Global civil society meets amidst crisis of empire
13/01/2004
- Opinión
For the thousands of representatives of global civil society who
will be gathering in Mumbai for the World Social Forum on January
16- 22, Washington is the world's number one problem. Yet what a
difference a year makes! The US they confront today is not quite
the same cocksure superpower of yesterday.
When George W. Bush landed on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham
Lincoln off the California coast on May 1st last year to mark the
end of the war in Iraq, Washington seemed to be at the zenith of its
power, with many commentators calling it, with a mixture of awe and
disgust, the "New Rome." The carrier landing, as Canadian scholar
Anthony Wallace points out, was a celebration of power-a spectacle
that was masterfully choreographed along the lines of the American
sci-fi thriller Independence Day and Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of
the Will.
In the opening scene of Triumph, Adolf Hitler is pictured
approaching from the air the Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg in 1934.
President Bush began his big spectacle on board the Abraham Lincoln
by touching down on the vessel's deck in a S-3B Viking jet.
Emblazoned on the windshield of the aircraft were the words
"Commander in Chief." The US president then emerged in full
fighter garb, invoking the imagery of the dramatic concluding
scenes in Independence Day. In those scenes, an American president
leads a global coalition from the cockpit of a small jet fighter.
The aim of this US-led operation is to defend the planet from the
attack of outer-space aliens.
But fortune is fickle, particularly in wartime.
Less than six months later, in mid-September, the US, along with
the European Union, lost the "Battle of Cancun," as the fifth
Ministerial Meeting of the World Trade Organization collapsed in
that Mexican tourist town. A key architect of the successful effort
to thwart Washington and Brussels' plan to impose their agenda on
the developing world was the newly formed Group of 20, led by
Brazil, India, South Africa, and China.
That the G20 dared to challenge Washington was not unrelated to the
fact that by September, the legitimacy of the invasion was in
tatters owing to the collapse of the weapons-of- mass-destruction
rationale for waging the war; Bush's loyal ally, Tony Blair, was
fighting for his political life; and US forces in Iraq were being
subjected to something akin to the ancient torture known as "Death
by a Thousand Cuts."
Power is partly a function of perception, and the inflation of US
power right after the Iraq invasion was followed by an even more
rapid deflation in the next few months. With its image transformed
into that of a flailing Gulliver lashing out ineffectively at unseen
Lilliputians in Baghdad and other cities in central Iraq, other
candidates for "regime change" such as Pyongyang, Damascus, and
Teheran saw Washington's missives as increasingly hollow.
Washington was not unaware of the rapid erosion, in the eyes of the
world, of its capacity to coerce: by late October, in fact, George
W. Bush was talking, Bill Clinton-like, about giving a "security
pledge" to North Korea, the aggressive isolation of which had been
one of the hallmarks of this first year in office.
Unable to call for a higher troop commitment without triggering the
perception of being trapped in a war without a foreseeable ending,
Washington was desperate. By the time of the Cancun ministerial,
the message coming out of Washington was: "We want to get out of
Iraq, but not with our tail between our legs. We need UN cover,
some semblance of a multinational security force to leave behind,
and some semblance of a functioning governme nt."
US authorities hailed the passing on October 17 of a watered-down UN
Security Council resolution authorizing a multinational force under
US leadership, but most observers saw few non-US occupation troops
and little non-US funding for reconstruction resulting from its
vague provisions. To many governments, it was reminiscent of
"peace with honor," Richard Nixon's exit strategy from Vietnam, and
few were willing to become ensnared in a los t cause. When
Washington announced an accelerated withdrawal plan a few weeks
later in response to increasingly effective guerrilla attacks, the
impression stuck that, indeed, the Bush administration was after a
Vietnam- style exit.
By the third week of October, 104 US occupation soldiers had been
killed since Bush's May 1st declaration ending the war-with the
average death rate hitting one a day in the first three weeks of the
month. In November, a lso known as Washington's cruelest month,
some 74 US combatants were killed in action, over 30 of them in
three helicopters brought down by Iraqi fire. By the end of 2003,
some 325 US troops had been killed in combat sin ce the invasion of
Iraq in March, 210 of them since Bush's Nuremberg-style descent from
the skies.
The capture of Saddam Hussein in mid-December simply served to
confirm that Saddam was not in control of what was clearly a
people's resistance since guerrilla attacks continued unabated. And
as 2004 commences, the quest ion is no longer whether the Iraqi
resistance would stage their equivalent of a Tet Offensive but when.
THE DYNAMICS OF OVEREXTENSION
The Iraq quagmire and the collapse of the Cancun ministerial of the
WTO were just two manifestations of that fatal disease of empires:
over-extension. There were other critical indicators, among them: -
the failure to consolidate a dependent regime in Afghanistan where
the writ of the Karzai government only extends to the outskirts of
Kabul; - the utter failure to stabilize the Palestine situation,
with Washington increasingly held hostage by the Sharon government's
lack of any interest in serious negotiations to bring about a viable
Palestinian state; - the paradoxical boost given to Islamic
extremism not only in its Middle Eastern birthplace but in South
Asia and Southeast Asia by US-led invasions-that of Iraq and
Afghanistan-that had been justified to snuff out terro rism; - the
unraveling of the Atlantic Alliance that won the Cold War; - the
emergence in Washington's own backyard of anti-US, anti-free-market
regimes exemplified by those led by Luis Inacio da Silva in Brazil
and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela while the US was focused on the Middle
East - the rise of a massive transborder civil society movement that
has led the increasingly successful drive to delegitimize the US
presence in Iraq and contributed decisively to the collapse of the
WTO ministerials in Seatt le and Cancun.
IMPERIAL DILEMMA
Against such challenges to its hegemony, the US's absolute
superiority in nuclear and conventional warfare capability counts
for little, in much the same way that a sledgehammer is useless in
swatting flies. To intervene , invade, and enforce an occupation,
ground forces will continue to be the decisive element, but there is
no way the US public, most of whom no longer see the Iraq invasion
as worth its price in US casualties, will tolera te a significant
expansion in ground troop commitments beyond the 168,000 serving in
Iraq and the Gulf states and some 47,000 deployed to Afghanistan,
South Korea, the Philippines, and the Balkans.
One option is to return to the gunboat diplomacy of the Clinton era,
to what Boston University's Andrew Bacevich describes as the
calibrated application of airpower without ground force commitments
"to punish, draw lines, signal, and negotiate." The Bush people,
however, rail against such an option, and for good reason: whether
it was Bill Clinton's fusillade of cruise missiles against Osama
bin Laden's reported hideouts in Afghanistan an d Sudan or
President Lyndon Baines Johnson's Operation Rolling Thunder against
North Vietnam in 1964, air strikes are very limited in their impact
against a determined foe. But then neither does the ground troop
option f are any better, leading to the question: is the US in a no-
win situation?
The problem is that the Bush people have unlearned a vital lesson of
imperial management: that, as Bacevich puts it, "Governing any
empire is a political, economic, and military undertaking; but it is
a moral one as well. " If the Roman Empire lasted 700 years, says
UCLA's Michael Mann, it is because the Romans figured out that the
solution to the problem of overextension was not the deployment of
more and more legions but the extension o f citizenship first to
local elites, then to all freemen.
For much of the post-World War II period, in fact, the dominant
bipartisan faction of the US political elite exhibited the Roman
realization that a "moral vision" was central to imperial
management. That was a world forg ed mainly by alliance-building,
undergirded by multilateral mechanisms such as the United Nations,
World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, and resting on the
belief that, as Frances Fitzgerald put it, "electoral democracy
combined with private ownership and civil liberties, was what the
United States had to offer the Third World."
National Security Memorandum 68, the defining document of the Cold
War, was not simply a national security strategy; it was an
ideological vision that spoke of a "long twilight struggle" against
communism for the loyaltie s of the peoples and countries throughout
the world. This cannot be said of the current administration's
National Security Strategy document which speaks in narrow terms of
the American mission mainly as one of defending the American way of
life from its enemies abroad and arrogates the right to strike
against even potential threats in pursuit of American interests.
Even when the reigning neoconservatives speak about extending
democracy to the Middle East, they cannot dispel the impression that
they see democracy in the light of realpolitik--as a mechanism to
destroy Arab unity in order to assure the existence of Israel and
guarantee US access to oil.
A RETURN TO MULTILATERALISM
Can a more sophisticated administration undo the damage to US
imperial management wrought by the Bush presidency by bringing back
mutilateralism and a "moral" dimension to empire? Perhaps, but even
this approach may be anachronistic. For history does not stand
still. It will be difficult for a reinvigorated US-led coalition
politics to douse the wildfire of Islamic fundamentalist reaction
that wi ll eventually bring down or seriously erode the staying
power of US allies like the Saudi and Gulf elites. Going back to
the Cold War era promise of extending democracy is unlikely to work
with disenchanted people who ha ve seen US-supported elite-
controlled democracies in places like Pakistan and the Philippines
become obstacles to economic and social equality. To revert to the
Clinton era of promising prosperity via accelerated globali zation
won't work either since the overwhelming evidence is that, as even
the World Bank admits, poverty and inequality increased globally in
the 1990s -- the decade of accelerated globalization.
As for economic multilateralism, financier George Soros' appeal for
a reform of the IMF, World Bank, and WTO to promote a more equitable
form of globalization may seem sound, but it is unlikely to draw the
support of the dominant US business interests which, after all,
torpedoed the WTO talks with their aggressive protectionist posture
on agriculture, intellectual property rights, and steel tariffs, and
their gangbuster attitudes towards other economies in the areas of
investment rights, capital mobility, and the export of genetically
modified products. Armed with the ideological smokescreen of free
trade, the US corporate establishment is, in fact, lik ely to become
even more protectionist and mercantilist in the era of global
stagnation, deflation, and diminishing profits that the world has
entered.
CHALLENGERS
And the future? Militarily, there is no doubt that Washington will
retain absolute superiority in gross indices of military might such
as nuclear warheads, conventional weaponry, and aircraft carriers,
but the ability to transform military power into effective
intervention will decline as the "Iraq syndrome" takes hold.
The break-up of the Atlantic Alliance is irreversible, with the
conflict over Iraq merely accelerating the disruptive dynamics of
differences building since the 1990s in practically all dimensions
of international relatio ns. Europe will most likely move towards
creating a European Defense Force independent of NATO, though it
will not challenge US strategic superiority. Politically, however,
Europe will increasingly slip out of the US orb it and present an
alternative pole--pursuing regional self-interest via a liberal,
diplomacy-oriented, and multilateral approach.
In terms of economic strength, the US will remain the dominant power
over the next two decades, but it is likely to slip as the source of
its hegemony--the global framework for transnational capitalist
cooperation to whic h the WTO is central--is eroded. Bilateral or
regional trade arrangements are likely to proliferate, but the most
dynamic ones may not be those integrating weak economies with one
superpower like the US or EU but regiona l economic arrangements
among developing countries-or, in the parlance of development
economics, "South-South cooperation." Formations, such as Mercosur
in Latin America, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN
), and the G20, will increasingly reflect the key lessons that
developing countries have learned over the last 25 years of
destabilizing globalization: that trade policy must be subordinated
to development, that technolog y must be liberated from stringent
intellectual property rules, that capital controls are necessary,
that development demands not less but more state intervention. And,
above all, that the weak must hang together, or the y will hang
separately.
Among the developing countries, China is, of course, in a category
by itself. Indeed, China is one of the winners of the Bush era. It
has managed to be on the side of everybody on key economic and
political conflicts an d thus on the side of nobody but China. As
the US has become ensnared in wars without end, China has deftly
maneuvered to stay free of entangling commitments to pursue rapid
economic growth, technological deepening, and political stability.
Democratization, of course, remains an urgent need, but the
unraveling of China owing to its slow progress--which many China
watchers love to predict to sell their books--is not likely to
happen.
The other big winner of the last few years is what the New York
Times called the world's "second superpower "after the US. This is
global civil society, a force whose most dynamic expression is the
World Social Forum tha t is meeting in Mumbai. This rapidly
expanding trans-border network that spans the South and the North is
the main force for peace, democracy, fair trade, justice, human
rights, and sustainable development. Governments a s disparate as
Beijing and Washington deride its claims. Corporations hate it.
And multilateral agencies find themselves compelled to adopt its
language of "rights." But its increasing ability to delegitimize
power and cut into corporate bottom lines is a fact of
international relations that they will have to live with.
A decreased US capacity to control global events, the rise of
regional economic blocks as the multilateral system declines, rising
assertiveness among developing countries, and the emergence of
global civil society as an increasingly powerful check on states and
corporations-these trends are likely to accelerate in the next few
years.
History is cunning and mischievous, often playing an outrageous game
of bringing about precisely the opposite than what its actors
intend. "Full spectrum dominance" by the United States in the 21st
century has been the a vowed objective of the neoconservatives that
came to power with George Bush. Paradoxically, pursuit of this
objective by the current administration has accelerated the erosion
of US hegemony-a process that might have be en slowed down by a more
skilled imperial elite.
The crowds in Mumbai will undoubtedly continue to regard the US as a
mortal threat to global peace and justice, but they will also be
cheered by the increasing difficulties of an arrogant empire that
fails to see that dec line is inevitable and that the challenge is
not to resist the process but to manage it deftly.
*Walden Bello is professor of sociology and public administration at
the University of the Philippines and executive director of the
Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global
South. He is one of t he recipients of the Right Livelihood Award-
better known as the Alternative Nobel Prize-for 2003.
FOCUS ON TRADE
NUMBER 96, JANUARY 2004
https://www.alainet.org/en/articulo/109079?language=es
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