G77 and the decolonization of geopolitics

Rafael Bautista S.

07/06/2014

Opinión

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The recent crises in Ukraine and Syria point to the complex transition towards a world without a single hegemonic centre. This is a world that is in the process of becoming an “incipient multipolar world” (the areas in dispute are indicative of this trend). The Twenty-first century dawns on a new emerging world that no longer presupposes western cultural or civilizational hegemony. The neoliberal narrative of “the end of history” crashed on September 11, 2001, and the last crusade, the so-called “clash of civilizations” has been defeated in Syria and Ukraine. That is to say, the phenomenon of colonization that marked the modern world is coming unglued in the new century. Even the emerging new powers, should they opt for areas of influence, will be unable to do this in the way that the western powers did as they divided up Africa and the East. The survival of a multipolar world hangs on the following detail: the terms in which geopolitical alliances are expressed can only be based on mutual and strategic cooperation, rather than exclusive relations of domination.

The latest bragging efforts that the West unleashes in their small wars only serves to demonstrate their profound decadence. They could not invade Syria, and the price of this is not only their credibility, but a lack of confidence in their military capacity. One might even say that on December 3, 2013 a third world war was avoided, when the Russian S300-PS defence system, from the Tartus base in Syria, intercepted and destroyed tomahawk missiles (launched from the North American base at Rota, in the bay of Cadiz) which were aimed at Damascus. From this point in time, it is clear that the Russians have recovered their military importance, a fact that results in a new equilibrium in a world that had been captured by the USA. According to Ehud Barack, former Israeli minister of military affairs, this has weakened the US in the whole world. After the Russian victory against Georgia over South Osetia in 2008, it can be said that Twentieth-century geopolitics has given way to a new planetary configuration.

In Ukraine this has emphasized the same juncture, since Western intrusion, led by the United States, has led to closer ties between China and Russia, which is unfortunate for the West, and will mean a definitive shift of the world economy towards the Orient. The latest monumental agreement between Russia and China (whose bilateral commerce will reach 200 billion dollars by 2020) not only seals the hegemony of an Oriental Eurasia, but even opens possibilities for a Chinese expansion towards the West, including probable joint military exercises between Russia and China in the Black Sea. Neither the US nor Europe have the economic and military muscle to enforce economic sanctions on a Russia which, allied with China, has no need to subject itself to the West that is sliding into decadence.

The world and its geopolitical cartography, as conceived by Western powers since the Nineteenth Century, is coming to an end. This means that the centre-periphery order, as established in the modern world, now makes no sense. Nor is there any sense, in the face of the climate and energy crisis, in an economic system that only knows how to administer the systematic dispossession of life (of humanity and nature) in favour of the fetishes of the modern world: capital and the market. This is a crisis of civilization, and can only be understood in its true magnitude, from a multidimensional perspective.

This also means that modern sciences, in their epistemological crisis, are also not in a position to make sense of the crisis. If they are all based on modern myths and prejudices, how can they analyze a crisis that arises from those same myths and prejudices? The present crisis reveals a rebellion rooted in the limits of a finite world, while modern science, capitalist economy and the development paradigm presuppose infinite resources as the basis of infinite progress.

This assumption is at the origin of modern society. But it is false, since resources are not infinite. Neither nature nor human labour can guarantee unlimited progress. Unlimited growth is simply a transcendental illusion. Because of this, the modern world faces the worst possible crossroads: if its economy is based on economic growth, this growth presupposes the unlimited use of fossil fuels. Without energy, growth is impossible. For the first world, growth implies increasing its consumption of energy, but if we add to this the fact that the modern myth of the wealthy countries is to grow indefinitely, faithful to the model of infinite development and progress, their form of living itself simply cannot be maintained. Therefore, as a consequence of this crisis, one can foresee the cultural and civilizational collapse of Western modernity. The first world is no longer in control of energy on a world basis (since 2003, when British Petroleum confirmed the failure of the Iraq war). Given that, it can no longer subsidize its development with the extreme poverty that its economy generates in the rest of the planet.

The financial crisis is tied to the energy crisis, the other face of the rebellion of limits against the pretensions of unlimited growth. This growth is unsustainable in the face of the gradual exhaustion of energy resources. This threatens the future stability of the dollar, that without petroleum, has nothing to support it (unless it be nuclear weapons). The first world needs increasing amounts of energy to sustain economic growth, but if it can no longer access cheap and abundant energy, the whole industrial and technological complex will stagnate. It enters into crisis. Both their production and consumption can no longer be maintained. The crisis demonstrates this. The climate crisis is the rebellion of limits: the world is finite.

Because of this, the myth of globalization involves an impossible impasse: if the world is one, it is not infinite. The modern-western-world system is in conflict with the source of everything that makes life possible. Nature is unique, but this does not mean that it is infinite. Uniqueness implies vulnerability. Its finitude is the verification of its condition as a subject. Because of this it cannot not have rights. If life comes from this world it is because it is the Mother. Hence we call it Pacha Mama. The indiscriminate extraction of its vital components, in support of an excessive accumulation of profits, makes it impossible to restore that which is lost. The over-exploitation of a resource leads to the slow destruction of its whole vital context. We call this extractivism, the prototype of capitalism.

The geophysical Hubbert curve was developed to demonstrate that any depletable element, such as petroleum, reaches a peak point in its exploitation that will never be surpassed. According to the World Energy Outlook (annual report of the International Energy Agency, 2010), this peak, at a world level, was already attained in 2006. If it be true that the peak for all hydrocarbons, in addition to uranium, will be reached in 2018, then a transformation of the energy base becomes indispensable; but the wealthy countries are proving incapable of a sensible response to this reality. They are now gambling on an even greater danger: agrofuel.

It would appear that the wealthy countries, as they are unable to devise a way out of their crisis, choose to dig themselves in deeper. This supposed solution to the energy crisis would lead to a food holocaust at a global level (the increase in grain and food prices confirms a speculative trend to the advantage of a smug financial capital).

The struggle over energy is right now the keynote of geopolitical shifts. For the Empire the dollar-petroleum combination is a basic need. Without petroleum, planetary military infrastructure cannot be sustained. Petroleum guarantees control. Hence the situation in Ukraine and Syria also leads us to reflect on the systematic threat wielded by the powers-that-be in Venezuela. They need Venezuelan oil to balance their power in the face of these new defeats in Ukraine and Syria.

The USA is pursuing its energy sovereignty by re-capturing Latin America. Due to this, the NAFTA agreement with Mexico revives the “Monroe Doctrine”; and what is now happening in Venezuela is part of their geopolitical strategy in the face of the rise of China and Russia. The US military bases in Colombia and Peru are aimed not only at Venezuela but also at Brazil. Not only the Orinoco but the Amazon basin are geo-strategic areas to restore a unipolar world (It would appear that Brazil, still part of the BRICS, has not taken notice of this design).

All this helps us to diagnose, establish and determine the epochal context that underlines the celebration of the 50-year Summit meeting of the G77. This summit in Bolivia is unprecedented, since while, in its beginnings, the G77 limited itself to the coordination of programmes of trade and development with a view to a better integration in the world market, the new geopolitical and geo-economic configuration is establishing the basis for making this group a counterweight to the hegemony – in decadence – of the rich countries.

Not only Bolivia, but ALBA and even MERCOSUR now have their best chance of leading a transition grounded in a world perspective. There is therefore a need to develop a geopolitical perspective that is not only circumstantial, but is in accord with this process of planetary transition. Politicising the G77 Summit is fundamental for our countries to situate our region in the new centre of gravity for the civilizational transition of the Twenty-first century. So “living well” and “decolonization” cannot remain at a purely rhetorical level, but must establish themselves as a discourse related to a world in transition towards a new civilization.

G77 was born in a paradigm of development and in a world divided between two powers. With the imposition of a unipolar world, the group was limited to a declarative function. But with the decadence of the unipolar world and the rise of BRICS, new margins for action emerge for this kind of organization (this is also the case with the “non-aligned”). This is the case because international organizations (related to US hegemony) are now seriously questioned. This means that, in the face of the decline of some institutions and the ascendance of others, the G77 enjoys conditions never before experienced, because the modern world is now facing, for the first time, the absence of Western hegemonic power. But at the same time, this world is in the midst of a crisis of civilization that threatens the survival of the planet.

In this context, the meeting in Bolivia could awaken a global awareness of a necessary paradigm change in the face of the decadence of capitalism. Only a community of forces on the part of poor countries could open new directions for peripheral economies, with a view to decoupling themselves from the prerogatives of the rich countries (now in profound crises) and to take on economic initiatives that no longer seek an integration subordinated to capital and to global markets, but rather a reconstruction of their own economies. This transitional period towards a new world economic system will last for at least a century; no one knows where it will lead, but the economy cannot continue with the prerogatives of the present model of production, consumption and accumulation.

The rise of emerging powers can not only introduce a new equilibrium into global power, but also make it possible to decentralize global economies and politics. The centre-periphery disposition cannot be maintained; with the rise of the BRICS, cultures and civilizations that the modern world regards as archaic and outmoded are being reclaimed. India and China are returning to the global importance they enjoyed before modernity. This explains why a good part of the US literature speaks of a “clash of civilizations.” The West feels threatened by the awakening of civilizations that they assumed were no longer viable, a fact that belies their presumed superiority as civilizations.

This year China will be in first place as a world economy and by 2020, China will be more advanced in technology, economy, science, education, etc., than Europe and the USA combined. In the PISA index, that measures the educational levels in the world, of the first ten places, seven are Asian countries (even Vietnam is ahead of the USA). That is to say, the decadence of the first world is already a fact.

In this context, the first world is no longer a model civilization. And the economy that this area pushed for five centuries is no longer sustainable. With respect to energy, the world can no longer support the Western model of consumption; it must also be noted that the emerging powers are not self-sufficient and one can no longer speak in colonialist terms according to the past models of Europe and the USA. Colonization will no longer be possible in the Twenty-first century.

This means that in a multipolar world, it is possible to think of a situation that is much more rich and complex: zeropolarity. This notion is new in geopolitics and describes a world without concentrated hegemonies. Nor can the new emerging powers decide everything without reference to others affected; this means that no power can exercise, in a unique way, its influence over all events.

When the hegemonic powers recede in any area, national sovereignties, even minimal, awaken to new challenges. If these challenges are generalized, then we have a new juncture. This amounts to a “change of epoch.” A new planetary geopolitical disposition that no longer has a single centre opens margins of action for poor countries. But these countries cannot, in isolation, overcome their situation. It is only through cooperation and strategic alliances that they could effectively face the onslaught of the rich countries.

These alliances cannot ignore the BRICS. China is recovering the Pacific as the centre of the global economy, and this indicates that commercial flows will be de-occidentalized. Together with India they will establish a new geography for the world economy. For the first time, after 500 years, America again appears at the oriental extreme of the orient, showing the true path and direction of human civilization. The West was never the apex of the development of human civilization. The implications of this kind of change will have repercussions even in cultural areas.

An alliance with the BRICS does not necessarily mean endorsing, much less imitating their model of economic growth. In the context of a new geopolitical cartography and a new global institutional map, our countries can demand a transformation of the productive model that gave rise to capitalism, and this under more favourable conditions. We therefore need to reaffirm the creation of a new global financial architecture. No one, in the global context, can be independent of the whole. One is independent in the measure in which one knows and takes advantage of the degree of dependence involved.

A transformation of the productive model presupposes a new financial architecture and a new legal framework, both national and international, that restores the sovereignty of peoples. To put all this in question also implies that it is not a model of development that is in crisis, but development itself, the project of control and domination of nature, nature reduced to an object of disposal, is what can no longer be sustained. The very notion of nature implicit in capitalism and modernity is what makes the whole economic system unsustainable. Because of this, the defence of “the rights of Mother Earth”, “living well”, “decolonization” have become the criteria that sustain a global awareness. This establishes, in our case, a leadership never before imagined, and one that opens up the possibility of establishing a world agenda.

The challenges are great. For example, to question the global market itself implies the promotion of local systems of production and ancestral technologies or the recovery of community campesina economies as the basis for food sovereignty. This alone could remedy, perhaps up to 50%, the emission of greenhouse gases that result from big agribusiness. Food self-sufficiency is part of the consolidation of alternatives in the economy, as well as the recovery of once-despised cultures.

The level of aggression and destruction inherent in capitalist production underlines a constant in its own logic: destroy in order to produce. In this way, the decadence of capitalism drags the world and life itself in its wake. The implications for the future of this decadence makes the search for new alternatives a basic imperative. Therefore, the answer cannot come from the first world, since this system limits its goal to changing the course of a multipolar world and to impeding its consolidation.

In Ukraine, the Western option consists in the restoration of the unipolar hegemonic order. This is due to the fact that the survival of Europe itself is at stake. The dependence on Russian gas moves the region away from the US sphere and makes it an energy semi-colony whose centre is moving eastwards. The geopolitical dislocations of this new century result in the Eurasian region becoming a strategic location from which to control and dominate the world. For the West it is vital to recover this zone, since their strategists believe that Ukraine is the point of entry to Eurasia, where 75% of world population lives and where three fourths of known energy resources are to be found. Capturing Ukraine is an attempt to prevent the economy from being “orientalized”, since if Russia joins China (and India), the West will cease to enjoy the importance that it once had and its economy will no longer dominate. Because of this Germany is playing a double game, coming closer to China and Russia, but without renouncing its place in the West.

G77 cannot ignore this new context that is changing the world geopolitical game. In the midst of a coming multipolar world, its vision cannot be reduced to local scenarios. In a single shared world, everything relates to everything else. A new reading of international relations involves the geopolitical updating of a world in transition. The present narrative is geopolitical, but not a provincial-imperial geopolitics, but rather a geopolitical reality on a truly world scale.

This also allows us to perceive the ideological character – unilateral and plagued with cultural provincialism – of the theoretical-conceptual framework of international relations and diplomacy, as social disciplines. These disciplines involve a reductionist European-North American perspective, which justifies an exceptionalism that is inadmissible today. The decisive dependence of these disciplines on North American foreign policy reveals a profound ignorance of other cultures and civilizations that simply cannot be reduced to the Western perspective.

This leads us to deduce that, if the world to come is to be multipolar, our geopolitics must also, in accord with this new world, have a multidimensional vision with global implications. That is to say, we must learn to see the world from our own perspective. If the Chinese, Indians, Iranians and Russians establish their own think tanks, with geopolitical perspectives that differ radically from those of Europe or the Americans, we can do no less on our own side of the world. The definitive question is, either we elaborate our own perspective on what is taking place in the world, or we put up with the usual perspective, which is the Western one. From a given narrative, a particular position is deduced. If the narrative is the decadent, modern-Western one, the conclusion will be a defence of the interests and the values of Western modernity.

The world is what we make it. Either you discover the world or it is hidden from you. The foreign policy of our countries has always been constituted by the theoretical-conceptual frameworks of the imperial geopolitical narrative. To free ourselves from this implies the emergence of a new geopolitical narrative that gives rise to a new kind of international relations. The theory of international relations has usually been based on an abstract vision, one that is out of context, without history, employing merely formal concepts, leading to a passive accommodation to the status quo. Geopolitics appeared as the patrimony of the centre, and because of this, even an ingenuous left understood this as an imperial discipline. (Trapped within interpretations, they often forgot the real world in which they lived).

The hegemonic-imperial readings of reality are in crisis, revealing the provincialism of the vision from the centre in the face of a world with rising civilizations that they are unable to understand. The West never knew the world, and that is why it looks with astonishment at the rise of emerging powers and discovers that it can only impose its own vision through brute force. The well-known historian from Yale University, Paul Kennedy, maintains that international affairs are not doing well in the political and social world, and that they are beginning to crumble, both on an institutional and a discursive level. But he sees this collapse as an attack on the “free world”, that is to say, he is incapable of seeing that this is a question of a cultural and civilizational collapse of Western hegemony, that is, of the so-called “free world.”

The conclusion made by such personalities – who are highly influential in circles of power – is that the world is going mad. This vision betrays a centre that is unable to read an emerging new world. For Charles Hill, the legendary official with the Department of State, the old order known as the American Century, that was part of the modern era, appears to be dying. His diagnosis is revealing, since he points out that the coming era “will not be modern”; but what would constitute a hope for the rest of the world – the poor part – he sees as “nothing agreeable.”

Obviously, from the point of view of the empire, there is nothing agreeable in the loss of their pre-eminence. This is why David Brooks (New York Times columnist) justly points out that the modern order that Hill refers to, is a system of States that incarnate the major vices of international relations: the desire of an expansive domination and the elimination of diversity. Hence, one may assume that international relations were never thought out in terms of a multipolar, non-Western world. For the Empire, geopolitics have always involved the exclusive defence of their own interests, which they consider to be their values. A multipolar and polycentric world is something inconceivable for imperial geopolitics, but it is a necessity in the context of a geopolitics of our own countries. It therefore makes sense to speak of a decolonization of geopolitics.

The transition between civilizations cannot advance blinkered. To become aware of the potential sense of a new planetary reconfiguration, without a single hegemony, allows us to envision a new global physiognomy that is more in accord with a diverse and plural reality. This is why the provincial vision of an imperial geopolitics cannot serve to interpret the meaning of the transition. The geopolitical narrative has to recover forgotten histories and the forgotten cultural horizons. If G77, and Bolivia and the countries of ALBA are to meet the challenge of leading the civilizing transition, what should happen logically would be the possibility of founding, in the medium term, a new “League of Nations, (also implying a recognition of their true roots: the indigenous Iroquois league).

If all the world institutions now no longer enjoy legitimacy, since they all are based on the centre-periphery model, the prototype of modern Western hegemony, then the United Nations itself should disappear and yield its place to a new and more democratic organization. The G77 has the greatest concentration of member countries of the United Nations, and hence its legitimacy is considerable. A new world cannot emerge from archaic institutions.

(Translated for ALAI by Jordan Bishop)

La Paz, Bolivia, 30 de mayo de 2014

- Rafael Bautista S. is the author of La Descolonización de la Política. Introducción a una Política Comunitaria. Plural editores, La Paz, Bolivia. rafaelcorso@yahoo.com

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