“It was the need to finance wars that lay at the origin of this convergence of power and wealth. But this time, the meeting between the ‘princes’ and the ‘bankers’ produced an absolutely new and revolutionary phenomenon: the birth of the ‘national state-economies.’ In effect, these were machines for accumulating power and wealth that expanding out from Europe to the rest of the world at a rate and scale that allow us to speak of a new universe compared to what had happened in earlier centuries.”
J.L.F. , O PODER AMERICANO, Editora Vozes, 2004, p. 34.
1. FACT AND THEORY
Every analysis of the international system supposes some kind of theoretical vision concerning the time, space and movement of its ‘historical mass.’ Without theory, it is impossible to interpret the global conjuncture and identify the cyclical movements and structural longues durées that simultaneously conceal and reveal themselves through the immediate events of the world system. It only makes sense to speak of ‘large-scale crises,’ ‘turning points’ and ‘trends’ if we employ a theory that relates and hierarchizes local, regional and global facts and conflicts within a single interpretative schema. Moreover, it is theory that defines the \'central focus\' of the analysis and its \'timeline.\' For example, when discussing the global transformations seen over the last few decades, it is commonplace to talk of a ‘crisis in American hegemony’ in the 1970s, succeeded by two crucial historical turning points in 1991 and 2001. But this apparent consensus tends to conceal very different interpretations rooted in the theoretical premises of each analyst. This in mind, the present analysis of the international conjuncture begins by providing a synopsis of its observational focus, its central thesis and its main theoretical premises, before turning to an analysis of the recent changes in the world system and a discussion of the new place occupied by China, India, Brazil and South Africa.
1.1. the focus of the analysis and its central thesis
My analysis focuses on the movement of expansion, and the strategic transformations in US global power, especially after its ‘crisis’ in the 1970s and its victory in the 1990s when the United States explicitly assumed the project of building a global empire. But soon after, this project reached its theoretical limit of expansion, and dialectically opened the way for the reappearance and universalization of the nation states and their geopolitical calculus, which now affects all the regional zones of the world system. Many analysts confuse this change with a ‘terminal crisis’ in American power or in the ‘modern world system’ itself without realizing that, at the start of the 21st century, this modern system of ‘nation states-economies’ attained its maximum extension and universality, globalizing the political-economic competition between nations and thus allowing a new growth cycle within the international economy.
1.2. the theoretical premises
My hypothesis is based on a theory and several historical generalizations concerning the formation, expansion and alterations of the world system that initially formed in 16th century Europe and became consolidated globally in the 17th and 18th centuries. Below I summarize the main theses in order:
i) The current ‘world political system,’ born in 16th century Europe and universalized over the last 500 years, was not a spontaneous or diplomatic creation. It was a product of power, the conquering power of some European territorial states that defined their national borders at the same time as they expanded in conjunction beyond Europe and transformed into global empires.
ii) Likewise, the ‘world economic system’ that formed during the same period from Europe outwards was not an exclusive creation of the \'markets\' or ‘capital in general.’ It was a sub-product of the competitive and colonialist expansion of some European national economies that became internationalized along with their respective ‘state-economies,’ which immediately transformed into colonial empires.
iii) Two features distinguish the originality, and explain the victorious force, of these European powers: firstly, the way in which the territorial states were created and interconnected with their national economies, producing an absolutely new and explosive ‘machine’ for accumulating power and wealth – namely, the ‘national states-economies;’ and secondly, the way in which these ‘national states-economies’ were born simultaneously and in a permanent situation of competition and warfare with each other and the imperial powers outside of Europe.
iv) As the German sociologist Norbert Elias argued, ever since the onset of this system and its state of permanent competition, “who doesn’t rise, falls.” This logic led to warfare becoming the main activity of the first European territorial powers, and later the basic activity of the nation states. As a result, wars ended up performing a contradictory role in Europe, acting as a simultaneously destructive and integrative force, catalyzing a kind of ‘destructive integration’ of territories and regions that had remained distant or separate until the 16th and 17th centuries, and that only began to make up part of the same political unit, or the same political system, after the 30 Years’ War and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, and the Northern Wars at the start of the 18th century.
v) Within this new political system, all the states were forced to expand to survive. For this reason, we can speak of an \'expansive compulsion\' to the whole system and to each of its territorial states, and the need for permanent conquest, as well as new monopolistic positions of power and wealth accumulation. In this sense, we can say that ever since the earliest stages in the formation of the new system, its competitive units had to propose, in the final instance, the conquest of an increasingly global power over ever broader and more unified territories and populations until they reached the theoretical limit of absolute monopolization and the constitution of a worldwide political and economic empire.
vi) However, this trend towards the centralization and monopolization of power and wealth, which arises from the competition within the world system, has never once been fully actualized over the last 500 years. The reason for this was because the same forces that work towards global power also work towards the strengthening of national power and capital. More precisely, the victory and constitution of a world empire would be the victory of a specific national state – one capable of monopolizing power to the point of causing the disappearance of its competitors. But at the same time, without any surviving competition, the victorious state would not be able to continue expanding its own power, as in the case of inter-capitalist competition. In this sense, it can be concluded that the hypothetical victory of a single ‘national state-economy’ would also mean the destruction of the mechanism for accumulating power and wealth that maintains the world system in a state of disordered, unbalanced and continuous expansion.
vii) This contradiction at the core of the world system prevents the birth of a global empire, but does not prevent the precocious oligopolization of power or the ownership of wealth in the hands of a small group of states that transformed into the Great Powers, with the capacity to impose their sovereignty and power far beyond their national borders. A kind of central nucleus to the system that never had more than six or seven \'partners,\' all of them European, until the start of the 20th century, when the United States and Japan joined the world’s ‘inner governing circle.’ In addition, these states always imposed barriers to the entry of new ‘partners,’ and despite their competitive and bellicose relations, always maintained complementary relations with each other.
viii) The states and their national capital markets have not always worked alongside each other in terms of their economic and political-military competitions. However, when the resources essential to both the states and private capital have become scarce, their national alliance often converged to the point of joint action in wars. Likewise, there has always been coexistence, complementarity and even alliances and fusions between the competing states and national capitals, alongside the competition, conflicts and wars. Sometimes conflict predominated, at other times complementarity, but it was this ‘dialectic’ that enabled the existence of more or less prolonged periods of peace and convergent economic growth among the Great Powers. Furthermore, it was only in some exceptional moments, generally after large wars, that the victorious power was able to exercise a \'benevolent hegemony\' within the group of Great Powers and with the rest of world, thanks to the common interest in rebuilding the recently destroyed system.
ix) Until the end of the 18th century, the ‘world political system’ was limited to the European states and their empires, joined in the 19th century by the American states and later in the 20th century by the new African and Asiatic states. Something different happened with the ‘world economic system’ which always included the colonial economies within the international division of labour defined by the needs of the imperial centres.
x) It was only at the end of the 20th century that the world system definitively universalized the great European invention of the ‘national states-economies.’ But in the process, the world system also became fragmented, giving rise to the various regional political and economic structures, and to the proliferation of battles for leadership or hegemony within these subsystems as a kind of indispensable preparatory stage for countries looking to fight eventually for global power.
xi) In conclusion, I propose that any discussion concerning the future of the current world system, and the perspectives of its states or \'emerging powers,\' should be based on three preliminary assertions: i) within the ‘expanding universe’ of the ‘national states-economies,’ there is no logical possibility of a ‘perpetual peace,’ nor of balanced and stable markets; ii) there is no possibility that the Great Powers can practice a long-term or permanent policy designed merely to preserve the status quo; in other words, there are inherently expansionist, even where they have already conquered a global position and kept themselves at the top of the world system’s hierarchies of power and wealth; iii) for this reason, the leader or hegemonic power always destabilizes its own hegemonic situation, since, “who doesn’t permanently rise, falls,” within this world system; and finally, iv) there is no possibility whatsoever that the leadership of capitalism’s economic expansion will escape the control – even once – of the expansive and conquering ‘national states-economies.’
2. THE GLOBAL POWER OF THE UNITED STATES
2.1. expansion, hegemony and imperial project
The United States was the first nation state to form outside of Europe. However, its conquest and colonization were the result of European expansionism, just as its war of independence was a ‘European war.’ Furthermore, its birth was also the first step in a process of universalization of the inter-state political system invented by the Europeans and which would only be completed at the end of the 20th century. In addition, after the independence of the 13 colonies in 1776, the United States expanded continuously in the same manner as all the national states that had already transformed into Great Powers and Colonial Empires.
Through the use of warfare or the markets, the United States annexed Florida in 1819, Texas in 1835, Oregon in 1846, and New Mexico and California in 1848. At the start of the 19th century, the United States government had already ordered two colonial-style ‘punitive expeditions’ in North Africa where its ships bombarded the cities of Tripoli and Algiers, in 1801 and 1815. On the other hand, in 1784, only a year after signing the Peace Treaty with Great Britain, the first North American merchant ships had arrived at the Asian ports, and half a century later, the United States, along with the Great European Economic Powers, had already signed or imposed Trade Agreements with China, 1844, and Japan, in 1854. Finally, in America itself, four decades after its independence, the United States already believed it had the right to pursue exclusive hegemony across the entire continent, and executed the Monroe Doctrine, intervening in Santo Domingo in 1861, in Mexico in 1867, in Venezuela in 1887 and in Brazil in 1893. And finally, it declared and won the war with Spain in 1898, conquering Cuba, Guam, Porto Rico and the Philippines, intervening soon afterwards in Haiti in 1902, in Panama in 1903, in the Dominican Republic in 1905, in Cuba in 1906 and, again, in Haiti in 1912. Finally, between 1900 and 1914, the US government decided to fully assume the military and financial protectorate of the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Nicaragua, Panama and Cuba, and confirmed the status of the Caribbean and Central America as its immediate and incontestable \'zone of influence.’
In the First World War, the United States played a decisive part in the victory of Great Britain and France in Europe and in the decisions of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. But it was only after the Second World War that the US occupied the place of Great Britain within the world system, imposing its hegemony in Europe and Asia, and a while later in the Middle East after the Suez Crisis in 1956. It was during this period of reconstruction of Europe, Asia and the world political and economic system itself that the United States led – until the 1970s – an unprecedented experiment in ‘world governance’ based on ‘international regimes and multilateral institutions,’ tutored by the US. The engineering of this new system was based on the geopolitical bipolarization of the world with the Soviet Union on one side, and a privileged relation of the United States with Great Britain and ‘English-speaking peoples’ on the other. However, other factors also played a decisive role in founding this new \'regulated order:\' these included European unification, under NATO’s military protection, and the original and virtuoso economic alliance of the United States with Japan and Germany, which were transformed into US \'military protectorates\' and regional leaders of the process of capitalist accumulation in Europe and Southeast Asia.
This period of reconstruction of the world system, and the ‘benevolent hegemony’ of the United States, lasted until the 1970s when the USA lost the Vietnam War and abandoned the international monetary and financial regime created under its leadership in the Bretton Woods Conference at the end of the Second World War. This was when talk of a ‘hegemonic crisis’ surfaced and many people thought it was the end of American power. The dominant interpretation of this ‘American hegemonic crisis’ of the 1970s emphasizes the geopolitical field, the military defeats and the diplomatic failures of the United States in Vietnam – and their \'domino effect’ in Laos and Cambodia – but also in Africa, Central America and the Middle East, culminating with the Shi’ite revolution and the \'hostage crisis\' in Iran, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of the decade in 1979. On the economic side, this same interpretation usually highlights the end of the ‘dollar standard,’ the rise in oil prices, the loss of US economic competitiveness, and the first great world recession after the end of the Second World War. A succession of events that supposedly weakened and challenged American power, provoking a devastating conservative response in the 1980s. According to the dominant theory, this response allowed the ‘return of US hegemony’ and gave rise to the main transformations of the world system at the end of the 20th century.
However, there is another – more dialectical – way of reading these same events, based on the process of reconstructing the world system and the success of US hegemony after the end of the Second World War. From this point of view, the competitive rebirth of Germany and Japan was a necessary outcome of the capitalist economic growth of the ‘golden era’ and the US strategy of linking its economy preferentially to the German and Japanese economies – a strategy induced by the Cold War within the European Community, and by the Chinese Revolution and the Korean and Vietnam Wars in Southeast Asia. It was this same economic success and the type of agreement of the United States with Western Germany that allowed the existence of the social democratic government of Willie Brandt, who in 1968 had ‘dared’ to pursue a diplomatic initiative of the magnitude of Ostpolitik without consulting the United States first. On the other hand, the increase in the economic weight and global competitiveness of Europe and Japan, along with the increase in the costs of US expansionism in Vietnam, inevitably ended up putting pressure on the dollar-gold parity established at Bretton Woods. After 1968, the US budget deficit started to grow and the United States began to present trade balance deficits, the first since the Second World War. Hence, even before the ‘dollar standard’ was finally burst in 1973, the US monetary authorities were already busy discussing the problem and analyzing the best alternatives in terms of US interests, including the ‘deregulationist\' theses that had been argued and defeated in passing by the financial sectors at the Bretton Woods Conference. From this point of view, the ‘dollar crisis’ at the start of the 1970s was neither an accident nor a defeat; it was the result of a period of economic success and also a planned change in the United States’ international economic strategy, taken with the aim of maintaining the autonomy of its economic policy and retaining US leadership of the global economy. Likewise, it can be said that the growing technological strengths of the Soviet Union in the military and space fields that so preoccupied the United States in the 1970s were also an inevitable consequence of the American strategy of containment and continuous military and technological pressure on the USSR, which simultaneously served to justify the USA’s massive technological-military investments. Finally, the so-called ‘insubordination of the periphery,’ one of the elements of the ‘70s crisis,’ was also, at least in part, a great geopolitical victory for the United States, which supported the process of decolonizing Africa and Asia along with the Soviet Union. At the end of the Second World War, there were around 60 national states, while by the time the Cold War ended, there were already 200 independent national states across the world. It was precisely during the period of \'regulated order,\' or the \'benevolent hegemony\' of the US that the \'inter-state\' system became universal, creating a new reality and a challenge of \'world governance,’ which began to manifest in more acute form in the 1960s during the decolonization of Africa.
From various points of view, therefore, it can be said that at the end of the 1960s the space and time of the virtuoso partnership and the ‘benevolent hegemony’ of the United States had already been exhausted. It was toppled by its own success and contradictions, and was modified by the power for self-transformation of its creator and hegemon, the United States, which ‘fled forwards’ and redefined its international project so as to maintain its lead in the race for power and wealth within the world system. After all, as Norbert Elias remarked, in this system “who doesn’t rise, falls.” It was with this aim in mind that the US abandoned the Bretton Woods system, recuperating its freedom in terms of monetary initiative; likewise, it abandoned Vietnam and drew closer to China, renegotiating its expansionist position in Southeast Asia and returning the ancient \'tributary states\' of Cochinchina to the Chinese. This was precisely the start, in 1970, of the great geopolitical transformation of the world system, which continues apace at the start of the 21st century. At first, the United States and China jointly reorganized the geopolitical landscape of Southeast Asia, without the Americans abandoning their military protection of Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. Afterwards, though, this same strategic change of the 1970s ended up opening the doors and redrawing the economic map of the world with the construction of the US-China axis, which transformed into the motor of the global economy.
Here, defeat in Vietnam undoubtedly had a key role in initiating the ‘military revolution’ that changed the strategic and logistic conception of warfare at the end of the 20th century. After the defeat, the US developed new battlefield information, control and command systems, and invested heavily in the production of new vectors, teleguided bombs and remote controlled equipment. This new generation of military technology was tested out in the Gulf War in 1991, and later transformed into an important tool of the American imperial project in the 1990s. Likewise, the ‘dollar crisis’ and market deregulation had a decisive role in the ‘financial revolution’ of the 1980/90s and in the birth of the new ‘flexible-dollar’ monetary system, which was also transformed into fundamental tools of power for the ‘American escalade’ over the following decades. After 1991, with the elimination of Soviet competition, and with the widening of deregulated space within the world economy, a new type of ‘global territory’ was created, submitted to the rule of the dollar and the speed of intervention of American military forces. This was the moment when the world system definitively left behind the idea of a ‘regulated’ model of ‘global governance’ and ‘benevolent hegemony,’ and began to experience the new American imperial project, which began to be designed in the 1970s and reached its ‘cruising speed\' in the 1990s during the period in which China was still digesting its own change in international economic and geopolitical strategy.
2.2. the limits of empire
Looking back at the 1990s from the viewpoint of this imperial project and its military expansionism, long before the terrorist attacks, it is easier to understand the speed and the geopolitical intentions of the American occupation of territories bordering on Russia, which had been under Soviet influence until 1991. The movement of occupation began with the Baltic, crossed Central Europe, the Ukraine and Belarus, passed through the ‘pacification’ of the Balkans and arrived in Central Asia and Pakistan, extending the borders of NATO, despite opposition from the Europeans. By the end of the decade, the geopolitical distribution of the new US military bases left no doubts concerning the existence of a new buffer zone separating Germany from Russia and Russia from China, or of the existence of a new global military power with centralized control of a worldwide infrastructure consisting of over 700 bases across the globe, with ‘reciprocal military support’ agreements with around 130 countries, sovereign control of all the oceans and the capacity to intervene almost instantaneously at any point of world air space. Likewise, when we observe the 1990s from the viewpoint of the US project to build a ‘global financial empire,’ we can also gain a better understanding of the expansionist logic of its policy of financial deregulation, privatization and globalization. At the end of the 1990s, the dollar had been transformed into the currency of the international monetary system, its standard of reference being none other than American power itself and the decisions of its central bank, the Federal Reserve. US public bonds had been transformed into the basis of the new monetary system, acting as a reserve and a financial asset for almost all the world’s governments.
However, soon after, at the start of the 21st century, this imperial project began to reveal some difficulties, despite its global power structure. After winning the Afghanistan War, the United States led and won the Iraq War in 2003, conquering Baghdad, destroying the Iraqi military forces and overthrowing President Saddam Hussein. In the wake of its two victories, though, the US forces have so far been unable to rebuild the two countries, nor have they managed to define their long-term objectives with any precision following the instalment of local US-backed governments. But these were just the last two episodes of an imperial political and military experience that has not been successful from the perspective of the United States’ immediate objectives. Its military interventions failed to expand democracy or free markets; air warfare was not sufficient, nor territorial conquest; and the military conquest on the ground failed to enable the national reconstruction of the defeated countries. Undoubtedly, we are not faced with the ‘final crisis’ of American power, nor the apocalypse of the world system; what is happening, rather, is that the United States’ imperial project has reached its limit within the rules of the current world system and has no means of advancing further. This is for two basic reasons: firstly, it seems impossible to sustain a global empire without colonies and with only military bases, and the United States lacks the national willingness to assume the costs of a colonial system; secondly, once again, the success of the ‘Asian’ strategy of the US in the 1970s has already generated a new reality which escapes its control, and today the United States has no longer any means of curbing China’s economic expansion, and is unable to conceive of a world empire without including at least a Chinese partner.
But at this moment, the picture is much more complicated, since the American military quagmire in the Middle East and the astonishing velocity of Chinese economic expansionism are provoking a rapid fragmentation of the world system along with the return to fights for regional supremacy. Nobody believes any longer in the possibility of a ‘definitive victory’ in the ‘global war’ on terrorism, at least in the form conducted by the United States since 2001. Nor is serious consideration given to the idea that it would be possible to stop, interrupt or slow down the \'Asianization\' of the world economy. And at this point in time, there is no longer any \'ethical\' project or ideology capable of rousing world public opinion, legitimating US interventions or allying the main powers. The utopia of globalization has become commonplace and lost its capacity to convince, social democracy suffers from profound anaemia, and nationalism is reappearing everywhere. Finally, within the United States, there is at present no sufficiently powerful political alternative with a clear project for changing the country\'s current international strategy. Meanwhile, we are witnessing a return to the world system of the ‘geopolitics of nations’ and market competition among its national economies with repercussions extending to every corner of the globe.
- THE RETURN OF THE NATIONS
To summarize: since the beginning of the new millennium, the crisis faced by expansion of the American empire has reignited competition between the nations, and everywhere we can observe a decline in the capacity for unilateral United States intervention with an increase in the levels of uncertainty and freedom of action of old and new powers in each of the ‘regional chessboards’ of the world system:
i) Starting with the Middle East, which transformed into the epicentre of the international setting and the main symbol of the current limitations of the American imperial project. The failure of military intervention, especially after the end of the Iraq War, has definitively discredited the ‘Big Middle East\' project of the second Bush administration, which proposed to implant democracies and free markets in the territory situated between Morocco and Pakistan. However it has also corroded the credibility of American threats to intervene in Ian, North Korea or any other state with a degree of military strength and international support. Much more serious than this, though, is the civil war that threatens to rip apart the Iraqi territory and which has little prospect of coming to an end in the foreseeable future. This has been the paradoxical effect of US action, which provoked a major shift in the correlation of regional power by boosting Shi’ite power, led by Iran, transforming the latter into the biggest challenger to US hegemony in the Middle East. With the increase in the power of the Shi’ites in the region, Iran today has an ever wider influence in Iraq itself, as well as Lebanon, Palestine and among all the Islamic groups more resistant to the power of Israel and the United States within the region. This rise in Iran\'s influence has provoked regional competition with Israel, but also with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and may have very complicated repercussions, unleashing a nuclear arms race in the region. The United States will continue to exert a sizeable influence in the Middle East, but has lost its position of arbitration, and from here on will have to live with the active presence of Russia, China and other countries with interests in the energy resources of the Middle East. And, above all, the Us will have to deal with the challenge and hegemonic competition with Iran within the region itself.
ii) In Europe, the situation is less conflict-ridden, but the growing opposition to US unilateralism and NATO’s military power is unmistakable. The size of the European Union and NATO have both increased, but Europe at this moment is living through a situation of paralysis in terms of its strategy and decision-making. Its main problem is becoming increasingly visible: the EU lacks a unified and homogenous central power capable of defining and imposing objectives and strategic priorities for its associated states. On the contrary, it is ever more divided between the European projects of its most important members, France, Great Britain and Germany. A divergence which does nothing to hide the secular competition between these three countries, which remained dormant after the Second World War, but reappeared after the end of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany and the re-emergence of Russia. The fears of France and Great Britain are nowadays palpable as they face the strengthening of Germany in the centre of Europe. Undoubtedly, the reunification of Germany and the re-appearance of the old Russia on the European scene has added a huge twist to the process of European unification. Germany strengthened its position as the continent’s largest demographic and economic power, and began to adopt a more autonomous foreign policy centred on its own national interests. Since reunification, Germany has been deepening its Ostpolitik of the 1960s and promoting a vibrant economic-financial expansion in the direction of Central Europe and Russia. This strategy has placed Germany once again at the epicentre of the struggle for hegemony within Europe as a whole and within the European Union, obfuscating the role of France and challenging the ‘Americanism’ of Great Britain. A strategic alliance between Germany and Russia is not beyond the realms of possibility: Russia is the largest supplier of energy to Germany and the rest of Europe, as well as being the world’s second largest nuclear power. But were this alliance to exist, it would radically affect the future of the European Union and its relations with the United States, and it is not inconceivable that it could revive the geopolitical competition between the European states responsible for forming the current world system in the first place.
iii) In Latin America, the scenario is slightly different since America is still the only continent in the world system where there has never been a hegemonic dispute between its national states. Firstly, it was a colony, and then a ‘frontier of expansion’ or ‘periphery’ of the European economy, but after its independence it was always under Anglo-Saxon control, dominated by Great Britain until the end of the 19th century, and the United States up until the start of the 21st century. On the other hand, during almost two centuries of independent life, the political and territorial fights south of the Rio Grande have never attained the intensity or had the same effect as in Europe. Neither has an integrated and competitive system of national states and economies formed in Latin America, as occurred in Asia after its phase of decolonization. Consequently, the Latin American states have never occupied an imposing position in the world system’s large geopolitical disputes; instead, it functioned throughout the 19th century as a kind of test bed for ‘free trade imperialism.’ After the Second World War and during the Cold War, the South American governments allied with the United States, with the exception of Cuba, and after the Cold War, during the 1990s, most of the region’s governments adhered to the neoliberal policies and reforms advocated by the US. Now, though, at the start of the 21st century, South America in particular is living through a period of large changes with a shift to the left among the majority of its governments, which are critical of neoliberal policies and ‘US imperialism.’ In this sense, a change in the relationship between South America and the United States is undeniably under way, especially after Argentina’s success in declaring a moratorium on its debts in 2001, the failure of the coup d’État in Venezuela – welcomed by the US – in 2002, and the rejection of the US-sponsored ALCA project at the Punta del Este meeting in 2005. At the same time, these events have been accompanied by the expansion of MERCOSUL, the formation of the South American Community of Nations and ALBA, and the re-emergence on the continent of a proposal to build a ‘socialism for the 21st century,’ abandoned since the overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973.
iv) During the 1990s, a conviction became widespread that Africa was an ‘unviable’ and marginal continent within the triumphal process of economic globalization. It was supposedly a continent of no interest to the Great Powers, nor their corporations and private banks. But Africa is neither so simple or so homogenous, with its 53 states, 5 macro regions and almost 800 million inhabitants: in effect, a gigantic and fragmented mosaic of states without any real competitive state system, nor an integrated regional economy. Indeed, the current African state system was created by the European colonial powers and only remained ‘integrated’ until 1991 thanks to the Cold War and its bi-polar dispute, which affected North Africa after the Suez Canal crisis in 1956, and Central Africa following the start of Congo’s fight for independence in the 1960s, and finally Southern Africa after the independence of Angola and Mozambique in 1975. Following the end of the Cold War and the failure of the US’s \'humanitarian intervention’ in Somalia in 1993, President Clinton visited Africa in 1998 and defined the American ‘low calorie’ strategy for the continent: peace and economic growth through markets, globalization and democracy. A few years later, during the first Republican government of George Bush (Junior), the US took part in various negotiations and peace forces, and became involved in setting up and monitoring the electoral processes in the new democracies of Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Congo Republic, Burundi and the Sudan. But in fact, the United States’ concern with Africa is confined today almost exclusively to the disputes over oil-producing regions and the control and repression of Islamic forces and the terrorist groups from the Horn of Africa. In this sense, despite the gestures of good will, all the signs indicate that old Europe no longer has the ‘stamina’ and the US no longer the ‘installed capacity’ to see through the project of the \'African rebirth’ proposed by President Mandela in the 1990s. Consequently, this vacuum may well allow the emergence of a local hegemonic struggle, or a new massive economic presence from China and India that will transform into an important political factor in the region.
v) Finally, in Eastern Asia, the regional system of national states and economies increasingly resembles the old European model of accumulating power and wealth found at the origins of the current world system. It is the region with the highest economic dynamism within the global system and, at the same time, where the most intense and explicit competition for regional hegemony is in progress. This involves its ancient imperial powers – China, Japan and Korea – but also Russia and the United States. Until the 1930s, Japan was the main ally of Great Britain in the region and later of the United States until the Japanese invasion of China in 1938. During the Second World War, the US opposed the Japanese invasion and moved closer to China, sponsoring its participation in the three-way meeting in Moscow, in which the San Francisco Conference was convoked, and after the war sponsored the inclusion of China on the UN Security Council. With the start of the Cold War and the victory of the Chinese Revolution, followed by the Korean and Vietnam Wars, Japan was \'rehabilitated\' and transformed into a \'military protectorate\' of the United States, with an extremely important position within American hegemonic control of Southeast Asia. However, from the 1970s onwards, the change in the USA’s international strategy and its move towards China altered the regional architecture assembled after the Second World War. In the new configuration, the Chinese position was strengthened, increasing its regional competition with Japan, more recently aggravated with the first nuclear weapon testing by North Korea. At the start of the 21st century, the involvement of the United States in the Middle East and its \'global war\' on terrorism has noticeably diminished its capacity to intervene directly in East Asian affairs. It is also increasingly clear that if the American distance from the region increases, there will be rapid Japanese re-armament with a strong nationalist connotation. Moreover, if North Korea does not interrupt its nuclear weapons testing, the most probable scenario is that Japan will acquire its own nuclear arsenal. This picture could become even more complicated if India was forced to become involved in this hegemonic dispute, whether from its own decision or due to a strategic alliance with the United States.
In all events, the region’s biggest geopolitical shift and the big unknown concerning its future relates to the new global expansion of China. So far, it has remained faithful to the original model of Chinese expansion from the 15th century, which was basically diplomatic and mercantile, in contrast to the bellicose and mercantile – and later capitalist – expansion of the Europeans. From the geopolitical viewpoint, it is more likely that China restricts itself to the fight for hegemony of Southeast Asia, and the region close to the Pacific. But if China follows the paths of all the Great Powers of this world system, at some point it will have to combine its economic expansion with a global political expansion. In this case, it will increasingly confront Anglo-American resistance and power. But we could also see a repetition of what took place in the 17th century with the fusion of Anglo-Dutch economic interests, and in the 20th century with the fusion of Anglo-American interests. The overriding new factor, however, is that this no longer involves a relation of competition, warfare and fusion between Europeans or descendents of Europeans; it amounts to a return to the relations and competition found at the outset of the system, a kind of ‘settling of accounts’ between the Asians and the Europeans and their descendents.
3. A NEW ECONOMIC GEOMETRY
3.1. United States, China and India.
At the other end of this new dynamic axis within the world economy is the United States, which continues to be the largest consumer of world energy and which, in addition, is striving to diversify its supply sources so as to lessen its dependence on Middle Eastern countries. Today Saudi Arabia meets just 16% of the internal demand of the United States, which has already succeeded in transferring most of its energy supply to a region within its immediate strategic safety zone, situated in Mexico and Canada, followed by Venezuela, which is its fourth largest oil supplier. Furthermore, the US has been working actively to obtain a long-term strategic agreement with Russia and has advanced in aggressive and competitive form on the new oil-producing territories situated in sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Caspian Sea region. Hence, the United States is disputing all the territories with current or potential energy surpluses with China and India. It is this competition, which is transforming into a simultaneously complementary and competitive economic triangle, which is effectively organizing and dynamizing various regions and national economies across the world, including South America and Africa.
3.2. United States, China and South America
South America also witnessed a reversal in the pessimistic economic expectations issued at the start of the 21st century. The prognosis was for a lean period with low growth and external imbalances, especially after the crises in Argentina and Venezuela in 2001 and 2003. But from 2002 onwards, there was a return to growth in all the continent’s countries, led – somewhat paradoxically – by the economies of Argentina and Venezuela, which overcame the crisis and quickly achieved the production levels found before the crisis, growing at average rates of between 7% and 9% over the last four years, while the rest of the continent grew at average rates varying between 3.5% and 5.5%, with the notable exception of Brazil, which has been growing for more than two decades at an average rate of approximately 2.5% only. As at other times during the evolution of global capitalism, the South American export economies are now accompanying the expansive cycle of the world economy, led by the United States and China. But there is a novel element in this new cycle of South American growth: the decisive impact of Asian exports, imports and investments in the continent, particularly from China, which has been the main force responsible for the increase in South American exports of minerals, energy and grains. At the same time, China’s own exports to Latin America rose by 52% in 2006, while those from the United States only rose 20%. For Brazil alone, Chinese sales grew 53%, while Brazilian exports to China grew by 32% in the same year. In 2006, Brazil already imported more from Asia than from its traditional partners, the United States and Europe, and China already surpassed Brazil as the largest supplier of manufactured goods to the countries of Latin America. To get an idea of the speed of these changes, in 1990, Brazil supplied 10% of Chile’s imports of manufactured goods, while China supplied 1%; 15 years later, Brazil supplies 13% while China has already reached 12%. But as well as boosting its trade, China is occupying an increasingly important role within the region as an investor, competing with the traditional sources of investment capital in South America.
At the same time, from the internal point of view of the South American economy, the new international prices of minerals and energy have strengthened the fiscal capacity of the producer states, and are serving to finance various ambitious projects of physical and energy integration within the continent itself. In addition, Venezuela’s very strong currency reserves have allowed it to act twice as a ‘last resort lender’ to Argentina and Paraguay, creating a new type of relationship and completely original integration in terms of South American history.
From every point of view, therefore, China has been playing a new and fundamental role in the South American economy. The United States continues to be the hegemonic power in South America, and it is unlikely that the Chinese will become politically involved in the region. But there is no doubt that this international ‘tranquillity’ led by the US and China has contributed to the emergence of a new economic triangle that will contribute to deepening the South-South material and political relations, and to a greater autonomy of South American foreign policy in relation to its traditional centres of economic and political power.
3.3. China, India and Africa
Something analogous also occurred in the case of Africa. In the 1990s, after the Cold War had ended and financial globalization had reached its peak, the African continent remained practically at the margins of the new flows of trade and investment, reinforcing its widespread image as an unviable continent burdened with \'failed states,\' \'civil wars,\' \'genocides\' and sweeping epidemics, but also with just 1% of world GDP, 2% of global commercial transactions and less than 2% of world direct foreign investment. Even so, during the first decades of independence, some of the new African states had economic growth rates on a par with the more successful developing states of Asia and Latin America. This initial success, however, was trampled by the economic crisis of the 1970s and the change in direction of the world economic system. From the 1970-80s, the African economy experienced continuous decline until it reached the extremely low levels of the 1990s. In the long-term, though, as in Latin America, the majority of the African economies depend on their exports of raw materials and their performance accompanies the cycles of the international economy. Indeed, this is what has been happening again: since at least the end of the 1990s, a new change to the African economic panorama has been under way, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. The average economic growth of 2.4% in 1990 rose to 4.5% between 2000 and 2005, reaching a rate of 5.3% in 2006, with forecasts that it will attain 5.5% in 2007 and 2008. Since the end of the 1990s, 16 countries from the region, home to 35% of its population, have been growing at rates of over 5.5%, and some oil-producing countries at ‘exorbitant’ rates, as in the case of Angola (16.9%), the Sudan (11.8%), and Mauritania (17.9%).
As in South America, this African transformation once again conceals the impact of the enormous growth of two Asian giants, China and India. These countries consumed 14% of African exports in 2000; today they consume 27%, the same as Europe and the United States. Meanwhile, the Asian exports to Africa have been growing at 18% per year, and the same is happening with direct Chinese and Indian investments in sub-Saharan Africa, concentrated in energy, mines and infrastructure. Suffice to say that more than 800 companies, with 900 investment projects and 80,000 Chinese workers already exist on the African continent. A real ‘economic invasion’ led by state companies and followed, albeit at a lesser scale, by the Indian government and private capital which are making a similar massive investment, deepening the country’s political, economic and cultural relations with Africa.
From this point of view, all the signs are pointing in the same direction: sub-Saharan Africa is transforming into the biggest frontier of economic – and perhaps political and demographic – expansion of China and India in the first decades of the 21st century. In this sense, a new geo-economics triangle is forming, involving China, India and sub-Saharan Africa. But it is unlikely that the United States will abandon its positions in the region, especially in the fight for its ‘energy security.’ But there is nothing to prevent Africa from transforming into a key space of negotiation and fusion between the Asian and US economic interests.
In summary: the change in the economic relations between Asia, Africa and Latin America, led by China and India, has had an enormous impact in terms of the economic re-designing of the world system. For the first time in the history of the world economic system, ‘South-South’ relations have become dense enough in material terms to arouse concrete interests in the world of capital investments and power: this is happening almost precisely where third-world ideologies and the movement of the ‘non-aligned’ countries flourished during the 20th century.
5. VARIOUS POLITICAL GEOMETIRES
In the geopolitics of nations, there is no room for alliances based merely on statistical averages, sociological similarities or historical analogies. In fact, ideological coincidences only operate effectively when they coincide with the needs of the countries from the viewpoint of their development and their security. From this point of view, the formation of an economic space unified by large commercial and financial flows between China, India, Brazil and South Africa is a new and highly important fact, and could become the material basis for various sector-based and localized partnerships between all or some of these four countries. But it is highly unlikely that this simple economic nexus will sustain or justify a strategic, geopolitical and long-term alliance between them. Hence, the construction of a common agenda between China, India, Brazil and South Africa should start out from a recognition of the differences existing between their distinct involvements and interests within the world system. These are four countries that occupy a prominent position in their respective regions due to the size of their territory, their population and their economy. Yet this similarity hides very large differences in interests, strategic perspectives and capacity to implement decisions autonomously within the international field.
i) China and India
In contrast to Brazil and South Africa, China and India possess millennial civilizations and combined a third of the world population. More importantly, though, these two Asian giants share 3200 km of frontiers, as well as borders with Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan and Myanmar. Moreover, China and India are in dispute over particular territories, have waged war on each other over the last few decades and are nuclear powers. Within this geopolitical chessboard, the Indians believe that China’s friendly relations with Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are part of a Chinese strategy of ‘hem in’ India and supporting Chinese expansion in South Asia, India’s immediate ‘zone of influence.’ For its part, China considers that the recent closening of ties between the United States and India and their new strategic and nuclear partnership make up part of a strategy to ‘hem in’ China. All these are facts, expectations and developments that characterize a very close relation of territorial and bellicose competition for supremacy in the South and Southeast of Asia, involving the United States, China and India. Moreover, as we have seen, China and Indian are also competing at this moment in Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa in the fight to ensure their ‘energy security.’ Today, China is investing considerable resources in the modernization of its armed forces and its arsenals, such as its submarine fleet, powered by diesel and nuclear energy simultaneously, indicating a clear interest in maritime control of the South Pacific. The same can be said of the recent development of the new Chinese system for attacking and destroying satellites – a technology that was previously only possessed by the US and Russia – which provides China with the conditions to destroy the basic nexus of control of the new US warfare technology. On the other hand, it is no secret that China today holds a central place within the strategic planning of the United States, occupying the position of the potential adversary needed for the organization and expansion of American power. After all, China had a decisive role in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and presents almost all the characteristics of the Great Powers that have formed within the world system since its European origins in the 16th century – with the difference, as we have already seen, that until now Chinese expansionism outside of Asia has been almost entirely diplomatic and economic. But within Asia, the Chinese project is clearly hegemonic and competitive, including from the military point of view.
India, on the other hand, does not yet possess the characteristics of an expansive power and behaves in strategic terms as a state that was forced to arm itself to protect and guarantee its security in a region of high instability, where it is engaged in a territorial dispute and nuclear competition with its neighbour, Pakistan. But even so, it develops and controls cutting-edge military technology as in the case of its sophisticated ballistics system and its own nuclear arsenal, as well as possessing one of the best trained armies in Asia. It was only after its military defeat to China in 1962 and the first Chinese nuclear test explosion in 1964, just before India’s war with Pakistan in 1965, that India abandoned the ‘practical idealism’ of Nehru’s foreign policy and adopted the realpolitik of Prime Minister Bahadur Shastri, who authorized the start of the Indian nuclear program in the 1960s. This was when Indian foreign policy changed and its new nuclear national defence strategy was assembled, which came of age with the first nuclear bomb tests in 1998 and the success of the Indian Agni II ballistic missile in 1999. This was the moment, precisely at the peak of the ‘globalization utopia,’ that India fully assumed its position as a nuclear power and began to define its strategy for regional and international action, based on the expansion of its economic and military power. Armed with this new strategic approach, India is today fighting to access and control energy resources in Africa and the Middle East, as well as Central Asia – despite the fact that China has taken a head start in this region and already leads the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, created at its initiative in 1996, along with Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. On the other hand, since 2002, India has established a ‘Global Partnership for the 21st Century’ with Japan and has been forging closer ties with Russia in relation to more long-term energy and strategic questions.
ii) Brazil and South Africa
Like China and India, Brazil and South Africa are the most important states and economies of their respective regions, responsible for an expressive part of the population, product and internal and external trade of South America and Africa. However they do not share borders with each other, and unlike China and India are not involved in territorial disputes with their neighbours, do not face internal or external threats to their security and are not important military powers, at least since South Africa abandoned its nuclear program in 1991. After its independence, South Africa lived through two histories and two completely different international profiles, before and after the end of apartheid and the election of Nelson Mandela as President in 1994. After the Second World War, and during the apartheid period between 1948 and 1991, South Africa faced an almost permanent internal social and political rebellion. It was also subject to boycotts from the international community and, in the 1980s, became engaged in a regional war with the countries of the Southern African Development Coordination Conference (SADCC), also called the ‘Front Line States.’ But after the end of apartheid and Nelson Mandela’s election in 1994, the question of South Africa’s internal security and international standing changed radically, in particular in relation to sub-Saharan Africa and the countries of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), created in 1990 and uniting former enemies, Botswana, Mauritius, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Tanzania, as well as South Africa itself. Beyond this immediate ‘zone of influence,’ South Africa has been involved in almost all the peace actions and negotiations taking place on the African continent in the 1990s and the first years of the 21st century, but without presenting any desire for expansion or disposition for a hegemonic fight within Africa. On the contrary, it has proceeded with an enormous degree of caution as a country, perhaps due to its own racist and war-ridden past. On the other hand, since Mandela’s first government, South Africa has proposed to perform a ‘Cape of Good Hope’ role, connecting the countries of Asia and Latin America and looking to occupy a key role within this new economic geometry. In 1997, it signed the ‘Red Fort Declaration’ with India, where the two countries proposed a joint action for deepening ties with Latin America that contributed decisively to the creation of the India, Brazil and South Africa (IBSA) Dialogue in 2003. In 1998, South Africa’s Foreign Affairs Minister Alfred Nzo confirmed these priorities before the South African parliament and defined the establishment of solid relations with key countries connecting Asia, Africa and Latin America, in order to “strengthen the voice of the south in international forums,” as a strategic objective for South Africa. Nonetheless, the volume and pace of South Africa’s GDP growth, the size of its population and its military limitations prevent South Africa from developing any kind of aim towards supremacy outside its immediate region in Southern Africa.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Brazil’s regional and international history was always more tranquil and linear. The Brazilian state never had expansive characteristics, nor did it ever dispute for hegemony of its own continent with Great Britain or the United States. After 1850, Brazil did not face any more civil wars or threats of internal division, and after the Paraguay War in the 1860s, Brazil participated only briefly in Italy in the Second World War, and was later occasionally involved in UN peace-keeping operations. Its relationship with its South American neighbours since 1870 has always been peaceful and with little competitiveness or political and economic integration, and throughout the 20th century, its position within the continent was always one of junior partner to the continental hegemony of the United States. After the Second World War, Brazil did not have any significant involvement in the Cold War, but despite its alignment with the United States, it started to pursue a more autonomous and global foreign policy from the 1960s onwards when it closened its ties with Asia and Africa and the socialist countries, established relations with the Non-Aligned Countries Movement as an observer country and had an active role in the negotiations for the creation of ALALC (Latin American Free Trade Association), UNCTAT (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) and the Group of 77 (G77). In the 1970s, particularly during the government of Gal Ernesto Geisel, Brazil embarked on an international project as an ‘intermediary power,’ deepening its developmentalist economic strategy, breaking its military agreement with the United States, broadening its Afro-Asiatic relations and signing a nuclear agreement with Germany. But Brazil’s economic crisis of the 1980s and the end of the military regime deactivated this project, which was completely shelved in the 1990s when Brazil returned to allying itself with the United States and its project for creating ALCA, a dream fostered by the US since the end of the 19th century. More recently, however, since 2002, Brazilian foreign policy changed direction once again and defined as its new priorities the integration of South America, through Mercosul and the South American Community of Nations, and a more strategic relation with the key countries of Africa and Asia; in particular, South Africa, Indian and China.
The project for South American integration goes back to the ideas of Simon Bolivar in the first half of the 19th century. But the construction of the regional common market began in the 1960s with the creation of the Latin American Free Trade Association (ALALC) and experienced two decisive moments: the creation of the Andean Community in 1969, and the creation of Mercosul in 1991. Finally, on December 8th 2004, the countries of the Andean Pact and Mercosul signed the Cuzco Declaration, setting out the bases for the South American Community of Nations. Over the last few years, Brazil has been working to deepen this project of integration, but faces a number of crucial limitations, since Brazil is not considered – today – a successful \'development model\' to be followed by the rest of the continent’s countries, as is this case of China and India in the Southeast and South of Asia. In addition, Brazil has lacked the capacity to meet the material needs of its neighbours due to its low economic growth, its low capacity for public and private investment, but above all due to the Brazilian state’s low potential for strategic coordination after its crisis of the 1980s and its neoliberal dismantling in the 1990s.
iii) the route of ‘good hope’
As can be seen, the dynamic differences between China, India, Brazil and South Africa are enormous. After the 1990s, China and India projected themselves within the world system as economic and military powers; they also have clear hegemonic aims within their respective regions and today occupy an absolutely asymmetric global geopolitical position in relation to Brazil and South Africa. Despite this, Brazil, South Africa and India – and even China, although most likely for a short time only – still occupy the shared position of ‘emerging countries’ which continually demand changes to the rules of the world system’s ‘management’ and to its hierarchical and unequal distribution of power and wealth. For this reason, at the present time they share a reformist agenda in terms of the United Nations System and the composition of its Security Council. Likewise, they have all promoted liberalizing positions in the Doha Round, forming the G20 within the World Trade Organization. However, on these political and economic issues we can anticipate a gradual distancing from China which has already been acting on various occasions as a nation that makes up part of the current configuration of world power, rather than one that questions it. From now on, its behaviour will be increasingly that of a Great Power like all the others that make (or made) up part of the ‘leading circle\' of the world system. Consequently, we can expect a greater convergence of positions between India, South Africa and Brazil than with China. But even in relation to India, the political convergences will probably be focused on specific issues insofar as Brazil and South Africa will probably remain faithful to the ‘pragmatic idealism’ of their current foreign policies. Neither of the two demonstrates the desire or possesses the tools of power or the challenges needed to pursue the kind of realpolitik that defines the Great Powers. Both are likely to maintain their current position as peaceful advocates for the world’s ‘victims’ and for ‘universal ethical good sense.’ From the economic point of view, however, the new geography of trade and investments within the South-South region will probably deepen the material connections between these four countries and their regions, and from this perspective, South Africa will transform into a new Cape of Good Hope between Asia and America: the two ends of European expansion that gave rise to the current world system.
6. A CONVERGENT SOCIAL AGENDA
China, India, Brazil and South Africa are all societies with high levels of inequality in terms of income distribution, wealth, and access to basic social rights. They also have serious urban problems with sprawling shantytowns and poverty, rural regions with low productivity, and large contingents of the population whose basic health, energy and food needs go unmet. But despite the common struggle of the poor countries to improve the global distribution of power and wealth, and despite the support of international organizations and the occasional emergency aid projects from the Great Powers and NGOs, the response to the challenges set by poverty and inequality continues to be the responsibility of each of the national states where the “world’s poor are ‘stocked’ and where the resources capable of altering the social distribution of power and wealth are generated and accumulated.” Consequently, the first point on the common social agenda of China, India, Brazil and South Africa is multiplying jobs and incomes, something which is strictly unviable without an accelerated pace of economic growth in the case of these four countries. Expansion of public and private investment will enable increased rates of growth, while the latter will allow social control and a more audacious policy for countering the process of wealth polarization which inevitably accompanies capitalist development when it remains at the mercy of market forces. As a result, in addition to public investment, pro-active wealth redistribution policies are indispensable, applied through wage level controls but also – and indeed especially – through the supply of cheap popular food items and the universal public health, education, sanitation, energy, transport and communication services. This is the only way of overcoming transitory kinds of aid policies, transforming wealth distribution and improving social inclusion into a permanent structural feature of the civil societies involved.
From this point of view, a growing distance undoubtedly exists today between the social advances made by China in comparison with India, Brazil and South Africa: this difference is related to the average growth rates of their economies of the last few decades and to the degree of concern of their governments with the question of social inequalities. China has grown for 27 years at an average rate of 9.6%, while Brazil and South Africa have grown at an approximate rate of 2.5%, and India, after 2003 only, has been maintaining a rate of around 8%. China annually undertakes public and private investments of between 30 and 40% of its GDP, while in Brazil investment is no more than 20% of GDP. India today is still in a situation similar to China’s at the start of the 1980s, and its economic boom has yet to reach the rural world where around 60% of the Indian population lives, with agriculture growing at a rate of 3.9% a year, well below the national average of 8.4% in 2005. The prospects for the next few years are for these differences to continue with Asia growing at an average of 8% to 9% per year, with Brazil and South Africa growing at an average rate between 3% and 4%. This is despite the fact Brazil over the last few years has also seen a small fall in the levels of social inequality, thanks to the increase in the value of wages above the inflation rates, and thanks also to its welfare and emergency distribution policies.
However, there remains a very important point of convergence between these countries, despite the differences in their economic strategies: namely, the priority which has been given by their current governments to the promotion of social inclusion and equity. In this sense, we can say that an agenda of shared social concerns exists between these countries, with the fight against hunger and poverty and the guarantee of food security, health, employment, education, human rights and environmental protection. This political appears in explicit form in the Brasília Declaration of 2003, which constituted the IPSA Group, and in its later working documents, where India, South Africa and Brazil propose to cooperate and jointly promote actions capable of fighting all types of inequality, defending the environment and combating large-scale epidemics such as \'bird flu,’ AIDS and others which already threaten to transform into pandemics. In all these fields, we can see the consolidation of a common agenda and the political desire for inter-governmental cooperation in the scientific and technological field. Likewise, the space for NGO activities in these four countries has also expanded.
Shifting to a wider perspective, we can also observe that at the turn of the 21st century, the new geopolitics of nations has also engendered a large social and political mobilization in favour of social and egalitarian transformations in the societies most affected by the changes in the world system. As we have seen, the world experienced an era of liberal euphoria after 1990, but it now seems that a new era is under way of convergence between the movements of national self-protection that question the international status quo and the social movements that are fighting against inequality within each of the these countries and regions. The end of apartheid and the democratization of South Africa was an emblematic moment in this reversal, even though after 1994 the Mandela government maintained the same orthodox and neoliberal economic policy of the previous government. In a long-term perspective, however, the regime change in South Africa represented the end of European colonialism and the high point of the fight to free Black Africa. For their part, after 2001, the new left-wing governments in South America, including in Brazil, began to react against neoliberal policies and implement more egalitarian policies towards social transformation. Likewise, all international studies recognize that the economic growth in China and India, as we saw above, has rapidly reduced the poverty in these two countries, even though social inequalities are still considerable.
This return to \'social issues,’ along with the ‘national issue,’ in recent years recalls the classic thesis of the Austrian economist Karl Polanyi on the origins of the ‘great egalitarian transformation’ of the more developed countries after the First World War and the crisis of the 1930s. According to Polanyi, this sea-change in ‘liberal civilization’ which had been triumphant and incontestable in the 19th century, resulted from a tendency inherent to all liberal economies and societies, which are simultaneously powered, the author argues, by two contradictory forces of material and social type. The first of these is an ‘internationalizing-liberal’ force and pushes national economies and societies towards globalization, the universalization of ‘self-regulating’ markets and social inequality. The second acts in an opposite direction, involving the ‘self-protection of societies and nations’ against the destructive effects of self-regulating markets, which he called ‘satanic mills.’ In the case of European countries, especially in the 20th century, these two movements of self-protection – national and social – converged under the external pressure of the two World Wars, the economic crash of the 1930s, and later the Cold War, creating a widespread social consensus in favour of the policies of economic growth, full employment and social welfare, considered heretical until then by economic liberals. Outside of Europe and the United States, however, this ‘double movement’ of national and social self-protection rarely happened in convergent form, at least until the end of the 20th century, perhaps because these countries and regions had not faced the external challenges that ended up forming solidarity between their elites and their national populations, motivated by mutual needs.
Karl Polanyi failed to anticipate the ‘liberal-conservative restoration’ of the self-regulating markets that took place after 1980. Neither could he have predicted, therefore, that at the start of the 21st century, there would be a widespread reaction against the destructive and ‘unequalizing’ effects of the neoliberal policies of the previous two decades. Even so, evidence is accumulating that an increasingly wider and more universal movement is developing in favour of democracy and social equality. A kind of return to the world of labour and the excluded after three decades of the incontestable supremacy of the world of capital. The big novelty, however, is that as a new century begins, the movement for ‘national and social self-protection’ is starting at the periphery of the world system – and occurring without the prior existence of wars and mass destruction. For this reason, if this trend is confirmed and broadened, we may well see a convergence between the civil societies and governments of China, India, Brazil and South Africa with the aim of leading a global project for a more egalitarian distribution of power and wealth, presently oligopolized by the Great Powers within this world system created by Europeans, precisely at the moment when they conquered, subjected and connected Asia, Africa and America in the 16th century.
