Crisis
Of The Globalist Project And
The New Economics Of George W Bush
By Walden Bello
16 July , 2003
(Prepared for the McPlanet
Conference, Berlin, June 27, 2002. The original version of this piece
will appear in the Fall issue of New Labor Forum.)
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 discuss 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 both 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 worlds most powerful
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 stoutly 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 Washington has threatened to
file a case with the WTO against the EUs 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 heralding 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 dominance 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 constraints
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 accounted
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 trade
liberalization. There were, broadly, two versions of neoliberal ideologya
hard Thatcher-Reagan version and a soft Blair-Soros
version (globalization with safety nets.) But underlying
both approaches was unleashing 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 tenets
of the globalizationthe 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 fact, 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 could 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 structural
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 Copernican 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 shock
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 that 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 sector 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 overproduction, 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, resulting 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 occurred 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 trough 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 profitable 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 perspective, 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 deflation.
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 of 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 over 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 legitimacy 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 creation of the global
institutional and legal mechanisms to deal with the problem. The Rio
Summits 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 linked and appeared to be making headway in reversing
the global environmental crisis, like the Montreal 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 casesthe tuna-dolphin case between the
US and Mexico, the turtle-shrimp controversy pitting the US and Asian
countriesit seemed that national environmental laws were being
subordinated to free trade. The thrust seemed to be to bring environmental
protections 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 EUs ban
on hormone-treated beef from the US--enacted in response to popular
demand in Europe-- continued despite the WTOs 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 interaction 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 administration 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 saying that business
has too much power over their lives, leading the countrys
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 subject 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 USs 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 Dalys
apocalyptic 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 pollution-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 new 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 military-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 economy
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 class. 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 nationalist
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 administration,
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:
- Bushs 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 globalization 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 many instances, contradict
particular US corporate interests. The Bush coteries 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 serve 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 the 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 emphasis 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 rather
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 believes 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 trans-Atlantic relationship,
this was clearly aimed partly at Europe. But perhaps the more strategic
goal was to preempt the regions 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 Declarations 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 willing
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 similar 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 pass 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 that 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 prevents nuclear ship
visits, which the US feels is directed at it.
- Manipulation of the dollars
value to stick the costs of economic crisis on rivals among the center
economies and regain competitiveness for the US economy. A slow depreciation
of the dollar vis-à-vis the euro can be interpreted 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-neighbor 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 managements 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 vetoed 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 not 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 exempting
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
administrations economic policies must take into account both
the state of the US economy and the global economy and the broader strategic
picture. A key base for successful imperial management are expanding
national and global economiessomething precluded by the extended
period of deflation and stagnation ahead, which is more likely to spur
inter-capitalist rivalries.
Moreover, resources include
not only economic and political resources but political and ideological
ones as well. For without legitimacywithout what Gramsci called
the consensus of the dominated that a system of rule is
justimperial 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 achieved 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 consensus 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 element 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:
- Washingtons 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 Washingtons unrestricted support,
the Palestinian peoples uprising
- the inflaming of Arab and
Muslim sentiment in the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia,
resulting in massive ideological gains for Islamic fundamentalistswhich
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 Washingtons own backyardBrazil,
Venezuela, and Ecuadoras 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 communityamong
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.
Copyright 2003 Focus on the
Global South