex in
the US. Indeed, since the eighties there has been a sharp struggle
between the more globalist fraction of ruling elite stressing common
interest of global capitalist class in a growing world e conomy and
the more nationalist, hegemonist faction that wanted to ensure the
supremacy of US corporate interests.
As Robert Brenner has pointed out, the policies of Bill Clinton and
his Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin put prime emphasis on the
expansion of the world economy as the basis of the prosperity of the
global capitalist clas s. For instance, in the mid-1990s, they
pushed a strong dollar policy meant to stimulate the recovery of the
Japanese and German economies, so they could serve as markets for US
goods and services. The earlier, more nat ionalist Reagan
administration, on the other hand, had employed a weak dollar policy
to regain competitiveness for the US economy at the expense of the
Japanese and German economies. With the George W. Bush administrati
on, we are back to economic policies, including a weak dollar policy,
that are meant to revive the US economy at the expense of the other
center economies and push primarily the interests of the US corporate
elite instead of that of global capitalist class under conditions of
a global downturn.
Several features of this approach are worth stressing:
- Bush's political economy is very wary of a process of globalization
that is not managed by a US state that ensures that the process does
not diffuse the economic power of the US. Allowing the market solely
to drive glo balization could result in key US corporations becoming
the victims of globalization and thus compromising US economic
interests. Thus, despite the free market rhetoric, we have a group
that is very protectionist when it comes to trade, investment, and
the management of government contracts. It seems that the motto of
the Bushites is protectionism for the US and free trade for the rest
of us.
- The Bush approach includes a strong skepticism about
multilateralism as a way of global economic governance since while
multilateralism may promote the interests of the global capitalist
class in general, it may, in man y instances, contradict particular
US corporate interests. The Bush coterie's growing ambivalence
towards the WTO stems from the fact that the US has lost a number of
rulings there, rulings that may hurt US capital but s erve the
interests of global capitalism as a whole.
- For the Bush people, strategic power is the ultimate modality of
power. Economic power is a means to achieve strategic power. This
is related to the fact that under Bush, the dominant faction of the
ruling elite is th e military-industrial establishment that won the
Cold War. The conflict between globalists and unilateralists or
nationalists along this axis is shown in the approach toward China.
The globalist approach put the emphasi s on engagement with China,
seeing its importance primarily as an investment area and market for
US capital. The nationalists, on the other hand, see China mainly as
a strategic enemy, and they would rather contain it ra ther than
assist its growth.
- Needless to say, the Bush paradigm has no room for environmental
management, seeing this to be a problem that others have to worry
about, not the United States. There is, in fact, a strong corporate
lobby that believe s that environmental concerns such as that
surrounding GMOs is a European conspiracy to deprive the US of its
high tech edge in global competition.
If these are seen as the premises for action, then the following
prominent elements of recent US economic policy make sense:
- Achieving control over Middle East oil. While it did not exhaust
the war aims of the administration in invading Iraq, it was certainly
high on the list. With competition with Europe becoming the prime
aspect of the tr ans-Atlantic relationship, this was clearly aimed
partly at Europe. But perhaps the more strategic goal was to preempt
the region's resources in order to control access to them by energy
poor China, which is seen as the US' strategic enemy.
- Aggressive protectionism in trade and investment matters. The US
has piled up one protectionist act after another, one of the most
brazen being to stall any movement at the WTO negotiations by defying
the Doha Declarati on's upholding of public health issues over
intellectual property claims by limiting the loosening of patent
rights to just three diseases in response to its powerful
pharmaceutical lobby. While it seems perfectly willin g to see the
WTO negotiations unravel, Washington has put most of its efforts in
signing up countries into bilateral or multilateral trade deals such
as the Free Trade of the Americas (FTAA) before the EU gets them into
s imilar deals. Indeed the term "free trade agreements" is a
misnomer since these are actually preferential trade deals.
- Incorporating strategic considerations into trade agreements. In a
recent speech, US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick stated
explicitly that "countries that seek free-trade agreements with the
United States must pa ss muster on more than trade and economic
criteria in order to be eligible. At a minimum, these countries must
cooperate with the United States on its foreign policy and national
security goals, as part of 13 criteria tha t will guide the US
selection of potential FTA partners." New Zealand, perhaps one of
the most doctrinally governments to free trade, has nevertheless not
been offered a free trade deal because it has a policy that preve nts
nuclear ship visits, which the US feels is directed at it.
- Manipulation of the dollar's value to stick the costs of economic
crisis on rivals among the center economies and regain
competitiveness for the US economy. A slow depreciation of the
dollar vis-à-vis the euro can be i nterpreted as market-based
adjustments, but the 25 per cent fall in value cannot but be seen as,
at the least, a policy of benign neglect. While the Bush
administration has issued denials that this is a beggar-thy-neighb or
policy, the US business press has seen it for what it is: an effort
to revive the US economy at the expense of the European Union and
other center economies.
- Aggressive manipulation of multilateral agencies to push the
interests of US capital. While this might not be too easy to achieve
in the WTO owing to the weight of the European Union, it can be more
readily done at the World Bank and the IMF, where US dominance is
more effectively institutionalized. For instance, despite support
for the proposal from many European governments, the US Treasury
recently torpedoed the IMF management's proposal for a Sovereign
Debt Restructuring Mechanism (SDRM) to enable developing countries to
restructure their debt while giving them a measure of protection from
creditors. Already a very weak mechanism, the SDRM was ve toed by US
Treasury in the interest of US banks.
- Finally, and especially relevant to our coming discussions, making
the other center economies as well as developing countries bear the
burden of adjusting to the environmental crisis. While some of the
Bush people do n ot believe there is an environmental crisis, others
know that the current rate of global greenhouse emissions is
unsustainable. However, they want others to bear the brunt of
adjustment since that would mean not only exe mpting environmentally
inefficient US industry from the costs of adjustment, but hobbling
other economies with even greater costs than if the US participated
in an equitable adjustment process, thus giving the US economy a
strong edge in global competition. Raw economic realpolitik, not
fundamentalist blindness, lies at the root of the Washington's
decision not to sign the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change.
THE ECONOMICS AND POLITICS OF OVEREXTENSION
Being harnessed very closely to strategic ends, any discussion of the
likely outcomes of the Bush administration's economic policies must
take into account both the state of the US economy and the global
economy and the b roader strategic picture. A key base for
successful imperial management are expanding national and global
economies-something precluded by the extended period of deflation and
stagnation ahead, which is more likely to sp ur inter-capitalist
rivalries.
Moreover, resources include not only economic and political resources
but political and ideological ones as well. For without legitimacy-
without what Gramsci called "the consensus" of the dominated that a
system of rule is just-imperial management cannot be stable.
Faced with a similar problem of securing the long-term stability of
its rule, the ancient Romans came up with the solution that created
what was till then the most far-reaching case of collective mass
loyalty ever achieve d till then and prolonged the empire for 700
years. The Roman solution was not just or even principally military
in character. The Romans realized that an important component of
successful imperial domination was consen sus among the dominated of
the "rightness" of the Roman order. As sociologist Michael Mann notes
in his classic Sources of Social Power, the "decisive edge" was not
so much military as political. "The Romans," he writes, "gradually
stumbled on the invention of extensive territorial citizenship."
The extension of Roman citizenship to ruling groups and non-slave
peoples throughout the empire was the political breakthrough that
produced " was probably the widest extent of collective commitment
yet mobilized." Political citizenship combined with the vision of the
empire providing peace and prosperity for all to create that
intangible but essential moral ele ment called legitimacy.
Needless to say, extension of citizenship plays no role in the US
imperial order. In fact, US citizenship is jealously reserved for a
very tiny minority of the world's population, entry into whose
territory is tightly controlled. Subordinate populations are not to
be integrated but kept in check either by force or the threat of the
use of force or by a system of global or regional rules and
institutions-- the World Trade Organization, the Bretton Woods
system, NATO-- that are increasingly blatantly manipulated to serve
the interests of the imperial center.
Though extension of universal citizenship was never a tool in the
American imperial arsenal, during its struggle with communism in the
post-World War II period Washington did come up with a political
formula to legitimize its global reach. The two elements of this
formula were multilateralism as a system of global governance and
liberal democracy.
In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, there were, in fact,
widespread expectations of a modern-day version of Pax Romana.
There was hope in liberal circles that the US would use its sole
superpower status to buttress a multilateral order that would
institutionalize its hegemony but assure an Augustan peace globally.
That was the path of economic globalization and multilateral
governance. That was the path eliminated by George W. Bush's
unilateralism.
As Frances Fitzgerald observed in Fire in the Lake, the promise of
extending liberal democracy was a very powerful ideal that
accompanied American arms during the Cold War. Today, however,
Washington or Westminster-type liberal democracy is in trouble
throughout the developing world, where it has been reduced to
providing a façade for oligarchic rule, as in the Philippines, pre-
Musharraf Pakistan, and throughout Latin America. In fact, liberal
democracy in America has become both less democratic and less
liberal. Certainly, few in the developing world see a system fueled
and corrupted by corporate money as a model.
Recovery of the moral vision needed to create consensus for US
hegemony will be extremely difficult. Indeed, the thinking in
Washington these days is that the most effective consensus builder
is the threat of the use of force. Moreover, despite their talk
about imposing democracy in the Arab world, the main aim of
influential neoconservative writers like Robert Kagan and Charles
Krauthammer is transparent: the manipulation of liberal democratic
mechanisms to create pluralistic competition that would destroy Arab
unity. Bringing democracy to the Arabs is not so much an
afterthought as a slogan that is uttered tongue in cheek.
The Bush people are not interested in creating a new Pax Romana.
What they want is a Pax Americana where most of the subordinate
populations like the Arabs are kept in check by a healthy respect
for lethal American power, while the loyalty of other groups such as
the Philippine government is purchased with the promise of cash. With
no moral vision to bind the global majority to the imperial center,
this mode of imperial management can only inspire one thing:
resistance.
The great problem for unilateralism is overextension, or a mismatch
between the goals of the United States and the resources needed to
accomplish these goals. Overextension is relative. That is, it is to
a great degree a function of resistance. An overextended power may,
in fact, be in a worse condition even with a significant increase in
its military power if resistance to its power increases by an even
greater degree. Among the key indicators of US overextension are the
following:
- Washington's continuing inability to create a new political order
in Iraq that would serve as a secure foundation for colonial rule -
its failure to consolidate a pro-US regime in Afghanistan outside of
Kabul - the inability of a key ally, Israel, to quell, even with
Washington's unrestricted support, the Palestinian people's uprising
- the inflaming of Arab and Muslim sentiment in the Middle East,
South Asia, and Southeast Asia, resulting in massive ideological
gains for Islamic fundamentalists-which was what Osama bin Laden had
been hoping for in the first place - the collapse of the Cold War
Atlantic Alliance and the emergence of a new countervailing alliance,
with Germany and France at the center of it - the forging of a
powerful global civil society movement against US unilateralism,
militarism, and economic hegemony, the most recent significant
expression is the global anti-war movement; - the coming to power of
anti-neoliberal, anti-US movements in Washington's own backyard-
Brazil, Venezuela, and Ecuador-as the Bush administration is
preoccupied with the Middle East - an increasingly negative impact of
militarism on the US economy, as military spending becomes dependent
on deficit spending, and deficit spending become more and more
dependent on financing from foreign sources, creating more stresses
and strains within an economy that is already in the throes of
stagnation.
In conclusion, the globalist project is in crisis. Whether it can
make a comeback via a Democratic or Liberal Republican presidency
should not be ruled out, especially since there are influential
globalist voices in the US business community-among them George
Soros-- that are expressing opposition to the unilateralist thrust
of the Bush administration. In our view, however, this is
unlikely, and unilateralism will reign for sometime to come.
We have, in short, entered a historical maelstrom marked by
prolonged economic crisis, the spread of global resistance, the
reappearance of the balance of power among center states, and the
reemergence of acute inter-imperialist contradictions. We must have
a healthy respect for US power, but neither must we overestimate it.
The signs are there that the US is seriously overextended and what
appear to be manifestations of strength might in fact signal
weakness strategically.
* Walden Bello is professor of sociology and public administration
at the University of the Philippines and executive director of the
Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South.
FOCUS ON TRADE.
NUMBER 89, JULY 2003.
http://focusweb.org
https://www.alainet.org/de/node/107856
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