N° 15, Agosto-Noviembre
de 2003
The crisis of the
globalist project and the new economics of George W. Bush
Walden Bello *
“Capitalism constantly erodes man and woman's being-in-nature (creature) and
being-in-society (citizen) and, even as it drains them of life energy as
workers, it moulds their consciousness around one role: that of consume r.
Capitalism has many “laws of motion,” but one of the most destructive as far as
the environment goes is Say's law, which is that supply creates its own demand.
Capitalism is a demand-creating machine that transforms li ving nature into
dead commodities, natural wealth into dead capital.” Walden Bello, McPlanet Conference, Berlin,
27-29 June 2003
I would like to thank the Heinrich Boll Foundation, ATTAC Germany, and all the
other organizers of this conference for inviting me to this very important
meeting. What I would like to do in this introductory talk is to d iscuss the
key elements of the global conjuncture. I would like to paint, in broad
strokes, the global political and economic context in which we must situate our
environmental activism.
Let me begin by taking you back to1995, the year the World Trade Organization
was born. The offspring of eight years of negotiations, the WTO was hailed in
the establishment press as the gem of global economic governance in the era of
globalization. The nearly 20 trade agreements that underpinned the WTO were
presented as comprising a set of multilateral rules that would eliminate power
and coercion from trade relations by subjecting bo th the powerful and the weak
to a common set of rules backed by an effective enforcement apparatus. The WTO
was a landmark, declared George Soros, because it was the only supranational
body to which the world's most power ful economy, United States, would submit
itself. In the WTO, it was claimed, the powerful United States and lowly Rwanda
had exactly the same number of votes: one.
Triumphalism was the note sounded during the First Ministerial of the
WTO in Singapore in November 1996, with the WTO, International Monetary Fund
(IMF), and the World Bank issuing their famous declaration saying that the task
of the future was the challenge now lay in making their policies of global
trade, finance, and development “coherent” so as to lay the basis for global
prosperity.
THE CRISIS OF THE GLOBALIST
PROJECT
By the beginning of 2003, the triumphalism was gone. As the fifth Ministerial
of the WTO approaches, the organization is in gridlock. A new agreement on
agriculture is nowhere in sight as the US and the European Union s toutly
defend their multibillion dollar subsidies. Brussels is on the verge of
imposing sanctions on Washington for maintaining tax breaks for exporters that
have been found to be in violation of WTO rules, while Washing ton has
threatened to file a case with the WTO against the EU's de facto moratorium
against genetically modified foods. Developing countries, some once hopeful
that the WTO would in fact bring more equity to global trade , unanimously
agree that most of what they have reaped from WTO membership are costs, not
benefits. They are dead set against opening their markets any further, except
under coercion and intimidation. Instead of heraldi ng a new round of global
trade liberalization, the Cancun ministerial is likely to announce a stalemate.
The context for understanding this stalemate at the WTO is the crisis of the
globalist project--the main achievement of which was the establishment of the
WTO--and the emergence of unilateralism as the main feature of US foreign
policy.
But first, some notes on globalization and the globalist project.
Globalization is the accelerated integration of capital, production, and
markets globally, a process driven by the logic of corporate profitability.
Globalization has had two phases: the first lasting from the early 19th century
till the outbreak of the First World War in 1914; the second from the early
1980s until today. The intervening period was marked by the domi nance of
national capitalist economies characterized by a significant degree of state
intervention and an international economy with strong constraints on trade and
capital flows. These domestic and international constra ints on the market,
which were produced by the dynamics of class conflict internally and
inter-capitalist competition internationally, were portrayed by the neoliberals
as having caused distortions that collectively accou nted for the stagnation of
the capitalist economies and the global economy in the late seventies and early
eighties.
As in the first phase of globalization, the second phase was marked by
the coming to hegemony of the ideology of neoliberalism, which focused on “liberating
the market” via accelerated privatization, deregulation, and tra de
liberalization. There were, broadly, two versions of neoliberal ideology-a “hard”
Thatcher-Reagan version and a “soft” Blair-Soros version (globalization with “safety
nets.)” But underlying both
approaches was unleas hing market forces and removing or eroding constraints
imposed on transnational firms by labor, the state, and society.
THREE MOMENTS OF THE CRISIS OF GLOBALIZATION
There have been three moments in the deepening crisis of the globalist project.
The first was the Asian financial crisis of 1997. This event, which
laid low the proud “tigers” of East Asia, revealed that one of the key t enets
of the globalization-the liberalization of the capital account to promote freer
flows of capital, especially finance or speculative capital -- could be
profoundly destabilizing. The
Asian financial crisis was, in f act, shown to be merely the latest of at least
eight major financial crises since the liberalization of global financial flows
began in the late seventies. How profoundly destabilizing capital market
liberalization coul d be was shown when, in just a few weeks' time, one million
people in Thailand and 21 million in Indonesia were pushed below the poverty
line.
The Asian financial crisis was the “Stalingrad” of the IMF, the prime
global agent of liberalized capital flows. Its record in the ambitious
enterprise of subjecting some 100 developing and transitional economies to “str
uctural adjustment” was revisited, and facts that had been pointed out by such
agencies as the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and United Nations
Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) as early as the late eighties now
assumed the status of realities. Structural
adjustment programs designed to accelerate deregulation, trade liberalization,
and privatization had almost everywhere institutionalized stagnation, worsened
poverty, and increased inequality.
A paradigm is really in crisis when its best practitioners desert it, as
Thomas Kuhn pointed out in his classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
and something akin to what happened during the crisis of the Coperni can
paradigm in physics occurred in neoclassical economics shortly after the Asian
financial crisis, with key intellectuals leaving the fold--among them Jeffrey
Sachs, noted earlier for his advocacy of “free market” shoc k treatment in
Eastern Europe in the early 1990s; Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of
the World Bank; Columbia Professor Jagdish Bhagwati, who called for global
controls on capital flows; and financier George Soros , who condemned the lack
of controls in the global financial system that had enriched him.
The second moment of the crisis
of the globalist project was the collapse of the third ministerial of the WTO
in Seattle in December 1999. Seattle was the fatal intersection of three
streams of discontent and conflict th at had been building for sometime:
- Developing countries resented the inequities of the Uruguay Round agreements
that they felt compelled to sign in 1995.
- Massive popular opposition to the WTO emerged globally from myriad sectors of
global civil society, including farmers, fisherfolk, labor unionists, and
environmentalists. By posing a threat to the well being of each se ctor in many
of its agreements, the WTO managed to unite global civil society against it.
- There were unresolved trade conflicts between the EU and the US, especially
in agriculture, which had been simply been papered over by the Uruguay Round
agreement.
These three volatile elements combined to create the explosion in Seattle, with
the developing countries rebelling against Northern diktat at the Seattle
Convention Center, 50,000 people massing militantly in the streets, and
differences preventing the EU and US from acting in concert to salvage the
ministerial. In a moment of lucidity right after the Seattle
debacle, British Secretary of State Stephen Byers captured the essence of the
crisis: “[T]he WTO will not be able to continue in its present form. There has
to be fundamental and radical change in order for it to meet the needs and
aspirations of all 134 of its members.”
The third moment of the crisis
was the collapse of the stock market and the end of the Clinton boom. This was
not just the bursting of the bubble but a rude reassertion of the classical
capitalist crisis of overproductio n, the main manifestation of which was
massive overcapacity. Prior to the crash, corporate profits in the US had not
grown since 1997. This was related to overcapacity in the industrial sector,
the most glaring example being seen in the troubled telecommunications sector,
where only 2.5 per cent of installed capacity globally was being utilized. The
stagnation of the real economy led to capital being shifted to the financial
sector, re sulting in the dizzying rise in share values. But since
profitability in the financial sector cannot deviate too far from the
profitability of the real economy, a collapse of stock values was inevitable,
and this occurre d in March 2001, leading to the prolonged stagnation and the
onset of deflation.
There is probably a broader structural reason for the length of the current
stagnation or deflation and its constant teetering at the edge of recession. This may
be, as a number of economists have stated, that we are at the tail end of the
famous “Kondratieff Cycle.” Advanced by the Russian economist Nikolai
Kondratieff, this theory suggests that the progress of global capitalism is
marked not only by short-term business cycles but also by long-term “supercycles.”
Kondratieff cycles are roughly
fifty to sixty-year long waves. The upward curve of the Kondratieff cycle is
marked by the intensive exploitation of new technologies, followed by a crest
as technological exploitation matures, then a downward curve as the old
technologies produce diminishing returns while new technologies are still in an
experimental stage in terms of profitable exploitation, and finally a tro ugh
or prolonged deflationary period.
The trough of the last wave was in the 1930s and 1940s, a period marked by the
Great Depression and World War II. The ascent of the current wave began in the
1950s and the crest was reached in the 1980s and 1990s. The pro fitable
exploitation of the postwar advances in the key energy, automobile,
petrochemical, and manufacturing industries ended while that of information
technology was still at a relatively early stage. From this perspecti
ve, the “New Economy” of the late 1990s was not a transcendence of the business
cycle, as many economists believed it to be, but the last glorious phase of the
current supercycle before the descent into prolonged deflatio n. In other
words, the uniqueness of the current conjuncture lies in the fact that the
downward curve of the current short-term cycle coincides with the move into
descent of the Kondratieff supercycle. To use the words o f another famous
economist, Joseph Schumpeter, the global economy appears to be headed for a
prolonged period of “creative destruction.”
ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS AND
CAPITALIST LEGITIMACY
I have been talking about moments or conjunctural crystallizations of the
crisis of the globalization project. These moments were manifestations of
fundamental conflicts or contradictions that were unfolding unevenly ove r
time. A central smoldering contradiction was that between globalization and the
environment. I would now want to devote a few words to how the environmental
crisis has proven to be a central factor unravelling the leg itimacy of the
globalization project, indeed of capitalism as a mode of economic organization
itself.
Both before and after the World Summit on Environment and Development in Rio de
Janeiro in 1992, the sense was that while the world environmental situation was
worsening, consciousness of this fact was leading to the crea tion of the
global institutional and legal mechanisms to deal with the problem. The Rio
Summit's agreeing on Agenda 21, a global program for environmental improvement
that would have counterpart country programs, seemed to mark a major step
forward in terms of global cooperation.
The late eighties and early nineties were, moreover, a period when a number of
multilateral environmental agreements were inked and appeared to be making
headway in reversing the global environmental crisis, like the Mont real
Protocol putting controls on the production of CFCs to preserve ozone layer,
and the CITES Treaty putting tough controls on trade in endangered species. Also,
with the coming to power of Bill Clinton and Al Gore in 1992, an
environmentally correct administration seemed to be in place.
Several moves stalemated this process.
First, the establishment of the WTO. As Ralph Nader put it, the WTO placed
corporate trade “uber alles,” meaning practically all dimensions of economic
and social life except for national security. In other words, laws protecting natural resources and the
environment needed to be changed if they were seen as imposing standards that
were seen as unfair to foreign trading interests. In a series of landmark
cases-the tuna-dolphin case bet ween the US and Mexico, the turtle-shrimp
controversy pitting the US and Asian countries-it seemed that national
environmental laws were being subordinated to free trade. The thrust seemed to
be to bring environmental pr otections in different countries to the lowest
common denominator rather than to bring them up to the highest standards.
Second, the aggressive push by corporations to exploit advanced food technology
and biotechnology alarmed environmentalists and citizenries all over. The EU's
ban on hormone-treated beef from the US--enacted in response to popular demand
in Europe-- continued despite the WTO's viewing it as illegal. Likewise,
genetic modifications in agricultural production coupled with resistance to
ecolabelling on the part of US firms such as Monsanto triggered a consumer
backlash in Europe and other parts of the world, with the precautionary
principle being invoked as a powerful weapon against the US corporations'
criterion of “solid science.” Also, the aggressive effort by US biotech firms
to extend patenting to life forms and to seeds led to strong resistance by
farmers' groups, consumer groups, and environmentalists to what was denounced
as the “privatization” of the aeons-long i nteraction between nature and
communities.
Third, the strong resistance of
the US industrial sector to acknowledge the fact of global warming, at a time
when the speed of the melting of the polar ice caps was accelerating, was
perceived as a brazen attempt to put profits ahead of the common interest. This
perception could only be reinforced by the successful corporate effort to
stalemate a collective global effort to effectively deal with global warming
during the Clinton administ ration and finally to kill it when the Bush
administration refused to sign and ratify the already weak Kyoto Protocol on
climate change.
The aggressive anti-environmental posture of US corporations was one of
the factors that led to a great distrust of business even within the United
States, with 72 per cent of Americans surveyed by Business Week in 2000 s aying
that business “has too much power over their lives,” leading the country's
prime business weekly to warn: “Corporate America, ignore these trends at your
peril.”
At the same time, developing
countries felt that the US was using environmental arguments to slow down their
development with its position that the greenhouse gas emissions of developing
countries needed to be also subjec t to substantially the same restrictions
imposed on the developed countries before Washington would sign the Kyoto
Accord. Indeed, such suspicions were not unfounded, since Bush administration
people were targeting China , whose rapid development was seen as a strategic
threat to the US. Environmentalism was being deployed in the US's effort to
maintain its geo-economic, geopolitical edge.
By the early 2000s, then, the global consensus represented by the Rio Summit
had unraveled, and it all but collapsed under the massive corporate
greenwashing campaign that was unleashed at the World Summit on Sustainable
Development (also known as Rio+10) in Johannesburg in September 2002. “Sustainable
development,” a vision that attempted to reconcile economic growth with
ecological stability fell by the wayside, and Herman Daly's apoca lyptic image
of an economic system marked by hyper-growth outstripping in record time an
ecological system created over aeons seemed closer to realization as US,
European, and Japanese capital worked closely with a pollut ion- friendly
government to make high-growth China both the workshop and wastebasket of the
world.
A few years ago, many agreed
with economist Herman Daly that ecological deterioration is due to the
inexorable drive of the man- made system of production to fill with geometric
speed the limited space created over eons by nature. From this perspective,
slower growth and lower rates of consumption were the key to environmental
stabilization, and this could be achieved through policy choices supported by
the public.
Increasingly, this analysis is giving way to the more radical view that the
main culprit is an unchecked capitalist mode of production that unceasingly
transforms nature's bounty into commodities and incessantly creates n ew
demands. Capitalism constantly erodes man and woman's being-in-nature
(creature) and being-in-society (citizen) and, even as it drains them of life
energy as workers, it moulds their consciousness around one role: that of
consumer. Capitalism has many “laws of motion,” but one of the most destructive as
far as the environment goes is Say's law, which is that supply creates its own
demand. Capitalism is a
demand-creating machine that transforms living nature into dead commodities,
natural wealth into dead capital.
Environmentalism, in short, has regained its radical edge over the past decade,
moving the critique of globalization to a critique of the dynamics of
capitalism itself.
THE NEW ECONOMICS OF THE GEORGE W. BUSH
The interlocking crises of globalization, neoliberalism, capitalist legitimacy,
and overproduction provide the context for understanding the economic policies
of the Bush administration, notably its unilateralist thrust.
The globalist corporate project expressed the common interest of the global
capitalist elites in expanding the world economy and their fundamental
dependence on one another. However, globalization did not eliminate competition
among the national elites. In fact, the ruling elites of the US and Europe had
factions that were more nationalist in character as well as more tied for their
survival and prosperity to the state, such as the mil itary-industrial complex
in the US. Indeed, since the eighties there has been a sharp struggle between
the more globalist fraction of ruling elite stressing common interest of global
capitalist class in a growing world e conomy and the more nationalist,
hegemonist faction that wanted to ensure the supremacy of US corporate
interests.
As Robert Brenner has pointed out, the policies of Bill Clinton and his
Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin put prime emphasis on the expansion of the
world economy as the basis of the prosperity of the global capitalist clas s.
For instance, in the mid-1990s, they pushed a strong dollar policy meant to stimulate
the recovery of the Japanese and German economies, so they could serve as
markets for US goods and services. The earlier, more nat ionalist Reagan
administration, on the other hand, had employed a weak dollar policy to regain
competitiveness for the US economy at the expense of the Japanese and German
economies. With the George W. Bush administrati on, we are back to economic
policies, including a weak dollar policy, that are meant to revive the US
economy at the expense of the other center economies and push primarily the
interests of the US corporate elite instead of that of global capitalist class
under conditions of a global downturn.
Several features of this approach are worth stressing:
- Bush's political economy is very wary of a process of globalization that is
not managed by a US state that ensures that the process does not diffuse the
economic power of the US. Allowing the market solely to drive glo balization
could result in key US corporations becoming the victims of globalization and
thus compromising US economic interests. Thus, despite the free market
rhetoric, we have a group that is very protectionist when it comes to trade,
investment, and the management of government contracts. It seems that the motto
of the Bushites is protectionism for the US and free trade for the rest of us.
- The Bush approach includes a strong skepticism about multilateralism as a way
of global economic governance since while multilateralism may promote the
interests of the global capitalist class in general, it may, in man y
instances, contradict particular US corporate interests. The Bush coterie's
growing ambivalence towards the WTO stems from the fact that the US has lost a
number of rulings there, rulings that may hurt US capital but s erve the
interests of global capitalism as a whole.
- For the Bush people, strategic power is the ultimate modality of power. Economic
power is a means to achieve strategic power. This is related to the fact that
under Bush, the dominant faction of the ruling elite is th e military-industrial
establishment that won the Cold War. The conflict between globalists and
unilateralists or nationalists along this axis is shown in the approach toward
China. The globalist approach put the emphasi s on engagement with China,
seeing its importance primarily as an investment area and market for US
capital. The nationalists, on the other hand, see China mainly as a strategic
enemy, and they would rather contain it ra ther than assist its growth.
- Needless to say, the Bush paradigm has no room for environmental management,
seeing this to be a problem that others have to worry about, not the United
States. There is, in fact, a strong corporate lobby that believe s that
environmental concerns such as that surrounding GMOs is a European conspiracy
to deprive the US of its high tech edge in global competition.
If these are seen as the premises for action, then the following prominent
elements of recent US economic policy make sense:
- Achieving control over Middle East oil. While it did not exhaust the war aims
of the administration in invading Iraq, it was certainly high on the list. With
competition with Europe becoming the prime aspect of the tr ans-Atlantic
relationship, this was clearly aimed partly at Europe. But perhaps the more
strategic goal was to preempt the region's resources in order to control access
to them by energy poor China, which is seen as the US' strategic enemy.
- Aggressive protectionism in trade and investment matters. The US has piled up
one protectionist act after another, one of the most brazen being to stall any
movement at the WTO negotiations by defying the Doha Declarati on's upholding
of public health issues over intellectual property claims by limiting the
loosening of patent rights to just three diseases in response to its powerful
pharmaceutical lobby. While it seems perfectly willin g to see the WTO
negotiations unravel, Washington has put most of its efforts in signing up
countries into bilateral or multilateral trade deals such as the Free Trade of
the Americas (FTAA) before the EU gets them into s imilar deals. Indeed
the term “free trade agreements” is a misnomer since these are actually
preferential trade deals.
- Incorporating strategic
considerations into trade agreements. In a recent speech, US Trade Representative
Robert Zoellick stated explicitly that “countries that seek free-trade
agreements with the United States must pa ss muster on more than trade and
economic criteria in order to be eligible. At a minimum, these countries must
cooperate with the United States on its foreign policy and national security
goals, as part of 13 criteria tha t will guide the US selection of potential
FTA partners.” New Zealand,
perhaps one of the most doctrinally governments to free trade, has nevertheless
not been offered a free trade deal because it has a policy that preve nts
nuclear ship visits, which the US feels is directed at it.
- Manipulation of the dollar's value to stick the costs of economic crisis on
rivals among the center economies and regain competitiveness for the US
economy. A slow depreciation of the dollar vis-ŕ-vis the euro can be i
nterpreted as market-based adjustments, but the 25 per cent fall in value
cannot but be seen as, at the least, a policy of benign neglect. While the Bush
administration has issued denials that this is a beggar-thy-neighb or policy,
the US business press has seen it for what it is: an effort to revive the US
economy at the expense of the European Union and other center economies.
- Aggressive manipulation of multilateral agencies to push the interests of US
capital. While this might not be too easy to achieve in the WTO owing to the
weight of the European Union, it can be more readily done at the World Bank and
the IMF, where US dominance is more effectively institutionalized. For
instance, despite support for the proposal from many European governments, the
US Treasury recently torpedoed the IMF management's proposal for a Sovereign
Debt Restructuring Mechanism (SDRM) to enable developing countries to
restructure their debt while giving them a measure of protection from
creditors. Already a very weak mechanism, the SDRM was ve toed by US Treasury
in the interest of US banks.
- Finally, and especially relevant to our coming discussions, making the other
center economies as well as developing countries bear the burden of adjusting
to the environmental crisis. While some of the Bush people do n ot believe
there is an environmental crisis, others know that the current rate of global
greenhouse emissions is unsustainable. However, they want others to bear the
brunt of adjustment since that would mean not only exe mpting environmentally
inefficient US industry from the costs of adjustment, but hobbling other
economies with even greater costs than if the US participated in an equitable
adjustment process, thus giving the US economy a strong edge in global
competition. Raw economic realpolitik, not fundamentalist blindness, lies at
the root of the Washington's decision not to sign the Kyoto Protocol on Climate
Change.
THE ECONOMICS AND POLITICS OF OVEREXTENSION
Being harnessed very closely to strategic ends, any discussion of the likely
outcomes of the Bush administration's economic policies must take into account
both the state of the US economy and the global economy and the b roader
strategic picture. A key base for successful imperial management are expanding
national and global economies-something precluded by the extended period of
deflation and stagnation ahead, which is more likely to sp ur inter-capitalist
rivalries.
Moreover, resources include not only economic and political resources but
political and ideological ones as well. For without
legitimacy- without what Gramsci called “the consensus” of the dominated that a
system of rule is just-imperial management cannot be stable.
Faced with a similar problem of
securing the long-term stability of its rule, the ancient Romans came up with
the solution that created what was till then the most far-reaching case of
collective mass loyalty ever achieve d till then and prolonged the empire for
700 years. The Roman solution was not just or even principally military in
character. The Romans realized that an important component of
successful imperial domination was consen sus among the dominated of the “rightness”
of the Roman order. As sociologist Michael Mann notes in his classic Sources of
Social Power, the “decisive edge” was not so much military as political. “The
Romans,” he writes, “gradually stumbled on the invention of extensive
territorial citizenship.” The extension of Roman citizenship to ruling groups
and non-slave peoples throughout the empire was the political breakthrough that
produced “ was probably the widest extent of collective commitment yet
mobilized.” Political
citizenship combined with the vision of the empire providing peace and
prosperity for all to create that intangible but essential moral ele ment
called legitimacy.
Needless to say, extension of citizenship plays no role in the US imperial
order. In fact, US citizenship is jealously reserved for a very tiny minority
of the world's population, entry into whose territory is tightly controlled. Subordinate
populations are not to be integrated but kept in check either by force or the
threat of the use of force or by a system of global or regional rules and institutions--
the World Trade Organization, the Bretton Woods system, NATO-- that are
increasingly blatantly manipulated to serve the interests of the imperial
center.
Though extension of universal citizenship was never a tool in the American
imperial arsenal, during its struggle with communism in the post-World War II
period Washington did come up with a political formula to legitimize its global
reach. The two elements of this formula were multilateralism as a system of
global governance and liberal democracy.
In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, there were, in fact, widespread
expectations of a modern-day version of Pax Romana. There was hope in liberal
circles that the US would use its sole superpower status to buttress a
multilateral order that would institutionalize its hegemony but assure an
Augustan peace globally. That was the path of economic globalization and
multilateral governance. That was the path eliminated by George W. Bush's
unilateralism.
As Frances Fitzgerald observed in Fire in the Lake, the promise of extending
liberal democracy was a very powerful ideal that accompanied American arms
during the Cold War. Today, however, Washington or Westminster-type liberal
democracy is in trouble throughout the developing world, where it has been
reduced to providing a façade for oligarchic rule, as in the Philippines, pre-
Musharraf Pakistan, and throughout Latin America. In fact, liberal democracy in
America has become both less democratic and less liberal. Certainly, few in the
developing world see a system fueled and corrupted by corporate money as a
model.
Recovery of the moral vision needed to create consensus for US hegemony will be
extremely difficult. Indeed, the thinking in Washington these days is that the
most effective consensus builder is the threat of the use of force. Moreover,
despite their talk about imposing democracy in the Arab world, the main aim of
influential neoconservative writers like Robert Kagan and Charles Krauthammer
is transparent: the manipulation of liberal democratic mechanisms to create
pluralistic competition that would destroy Arab unity. Bringing democracy to
the Arabs is not so much an afterthought as a slogan that is uttered tongue in
cheek.
The Bush people are not interested in creating a new Pax Romana. What they want
is a Pax Americana where most of the subordinate populations like the Arabs are
kept in check by a healthy respect for lethal American power, while the loyalty
of other groups such as the Philippine government is purchased with the promise
of cash. With no moral vision to bind the global majority to the imperial
center, this mode of imperial management can only inspire one thing:
resistance.
The great problem for unilateralism is overextension, or a mismatch between the
goals of the United States and the resources needed to accomplish these goals. Overextension
is relative. That is, it is to a great degree a function of resistance. An
overextended power may, in fact, be in a worse condition even with a
significant increase in its military power if resistance to its power increases
by an even greater degree. Among the key indicators of US overextension are the
following:
- Washington's continuing inability to create a new political order in Iraq
that would serve as a secure foundation for colonial rule - its failure to
consolidate a pro-US regime in Afghanistan outside of Kabul - the inability of
a key ally, Israel, to quell, even with Washington's unrestricted support, the
Palestinian people's uprising - the inflaming of Arab and Muslim sentiment in
the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, resulting in massive
ideological gains for Islamic fundamentalists-which was what Osama bin Laden
had been hoping for in the first place - the collapse of the Cold War Atlantic
Alliance and the emergence of a new countervailing alliance, with Germany and
France at the center of it - the forging of a powerful global civil society
movement against US unilateralism, militarism, and economic hegemony, the most
recent significant expression is the global anti-war movement; - the coming to
power of anti-neoliberal, anti-US movements in Washington's own backyard-
Brazil, Venezuela, and Ecuador-as the Bush administration is preoccupied with
the Middle East - an increasingly negative impact of militarism on the US
economy, as military spending becomes dependent on deficit spending, and
deficit spending become more and more dependent on financing from foreign
sources, creating more stresses and strains within an economy that is already
in the throes of stagnation.
In conclusion, the globalist project is in crisis. Whether it can make a
comeback via a Democratic or Liberal Republican presidency should not be ruled
out, especially since there are influential globalist voices in the US business
community-among them George Soros-- that are expressing opposition to the
unilateralist thrust of the Bush administration. In our view, however, this is
unlikely, and unilateralism will reign for sometime to come.
We have, in short, entered a historical maelstrom marked by prolonged economic
crisis, the spread of global resistance, the reappearance of the balance of
power among center states, and the reemergence of acute inter-imperialist
contradictions. We must have a healthy respect for US power, but neither must
we overestimate it. The signs are there that the US is seriously overextended
and what appear to be manifestations of strength might in fact signal weakness
strategically.
* Prepared for the McPlanet
Conference, Berlin, June 27, 2003. The original version of this piece will
appear in the Fall issue of New Labor Forum. Walden Bello is professor of
sociology and public administration at the University of the Philippines and
executive director of the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South. Focus on Trade. Number 89, July 2003.
Regresar a la Página
Vigente de América Semanal...