The
Pax Americana
By Arthur Mitzman
Counter
Punch
21 July, 2003
Both
the critics and the supporters of neoliberal globalization had, in the
years before September 11, 2001, assumed that neoliberal globalization
had made obsolete the nationalist militarism and imperialism of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There is a powerful geopolitical
basis for such an assumption. Traditional empires expanded in two-dimensional
space, along the surface of land and sea. The further away the imperial
possession or interest, the more difficult was communication and transportation.
Accordingly, capitalist imperialism too was tied to nationalism, and
powerful corporations looked to their governments for support -- tariffs
and if necessary armies -- against all comers.
Neoliberal globalization
has been based on the technological revolutions of the last half century.
Air transport and telecommunications have added a third dimension to
geopolitical and entrepreneurial space: the rapid transportation of
goods and persons, and the instantaneous transmission of information
through the earth's atmosphere. Using this third dimension, multinational
corporations prowl the surface of the earth for cheap labor to reduce
the costs of production, for willing partners (or unwilling corporate
victims) on other continents, and for lucrative international currency
deals that escape the attention of national regulators. The nation-state,
together with war and imperialism, had, we thought until 2001, become
obsolete.
But neoconservative
ideology, having guided the military prowess of the world's only remaining
superpower into the conquest of Iraq, argues openly for a new American
empire, a Pax Americana mandated by U.S. military preeminence, justified
by the democratic values of American civilization, and based on neoliberal
principles of market economy, deregulation and privatisation.
How did we get here?
Is neoconservatism an atavism or is it, by some defiance of what we
thought to be logical, the real face of neoliberal capitalism? And what
is the significance for America's imperial pretension of the reemergence
of quasi-religious patriotic conviction after September 11? A brief
look at the last century will illuminate these questions.
MODERNIZATION, NATIONALISM AND CAPITALIST IMPERIALISM
One of the most
powerful forces underlying the awful history of the past hundred and
fifty years has been the paradoxical but lethal dialectic between economic
modernization and xenophobic nationalism. A brief look at this dialectic
in European history will illuminate the antecedents of the current neoconservative
cry for a global Pax Americana to save the world from terrorism and
rogue states.
The turn to extreme
nationalism in Europe -- and particularly in Germany and France -- at
the end of the nineteenth century was mediated in both cases by the
impact on traditional societies of capitalist modernization. As indicated,
the latter, begun under the flag of free trade, shifted to the quest
for protected Empires (and protected industrial sectors) in the course
of the depression of the 1870's. The economic motives for this turn
were supplemented by the growing power of right-wing populist, xenophobic
parties in which the democratic nationalism of earlier generations metamorphosed
into militarist chauvinism. Such parties, often inpired by a conservative
Christian antisemitism and antimodernism, offered artisans and peasants,
torn from the traditional social fabric of village life and hurled into
insecure urban jobs by the spread of industrial capitalism, a new sense
of identity -- identity with a militarized concept of the "nation"
and with the imperial state that claimed to incarnate it.
Where the tradition
of national democratic revolution was weak, as in Germany, the antisemitic
"völkisch" parties were so effective in attracting the
electorate of the older conservative and liberal parties that, to compete
with the populist upstarts, those older parties largely took over the
right-populist combination of antisemitism, cultural conservatism and
xenophobia in the decades before World War I. Where the democratic revolutionary
tradition was stronger, as in France, the threat to Republican institutions
from the populist Right may have been powerful during the Dreyfus Affair,
when it was supported both by the military establishment and by reactionary
Catholicism, but it was repulsed around the turn to the twentieth century
by a strong anti-clerical, anti-militarist backlash from radical republican
and socialist parties inspired by the ideals of 1789. Another source
of the relative weakness of the populist-nationalist reaction in France
was the more gradual - compared with Germany - transition to the industrial
age. The French peasantry, which had become firmly entrenched at the
time of the Revolution, slowed the growth of capitalist industry, as
did the relative scarcity of good coal deposits.
Nonetheless, the
imperialist turn of the eighteen-eighties and the power of populist
nationalism nurtured in both France and Germany a foreign policy based
on dangerous alliances with atavistic imperial states -- respectively
Russian and Austria-Hungary -- whose support for mutually hostile Slavic
nationalisms ultimately, in 1914, dragged all the great powers into
a conflict which lasted until 1945. With a twenty year intermission
for a brief recovery, a disastrous economic crisis and the fascist takeovers
in Italy, Germany and Spain, this conflict ended up costing the European
peoples tens of millions of dead and hundreds of millions of shattered
lives.
At the end of those
decades of carnage and despair, every major force in Europe and North
America, from capitalist conservatives to Christian Democrats, Social
Democrats and Communists, agreed to create institutions that would block
any new drift toward nationalist confrontation: the United Nations,
European Unification, and international, multilateral trade agreements.
These institutions worked effectively for a quarter of a century and
on paper for another twenty-five years. Since the Nixon regime's trashing
of the Bretton Woods currency stabilization agreement in the early seventies
they have been undermined by the increasingly unilateral tendencies
of the United States.(Will Hutton, The World We're In, 2002) They are
now being deconstructed by the openly imperial claims of the United
States.
The miscalculations
of various power elites in the early twentieth century are instructive.
Trigger for the first phase of the apocalypse -- Armageddon had a few
years earlier been threatened by conflicting great power claims in North
Africa -- were the unstable nationalisms of the Balkans, in which a
crumbling Ottoman Empire had ceded control to Russian and Austrian areas
of influence: The Russians were allied with Serbia, the Austrians had
long occupied Croatia. After the Austrians annexed Bosnia in 1909 --
a pre-emptive move designed, they thought, to prevent terrorism -- the
Serbian secret police helped establish the tiny terrorist organization,
the Black Hand, which, purportedly to castrate the war party in Austria,
carried out the murder of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in July
1914. Far from intimidating the Austrians, the assassination enraged
the Austrian war party and gave them the public support to issue an
ultimatum to Serbia with a forty-eight hour deadline, demanding that
the investigation of the murder would be carried out by Austrian agencies
in Serbia. Serbia's refusal led to an Austrian declaration of war. Since
Serbia was allied to Russia, czarist forces were immediately mobilized
against Austria-Hungary. Wilhelmian Germany, which had a similar alliance
with Austria was required to enter the war with Russia, and, since the
French-Russian alliance was common knowledge, with France as well. England's
alliance with France and Russia brought it too into the conflict.
The Wilhelmian government
was delighted to support Austria against this burgeoning list of enemies,
since it had long been perfecting a strategy for a two-front war that
would enable it to smash both its Slavic and Gallic enemies in a short
period of time -- the Schlieffen plan. In fact, all the participating
armies were initially supported by immense popular enthusiasm, egged
on by various patriotic, nationalist or "völkisch" journalists
and intellectuals who saw in a quick, successful war the heroic antidote
to generations of stultifying domination by bourgeois and late-aristocratic
elites. The fifty month bloodbath that followed, accompanied at its
close by the disintegration of the Russian, German and Austrian Empires,
is well known. As are the results of its repetition between 1939 and
1945.
The salient features
of this horror were three-fold.
First, the dialectic between the capitalist modernization of the age
and an essentially archaic and no-exit nationalist imperialism, mediated
by the social problems caused by rapid industrialization.
Secondly, the way main stream political and economic forces become captive
to the violent extremisms they had supported as, precisely, a popular
alternative to social reform or revolution.
Finally, the usefulness of acts of terrorism to stimulate popular support
for aggression.
Let's return now
to the present, where, unless U.S. neoconservatism is effectively blocked,
all the elements of the early twentieth century apocalypse, magnified
by the danger of nuclear war, threaten to reemerge.
THE NEOCONSERVATIVE
PAX AMERICANA, GLOBAL CAPITALISM AND EUROPE
In the flood of
recent material explicating the rise of neoconservative ideology and
the basis for a U.S. unilateral foreign policy, two works are particularly
illuminating: Robert Kagan's Of Paradise and Power. America and Europe
in the New World Order, (2003) and Will Hutton's The World We're In
(2002). Kagan offers a robust political defense of neoconservativism,
Hutton a trenchant economic critique of its significance for American
capitalism.
Kagan's book on
the U.S. and European "takes" on world politics would have
been more appropriately title "Of Weakness and Power", since
the European "paradise" he juxtaposes to the American power
realism is a transparent euphemism for weakness. In a Hobbesian vein
that many of the neoconservatives have taken over from Leo Strauss,
Kagan argues that only military might really counts in international
relations. Europeans, in their pleas for multilateral agreements and
their aversion to violence, are possessed, in this view, by the slave
mentality Nietzsche attributed to Christian pacifism in its efforts,
inspired by nothing more or less than the slave's weakness, to castrate
the virtuous power of the aristocracy. Kagan does not openly cite Nietzsche,
but his argumentation strongly suggests the "philosopher of the
hammer." (In fact, he uses the hammer in a striking metaphor comparing
European and American attitudes to world problems.)
Sustaining Kagan's
Hobbesian view of the international scene is the assumption of unceasing
threat. The jungle of imperialist power politics preceding World War
I was, in this view, followed by the global menace of international
fascism, particularly the design for world conquest of Nazi Germany.
After World War II, the focus of perceived threat shifted eastward to
the Soviet Union, whose expansion to eastern Europe was widely seen
as the harbinger of a Communist takeover of the rest of the continent.
After the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the threat shifted to the
southeast, to the fanatic world of middle eastern moslem fundamentalism,
and, most recently, to the Iraqi rogue state, with its horribly dangerous
weapons of mass destruction and its alleged ties to Osama Bin Laden.
Unlike post-1945
Europe, which exchanged the Hobbesian perspective for a Kantian one
of universal peace, the United States, in this view, has been on the
whole a responsible defender of liberal civilized values in a dangerous
world. Kagan's explicit reference point is the lonely sheriff in the
lawless mid-western town of movie legend, able and willing to defend
the cowardly townspeople (the Europeans, typified by the saloonkeeper
who can only think of buying off the badmen) against the threats of
amoral gangsters on horseback. Europeans, in their "postmodern"
paradise protected by U.S. power, have been able to devote themselves
to economic and cultural development. They could allow themselves to
spend only a fraction of what the U.S. does on defense, because they
were protected by the U.S. nuclear umbrella. This depiction of a Europe
able to ignore the profound threats to its existence because of U.S.
"realism" applies, in Kagan's analysis, both to the menace
of a Soviet takeover during the Cold War, and to the subsequent threats
from Islamic terrorism and Saddam's WMD. Kagan views any European skepticism
about the reality of these threats as wishful thinking, explicable in
terms of Europe's unwillingness to confront renewed global conflict
but nonetheless delusional.
Neoconservatism
refuted by historical reality
The last of the
menaces alleged by Kagan can be taken as pars pro toto for the rest.
The Pentagon's assurances that, according to unimpeachable intelligence
reports, the Ba'athist regime, in contravention of its pledged commitment,
still possessed and was itching to use enormous amounts of nerve and
mustard gas, motivated a U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq to
"disarm" perfidious Saddam. Since then, thousands of searchers
have been unable to locate the slightest trace of those diabolical instruments.
It turns out that most of the intelligence consisted of rumors, gossip
and forgeries forwarded by the U.S.-protected Iraqi exile organization
of the convicted embezzler Chalabi (himself privy to the neocon inner
circle) to the "Cabal", the secretive twelve man intelligence
unit (Office of Special Plans) established in the Pentagon by Donald
Rumsfeld as a counterweight to the C.I.A.
The alleged threat
of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe between 1945 and 1989, most historians
and political scientists now agree, was as chimerical as Saddam's Weapons
of Mass Destruction have turned out to be in 2003. Archival research
has confirmed the reasoning of many Cold War skeptics: the Soviet Union's
posture after the Second World War was essentially defensive. By its
occupation of eastern Germany, the Soviets were not planning global
conquest but simply maintaining the disunity of a Germany that had twice
in very recent history invaded and devastated European Russia.
Moreover, Soviet
domination of the European states that had earlier been part of either
the Austro-Hungarian or the Czarist Empires was largely a conservative
return to the pre-1914 status quo. After the crushing of German military
power, the Soviet military and political presence in Eastern Europe
had the double function of exploiting the raw materials of the region
for post-war Soviet industrial development, and of keeping under tight
control the latent nationalisms of the area, first and foremost the
German variety, but also to an important degree those of the quarreling
and unstable states between the Slavic heartland and German-speaking
Europe.
Notwithstanding
the internationalist rhetoric of Soviet Communism, however, the foreign
policy of Russia under Stalin and his successors was founded on the
realistic perception that any effort to take over, by invasion or subversion,
the much more developed industrial societies of western Europe would
inevitably shift westward the balance of political and economic power
in the Communist world and create the danger of contamination of the
Slavic heartland by liberal and socialist values. No more than Czarist
Russia after the defeat of Napoleon could Stalinist Communism realistically
envisage administering an empire that extended from the Sea of Japan
to the Bay of Biscay.
There remains of
course, the reality of September 11, the galvanizing shock that permitted
U.S. neocons to sell their world view to a traumatized U.S. public opinion.
While most of the world, including the vast majority of Europeans, were
horrified by this event, many Europeans were aware, as most Americans
were not, that the attacks on New York and Washington were not intended
to bring the U.S. to its knees but to express the outrage of fundamentalist
Moslem fanatics at the profanation of Islamic holy places, particularly
in Saudi Arabia, by the American military presence in the Middle East.
In fact, most European observers as well as a good many American ones
argue that the heavy-handed military riposte to the terror attacks of
2001 -- like the Austrian occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1909,
also undertaken in the name of combatting terrorism -- has increased
rather than decreased the possibility of their repetition.
To justify its military
response to all three situations, U.S. power has alleged the need to
prevent or pre-empt an imminent and devastating attack. For Kagan, as
for most other conservatives, the crucial never-to-be-repeated event,
elevated to the force of transhistorical legend, was the pusillanimity
of liberal democracies regarding the rise of Hitler: "The 'lesson
of Munich' came to dominate American strategic thought....today it remains
the dominant paradigm. While a small segment of the American elite still
yearns for 'global governance'and eschews military force, Americans
from Madeleine Albright to Donald Rumsfeld, from Brent Scowcroft to
Anthony Lake, still remember Munich, figuratively if not literally."
Yet in all three post-war situations, Europeans, who have far more reason
than Americans to fear attack and who have had a much closer experience
of both mass Communist Parties and Islamic (and non-Islamic) terrorism,
have rarely made the comparison with Munich and not shared the intense
U.S. feeling of insecurity. Kagan argues that this is because they are
too afraid to look reality in the face, just as they were when they
were "appeasing" Hitler. But the systematic errors of American
assessments of global menaces to the western social order suggests another
possibility: that Europeans are realistic in their assessments and Americans
are pathologically fearful of foreign menaces.
Social anxieties,
fear of terrorism and the new imperialism
Indeed, Americans
live in a society riven by such extremes of wealth and poverty that
social fear -- based on urban muggings and robberies, on downsizing,
on the many cases of middle class decline into the unprotected lower
orders, on becoming seriously ill without the necessary health insurance,
etc., etc. -- is pervasive, from the wealthy residents of gated communities
to the meanest inhabitants of urban ghettos. After decades of media
exploitation of this anxiety through cataclysmic scenarios of alien
invasions, sinister criminal gangs, diabolic intervention in human affairs,
South American drug barons, and fascist and communist totalitarian menaces,
it is hardly surprising that Americans should rally around flag and
president when their fears become focussed on a gang of fanatic Islamic
fundamentalists whose behavior might have come from a 007 film.
Looking at the insecure
mass of Americans threatened on a daily basis with criminal aggression
and social decline, often forced out of the decently paid jobs that
prevailed several decades ago into a life of parttime "flex"
work, one is reminded of the patriotism of the deracinated Roman mob,
forced out of the social nexus by the slaves brought back to Rome with
the victorious legions in a way comparable to today's elimination of
regular work by automation and job export. Another point of comparison
is with the right-populist masses, recruited from traditional middle
classes threatened by industrial capitalism, that supported xenophobic
ideologues and nationalist imperialism in pre-World War I Europe, and
fascist totalitarianism during the interbellum.
If, however, European
capitalist elites before World Wars I and II viewed alliances with such
right-wing popular forces as both a support for their imperialist aims
and a fine way of neutralizing the socialist opposition, they became
aware in 1945 that such opportunism led to a dead end of mutual annihilation,
and they have ever since quarantined the far right politically and socially.
Imperialist rivalries also were interred after the demise of fascism,
partly because of the post-war surge of Third World anticolonialism
and partly because of the turn, after the devastation of European cities
and populations, to principles of European political and economic cooperation.
If the threat from the left, seemingly supported by a resurgent Soviet
Union, was stronger than ever in the late 1940s, the response was not
the earlier combination of support for populist chauvinism and social
legislation, but the creation of a full-fledged welfare state, inspired
broadly by a Keynesian perspective on the need for state regulation
of market capitalism and for amelioration of the social problems it
produced. This welfare state coincided with the reconstruction of a
Europe based economically on the proliferation of Fordist methods of
mass production: burgeoning numbers of Europeans worked in centralized
factories and offices.
North American economic
elites, during and after a 1950's phase of paranoid nationalism sparked
by the Soviet nuclear bomb and the Korean War, similarly supported welfare
state protections, extended Fordist production of consumer goods, and
implemented Keynesian principles in international financial relations
through the Bretton Woods monetary accord.
Hutton on the assumptions
underlying social ideology in the U.S. and Europe
Will Hutton, in
his brilliant juxtaposition of European and American capitalism, The
World We're In, explains how in the early 'seventies the Nixon presidency
started a movement away from this Keynesian multilateralism by jettisoning
Bretton Woods. Thatcherism in England parallelled Reaganism in the U.S.
in exchanging the welfare state for the panaceas of privatisation, deregulation,
and pure market capitalism. From this point on, Hutton argues, the latent
unilateralism of American foreign policy, pendant of the anti-social
individualism of American capitalism, was coming to the fore, inhibited
only by the "Vietnam syndrome" that September 11 did so much
to dissipate. Underlying the U.S. and Thatcherian versions of market
capitalism, however, was a fundamental characteristic of Anglosaxon
capitalist development: the harshly individualist premises exemplified
in the philosophy of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes.
Europeans, to the
contrary, have, in their diverse mentalities and ideologies, generally
stressed the social basis of human existence, exemplified in the sociological
theory of Emile Durkheim. This social presupposition has very old roots
in Christian doctrines of responsibility for the poor and in feudal
notions of responsibility for one's dependents. In the modern era, the
plurality of nations and of social forces within nations has mandated
interstate cooperation and social compromise. Periods in which powerful
states have thrown these principles to the winds have been the darkest
and bloodiest in European history. In consequence, the European Keynesian
welfare state was more solidly anchored than the American variety in
popular as well as elite mentalities, and conservative efforts to convert
continental Europe to a privatised market economy based on U.S. principles
of pure individualism have encountered vast popular resistance.
Hutton denies the
Anglosaxon argument that government or social controls over market economies
limit wealth creation and productive growth and that their absence makes
a completely deregulated, privatised capitalism the most progressive
economic force on earth. He underlines the long-term competitive disadvantages
of U.S. shareholder capitalism based on such principles compared with
a European capitalism subject to the interplay of banking, state and
social controls. In a number of striking examples, Hutton points to
the undermining of powerful corporations like Boeing, Enron and General
Electric by the dependence of corporate finances on fickle shareholder
favor. To boost share prices on a day-to-day or at most week-to-week
basis, corporations are in continual search of flashy but expensive
merger operations, or downsizing gimmicks or a new way of cooking the
books to show more profit. Since the downsizing often goes at the expense
of research and development programs, which may only be profitable years
later, technological and productivity improvements tend to lag behind
those of European corporations in the same areas, whose financing is
more dependent on the judgment of lending banks as to their long term
viability. An additional consequence of dependence on shareholder value
is the bubble effect of incredible overvaluations, as in the telecoms
industry, where the bursting of the bubble led to the U.S. recession
of 2001.
Hutton's book of
2003 seems, like the neoconservative ideology he detests, to view the
unilateralist military and economic policies of the Bush regime as an
expression of the most deepseated impulses of the American social order.
The question however which Hutton does not broach is whether the multilateral
neoliberalism to which even conservative capitalists paid lip service
before 9/11 may not have actually been the norm of the current era,
to which the policies of the present administration and the neoconservative
ideology that support them may be little more than an opportunist and
temporary aberration, made possible by the national outburst of fear
and patriotism after the WTC and Pentagon attacks.
Who benefits from the new imperialism?
The knock-them-down,
build-them-up-policies that have since characterized U.S. military and
reconstruction campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq are of great benefit
to two major sectors of the American economy, energy and defense, which
happen to have supplied much of the campaign funding and many of the
key figures for the present Republican adminstration. But in terms of
the neoliberal globalization of the past two decades, the sudden release
of capitalism from two-dimensional space limitations to its three-dimensional
breakthrough, to its ability to buy cheap labor and materials everywhere
on earth, characterized by the spread of computerized technology, social
dumping on distant continents and the concomitant decline in labor costs
for the manufacture of consumer goods -- in all these terms, the energy
and defense industries are economically archaic. They are dwarfed by
the giant manufacturers of electrical appliances, cars, computer and
telecom equipment and apparel and by the burgeoning service industries
of consumer society, like the tourist industry.
Let's look at this
archaism of the defense and oil beneficiaries of Bush's policies in
another framework. Neoliberal capitalism signifies in social-economic
terms the replacement of a Fordist by a post-Fordist production system,
in which computerization permits the replacement of human labor by machines
and, where this is not yet feasible or advantageous, the export of onerous
work to branch factories or subcontractors in Asian or East European
or South American cheap labor areas. Concomitantly, the driving forces
of individual behavior, in the west at least, are no longer the work
norms and identities of mass production Taylorism and the welfare state
but the consumer norms inculcated by omnipresent advertising. In these
terms, both the oil rigs and the defense plants fall largely out of
the new conceptual framework of consumer society. Oil, it is true, is
a vital commodity for running that coveted prize of the aspirant consumer,
the automobile. But the car is precisely the characteristic symbol of
Fordist production, and even the more enlightened oil and automotive
companies, aware of the global pollution and warming problems the present
administration denies, are investing considerable sums on research into
alternative, non-pollutant, energy sources and motors.
Moreover, the production
costs of oil are roughly the same in the Western Hemisphere as in the
Middle East. Computerization does relatively little to eliminate a work
force which was neither large to begin with (compare it to the 200 million
on our planet whose livelihoods are dependent on the tourist industry,
crippled by international hostilities) nor tied to an assembly line;
in addition, unlike the other industries I have mentioned, the sales
of U.S. oil companies are not much geared to the world market, but are
more or less restricted to their captive clientele in North America.
The defense industry is even more clearly than the oil industry economically
archaic in both its production systems, which can hardly be exported
to Chinese export production zones, and its guaranteed sales to a single
consumer: the U.S. military.
In fact, the most
bizarre and untenable aspect of the present ideological and military
offensives of the Bush administration is this: whereas the ultimate
justification for "civilizing" Iraq is its failure to understand
the virtues of free market capitalism, the corrective force is a state-supported
"defense" industry and the beneficiary is the oil industry,
both of which only thrive by virtue of an interpenetration with the
state apparatus unmatched since the symbiosis of party, government and
economy in the Soviet Union.
It is of course
possible that Hutton's -- and the neocons' -- perspective on the deep-rooted
permanence of the new U.S. strategy is correct. In that case, only the
formation of economically protected continental blocs in Europe and
Asia will stand in the way of the subjection of the planet to a Pax
Americana. Such protectionist blocs, each fending off the other's capital
and products, are, according to many astute analysts, quite likely in
the coming decade. Whether a putative European bloc should also try
to equal U.S. military might is doubtful. To double, as some advocates
of a continental defense force argue, European military expenditures
would necessitate further cuts in the already weakened European social
protection system and significantly reduce popular support for the idea
of Europe. To the contrary, as Hutton points out, the strength of Europe
in any future contest with the United States lies not in its ability
to make war but in its superior social cohesion and productivity.
It is also possible,
however, that the conditioning of America's aggressive unilateralism
by the needs of the defense and oil industries is indeed an aberrant,
reactionary phenomenon, given a temporary boost by two more or less
accidental and non-systemic factors: the one-shot terrorist coup of
September 11, and the political need of the Bush/Cheney administration,
which is focussed on reelection in 2004, for popular military adventures
to distract the public from a reactionary domestic agenda that is loathed
by most Americans. In this case, as Immanuel Wallerstein has recently
argued, the impulse to correct it will come from within the capitalist
heartland itself, from the many U.S. corporate powers whose interests
in cheap labor and unfettered market reach would be thwarted by such
global protectionism.
In either case,
Hutton's point about the difference between the Anglosaxon and European
models of market capitalism gives an initial space for the European
opposition to an Americanized world and more broadly to the international
movements for peace and global justice. The resistance of Europe to
current American unilateralism, mirrored in a myriad of trade disputes
with the United States, is crucial. If Europe is to live up to its social
character, then Europeans, either within or against the European Union,
must themselves restore the social protections which, under the influence
of Americanized values of privatisation and deregulation, they have
until now allowed to be eroded. Moreover, only a socialized European
economy, one whose international trade policies could work toward reducing
north/south inequalities, would be able to offer a humane alternative
to U.S.-style globalization as a model for Asian, African and South
American development. In other words: Social Europe must come in the
place of neoliberalism as the model of the future.
Arthur Mitzman
is emeritus professor of modern history at the University of Amsterdam.
He is the author of The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max
Weber and Michelet, Historian: Rebirth and Romanticism in Nineteenth-Century
France and, most recently, the excellent Prometheus
Revisited: The Quest for Global Justice in the 21st Century.
He can be reached at: [email protected]