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Immanuel Wallerstein - 1999
Immanuel Wallerstein is a sociologist, historical social scientist, and world-systems analyst.
Wallerstein began as an expert of post-colonial African affairs, which he selected as the focus of his studies after an international youth conference in 1951, and which his publications were almost exclusively devoted to until the early 1970s, when he began to distinguish himself as a historian and theorist of the global capitalist economy on a macroscopic level. His most important work, The Modern World-System, appeared in three volumes in 1974, 1980, and 1989. Wallerstein rejects the notion of a Third World, claiming there is only one world connected by a complex network of economic exchange relationships — i.e., a world-economy or world-system, in which the dichotomy of capital and labor, and the endless accumulation of capital by competing agents (historically including, but not limited to, nation-states) account for frictions. This approach is known as the World Systems Theory.
The Euro (1 January 1999)
Jan. 1, 1999 marks the inauguration of the Euro, the new common currency of 11 countries in the European Union. Is that important, and who will benefit? For Europeans, or at least for western Europeans, it marks a giant step in the direction of restoring Europe to a central role in geopolitical decision-making, a centrality it had lost in 1945. The big loser is the United States. Does it matter for East Asia? Does it matter for the South? Does it matter for the world-system as a whole?
First, for Europeans themselves: It is clear that the economic benefits internal to the European Union are considerable, and this of course was the primary motivation and justification for creating the new currency. It will lead to larger, more efficient markets for European goods, both within Europe and in the rest of the world. It will therefore help Europe maintain and improve employment in the present difficult global market. The agreement on establishing the euro was a political compromise. There was considerable reluctance in the early 1990's about the idea, especially in Germany, the strongest economic zone within Europe. Germans feared that they would somehow be "dragged down" by what they thought of as the economically weaker European states in southern Europe (Italy, Spain, Portugal) but also Belgium. They therefore demanded a price, which took two main forms: a series of requirements of eligibility to enter the common currency, which essentially called for reduced governmental expenditures in these "weaker" countries; and a strong, independent European central bank, which would be in the hands of conservative neoclassical bankers. Both demands were accepted, amidst great protests by persons on the left that this involved selling out the European welfare state to Thatcherite/IMF ideologues. Many of the more conservative supporters of the prospective euro were sure that the "weaker" European countries could not meet the stiff conditions. And Great Britain, Denmark, and Sweden decided not to enter the euro yet. The great surprise of the last two years was that all the "weaker" countries met the conditions, helped by the financial upsurge of the last few years. And that Germany itself was one of those who had most difficulty, in large part because Germany herself, even under a Christian-Democratic government, was not willing to reduce significantly the welfare state. Just six months ago, with the appointment of the head of the European central bank, there was a serious discord between the French and German governments, partly revolving around nationalist pride but partly the result of a debate about the degree of "independence" of the central bank. A compromise was achieved. Shortly thereafter, however, the Social-Democrats won the German elections, and the German government position was no longer the same on the degree to which this central bank would be "independent." As we know, central banks throughout the OECD states have achieved considerable autonomy from their governments. But this is in the context of there being a government that could balance what the central bank did with other kinds of economic measures within its powers. At the moment, there is no central European executive that has economic powers to balance the European central bank, which makes the latter's power greater vis-a-vis the European Union than any national central bank vis-a-vis its government. It is clear that this is not viable, and it must lead in a very short time to establishing some kind of executive structure which can play a Europe-wide economic role. The fears of left skeptics about the euro seem to have been overstated. So were the fears of right skeptics. In the meantime, the United States dollar is about to lose its cherished role as uncontested reserve currency in world finance. In the next ten years, the euro will probably be as much used as the dollar. And once this happens, states and enterprises will feel freer to use the yen. Thus, the so-called triad will become not merely a reality in the world of production but in the world of finance. Great Britain will probably hasten to join the euro in the next two years, and Denmark and Sweden will follow. Others will ask to come in. As Europe moves to strengthen its political machinery, it will surely move towards the establishment of a European army, and this will further weaken the political role of the United States in the world-system. We can expect a significant increase in political discord between the U.S. and western Europe in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Does any of this matter for East Asia? Of course it does. On the one hand, it opens up East Asia's relations with the United States and enables East Asian countries to be less dependent. But it also creates a serious economic rival to East Asia's productive activities in a renewed Europe. In the back-and-forth of the next decade or two, this creates uncertainties. In the longer term of the rise of East Asia, the creation of the euro should not however be a too significant factor, for the structural factors underlying East Asia's rise will rermain unchanged. And for the South? It all depends on which South we mean. There are the so-called APC countries, those which once were colonies of European states. They, for the most part, have stronger economic ties with western Europe than with other OECD countries, and still receive some benefits (aid, lower tariffs) from this linkage. They should see therefore some slight benefit from the euro because of its impact on western Europe's economic health. But the fact is that the benefits they have been receiving from these links with the former colonizers have been rather small, and increasing them slightly will probably not make too much difference. When all is said and done, the euro signals a shift in geopolitics, the definitive turning-point out of a U.S.-dominated world-system to a polycentric one albeit one in which the polarization of North and South remains unchanged. Immanuel Wallerstein [Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315. These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.] The Dilemma of Conservative Parties (15 January 1999)
In a sense, conservative parties shouldn't exist. The heart of conservative doctrine for the last two centuries has been that the states should legislate as little as possible and that social decisions should be primarily the responsibility of "traditional" social structures: the family, the "community," the religious institutions, the local aristocracy where it exists. A party is a non-traditional organization designed to operate in an electoral setting in which the majority of the voters choose representatives who can then legislate on behalf of the voters. Parties were something forced upon conservatives by the steady rise of parliamentary institutions and the expansion of the suffrage (today, generally universal adult suffrage).
Conservative parties have thus always been confronted by an internal cleavage that they have had to contain if they hoped to be successful electorally. The truly well-off in any state, even a wealthy state, are inevitably a minority of the population. Their economic interest has always been to hold the line on governmental redistributive spending and therefore on governmental taxation. They have always had the political problem of persuading a large group of others, less well-off, of the virtues of their legislative priorities. As early as the 1830's - in West European countries and in the United States - their leaders have tended to propound more "moderate" views in order to obtain legislative majorities. In the scholarly literature, this is referred to as "enlightened conservatism" - that is, a conservatism that is more "centrist," making timely concessions to popular demands in order to maintain the essential of what they want to preserve, especially in the economic arena. But there has always been a second variety of conservatism, one far less interested in economic issues or only secondarily. This second variety of conservatism has focused on the social arena, and hence has been more "ideological," that is, more strident. For these social conservatives, the other "economic" variety has always been not pragmatic but spineless, not clever but virtually treacherous. Such conservatives too have always been a minority and have always also had the problem of how they could achieve their social program (including their legislative program). As suffrage became universal, such conservatives have sought to obtain their way not by timely concessions and centrism but by creating strong populist bases of intensive, highly committed followers. Such conservatives have often been tempted to go beyond the electoral processes to extra-parliamentary activities. The dilemma for conservative parties is that, to be successful, conservative parties have historically needed to be under the control of the eocnomic conservative wing but stil retain the votes of the social conservative wing. If they tilted too much in the latter's direction, they tended to lose voters in the center of the spectrum and hence to lose elections. In a sense, balancing these forces has been the normal activity of conservative politicians. And as long as social conservatives are relatively calm and somewhat "apolitical," it has worked. Sometimes, however, the relations between the two wings of conservatism has become very strained. This is usually because the state in question seems threatened by major social changes, which agitates the social conservatives and makes them suddenly quite unwilling to compromise with the economic or enlightened conservatives. One of two things then can happen. The social conservative wing can move definitively to extra-parliamentary violence. This was the fascist solution of the 1920's and 1930's. Or the conservative coalition can fall apart and become, for a long time at least, an electoral minority. The latter is what seems to be happening currently in a number of countries. Let us illustrate this by looking at three examples (out of many more possible ones) - France, Israel, and the United States. It is precisely because the details of the politics are so different in the three countries, as is the structure of governmental elections, that it is interesting to observe the similarities of the process. All three countries share one crucial feature: an elected chief executive, which forces a bipolarization at some point in the electoral process. In France, virtually all elections are in two rounds. Thus one can have many parties competing in the first round, and then the formation of left and right coalitions in the second round. For various historical reasons, the French right has had three different main organizations since 1945 (one Gaullist, one Christian-Democratic and centrist, and one non-Gaullist economic conservative), who came together in the second round of elections. As France began to face economic difficulties in the 1970's, a small xenophobic right wing party, called the Front National (FN), began to gain strength. The FN has always made its opposition to "immigrants" the centerpiece of its political program. Because it was openly racist and flirted with being extra-parliamentary, it was kept outside the mainline conservative coalition. When this group began to win 15% of the vote, however, the conservative coalition began to lose elections. Thereupon, the conservative coalition was faced with the issue of whether or not to include the FN in their second round. The mainline conservatives split deeply on this issue between those who considered the FN as neo-fascists and unfrequentable and those who thought of them as simply the right of the right wing. Within the FN, there has now emerged a split as well, between those who essentially refuse to play the parliamentary game at all because the mainline conservatives are thought to be as bad as the left (the followers of Le Pen) and those who wish to make alliances with the mainline conservatives, hoping to take over eventually the coalition (the followers of Bruno Megret). The result in France as of 1999 is utter disarray on the right, both among the mainline conservatives and the FN. Intra-conservative angers have reached a high pitch, and centrist voters have become more inclined to vote for various segments of the left coalition. Israel too has many parties, but the fact that the Prime Minister is now directly elected, separately from Parliament, forces coalition politics. In Israel, the groups equivalent to the FN have been both inside and outside the mainline conservative coalition. The key issues that divide economic conservatives from social conservatives in Israel is how to deal with the Palestinians and secondarily the institutionalization of religious orthodoxy. The range of difference among conservatives is not that large, going from those who are ready to make a very few concessions to the Palestinians and who are personally less involved in religious issues to those for whom no concessions whatsoever should be made either to the Palestinians or to the Jews who are less than fully orthodox. Of course, the issues in Israel are complicated by the element of outside pressures and by the fact that the Palestinians are about half the population now living in the area politically controlled by Israel. Here too, the result has been a disintegration of the conservative coalition, and the uncertainty that it can be recreated during and after the coming elections. The crisis in the Republican Party in the U.S. is not too different, except that the social conservatives there went inside the conservative coalition and have come close to taking it over completely, which has created great discomfort for the economic conservatives and threatens to lose the coalition its centrist voters and place it in a long-term minority. What is fascinating about these three situations is that the disarray in the conservative camp has led to a consolidation of the opposing camp, despite the internal strains of the latter. Just ten years ago, the left in all three countries was in great difficulty, but now it seems to be in the process of creating a new stable majority, largely due to the high pitch of the social conservatives which has undermined the balance of the conservative coalition. Immanuel Wallerstein [Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315. These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.] The World and Yugoslavia (1 February 1999)
During the years when Tito ruled Yugoslavia, it was a Communist state not too different from other Communist states in east/central Europe, except that it was "neutral" in the Cold War. Yugoslavia was indeed one of the founders and key figures in the worldwide "nonalignment" movement. To be sure, Yugoslavia had many internal problems. The one problem it did not seem to have was intergroup conflict. The Stalinist schema of constitutional group autonomy in a complicated, terraced pattern seemed to work. Indeed, it does not seem that, in the allocation of positions inside Yugoslavia, there was significant favoritism to any particular ethnonational group. In this respect, Yugoslavia was considered almost a model country.
When Tito died, the Yugoslav state began to unravel slowly, as was happening everywhere in Communist regimes. The Serbian state cancelled autonomy in Kosovo (Albanian area) and in Voivodina (Hungarian area). Then Slovenia sought to secede from Yugoslavia. When it succeeded, Croatia followed suit, but contested by the Serbian minority in Croatia. When Bosnia-Herzogovina also declared itself independent, a three-way war broke out, which finally ended in a shaky truce known as the Dayton agreement. Then, civil war erupted in Kosovo. Throughout all of this, there has been a decade of horror stories - of rapes, tortures, murders, and "ethnic cleansing." Needless to say, all sides have pointed the finger at each other. In the view of most international observers, although blame for these horrors is unequal, there seems to be no side with truly clean hands. The question, however, is what to do about this. This is not a question so much for those who live there. Most persons in these countries think they know what to do - fight. The question, what to do, is a question the rest of the world has posed itself. There are no doubt persons outside the region who have commitments because of common ethnic heritage or solidarity. But there are many not thus directly involved who are simply concerned about their appropriate role. There are two different languages the Western world has used about the conflicts in this zone. One language is geopolitical; and one language is that of human rights. Each is complicated. In geopolitical terms, the conflict concerns the "great powers" for two reasons. On the one hand, there is fear that the ongoing warfare will spread to areas not presently involved, such as other parts of the Balkans. The image is that of a forest fire which, if not contained, can grow and do serious damage to world order. Logically, it follows that the great powers should "interfere." But which great powers, and what kind of interference? The U.S., western Europe (collectively and singly), and Russia have all tried thus to "interfere," and thereby contain, if not resolve, the conflict. There have been two basic problems here. As always, the great powers have conflicting interests in the region, and therefore tend to draw different conclusions about the kind of interference, preferring the kind that will enable their "friends" to emerge on top. They have thus not acted in harmony, to say the least. This situation has been made all the worse by the fact that all the great powers have been reluctant to use serious military power in the region. It is hard to "interfere" successfully, if one has one's hand tied behind one's back. Hence, we have arrived at the unclear in-between situation we may observe: just enough interference to slow down some of the participants in the conflicts, but not enough to stop any of them from pursuing their conflicts violently. This kind of in-between situation always gives the benefit to the strongest, most decisive local forces, and simultaneously undermines the credibility of further great power interference (and not only in this region). For many persons outside the region, however, the situation is not a question of geopolitics, but a question of human rights. Ethnic cleansing is deeply immoral, they say, and it is the duty of the world community to stop it, if necessary by force, and to bring to individual justice the leading perpetrators of ethnic cleansing. The people who argue this case do so quite loudly. They are seldom, however, in positions of state power, but the media allow them to broadcast their denunciations and their pleas. So they have become a real political factor in the internecine struggles. Of course, the advocates of a human rights approach are quite right in one fundamental respect. Ethnic cleansing is indeed immoral, and the world should do something to stop it. The question is what? The advocates of a human rights approach are not naive. They do not think it is enough to denounce evil. They want action, and they know that, for action, they have to turn to the coercive machinery of states. Since however there exists no world government with a world police force, the only real coercive machinery available is the armies of the great powers, and the great powers have been giving priority to geopolitical considerations, which does not lead them at all to the same conclusions as are drawn by the advocates of human rights. The great powers have espoused human rights rhetoric from time to time, as it suited them, but they have not been willing to do very much about it, as the human rights advocates know only too well. The crucial thing to see is that this tension between geopolitics and human rights concerns is viewed differently in the Western world and in the "three continents" - Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In the Western world, it is seen as a conflict between the realists and the idealists (in the language of geopolitics) or between the cynics and those guided by moral values (in the language of the human rights advocates). Persons in the three continents tend to have another view. While many of them are as opposed to "ethnic cleansing" as anyone in the Western world, they are a lot less sure that there is a virtue in great power interference in the name of human rights. What they remember is that the whole European imperialist thrust of the nineteenth century was clothed in the language of a "civilizing mission," the necessity to end the "barbarous" actions of local despots and their "cruel" customs (including slavery and cannibalism). The people of the three continents suspect that often behind the human rights rhetoric there lies a new imperialist invasion, if not in intention then in actual result. They are not sure that having U.S. or west European troops occupy Kosovo (even if they were ready to do so) would actually result in a situation that was morally or politically better than the current one. Nor are they sure that, once these troops came in, they would leave so readily. What we can say is that there are at least four different stances vis-a-vis ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia (and by analogy anywhere else in the world): that of the people in the region; that of the geopoliticians in the great powers; that of the advocates of human rights concerns (primarily but not only Western); and that of politically alert persons in the three continents. The four views are largely incompatible one with the other. Immanuel Wallerstein [Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315. These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.] The Clinton Impeachment (15 February 1999)
Now that Clinton has been acquitted by the U.S. Senate of the two charges of which he was impeached, it is time to reflect on the most curious aspect of this long political drama. Bill Clinton has been the most conservative Democratic president of the twentieth century. He came to prominence as the leader of a movement internal to the Democratic Party seeking to eliminate all vestiges of leftist tendencies within the Democratic Party. He promised to be the president who would "end welfare as we know it," and he has in fact achieved this, to the dismay of the majority of the Democratic Party.
One might have thought that Republicans would have been indulgent towards such a committed centrist in politics. And yet, from the very moment he assumed his office in 1993, he has been the object of relentless hatred on the part of rightwing Republicans, particularly those from the Southern states, from which he himself comes. Only one previous Democratic president has been subject to such hatred - Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But he inspired hatred particularly among the wealthy in the northeastern states, who considered him, a scion of an old "aristocratic" family, as a "traitor to his class," because he fathered the New Deal. But Clinton is the opposite of Roosevelt, a politics right of center rather than left of center, and from a poor family, not a wealthy one. To explain this curious passion, we must look at the United States through four different time prisms, only one of which is peculiar to the United States. The first is 1968, which reflected a key cultural break in the United States, as elsewhere in the world. The most notorious, if not the most important, thing that is symbolized by 1968 is a certain break with what was considered conventional mores in most countries before then. In the U.S., the revolution of 1968 was marked by opposition to the U.S. role in the Vietnam war. It was also marked by a relaxed attitude towards drug use and sexual activity of all kinds. Bill Clinton is of that generation. He is scarcely an extreme exponent of the "counter-culture," but he did oppose the war in Vietnam. He did manage not to be drafted. He did smoke marijuana. And of course, he is politically committed to abortion rights, to fair treatment for gays and lesbians, and to the right of privacy. The so-called Christian right came into existence as a political movement precisely to combat all these cultural changes. What they have discovered is the degree to which their views on these matters are now those of a beleaguered minority. The second time span is longer. I date it to 1945. Up until 1945, in the United States, as in all other Western countries, indeed as in all other countries, political, economic, and social power was concentrated in the hands of the male members of the majority ethnic group. In the case of the United States, these were the so-called WASPs, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Every president, almost all members of the national political elite, the members of the Supreme Court, the heads of corporations, the presidents of universities (indeed the professors) virtually all came from that group. The postwar period brought about a cultural revolution different from that of sexual mores, and probably more important. It was the revolution we call today in the U.S. "multiculturalism." Since 1945, persons other than male WASPs have risen to high positions in all the U.S. structures (and parallel things have occurred in many other countries). In the U.S., this shift has been associated with the Democratic Party, to a large degree. Take a look at the House Judiciary Committee which voted the articles of impeachment. On the Republican side, voting for, was a group composed exclusively of WASPs, almost all from the South, and all but one male. On the Democratic side, voting against, were Catholics, Jews, Blacks, women, a gay, and one male Southern WASP. Is it so difficult to see in this passion the rebellion of the male WASPs against what they perceive as their diminished role in U.S. society? The third time span, this one exclusively American, is 1865 - the end of the Civil War and the emancipation, then the enfranchisement of Black Americans. Ever since, the great political fear of the Southern elites has been an electoral alliance of the Blacks and the poor Whites. U.S. politics, especially in the U.S. South, may be said to have revolved around this issue. At first such an electoral alliance seemed to take form, first in the Reconstruction period, and later in the early days of the U.S. populist movement. But is was squelched by the disfranchisement of the Blacks and the construction of the Ku Klux Klan to channel the sentiments of poor Whites. The South became a one-party Democratic zone, controlled by very conservative Democrats. As the Ku Klux Klan was dismantled and as the Blacks slowly regained their electoral rights after 1945, the conservative Southern Democrats shifted their political allegiance to the Republican party, succeeding by the 1990's in turning the one-party Democratic South into a virtually one-party Republican South. What Clinton represents in the South is the alliance of centrist poor Whites with the Black electorate. He represents thus the greatest threat to conservative politics in the U.S. South since the 1890's. No wonder, anti-Clinton sentiment is particularly strong among the Republican right coming from the South. Finally, one should not leave out one further element. It may have been common knowledge that Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and many others had mistresses and affairs,. but no one raised the issue publicly. It was common knowledge but it was not public knowledge. This was because of the self-restraint of the political opposition and of the press. Why did such self-restraint not play a role now? It is not that people have a different attitude today towards extra-marital sex (if anything, Puritanism was far stronger previously) but that the generalized legitimation of state institutions, and therefore the "respect" for the role of the President, has seriously declined - in the U.S. as throughout the world. It is not that Clinton has made respect for the presidency decline, but quite the opposite. In that the respect for the presidency having declined, political opponents and the press felt free to make public what had previously been merely common knowledge. This change in attitude towards the state on the part of ordinary people is perhaps the most fundamental issue behind the Clinton impeachment, but the explanation for it goes far beyond anything that occurred in the U.S. and needs to be analyzed at greater length than we can do here. Immanuel Wallerstein [Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315. These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.] Terrorists, Liberators, and The Rest of Us (1 March 1999)
States all over the world are repeatedly faced with movements of groups who consider themselves denied rights as a group within the framework of the state. In February of 1999, two such movements were very much in the news: the UCK representing the Kosovars living in Yugoslavia; and the PKK representing the Kurds living in Turkey. To the governments of Yugoslavia and Turkey, these movements are groups of "terrorists." The movements themselves consider themselves movements of liberation of their people. Both movements are demanding further rights: autonomy, even terrritorial independence.
The most striking thing to notice about these two situations is that, while the local government and the local movement seem to take analogous positions vis-a-vis each other in both countries, the rest of the world, and most notably the United States government, seems to regard them differently. In the case of the Kurds in Turkey, the U.S. has applauded the capture of the leader of the PKK, and even aided the Turkish government in achieving it. In the case of the Kosovars in Yugoslavia, the U.S. is seeking hard to force the Yugoslav government to enter into serious political negotiations with the UCK, and is even threatening the use of force if they do not do so. In both situations, the position of West European governments is more nuanced. In many other parts of the world, attitudes towards the two situations vary considerably. What is clearly missing is any consistent position, or consistent attitude towards such movements. If we look back over the last 50 years, yesterday's "terrorists" often have become today's honored leaders. Not so long ago, Nelson Mandela and the ANC were "terrorists" to the apartheid government of South Africa. Now they form the much respected government of South Africa, and the former apartheid government is condemned by very many for having engaged in "state terrorism." Not so long ago, the PLO in Palestine and Sinn Fein in Ireland were "terrorists." Now, in the eyes of most persons, they are, or almost are essential participants in the peace process. Not so long ago, the Indonesians had sentenced the "terrorist" leader of Fretilin in East Timor, Xavier Gumana, to life imprisonment for "terrorism." Today he has been freed, and the Indonesian government is discussing with him the possibility of allowing East Timor to be an independent state. Are there then no "terrorists"? Well, not quite. Most people would consider Aum Shinryiko in Japan a dangerous band of terrorists. Many people (but not all people) would consider Osama bin Laden (a Saudi leader of a movement which claims it wishes to liberate the Muslim world in general from outside domination) to be a dangerous terrorist. Is a terrorist someone who uses force against governments, or is a terrorist someone who uses excessive force against governments, and against simple citizens of certain states? If you ask someone who is involved in such a movement, he/she will say that they are using force as a last resort against the injustices of given states, injustices which cannot be rectified without the use of force. If you ask the governments in question, and in particular if you ask the ordinary citizens who have been the target of "terrorist" attacks and have suffered personally or who have known others who have died, they will insist that one cannot negotiate with terrorists, and that such movements must first renounce the use of force before they can enter the political arena. How about the rest of us, that is, those of us who are not directly involved on either side of such a dispute? What should our attitude be? Is every movement for the "liberation" of some group within a state legitimate? Should every group have the right to some kind of territorial autonomy? A fortiori, should every demand for formal secession and the creation of a new sovereign state be considered valid? Almost no one would think so. And yet clearly, groups are really oppressed in many countries, possibly in most countries. Clearly, the demands of oppressed groups for equal rights is not only legitimate but pressing. Sometimes it takes the form of demanding linguistic rights, sometimes religious rights, sometimes access to employment, sometimes political autonomy. The demography and the history of each country is different. The groups demanding the rights are different. What is clear is that the reflex position of state governments, the refusal to negotiate, the insistence to the outside world that the issue is purely internal, is fundamentally illegitimate. And the history of the modern world has shown, time and again, that it brings on the violence and that, many years later, sometimes 30-50 years later, these states make the kind of political concessions that could have averted the violence from the beginning. It seems clear that Kosovars, who are 90% of the population in Kosovo, have the right to regain the autonomy that was taken away from them a decade ago. It seems clear that the Kurds, who are most of the population in southeastern Turkey, have the right to use their own language, a right denied to them by the Turkish government which further denies that there are even any such people as Kurds. The governments of the world treat these issues in purely geopolitical terms. The U.S. is against the rights of Kurds in Turkey but is in favor of the rights of Kurds in neighboring Iraq because the U.S. has good relations with the government of Turkey and bad relations with the government of Iraq. But is the attitude of western Europe, of Russia, of China so different? Do they not also decide on their position in terms of short-term geopolitical considerations? As for the humanitarian NGO's, they defend "human rights." But deciding whose human rights are being violated in given situations is not at all easy. Once the violence begins, all sides begin to engage in actions that are reprehensible, that violate human rights. Of course, we can weigh moral blame. Which side is more to blame than the other? It is at this point that enter the realists, the geopoliticians, who say blame assessment is less important than peace-making, and peace-making involves compromise, political compromise that is often moral compromise. So what may we conclude? Each situation needs to be analyzed in its details, including where we are in the cycle of violence. There is rarely moral purity on either side, but there are often fundamental issues of human liberation at stake. Governments should rarely be taken at their word, and the defense that the matter is an internal affair should be treated with skepticism. On the other hand, outside intrusion often masks imperialist designs, and cannot be taken at its face value either. Should we negotiate with "terrorists"? Not at all if they are Aum Shinryiko, and absolutely if they are Nelson Mandela and the ANC of South Africa. And the rest of the cases fall in-between. And if there are no negotiations, whom should we support as individuals? Clearly again, we should not support Aum Shinryiko, but we should have supported the ANC, and the rest of the cases fall in-between. Liberation is more important than order. But all who speak in the name of liberation are not necessarily liberators. The lesson of history is that prudence in judgment is called for but so is decisiveness. Immanuel Wallerstein [Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315. These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.] The Expansion of NATO (15 March 1999)
On March 12, 1999, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary formally became members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The Poles, of all political persuasions, were ecstatic, the Polish president calling it "the most important day in our history." The Czechs and the Hungarians, while generally positive, were much more restrained in their enthusiasm, and there was even some opposition within each country. The reaction in the old NATO member countries was however quite different. While a few persons cheered, most political leaders seemed to be almost indifferent, a few hostile, and many worried about how to handle Russian fears and discontents. A curious event, this, which seemed so important and aroused so little strongly positive feelings.
It is understandable that the Poles should be so enthused. Poland's Foreign Minister, Bronislaw Geremek, distinguished medieval historian and a major figure in the Solidarnosc movement in the period of its struggle against the Communist government, said that for Poland the entry into NATO marked the final end of the Second World War. That war had started, let us remember, with the German invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, Great Britain and France declaring war on Germany because of it. Poland was of course overrun by the Germans, and after 1945 was brought under Soviet tutelage. I suppose what Geremek meant is that the West had finally fulfilled the commitment it made to Poland in 1939 by welcoming Poland back into its midst in 1999. For Poland, as to some extent for all east/central European states, admission to NATO is considered a symbolic recognition that these states constitute an intrinsic part of the Western world, which they very much desire for political, military, economic, and cultural reasons. And of course it symbolizes as well protection against Russia, seen as an outside, historically imperialist threat. Why then so much indifference within the old member countries? Well, for one, there is much indifference to NATO itself as an institution. And the primary reason is obvious. When Dean Acheson, then Secretary of State of the United States, presented the case for NATO fifty years ago, his primary emphasis was on "Soviet obstruction" of the proper working of the United Nations. One cannot say that this is a current issue. Insofar as NATO was an element in U.S. strategy in the so-called Cold War, this factor has completely disappeared from the world scene with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact that had linked the east/central European countries to the U.S.S.R. militarily. Why was not NATO dissolved the next day? This good question was never seriously debated publicly, nor to my knowledge even behind closed doors. Yet, it was of course a latent issue, to which the various member countries of NATO reacted differently. From the point of view of the United States, NATO had had a second function which had been very important. It was a mechanism by which the U.S. kept western European governments from striking out too independently on the geopolitical scene. The U.S. used the argument that it was necessary to keep a united political front as part of the continuing politico-ideological struggle with the Soviet Union. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. was somewhat distraught that it could no longer use that argument. It sought new ones, and found two. One was that NATO was necessary to contain the so-called rogue states of the rest of the world (such as Iraq or North Korea). Another was that NATO was essential to providing the military muscle to maintain the peace in the Balkan zone. Neither argument enchanted the west Europeans. For one thing, they did not always agree with the U.S. about the best policy to pursue vis-a-vis such states as Iraq. And secondly, they disliked intensely the arrangement the U.S. offered the west European states in the Balkans: that the U.S. supply airpower and the west European states ground troops. NATO thus became a source of political strain between the U.S. and western Europe. Why then did not the west Europeans simply let NATO die? The simple answer is that the west Europeans did not have their own act put together. The three main countries - France, Germany, and Great Britain - each had somewhat different visions of short-run tactics and middle-run strategy. Doing something as dramatic as letting NATO die was impossible for them as long as they hadn't made up their mind what to put in its place. Into the midst of this came the demand from the east/central European states for admission to NATO. The initial reaction of both the U.S. and the west European states was cool, and efforts were made to put the question off for a long time. At that point, the east/central Europeans, and especially the Poles, astutely shifted their campaign from the level of diplomatic negotiations to the level of U.S. internal politics. They mobilized their migrant communities in the U.S. (and the east/central Europeans, especially the Poles, have large communities there) and lobbied hard. The dynamics of U.S. internal politics was such that, once the ball started rolling, there was no way to stop it. At that point, the west Europeans felt the pressure. Were they to play the role of vetoing the entry of these new members, they risked a deterioration of their diplomatic relations with these countries. The Germans were particularly sensitive about the possible reaction of Poland. And so it was that everyone voted for the admission of the three countries, but without enthusiasm, and not having any real political or military purpose in mind. Of course, the Russians were upset, and various steps were taken to appease them: the promise that no nuclear weapons would be stationed in the three countries nor any tactical headquarters. More importantly, there was probably a quiet agreement that the admission of still other countries, and in particular that of the three Baltic states, would be delayed indefinitely. No less than Zbigniew Brzezinski virtually wrote this in a Polish newspaper this month. A cynic might note that there are fewer Estonians in U.S. cities than there are Poles. This postponement will relieve not only the U.S. but the west Europeans. So we are living a momentous event about which there is widespread discomfort, but joy in Warsaw, who will now supply the main quota of NATO-boosters in the world. What may be more important is the fact that a few days before the admission of the three countries to NATO, Tony Blair got on the bandwagon of establishing a European army, one that would be autonomous from NATO (and one almost certain not to include the three newly-admitted NATO members). Immanuel Wallerstein [Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315. These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.] Bombs Away! (1 April 1999)
When I was young, I saw many a war film in which the heroic American pilot, flying over hostile territory, shouted "bombs away!" The enemy was destroyed, and peace restored. The good guys won. President Clinton sent U.S. and NATO pilots on just such a mission against the Yugoslav government and its leader, whom Clinton compared to Hitler. When a war breaks out, and this is a war, there are three levels at which to judge it: juridically, morally, and politically.
Juridically, the bombing is an act of aggression. It is totally unjustified under international law. The Yugoslav government did nothing outside its own borders. What has been going on inside its borders is a low-level civil war into which the U.S. and other powers intruded themselves as mediators. The mediation took the form of offering both sides an ultimatum to accept a truce on dictated terms, to be guaranteed by outside military forces. At first, both sides turned this down, which upset the U.S. very much. They explained to the Kosovars that they couldn't bomb the Serbs unless and until the Kosovars accepted the truce terms. The Kosovars finally did so, and now the U.S./NATO are bombing. National sovereignty doesn't mean too much in the real world of power politics. The U.S. is not the first nor will it be the last state to violate some smaller country's sovereignty. But let us cut the cant. Doing so is aggression, and illegal under international law. The juridical situation tells us nothing about the moral situation. The U.S./NATO have justified their acts by asserting that the Yugoslav government is violating fundamental human rights, and that they have a moral duty to intervene (that is, to ignore the juridical constraints). So let us talk about the moral rights and wrongs. I have no doubt myself that the Yugoslav government has been guilty of atrocious behavior in Kosovo, as they has been previously, directly or via intermediaries, in Bosnia-Herzogovina. To be sure, their opponents, the Kosovo Liberation Army in this case, and the Croatians and Bosnians in the previous war, have also been guilty of atrocities. And I for one am not going to do the arithmetic to figure out who has done more atrocities than the other. Civil wars bring out the worst in peoples, and the Balkan wars of the last five years are not unusual in that respect. But it does weaken the moral justification for intervention when the immoralities are not one-sided. Furthermore, if Serb behavior in Kosovo is to be reprimanded, then the moral authorities who take it upon themselves to enforce moral law must explain why they have been unwilling to intervene in Sierra Leone or Liberia, in northern Ireland, in Chile under Pinochet, in Indonesia under Suharto, in Chechnya, or even for that matter in the Basque country. No doubt each situation is different from the other, and perhaps of different dimensions, but civil wars abound and atrocities abound. And if we are to take moral enforcers seriously, the least one can ask is that they are minimally consistent and minimally disinterested. So, in the end, we are thrown back on a political analysis. Who did what for what reasons, and how much do particular actions aid in the reasonable solution of the disputes? Let us start with the local participants in the conflict. In the geographically and ethnically intertwined and overlapping zones of the Balkans, the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was probably the optimal structure to ensure not only internal peace but maximal economic growth. But it came apart. This was not inevitable. There were some key turning-points. One was in 1987 when Milosevic decided to build his political future on Serbian nationalism rather than on Yugoslav nationalism/Communism and moved within two years to suppress Kosovo autonomy. This gave the excuse for, and perhaps instigated, the wave of successions: Slovenia, then Croatia, then Bosnia-Herzogovina, then the attempted secessions within Croatia and Bosnia by the Serbs, then the Kosovars. No doubt, non-Balkan forces also played a role, especially Germany in supporting, if not more than that, the idea of Croatian independence. Still, Milosevic's initial moves were a grievous long-term political error. We now find ourselves in one of those nasty, violent struggles in which everyone is afraid, paranoiac, and unwilling to contemplate any sort of real political compromise. And the fascist Ustashi in Croatia and Chetniks in Serbia are once again a serious political force. Nor will it end soon. The war in Northern Ireland went on for over twenty years before anything was possible. The war in Israel/Palestine has gone on even longer. Sometimes a civil war just has to exhaust itself before any one is rational. But what about the politics of the U.S.? Why has the U.S. government singled out this civil war for active intervention? In the case of the Gulf War, there was at least the rationale of the importance of oil (and the defense of an invaded sovereign state, Kuwait). But in economic terms, the Balkan zone is marginal. Nor can it be argued that there are immediate geopolitical concerns, such as shoring up an area politically so that some other power cannot take it over. This was the rationale, or at least one rationale, for the U.S. support of South Korea. Behind North Korea, argued the U.S., lay China or the Soviet Union. The rationale was that of the Cold War. But Yugoslavia has no oil, and there is no longer a Cold War with the Communist world. So why doesn't the U.S. ignore the situation the way it ignores the Congo (at least these days)? To be sure, the U.S. doesn't really ignore any country, but it does not intervene militarily in most situations. A curious argument has been made in the last few months. It has been said that the U.S. had to bomb the Serbs, or else NATO's credibility would be undermined. This is a curious argument because it is circular. If NATO threatens something, and then doesn't do it, of course its credibility would be undermined. But it didn't have to make the threat in the first place. Or maybe it did. Perhaps the political issue for the U.S. is precisely the need to justify the very existence of NATO, which no longer has an obvious role as such now that the Russian army seems to be so much weakened. But why would the U.S. want to have NATO at all? There seem to me to be two main reasons. One is that its existence in turn justifies the current military expenditures and indeed build-up in the U.S., which has economic and internal political advantages for the government. The second is that NATO is necessary to prevent the west Europeans from straying too far from U.S. control and above all from establishing an autonomous armed structure separate from NATO. The Yugoslav imbroglio seems ideal for both purposes. But will it work? If the Yugoslavs hold fast, and it seems likely they will, further military action would involve ground forces. Can the U.S. afford a second Vietnam? It seems doubtful. And will the west Europeans really continue to play the game? There are rumblings in the NATO ranks already, and the war is only a week old. We have all entered the bramble bush. The Yugoslavs will be bombed until it hurts. The Kosovars will be driven out of their homes. Many will die. Neighboring countries may be drawn into the armed conflict directly. And if the war is prolonged, there will be internal social turmoil in the U.S. and western Europe. "Bombs away" may have been worse than a crime; it may have been a folly. Immanuel Wallerstein [Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315. These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.] Wars, Wars, Wars (15 April 1999)
On May 18, 1999, we shall be celebrating the 100th anniversary of the opening of the Hague Peace Congress. This Congress led to the establishment of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, predecessor of the International Court of Justice. Currently, nonetheless, there are wars all over the place - in Yugoslavia to be sure, but also (depending on how much violence you require to define a situation as a war) in Iraq and in various parts of Africa (Congo, Angola, Ethiopia/Eritrea, Sierra Leone). If you add in situations where there has been considerable violence recently and may well be some soon again (such as Afghanistan, East Timor, and Colombia), we could easily add another 30 to 40 countries to the list. So what is it that we shall be celebrating?
War has of course been endemic to human society for as far back as we know. But war in the modern world has been of a different order, both in terms of technology and destruction and in terms of its defining characteristics. What we call war today is a function of the concept of sovereignty, a modern concept that began to be utilized only in the sixteenth century. Sovereignty is the assertion that each state has clear boundaries which it claims and which are recognized by other states within the interstate system, and that within these boundaries the government of the state has the monopoly of the legitimate use of force. War is then defined as a military battle between two sovereign states. And such wars are generally thought to be of two varieties - world wars (in which all major states are involved) and smaller wars, usually between two states only (smaller in geographic scope but of course often extremely destructive of the two states involved). If one state starts a war with another state, we call the first state an aggressor. Responding to an aggressor is legitimate; it is called self-defense. Virtually no state has ever proclaimed itself an aggressor. Instead, it usually seeks to insist that the other state either has been the aggressor or has committed some heinous crime that merits punishment via war. In this sense, the concept of sovereignty has legitimated war between states. If however violence occurs within the borders of a sovereign state, it is not defined as a war. Hence, such conflict immediately becomes illegitimate. If some group within a state rebels, whether as agent for an oppressed class or for an oppressed nation/ethnic group, the government of the state normally asserts that such a group constitutes a band of terrorists (that hence has no legitimate right to wage war). The rebellious group normally argues that the government of the state is itself illegitimate because it oppresses the group and hence has lost the right to maintain itself in office. The rebellious group normally wishes either to take over the government of the state or to carve out a new state within the old state's boundaries. If such a conflict goes on for a long time, AND IF outside nations line up on each side, the conflict is accorded the more noble name of civil war. This is thought to make it more legitimate somehow, which is why the government of the state in question resists such terminology. We talk, retrospectively, of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) or the American Civil War (1861-1865), but we haven't usually been calling the various recent violences in Central America civil wars or those in northern Ireland or Cambodia, and certainly not those in the Basque country or Turkey or Algeria. The language we use is clear, if deceptive. The aggressor is always the other state. The defender of humanitarian concerns is always us. The terrorists are always the groups not in power. The defender of law and order is always the government in power. But of course these naming games are games, not plausible forms of analysis. The line between interstate wars and civil wars is seldom clearcut, since outside powers tend to interfere in civil wars. Sometimes the interference is overt (sending in troops, or at least munitions). Sometimes the interference is more covert (providing money to one side or at least diplomatic support). But there is rarely an internal/civil war in which the rest of the world is truly neutral. And it is rarer still that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) can do anything about such absence of neutrality. The last time the ICJ judged illegitimate U.S. intervention in a civil war (that in Nicaragua), the United States government simply ignored it. The history of the modern world-system has been one long attempt to delegitimate internal wars. That is what sovereignty means. But sovereignty is not something a state can unilaterally proclaim. It must receive the recognition of (most) other states for its proclamation. Nor is sovereignty something which other states always respect, even if they formally recognize it (thereby promising to respect it). Sovereignty is violated constantly, most frequently by stronger states relating to weaker states. There is a generally accepted level of hypocrisy about sovereignty in which everyone participates, usually with the exception of the one whose sovereignty is being abused. Still, the attempt to delegitimate internal violence has been partially successful, in that it occurred constantly and everywhere 500 years ago, and over the centuries it has become less frequent. States have become internally stronger (militarily and in terms of legitimacy) and therefore more able to contain or repress rebellion. The Hague Convention was not concerned with such internal wars. It sought merely to constrain interstate wars. Of course, the most destructive world war in the history of the modern world - the German-American world war that went on in reality from 1914 to 1945 - occurred in splendid disregard of the Hague Convention. What is the situation today? We are unlikely to have another world war in the next 50 years or so. World wars are infrequent and the three that we have had - the Thirty Years' War (1614-1648), the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (1792-1815), and the German-American wars - have come at long intervals, each crowning a long contest for hegemony in the world-system. So-called smaller interstate wars are probably occurring at about the same pace today as they have been for a long time. The big change in the situation is the sharp rise in internal/civil wars that started about 25 years ago and promises to explode over the next 50 years. The cause is quite obvious. The increasing authority of the individual states over their internal zones has, for the first time in 500 years, begun to decline seriously. This decline is the result of the delegitimation of the state structures by their populations, itself the result of their disillusionment with the ability of the sovereign states to fulfill the liberal dream of gradual improvement in their real economic and social situation through gradual reformism. The consequence has been growing withdrawal of acceptance of state authority by the populations of the states. But this leads to disorder, and people react to disorder fearfully and by organizing self-defense groups of all sorts. And it is such groups that have been fueling the civil wars. We shall never begin to understand what is going on and what we ought to do about it if we do not cut through the hypocritical languages we have developed and continue to use. Terms like sovereignty and terrorism, and even genocide, simply blind us, or are used to blind us. Internal/civil wars are the result of some kind of injustice and/or inequality. The solution is more justice and equality. Outside powers intervene for all kinds of reasons, most of them seldom good ones. We should be suspicious of their motives, and keep our eye on the ball of increasing justice and equality. Immanuel Wallerstein [Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315. These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.] Shoals Ahead for the European Left (1 May 1999)
It is perhaps appropriate on the last May Day of the twentieth century that we discuss the serious difficulties the war in Serbia/Kosovo is about to create for the European left. May Day celebrates working-class militancy in a hostile environment, in which the government was presumed to be basically unfriendly. However, already in the late nineteenth century, European left movements, whose basic support was to be found in the working classes and the poor, decided to seek state power via electoral processes. They founded their strategy on a sociological assumption which has turned out to be false. They assumed that their social base was numerically the majority of the population and that therefore all that was needed in order to obtain state power was to secure a system of universal suffrage and then mobilize their votes.
They did in fact achieve universal suffrage and they did mobilize their votes. But nonetheless they found it difficult to win elections. What went wrong? It was the arithmetic. The working classes and the poor are indeed the overwhelming majority of the world's population. But the workings of the capitalist world-economy, concentrating wealth in a few countries, meant that, in those countries, the working classes and the poor, by the twentieth century, added up at most to 30-40% of the population. Their votes alone could not put left parties in power in western Europe (and, by extension, in North America and Australasia). There was another consideration. In all European countries except Great Britain, the electoral system was either one of proportional representation or of elections in two rounds. Either of these systems encourages the emergence of multiple parties. The net result was not only that often there were several left (and several right) in a given country, but that the serious left (as well as the serious right) had to seek "centrist" votes in order to win elections. In general, this has been harder for the left than the right, since those who thought of themselves as "centrist" normally have been more fearful of left electoral victories than of right ones. And this of course has been especially true to the degree that the left parties at a given time in a given place used a very militant discourse, promising to "change society." What then could left parties do? Left parties were in a position to be serious contenders in the parliamentary game only after the First World War. But even then, they did not win many elections in the interwar period. For one thing, the left parties were dramatically split between the Second and Third Internationals, and in many countries they essentially split the vote between them. One solution, pioneered by the French, was the Popular Front. This never really worked because of the depth of the chasm between the two groups and the fact that the Communist parties were tightly bound to shifts in the foreign policy of the Soviet Union. This situation continued at least until the 1960's. But there was another problem as well. Left parties, even in countries where there was in effect only one, were placed before an elementary tactical dilemma. To attract centrist votes, they needed to moderate their program. But in doing so they risked alienating a part of their base. The trick was to pick up votes without losing an equivalent number. It turned out not to be so easy. In the post-1945 Cold War atmosphere, given these problems, right parties won more often than not. This gave rise to rethinking tactics. Once again, the French pioneered a solution. Let us call it the Mitterand-Jospin solution. What Mitterand did in the 1981 election was to use a Popular Front tactics to achieve power, and then use power to marginalize the Communist Party. The outcome was a realignment of votes within the left bloc of votes, such that the Socialist Party was clearly the leading party. This was the period of the emergence of the Greens as well in Europe, including in France. And here is where Jospin came in. He led the French Socialist Party to an almost accidental electoral victory in 1997 and then constructed a government of what he called "la gauche plurielle" (the plural left). Unlike the Popular Front, made up of equal and mutually suspicious partners, the plural left government was a Socialist government with ministers drawn as well from the four smaller "left" parties: the Communist Party, the Greens, the MDC (a peculiarly French, Jacobinist party), and the Left Radicals (a leftover from the middle class Radical-Socialist Party that had once been strong and had been a mainstay of the 1930's Popular Front). The far left parties have remained outside, but their popular vote has been quite small. What was interesting about the concept of the plural left is that the parties all agreed to work together on a common program despite their differences, which they talked about but said would not interfere with their participation in the government. It was a formula of constant compromise within precise agreed-upon limits. What should be noticed is that the French concept of the plural left (a dominant Socialist party combined with smaller parties) has been adopted as well, with variations according to the national situation, in Italy and Germany. Thus it is that, whereas in the beginning of this decade, virtually all European governments were right governments, by 1999, virtually all were left governments, and notably in the big four countries - France, Germany, Great Britain, and Italy - all of which had plural left governments (except Great Britain, which has a single-member, winner-take-all system of voting). It seemed not too long ago a winning formula that would be useful for many decades to come. What has this to do with the war in Serbia/Kosovo? The plural left did survive the first shock of the NATO bombings. While the Communists, Greens, and others have been critical (or at least some of their leaders have been), they have all refused to allow their criticisms to escalate into a withdrawal from the government. BUT, and this is the important thing to realize: the critics have all made it clear that they could live with the bombings, but not with a land invasion. A land invasion could lead to serious political shakeups in France and Italy and a realignment of the German Social-Democrats with the Free Democrats. It might also lead to a crisis in the Greek government. If the plural left collapses as a result of the war in the Balkans, it may not be so easy to reestablish a left alliance of this sort afterwards. Confidence in the viability of a plural left will have been undermined. We may then be in for a new era of right governments in western Europe. And in such a situation, even the British Labor Party might get some of the rebound. Immanuel Wallerstein [Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315. These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.] Refugees (15 May 1999)
The twentieth century has taught us two things about refugees. One is that any mass exodus is a very painful experience for those who are engaged in it, whether they have fled their homes because of terror, fear of terror, or panic. The second is that refugees almost never go home, no matter how much they want to.
In the last two months, the world's media have been full of stories and images about Kosovo refugees. A large portion of the Kosovar population previously resident in Kosovo have now fled their homes (or have been pushed out of them). They have gone primarily to Albania and Macedonia, to a lesser extent to Montenegro, and in much smaller numbers to a large number of other countries. Families have been separated. Homes have been burned and are no longer there to which to return. And, as always with refugees, the number of adult males who have been successful in fleeing with their families is disproportionately small. In the case of the Kosovars, some adult males have joined the guerilla army, the KLA. Others have been killed by the Serbian forces, some arbitrarily and others to prevent them from joining the KLA. Still others have been arrested and interned. The story, as always, is not fully clear, but most of the details we have are grim. The world press, or at least the press of the Western world, has been covering these stories in some detail. The NATO governments have invested money in refugee aid, and have been willing to take into their countries some refugees, but a quite limited number. This is partly because they don't really want to have them, and partly because it is politically more effective if the refugees remain in bordering countries, in camps, awaiting return. By world standards, the amount of aid to these refugees is relatively large, but nonetheless the aid organizations are complaining daily that it is far from enough. And I have no reason to doubt that this is so. Housing refugees in camps in neighboring countries does pose problems for those countries. In Albania, where political receptivity for the Kosovar refugees is very high, the poorer Albanians are beginning to complain that they are living even worse than the Kosovar refugees, and get no assistance. In Macedonia, the problem is worse. There is a delicate demographic and political balance in the country between Slavic Macedonians and Albanian-speaking Macedonians. The refugees are shifting this balance, and the majority Slavic populations are afraid this will lead to a move for Albanian secession. They are politically unhappy and uncomfortable hosts. For the moment, the problem is contained (but the Macedonian government has now in effect closed the border to more refugees). However, if the situation continues for much longer, it could explode. One key agency that is aiding the refugees from Kosovo is the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). This agency of course operates throughout the globe and Kosovo is only one of its pressing concerns. The other pressing concerns are magnificently ignored by the major world news media. For example, about ten days ago, Fernando Costa Freire, speaking on behalf of a UNHCR structure in southern Africa, stated: "We are looking at bigger numbers of people in Angola than those fleeing Kosovo. We have to feed, clothe, and house these people and aid can only be sent to them by air and supplies are diminishing. Angola desperately needs more support from donors now." This past month, I have been watching three television news networks - CNN, BBC, and TF1 (France) - and I did not catch any mention of the Angola refugee dilemma, despite the fact that it is bigger than that of Kosovo. We know more or less why there are refugees in Kosovo. Why are there refugees in Angola? There has been a civil war in Angola for 24 years now. At the beginning, there were three factions: the MPLA, which formed the recognized government; the FLNA, which initially had strong support from Mobutu's Zaire and the U.S. government, both of which considered the MPLA to be too left-wing and "pro-Soviet"; and UNITA, which once had been Maoist but then decided to be super-pro-Western. The FLNA died out, but UNITA go strong support from the apartheid regime in South Africa and from the CIA. As always, there were ethnic underpinnings to these various movements, although the MPLA was resolutely nationalist and anti-"tribal." UNITA, given the strength of its outside support, in money and in actual troops (South African army as well as mercenaries), became a very strong force, controlling about half the country. It waged a no-holds-barred war. The result has been the world's record in land-mine casualties and an enormous number of refugees. With the end of the Cold War, the U.S. decided enough was enough and brokered, along with the U.N., a political compromise, with U.N.-supervised elections to determine the new government. The problem is that UNITA lost these elections, but refused to accept the results. And since they now controlled the diamond area, they could self-finance their war, even without South Africa support (no more apartheid government) and probably without CIA support (although one can never be sure). So there we are - refugees galore; a continuing war; and certainly a human rights disaster. It might all have been averted, if the U.S. had been willing in 1975 to accept what seemed to be majority views in Angola at the time. What should we do now? Send money? The refugees in Angola are living in far worse conditions that the Kosovar refugees. They will never go home. The war in Angola will continue for some time yet, and many more will die and be displaced. The world news media will continue to ignore Angola. And the policies of the other governments of the world will be made by a very few people out of the limelight, and pursuing narrow geopolitical objectives, without the least concern for "human rights." And in Kosovo? Will the refugees ever go home? The official NATO line is, absolutely, and under NATO protection. I am more skeptical. The war will continue for a while, until a political solution will be negotiated. When it is, some Kosovo refugees will return, but undoubtedly not all of them. How safe they'll be and how long they'll stay remains to be seen. In the wake of the First World War, there were extensive Greek-Turkish conflicts. The large Greek population resident in what is now Turkey and the large Turkish population resident in what is now Greece had to flee. They have never returned and will never return. In 1948, in the wake of independences, there were extensive Indian-Pakistani conflicts. Many millions of Muslims fled what is now India to Pakistan and many millions of Hindus fled what is now Pakistan to India. They have never returned and they will never return. Immanuel Wallerstein [Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315. These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.] Wars, Unwinnable and Interminable (1 June 1999)
The NATO attack on Yugoslavia has led to two kinds of debates. One is moral: Should NATO bomb Yugoslavia? But the second is pragmatic: Can NATO win the war? Or, can it win the war if all it does is bomb Yugoslavia? What makes wars winnable, and why have wars seemed more difficult to win, and therefore to end, in recent years?
What it takes to win a war has always been a combination of superior military capacity plus the willpower to pay the price of winning the war. The U.S. certainly has superior military capacity to Yugoslavia, as it does to Iraq. Everyone agrees that, at the present moment, the U.S. has superior military capacity to all other states, and certainly to any which is, or might be, a potential military opponent. But of course, the price of winning a war against Yugoslavia, or Iraq, or North Korea, not to speak of Russia or China, is high - very high. No doubt, the price of war is high on the other side, too. In the two wars in which the U.S. is currently involved - Yugoslavia and Iraq (for the war with Iraq continues daily) - the other side has apparently been willing to pay the price, the price of being bombed and boycotted. The U.S. thus far has not been willing to pay the price of using land forces (and therefore losing substantial numbers of lives) in either case. So what we have had in Iraq and what we seem to be having in Yugoslavia is an interminable, unwinnable struggle. Of course, these are not the only interminable wars that are going on. Among the most active wars at the moment are the continuing war in Kashmir, which has just started again; the war in Timor; the war in the Congo, in which the troops of at least seven other African countries have been involved; the murderous civil wars in the Sudan, Congo/Brazzaville, Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia; the renewed struggle between Ethiopia and Eritrea. And then there are the wars that are momentarily relatively quiet but could reerupt at any moment: Cambodia; Israel and the Arab world; northern Ireland; Rwanda and Burundi; various parts of the Caucasus. There is however a difference between the list of "local" or civil wars on the one hand and the wars that pit U.S. versus other countries. In the case of the former, the reason so many of the wars are interminable is that neither side commands truly greater force than the other and the rest of the world is content to stand by and permit the wars. In the case of the wars that pit the U.S. versus other countries, the explanation cannot be that, since the U.S. does in fact command greater force than the other countries. The explanation has to lie in the U.S. attitude towards the wars. How does the U.S. feel about waging such wars? On the one hand, the United States considers that it the world's "only superpower" and it is proud of this appellation. It wants to be the only superpower. It feels it deserves to be, and it trusts itself with the wise use of its power. It feels it is morally superior to most of the world, and surely to all those countries with which it might engage in warfare. It feels it symbolizes virtue in government, and is (or ought to be) a model for the rest of the world. It therefore resents any country (even close allies) who challenge this moral vision and this evaluation of the United States role in the world-system. So, when a Saddam Hussein or a Slobodan Milosevic defies the United States openly, the U.S. government usually feels it has to react. And in those cases that the government decides that it is wiser to ignore such defiance at a particular moment, one can be sure that the opposition party in the U.S. will shout loudly about the failure of the existing government to defend U.S. honor and therefore U.S. interests. We can see this happening right now in terms of U.S.-Chinese relations, where Clinton is trying to play down differences and the Republicans are trying to play them up. There is in addition another consideration, probably far more important than the self-image of the U.S. Real power in the world-system involves getting one's way - by persuasion when one can, by intimidation when one can't persuade. The threat of force by the world's only superpower is a major political weapon. But of course, threats only work when opponents believe them, or believe them at least in part. It is a game of poker. From time to time, the opponents call the bluff, to see what will happen. In point of fact, what has happened in the last 50 years is that sometimes the U.S. has carried out its threat, and other times it has not. It has a spotty record, which thereupon becomes a factor in everyone's calculations. We all worry about reading the signals right. Still today, there is debate about whether Acheson's speech in 1950 was a factor in persuading the North Koreans that the U.S. would not enter a Korean war, or whether the U.S. ambassador's talk with Saddam Hussein in 1992 was a factor in persuading him that the U.S. would not respond to an invasion of Kuwait. Would not then the simplest policy for the U.S. be not merely to flex its muscles, but to use them? Well, no. First of all, there are endless conflicts around the world, and the U.S. does not begin to have the money or the power to enter all of them militarily. It must pick and choose. And secondly, those it has entered have been extraordinarily costly in lives and money. The Korean War ended with a truce line virtually at the point where it was before the war began. The Vietnam war was a major defeat for the U.S. despite its military superiority. The incursion into Lebanon in the early 1980's was a defeat. The greatest military triumph of the U.S. since the Second World War has been its invasion of Grenada, a tiny Caribbean island with an army smaller than the police force of a tenth-rate U.S. city. Wars by a superpower require wide public support. U.S. public support would have been there no doubt for a war with the Soviet Union, had the U.S. dared to wage one. But in that case the other condition was missing, the necessary military superiority. And for wars with anyone else, U.S. popular support is at best lukewarm. Vietnam was justified as a war against a Communist country, hence a proxy for a war with the Soviet Union. And even then, only half the country went along. So what can a U.S. government do? It can fight wars on the cheap - with spectacular airpower and no ground troops, hence no loss of life. And it can try not even to pay for them, so that they are painless to the U.S. public. This is the basic constraint when the U.S. faces Yugoslavia, Iraq, North Korea, or China. Can this constraint be overcome? Not really, because the U.S. is struggling simultaneously to maintain an economic edge over western Europe and Japan and is struggling to keep civil strife from breaking out in the U.S. It does not have the resources or the political energy to do more than it is presently doing. And what it is presently doing is a formula for interminable, unwinnable wars, that will contribute further to creating anarchy in the world-system, with the consequence of continuing breakdown of the legitimacy of the state structures, everywhere. Immanuel Wallerstein [Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315. These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.] Mandela the Miraculous (15 June 1999)
When historians look back upon the twentieth century fifty years from now, they will want to explain how it is that Nelson Mandela became the universal hero, admired east and west, north and south, left and right. No other figure has received such universal acclaim, except perhaps Mahatma Gandhi. But Gandhi was a semi-religious figure, whereas Mandela is a completely secular one.
It was not always so. Twenty years ago, Mandela was in prison for life as a terrorist leader. He himself, and his movement, the African National Congress (ANC), were controversial. Denounced by the apartheid government and its supporters as "Communists," they were regarded suspiciously by the United States and many other Western governments. Furthermore, even the most ardent supporters of the ANC recognized that they were militarily weak (even if morally correct), and thought that it would be extremely difficult for them to come to power in South Africa. Furthermore, the ANC itself and its supporters elsewhere were sure that the only way to end apartheid was by a fierce armed struggle. Yet, a seeming miracle occurred. Beginning in the late 1980's, the apartheid government began to negotiate a transfer of power to the ANC. The negotiations became concrete in the early 1990's, and retrospectively one can say they went very fast. The outlawed parties were relegalized by the apartheid government, the apartheid laws were repealed, and the government (still in the hands of the old apartheid leaders) permitted elections by universal suffrage in 1994. The ANC won handily and Nelson Mandela was elected President of South Africa. A new constitution was adopted, and a fundamental political transformation was achieved. How was it possible that the apartheid supporters, so firm in their convictions and with such a strong hold on the governmental machinery, would allow their structures to be totally destroyed and all they stood for overturned? No doubt many factors played a role. The ANC had demonstrated over a period of 30-40 years a strong and continuing hold on the allegiance of the vast majority of South Africa's population. Even if it could not translate this support into military strength, it repeatedly showed to the government and to the world its support in civil society. Over the years, its international diplomacy had led to ever increased economic and political isolation of the South Africa apartheid government. This had become particularly uncomfortable for big business, which wished to emerge from this isolation and thought it could live quite well within a South Africa based on universal suffrage and with an ANC government. And the end of the Cold War meant that the Western world was less fearful of the fact that the South African Communist Party was a long-standing ally of the ANC. Yet all of this would not have sufficed for a peaceful transfer of power. The ANC had to make two deals. One was with big business. And the second was with the apartheid government. The first deal required that the ANC downplay its historic commitment to socialism and pursue a policy that would resemble that of many "social-democratic" governments around the world today: no nationalizations, and an openness to the world market, combined with some social welfare measures. The second deal, with the apartheid government and its supporters, especially the security forces, had to respond to the fears of the latter that they would have to pay the price for all their horrible acts during the apartheid period - the murders, the tortures, the persecutions. The deal was quite straightforward. The ANC agreed to set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Nobel prizewinner Archbishop Desmond Tutu, which would seek, through testimony, to reveal the "truth" about what had happened during the apartheid years and would then be willing to grant amnesty, upon request, from perpetrators of evil acts in return for a full exposition of exactly what they had done. Nelson Mandela thus presided for five years (1994-1999) over this transformation - the establishment of a non-racial government over which the ANC had political control. It was a government whose economic policies were on the left end of the world spectrum but fell well within the constraints of the capitalist world-system. And it was a government that pursued truth with reconciliation, but not necessarily with justice. The policies were those of the ANC and reflected the historic character of this movement, but there is no doubt that the remarkable personality of Nelson Mandela enabled this difficult program to go smoothly. Mandela has been able to marry an unremitting militancy about the rights of the majority in South Africa (and a personal suffering for this militancy) with an open hand to his former opponents (and to the White population of South Africa in general) that has inspired in almost everyone confidence in his sagacity and trustworthiness. In an era of widespread disillusionment with the old antisystemic movements, perhaps the world needed a hero. The world did indeed adopt Mandela. He seemed a symbol of incredible hopefulness that seduced even the most cynical. He calmed his own impatient followers. He made the U.S. government cheer, even as he was embracing Fidel Castro and Muammar Gaddafi for their fidelity in the long, hard struggle against apartheid. And throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America, he was lionized. Yet, as his term of office ends, South Africa's problems come only now to the fore. The deal the ANC made with big business has been hard to swallow by the left wing of the ANC, as well as by their formal allies, the South African Communist Party and COSATU (the trade-union organization). And the deal with the security forces has been hard to swallow by the families of all those who were killed and tortured by the apartheid government. The achievements of Mandela's presidency have been political - the peacefulness of the transfer of power. Economically, the picture is less brilliant. Yes, the government has provided more water for the townships and the rural areas, and yes it has built some new housing. Big business has not fled the country, and the economy is still functioning. But, in terms of the needs of the Black majority, the improvements have been a drop in the bucket. The real politics begin now, under the new president, Thabo Mbeki. The ANC was returned in 199 with an even bigger majority than in 1994 - a vote of confidence. But it will have to produce results economically in the next five years, or will not do so well again. The underlying social fissures are not at all healed. Nelson the miraculous is no longer there to calm the discontents. And there is no easy way to bring the Black majority to a standard of living anywhere near that of the remaining White population of the country. Immanuel Wallerstein [Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315. These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.] The Clinton-Milosevich Chess Match (1 July 1999)
The whole world has been watching the Clinton-Milosevich chess match since the beginning of 1999. In early June, most commentators seemed to believe that Clinton has won, and handsomely. Clinton proclaimed victory. So did his NATO allies. So did a large percentage of the world left, which is highly impressed with the demonstration of U.S. military power. Milosevich said that he won, but most people, including most people in Serbia, seem to think this is simply silly.
I believe assessment should be far more prudent. For one thing, the game is not over until it is over, and we are still in the middle of it. In the second place, assessment of chess moves should always be made in terms of alternatives. So let us look at the alternatives, as of the time of the Rambouillet meetings. The Rambouillet meetings were convened by the NATO powers in order to impose a "settlement" on the Kosovo crisis. These days, there is endless reference to the Rambouillet agreements, even in United Nations resolutions, but in fact there were no such agreements. There were basically three participants at Rambouillet: the Yugoslav government, an Albanian delegation (comprising both the KLA and Rugova), and certain NATO governments (who behaved as a relatively cohesive group at the meeting). What happened at the meeting was that the NATO powers drafted a set of terms and asked the Yugoslavs and the Kosovars to agree to them. What is now forgotten is that there was not one set of terms but two successive sets. The first set was accepted by the Yugoslavs and rejected by the Albanians. The second set (the set now referred to as the "Rambouillet agreements") was accepted by the Albanians and rejected by the Yugoslavs. Neither set was accepted by both parties. It is after the second failed agreement that the NATO powers gave their ultimatum to Belgrade, and then invaded. Let us look in more detail at what these terms were. The first set provided for withdrawal of Yugoslav troops from Kosovo, and the entry of a NATO force into Kosovo. These terms Milosovich accepted, or at least swallowed. The Albanian delegation demurred. They told Mrs. Albright that the terms had to include a referendum on independence. She added this clause, providing for one in three years. The NATO powers then added as well a secret annex (secret to the rest of us, but of course not to the Yugoslavs) providing the NATO troops with the right to enter at will the rest of Yugoslavia other than Kosovo. This Milosevich was not prepared to swallow. So, we had a war. What happened in the war? Yugoslavia was badly bombed. We learn now after the event that the bombing did far less damage to Yugoslav military capacity than NATO had hoped. The bombing did damage severely Yugoslavia's economic infrastructure, and current expectations are that GDP will go down 40% in the coming year. During the war, the Serbs engaged in ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, and current estimates are that some 10,000 persons were killed, and the homes of many more destroyed. No doubt there had been contingency plans to do this, but the fact is that before the war started, the amount of killing and destruction of homes had been relatively minor. It was the war that permitted, even encouraged, implementing this program. Now to the war itself. Clinton clearly did not want to engage ground troops. He knew that politically this would be a real loser at home. Nonetheless, Yugoslav resistance and the endless stream of Kosovo refugees, was pushing him into a corner where he would have had to engage land troops, and suffer the political losses this would incur. So, somewhat desperately, he enrolled the Russians as mediators. The Russians were happy to agree. NATO claims that they got unconditional surrender on the part of the Yugoslavs. Did they? Let us compare what NATO got with what the Yugoslavs were ready to give them at Rambouillet. They got the withdrawal of Serbian troops and the entry of NATO forces into Kosovo. They did not get version two of the agreements: the referendum on Kosovo independence, or the right for NATO troops to enter freely the rest of Yugoslavia. Furthermore, they got two things they had tried hard to avoid at Rambouillet. The final agreement required a U.N. resolution, and hence the right of the U.N. to have a say in the future. And they got the entry of Russian troops into Kosovo. So let us add this up. Had Clinton stuck to the original terms of Rambouillet, the U.S. would have gotten a better deal in Kosovo from its own point of view than what they got after a war. In addition, they got ethnic cleansing. To be sure, the ethnic cleansers were Serbs. But the fact is that these Serbs, however malignant, would not have been able to engage in the ethnic cleansing had Clinton stuck to his own original terms at Rambouillet. In the world of moral responsibility, Clinton has to share the blame. And in the world of practical politics, it does not add up to a stunning victory. The entry of the Russians into Kosovo is not to be underestimated. They have reasserted, and this for the next fifty years at least, their inescapable role as a power in the Balkans, exactly what the U.S. had wished to avoid. Incidentally, it is a piquant detail that the key Russian move, the occupation of the Pristina airport, was made possible by Mrs. Albright. Gen. Sir Michael Jackson had wanted to send British and French troops into Kosovo on June 11. Mrs. Albright flew to Macedonia to persuade him to put off entry one day, so that the U.S. Marines, who weren't yet "ready" (I thought the Marines were always ready) could go in at the same time. This delay of one day was exactly what made it possible for the Russians to occupy the Pristina airport, and therefore obtain a de facto Russian zone (even if we don't call it that). In the annals of diplomacy, Mrs. Albright will surely occupy a special place for this brilliant tactical move. Where then are we now in the chess game? Milosevich seems to have survived at home. Yugoslav politics are infinitely more open than Iraqi politics, and there is real opposition to him in both Serbia and Montenegro. But I would give him odds on remaining in power until the end of his term, which is 2002. Clinton has avoided the worst (sending in ground troops). At home, he comes out neither ahead nor behind. But, if conditions deteriorate in Kosovo, if (in particular) the Kosovo Liberation Army decides in the month or two to come that it doesn't really intend to disarm and starts shooting not at the absent Serbs but at the present NATO troops, Clinton (and Gore) could pay a heavy political price at home. In chess terms, the end game promises to be very tricky. So, why did Clinton throw away a good Rambouillet deal (which he himself proposed) in favor of one that he was unable to enforce? I come back to what I argued in a previous comment (No. 13, April 1, 1999), that the real objective of Clinton had nothing to do with ethnic cleansing, or the strategic importance of U.S. troops in the Balkans, or any of the other ostensible reasons. The real objective was to lock the Europeans into a renewed NATO and prevent the emergence of a European army outside of NATO. Has he succeeded at least in this objective? For the moment, he seems slightly stronger on this front than he was in 1998. But the rumblings are there all over Europe, even on the European right, about the importance of rethinking their military preparations. It is by no means sure that the U.S. has won in this regard more than a momentary respite. Immanuel Wallerstein [Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315. These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.] The Balance-Sheet of the World-Economy in the 1990's (15 July 1999)
For the past decade, politicians, journalists, and scholars have been recounting a story called "globalization." It is something that is supposed to have happened recently, and to have changed almost everything. For some, it is a wonderful thing. For others, it is a terrible menace. For the pros, it is something not only wonderful but inevitable. For the antis, it is something not only terrible but reversible.
What has actually happened in the 1990's? Geopolitically, it seems a success story for the United States. The Soviet Union collapsed. The United States engaged in two major wars: against Iraq in 1991 and against Yugoslavia in 1999. NATO was reinvigorated and "extended." And economically, the U.S. stock exchange has gone crazy and showed unprecedented gains, combined with low U.S. unemployment and inflation rates. Of course, it doesn't look too good in many other parts of the world. The economic success zone of 1970-1990, East Asia, has been in trouble. The Japanese speculative bubble burst in 1990 and the economy has been dragging ever since. In 1997, the so-called East Asian crisis led to currency collapses and economic squeezes in much of East and Southeast Asia. The Russian economy is in shambles. Let us not speak of the former Yugoslavia. Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina all went through separate mini-crises, and none of them are doing brilliantly. Africa is, by and large, a disaster zone - very little economic growth, civil wars and refugees in a large number of countries, and a continuing brain drain. As for western Europe, it has been holding its head above water economically, but unemployment rates are still high, and the European project, still controversial, is for the moment treading water. Today, even the balladeers of the neoliberal millennium are modifying their tune. In the beginning of the decade, Francis Fukuyama assured us that we had reached the end of history. At the end of the decade, he writes more cautiously, speaking of the dangers that our scientific successes in the field of biology hold before the world. And the IMF, which could do no wrong in the beginning of the decade, is now subject to serious criticism from impeccably conservative spokesmen for neglecting the political impact of unlimited opening of the world market. Instead of analyzing the decade of the 1990's as the beginning point of a neoliberal utopia that is unstoppable, unavoidable, and endlessly wonderful, it might be more useful to look at it as the third decade of a Kondratieff B-phase, or world economic stagnation, a phase that began circa 1970. It is a B-phase because it fits all the traditional descriptions of such a phase: profits from production have dropped considerably from the levels at which they were in 1945-1970 period; consequently, persons with capital shifted their primary locus of seeking profit from the productive sphere to the financial sphere; there was significantly increased unemployment worldwide; and lastly, there occurred significant shifts of loci of production from higher-wage areas to lower-wage areas (what used to be called the phenomenon of "runaway factories"). The 1970's was called the era of stagflation. Do we still remember the word? This was because there was high unemployment and economic slowdown, combined with high inflation. This was especially true of the U.S. It was also the period of the OPEC oil rise. For years, the media talked of nothing else. Who now remembers it? Despite all the Cassandras, it turned out not to damage the U.S. or indeed western Europe since the oil rent that the oil-producing states was routed through Western banks, which then lent it out to Third World and Communist-bloc countries who were in great balance of power difficulties because of the oil rise. It was in the 1970's that we came to know the concept of a "triad" of core zones: North America, western Europe, Japan. That we talked of a triad was a recognition of relative U.S.economic decline. The triad negotiated their differences in such venues as the Trilateral Commission and the G-7 meetings. And they began to compete with each other strongly in the world-economy. The 1970's was Europe's decade. The U.S. did so badly that Jimmy Carter was defeated for reelection, despite the remaining legacy of the Nixon Watergate scandal. The 1980's changed the scene. The 1980's had four buzzwords. The first was "debt crisis." Those who borrowed in the 1970's could not pay back. In 1980, this led Poland into the Solidarity crisis, which would eventually bring down the whole eastern European satellite structure. In 1982, Mexico announced it would in effect default, followed by a cascade of other Latin American states. The world needed new borrowers to sustain the speculative needs of world capitalism. They found two. The Reagan administration, committed in theory to reversing the expansive role of government, engaged in the biggest expansion of U.S. debt in U.S. history. The "military Keynesianism" of Reagan pulled the U.S. out of the acute recession into which his initial cutbacks had plunged the U.S., but at the price of a massive U.S. government debt, financed by the Japanese. The second set of new borrowers were the large U.S. multinationals. This was the era of "junk bonds," which made possible massive takeovers of corporations by speculators, who stripped the corporations of much of their capital and large segments of their work force. This downsizing involved downward social mobility for an important segment of the U.S. and western European middle strata. Finally, there was the "flying geese" effect. Japan took off in the production arena, and pulled East Asia (and indeed good parts of Southeast Asia) with her - hence the flying geese formation as a metaphor. The 1980's was unquestionably Japan's decade. The U.S. was falling behind, and was worried. Then came the 1990's. Just when the incredible U.S. national debt seemed to overwhelm U.S. legislators, Japan's bubble burst, leaving space for the now downsized U.S. corporations to start their own self-propelling speculative frenzy, combined with a momentarily good control of the new infotechnology industries. The buzz word now became "globalization," which meant that the U.S. government and the IMF joined forces to try to force open the gates of every country to allow the free entry and exit of world capital. The very success of globalization has begun its undoing. The East Asian "crisis" and the political transformations that followed was one consequence. The return of Social-Democratic governments to power throughout western and eastern Europe (and in the U.S.) was another. To be sure, these were often governments that followed the "globalization" line, but their election was the result of popular fears concerning what was happening. Ninety percent of observers are anticipating a major downturn in the U.S. stock market. They have been falsified thus far by a self-propelling optimism of investors. For how long? If we look at the last thirty years, what do we really see? First of all, a greatly increased polarization of the world-system. Never in modern history has the gap between what we call North and South been so great. The gap is economic, social, and demographic. The curve is straight upward. Secondly, we see a greatly increased polarization within the states of the North. Those who are doing well have never done so well, it is true. (However, as we noted, this varies amongst the triad according to decade.) But the zones of poverty are also escalating. The balance-sheet is for you to calculate. Immanuel Wallerstein [Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315. These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.] Guerrillas as Entrepreneurs (1 August 1999)
A strange thing is happening. Guerrillas are becoming entrepreneurs. The word guerrillas comes from the Spanish term "guerra" ("war") and was originally meant to indicate armed forces that engaged in hit-and-run warfare in defense of territory against a foreign invader. During the Second World War, the resistance forces in Nazi-occupied Europe were engaging in guerrilla warfare. But the term has long been extended to describe armed groups engaged in warfare against their own government.
The motivations can be multiple. Some guerrillas use an ideological justification: they wish to replace the existing regime with a different kind of government. The Chinese Communists, when they were in Yenan, were this kind of guerrilla movement. Some guerrillas use an ethno-national justification. They wish to force the government to permit the secession of a region, or at least the autonomy of a region. The Kurdish forces in various Middle East countries are this kind of guerrilla movement. And some guerrilla movements are simply the expression of a group of people who wish to seize power for their own glory and profit. It is of course not always easy to distinguish the motivations. Furthermore, the people against whom the guerrillas are fighting regularly ascribe motivations to the guerrillas that are different from those the guerrillas claim publicly for themselves. But this is standard political rhetoric/propaganda. One of the characteristics of a state in the modern world-system is that it claims the exclusive legitimate right to the use of violence within its frontiers. For any state, guerrillas are illegitimate, and indeed immoral. States seek to suppress guerrilla forces. The main problem of guerrilla forces is how to survive against the efforts of the state to suppress them. What is it that guerrillas need to survive? First of all, they need some sort of popular support. As Mao Zedong said, they need to be like "fish in the sea." The list of guerrilla movements that have failed because they couldn't muster some active support from the populations in their zone is long indeed. One famous example is the failure of Che Guevara to establish a guerrilla base in Bolivia, leading to his death and the elimination of his group. But popular support is not enough. Guerrillas are engaged in warfare. And warfare requires weapons. Weapons cost money, these days a lot of money. So guerrillas need money. One of the reasons the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa was never able to mount a serious guerrilla movement inside South Africa was the very high financial cost of a serious operation. They unmistakably had the popular support. But they did not have the resources for a military campaign. So what the ANC did is conduct a worldwide political campaign which ultimately was successful, but it is different from coming to power by military means, as did the Chinese Communists. The question is where can guerrillas get the money they need to wage warfare? There have been two traditional sources. They have raised money ("taxed") individual supporters, both within the country and in the rest of the world. This seems to have been the major source of financing of the Irish Republican Army. Of course, it helps if one has a diaspora that is reasonably wealthy. They have also raised money from sympathetic governments. During the Cold War, both the U.S. government and the government of the Soviet Union gave money directly to many guerrilla movements. They did so presumably because the guerrilla movements they supported were expected to pursue foreign policies more sympathetic to the objectives of one side or the other than the existing government. Both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. said that it supported particular guerrilla movements for ideological reasons, but a skeptical observer might be forgiven for believing that the ideological explanations were oftentimes mere cover for more mundane, geopolitical motives. The rise in cost of warfare occurred just at the time the Cold War began. Guerrilla movements began to rely on US/Soviet money. Guerrilla movements that sought to keep distance from both superpowers found themselves in great financial difficulty. But now the Cold War is at an end. Russia no longer has the money to disperse, even if it wanted to. Other lesser money distributors, such as South Africa or Cuba, are now out of the game. There still seem to be a few sources in the Islamic world, but their distribution is quite focused. For most guerrilla movements, the only real source of outside funds is the Central Intelligence Agency, and the U.S. government has very clear geopolitical priorities (and even financial constraints). So what is a poor guerrilla movement to do? In this neoliberal Utopia in which we are living, they can go into business. What it requires are two things: already controlling some territory and having some valuable resources to sell on the world market, especially the black market. Let us look at some recent examples. Angola is a case in point. From 1961 to 1975, Angolan nationalists were in a war of national liberation against the Portuguese colonial regime. There were however three nationalist movements, all claiming to being involved in guerrilla warfare. And they obtained such outside funds as they could get, which was not much, from different sources: one from the U.S., one from the U.S.S.R., and one from China. When the Portuguese regime collapsed, the MPLA seemed to be the dominant guerrilla force and assumed power in the capital city. The U.S. decided that the MPLA was too "leftist" for its taste (despite a history of complicated conflicts with the Soviet Union), and hastily switched support from the FNLA (which seemed to be dying) to UNITA (which had previously had Chinese support). The South African apartheid government was even more forthright and enthusiastic in its support of UNITA. As a result, since 1975, Angola has been living through a horrible and devastating civil war. UNITA's style of action and local government has grown more execrable as the decades passed. Finally, with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the apartheid regime in South Africa, the U.N. brokered two successive major peace agreements. Elections were held, and UNITA lost both of them. The whole world seemed to rally around the MPLA government, now fully legitimated. Did this stop UNITA? Not at all. Deprived of outside funding (or at least of most of it), they had important resources in their region - diamonds. And diamonds can be sold on the world market with ease, even when it is illegal. Today, UNITA is flush with money, and has used it to buy very expensive weapons, again illegally on the world market. They are doing very well against the legitimate government. They may yet win the civil war. What does UNITA stand for? It has a historic ethnic base. But it is today primarily a group of thugs with a lot of money. The U.S. officially deplores them. Of course, it had sustained them in the difficult days of the Cold War, which enabled UNITA to get where it is today. But the U.S. State Department prefers not to mention this. The State Department prefers to talk about "narco-guerrillas." What are they? This is a term the U.S. is now applying to the FARC in Colombia. The FARC is the last surviving major guerrilla movement in Latin America, having engaged in warfare against the government for some thirty years. It is an ideologically-based movement seeking to establish some form of socialist government. For this reason, the U.S. has long opposed it, and supported a succession of very corrupt regimes in Colombia. The FARC may at one time have been getting some money from the Cuban government, but for many reasons those days are long past. FARC has survived largely because of popular support among the peasantry. Where do they get the money? The U.S. now says it is from selling cocaine. Perhaps. But the U.S. is very selective about which cocaine-sellers they attack. When the Contras in Nicaragua or the KLA in Kosovo were accused of similar practices, the U.S. turned a blind eye, or perhaps even helped the Contras do it. The New York Times says the U.S. may be preparing active military intervention in Colombia. If so, the issue isn't cocaine. Immanuel Wallerstein [Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315. These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.] Guns and the Rights to Own Them (15 August 1999)
Every country has a military force, and it by definition bears arms. Every country has police forces, and they also always bear arms (although until about twenty years ago, the London constabulary boasted that they did not bear arms). The question, in all countries, is whether anyone else has the legal right to bear arms. In many countries this is today a burning question and it is almost always politically controversial.
The question comes in two main versions. In one kind of situation, there is asserted to be a high crime rate, in which police protection is deemed by some persons to be insufficient, and these persons wish to protect themselves by arming themselves. In another kind of situation, there is a group who feels that their rights are being violated by the government in power and by those who are its supporters and feel that they must arm themselves to counter the government. The United States is a good case in point for the first situation. (but we could talk of post-apartheid South Africa) Northern Ireland is a good case in point for the second (but we could talk of Angola or Chechnya). Colombia is a good example of both situations combined in one country. Let us see how the debate about who has the right to bear arms works out in the cases of the U.S. and northern Ireland. The United States has long had a fierce internal debate about the right of citizens to bear arms. There are those who feel that every individual in the United States has the right, almost the obligation, to own a weapon. They oppose any government interference with this right, even the registration of weapons or the limitation of the kinds of weapons one can purchase. They usually give three quite different reasons. One is that the U.S. Constitution expressly permits this, in the Second Amendment to the Constitution to form militias (an article whose interpretation is subject to much debate). The second is that a large number of citizens wish to bear arms in order to engage in the legitimate recreation of hunting, and this is perfectly reasonable. And the third is that citizens need to have arms to defend themselves against criminals. This latter argument has become more intense in the last thirty years as there was a perceived increase in the degree of criminality. Those opposed to this argument, and in favor of restrictions (even of the complete elimination) of the right of ordinary persons to bear arms argue that the widespread ownership of weapons leads to access of weapons that result in accidental deaths and even worse, access for sick and deranged persons who use the arms to attack other persons in the country. The recent outbreak of attacks on schoolchildren, either by other schoolchildren who have used serious weapons or by adults, is cited as the danger. That there is a clear correlation between the availability of arms to the population and the number of such tragic, senseless deaths can be seen by comparing the statistics of such attacks in the United States (fairly unrestrictive in access to arms) and most European countries (fairly restrictive). The rates in the U.S. are very much higher than in Europe. The answer of defenders of free access to arms purchases is twofold. One is pragmatic. It is argued that government restrictions on the purchase of arms hardly affect serious criminals but do affect the ability of other persons to defend themselves against criminals. The other argument is more political. It is that governments can not always be trusted, and that citizens should have the right to have arms in case they need to use them against oppressive governments. Let us turn to the situation in northern Ireland. There, a civil was has been going on for a very long time. The politics of the situation is basically simple. The Catholic population feel that they are being oppressed by the Protestant majority, who are a majority only because northern Ireland was partitioned from the rest of Ireland in 1922, precisely in order to ensure a Protestant majority. After a long period of constant violence, a truce was arrived at about one year ago, in which a new political compromise was to be implemented that would hopefully permit the end of the civil violence. This truce has now been endangered because, at a critical moment in the transition, the representatives of the Protestant population have insisted that the IRA, the armed movement that has been fighting for the rights of the Catholics, should formally disarm before Sinn Fein, perceived at its political arm, might be admitted to the interim government, whereas the IRA has argued that it will only disarm after the political compromise has been fully implemented. At the moment, we are at an impasse. Looked at politically, the arguments within the two countries, which could be replicated in many other countries, seem to take opposite positions. In the United States, the political left is largely opposed to free access to weapons, whereas conservative forces are largely in favor of free or freer access to weapons, and the far right is the most vigorous on this question. In Northern Ireland, the political lineup is in many ways the opposite. The left tends to sympathize with the reluctance of the IRA to lay down its arms at this point, which seems to them premature, whereas the more conservative forces tend to think this is an essential prerequisite to moving forward politically. What is really happening is quite simple. Those who trust the government in power, primarily for political reasons, see no reason why persons other than soldiers and police should have weapons. Those who distrust the government in power, and think that it is fundamentally oppressive, now or potentially, are in favor of widespread access to arms. In general, in the modern world-system, the liberal center has been relatively comfortable with the overall political situation in most countries and has therefore hewed to the line of "law and order" as enforced by governments, and wanted to suppress arms among all non-government persons. The left and the right, especially in their more aggressive formulations, have tended to be suspicious and have wanted to preserve their political options. Whenever law and order have broken down to any significant degree, ordinary citizens have immediately taken back into their own hands the role of protection and have armed themselves. This can happen very rapidly, as among the upper strata in South Africa in the last few years, or among ordinary persons in Colombia. The list of countries could easily be extended. The right to bear arms cannot be dissociated from the state of the political struggle not only within individual countries but within the world-system as a whole. To the extent that faith in the states as mediating, compromising structures declines, which has been happening to a significant degree in the last 20-30 years, the acquisition of arms goes up immediately. A disarmed population exists only where there is genuine optimism about the future and a reasonably degree of confidence in the state structure. We are not living in such a time, and so we are living in a time when more and more people bear arms. But, if more and more people bear arms, there will be more and more arbitrary and "irrational" use of such arms. One cannot have one without the other. The solution will only come when a new order emerges out of the generalized chaos into which we have been moving for the last few decades and which will continue now for some time. One cannot successfully or usefully isolate the question of the right to bear arms from the larger question of the basic historical social system within which we are living. Looked at over the long run of the modern world-system, the trend for some 400 years was towards the reduction of arms in the hands of persons other than soldiers and police, as the state assumed more and more effectively the role of protection and secured greater legitimation amongst its citizens. This curve has started to go down only in the last thirty years, but the rate of decline in the curve (that is, the increase in the percentage of citizens who bear arms) has been quite rapid. It is a measure of the declining legitimacy of the state in the modern world-system, itself a sign of its crisis. In the meantime, schoolchildren get killed. Immanuel Wallerstein [Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315. These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.] Whose Health Do We Preserve? (1 September 1999)
Once upon a time, someone invented DDT, a miracle spray that killed pests, and thereby increased agricultural output. A famous book by Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, published in 1962, argued persuasively that DDT had entered a long food chain, killing many other animals than the so-called pests, and threatening humans themselves. This book began the long campaign against the use of DDT, which is nearing its culmination point, a United Nations treaty that would ban all use after a date still being debated.
The issue of DDT was originally presented as health vs. profits, the health both of the biosphere and of humans. And in this debate health ultimately won in the political arena. As well it should! But now it turns out there is another issue. DDT, it seems, is the most effective, cheap method of controlling the anopheles mosquito that spreads malaria. And malaria is a major cause of premature death in all countries with tropical regions. These countries are by and large poor countries as well, so they need not only an effective but an inexpensive mode of combating malaria. Two of these countries currently using DDT to control malaria are China and India, which just by themselves represent 50% of the world's populations. They and others are opposing a UN ban and suggesting instead some limited use of DDT for these purposes. According to the New York Times, this is opposing environmentalists and public health advocates, in which neither side represents primarily the interest of profit-seekers. I would say, the real issue is: whose health do we preserve? George Bernard Shaw once quipped that a people suffering from colonial rule was like persons with a broken arm: there was nothing else they could think about until the arm was mended. But once mended, the really serious problems would then have to be faced. Analogously, a world suffering from capitalism is one in which its distortions govern all our thoughts. But once mended, we shall have to face up to even harder and more important problem s, like priorities in health concerns. We are getting a foretaste of the issue now. This problem is of course exacerbated by the realities of the polarization of the capitalist world. In the countries of the North, which are relatively wealthy, and which are largely in zones of temperate climate, malaria is not a serious issue. But the environment and food poisoning are serious issues. It is clear that the vices of using DDT far outweigh any virtues in such countries. But in the countries of the South, poor, and mostly tropical, malaria is a major concern, and it is not at all clear that in these countries the vices of DDT outweigh the virtues of its use. Now, we would all be relieved if some clever scientists found a way to square the circle, say by inventing another equally cheap way of combating malaria that would permit the elimination of the use of DDT everywhere. But so far, no one has done this. Furthermore, as in most of these issues, the scientists are of course finding it difficult to measure the exact amount of damage that is done by one or another decision (how many human lives are spared by eliminating DDT from the food chain? how many human lives are saved using DDT to fight malaria?). Since it is difficult to measure, different scientists have come up with different calculations. There is a second matter about which people differ, this time not the scientists but the politicians (and their voters). The issue is money. If China and India were to renounce the use of DDT in favor of some other more expensive (but for the sake of argument equally efficacious) mode of combating malaria, who should pay for it? the people of China and India, people in the "North", or people everywhere? This is a moral question and a political one. But it is not a minor one. What we see in the short run is a very unfortunate split among persons usually on the same side: environmentalists who are usually fighting persons primarily oriented to profit-making and so-called efficient production, and public health advocates who are usually fighting persons primarily oriented to profit-making and so-called efficient production. The environmentalists and the public health advocates are in this case fighting each other, with a strong overlay of a North-South split. In the long run, what is at issue is whether we can arrive at a "substantively rational" decision in this matter (and indeed in all others). What would such a decision be? Well, of course, one isn't sure in advance. The process would involve carefully weighing the interests of persons in different parts of the world (at the moment, primarily North and South, to simplify) and persons in different generational strata (the young, those of working age, the elderly, and those yet unborn). There is no perfect allocation of resources, but there are clearly some that are fairer than others and which we might consider optimal. They require balancing scientific data (and inferences) with political claims and administrative practicalities. The more egalitarian the distribution of world income, the more likely that existing and/or future potential imbalances would play a lesser role in the arguments, explicit or implicit. How we might resolve such issues in a not yet existing truly post-capitalist world remains to be seen. What we need to do as long as we're in the real existing capitalist world-economy is first of all to get the debate onto the table and into wide public discussion, and secondly to recognize that whatever we do ought not to have the consequence of expanding still further the gap between the haves and have-nots of this world, between the rich and the poor, the North and the South, the privileged and those who are oppressed. The use of DDT is in itself an important issue, but it is the tip of a very large iceberg. How we handle this debate therefore can be a sign of how we are ready to handle the vaster issues before us. Get the issue out of the backrooms of world diplomacy and even out of the backrooms of the specialists. And let such an issue open up the larger ones of the world we hope to construct as the existing world-system begins to crumble. Immanuel Wallerstein [Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315. These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.] East Timor: Why Are We Concerned Only Now? (15 September 1999)
As little as two weeks ago, the world's newspapers had hardly ever mentioned East Timor. Suddenly, it became the lead story in the world's media for days on end. What has happened? It cannot be the brutal terrorization and killing of the population of East Timor. However terrible it is now, East Timor has suffered worse at least twice in the last twenty-five years. Better late than never? No doubt, but it does inspire reflection. The "international community" - that headless monster - has intervened in conflicts in major ways at least twice during the decade of the 1990's: the United States and others fought the Persian Gulf War with U.N. blessing; the United States and NATO fought a war in Kosovo without U.N. blessing.
Is the East Timor situation similar? When I discussed the beginning of the war in Kosovo (Comment No. 13, April 1, 1999), I said we should look at it in three ways: juridically, morally, and politically. Juridically, the situation is that Indonesia invaded East Timor in late 1965, without legal or moral justification. Most of the world protested verbally and refused to recognize Indonesian sovereignty over East Timor, but did absolutely nothing about it (unlike for example when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991). East Timor had been a Portuguese colony for several hundred years, just as Indonesia had been a Dutch colony. Indonesia became a state aspiring to be a nation in the course of its struggle for independence. East Timor had not been part of that struggle. Instead it was conducting its own struggle in alliance with movements from other Portuguese colonies. Indonesia achieved its independence in 1949, a process no doubt speeded up by the fact of Japanese occupation during the Second World War. East Timor was in the process of receiving its independence in 1975 in the wake of the Revolution in Portugal. Indonesia interrupted this process and sent troops in. Why did Indonesia do this? Simply expansive nationalism of half an island that adjoined Indonesian territory, fueled by a military regime that maintained national unity of an extremely heterogeneous state by a combination of force and corruption. We need to remember that the regime, that of Gen. Suharto, had come to power by overthrowing the elected and still popular government of Sukarno, the hero of Indonesian independence. The United States had encouraged and supported this coup d'etat (in 1965) because Sukarno was aggressively Third Worldist in his foreign policy and because the legal Indonesian Communist Party was the strongest Communist party in the world at the time outside of Communist-bloc countries. Suharto's first achievement was the bloody slaughter of virtually the entire Communist party. Hence, the Suharto regime was a favorite of the U.S. government, in a country that was geopolitically crucial and extremely large in population. Henry Kissinger, U.S. Secretary of State when Indonesia invaded East Timor, reputedly sniffed that he was scarcely going to sacrifice U.S. friendship with the Suharto regime on behalf of East Timor with a minuscule population and a national liberation movement, Fretilin, that mouthed pseudo-Marxist anti-imperialist rhetoric. So the Indonesians moved in, the U.N. ritually condemned the move, and the U.S. gave massive support to the Indonesian military, who used it, among other things, to massacre so many East Timorese, twice before now, that it is calculated that no other country, during the Second World War or since, has lost as large a proportion of its population in warfare. The East Timorese of course had no army, not even a puny guerilla. That they were largely Catholic, because of the long Portuguese colonial period, added fuel to the Indonesian, largely Muslim, reckless disregard for their feelings or rights. After decades of corrupt dictatorial rule, the Suharto regime finally ran into serious internal struggle during the Asian financial crisis, and Suharto resigned. The successor interim regime of Habibie has been weak, effectively sharing power with the army. It sought to unload ballast. It held elections for a new legislature which the government party lost, is looking forward to a presidential election which, if honest, it will probably lose. And, for the first time since Indonesia had invaded East Timor, the government (against army sentiment) consented to a referendum among East Timorese on independence. The vote in favor was overwhelming. Although somehow mysteriously the Indonesian government had managed to ensure absolute peace during the voting, they equally mysteriously have been unable to prevent violence ever since. It is quite clear now what happened. The Indonesian military dressed up at night as civilian "militia" and began to burn, kill, and loot, attacking not merely all East Timorese they suspected of having voted for independence (which of course was almost everyone) but anyone who protected them (the churches, the Red Cross, the United Nations observers). It has been scandalous, and finally enough pressure was put upon the United States so that it in turn put enough pressure on Gen. Wiranto, the Indonesian army commander, so that Indonesia is now in the process of agreeing to allow an international force to come in. As of this writing, the exact terms of this new phase are not yet settled, and in the meantime the slaughter of East Timorese continues, even though independence now seems inevitable within months. But will there be East Timorese left? The juridical case for intervention by outsiders was at least as good in East Timor ALREADY IN 1975 as it was in Kuwait and infinitely better than in Kosovo (where there was no juridical legitimacy whatsoever). The moral case was the strongest of the three, and the destruction of the East Timorese population far exceeds what occurred in the other two areas. It is obviously only the political situation that has been different. The United States in particular, and the Western powers in general, never appreciated the Milosevic regime, and they had had ambiguous relations with the Saddam Hussein regime. But they positively adored the Suharto regime. What do a few poor East Timorese matter when one is trying to preserve a friendly corrupt, dictatorial regime in a key country? No doubt the Indonesians have some real problems of their own. They are trying hard to maintain the state intact against secessionist movements on many of their thousands of islands, in a state whose population has little in common culturally except the heritage of Dutch rule and contemporary history. They are genuinely afraid that independence for East Timor will be taken as a precedent in other regions. And the fear is no doubt justified. But, then, they didn't have to invade East Timor in the first place. Immanuel Wallerstein [Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315. These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.] The Mexican Time Bomb (1 October 1999)
Mexico has spent 200 years too close to the United States. There is not much that it can do about this geographical proximity, but it has led to a situation today whose consequences may be felt far beyond Mexico and the United States. The historical background is quite simple. As the United States expanded westward during the nineteenth century, absorbing areas that had been controlled by Native Americans, it came to share frontiers with two countries that had been colonies of European states: Canada and Mexico.
Canada remained a colony of Great Britain until 1867 and after that slowly acquired full sovereignty. Its British protective armor meant that the United States could not really bully Canada too much. Mexico however was different. Spain was not much of a protection and in any case Mexico became an independent state early in the nineteenth century. Mexico was militarily weaker than the United States, and U.S. settlers appropriated a goodly chunk of northern Mexico - what became Texas, the southwest United States and southern California. Mexican politics has been a maelstrom of elements common to most Latin American countries: a large Indian population, oppressed and rebellious; a small wealthy elite oriented to Europe and the United States: a significant populist intelligentsia, inspired by the French Revolution and later by the Russian Revolution and generally anti-gringo; a military that has not hesitated to act directly whenever it deemed it necessary, which was usually when either the Indians or the intelligentsia or both seemed to get too strong politically; caudillos, whose political impact was by and large ambiguous. But Mexico had some special elements as well: considerable oil resources, and proximity to the United States. Proximity to the United States had three major consequences. One, it was easier to migrate illegally to the United States than from other Latin American countries. This illegal migration was, and is, often abetted by U.S. employers who sought the cheap labor. Secondly, the U.S. military found it easier to intervene against caudillos who were too rambunctious or anti-gringo, or to defend the frontier when it was thought that there was too much illegal immigration. Thirdly, the oil concentrated attention, especially that of the U.S. government. Mexican oil is today only a small part of world production. But in the earlier part of the twentieth century, it played a statistically more significant role. To tell that story however one must tell the story of the Mexican Revolution. The Mexican Revolution was the first of the great antisystemic revolutions of the twentieth century. It is usually dated as having occurred in 1910, with the rising of Francisco Madero against Porfirio Diaz. This predates the first Chinese revolution (1911) by one year and the Russian Revolution by six. The Mexican revolution had very ambiguous results. Madero, a classical liberal, was ousted and killed by military leaders. Emiliano Zapata led an Indian revolution within the revolution, which succeeded for a while but was militarily suppressed. And after about a dozen years, the general situation was stabilized by the creation of a single-party state (a well-known twentieth-century invention) under the aegis of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). The name itself is extraordinary. The party is the party of "institutionalized" revolution. But to institutionalize a process of rapid change (a revolution) is of course to contain it and to tame it, which is what happened. The PRI created a single-party regime that had the usual features of a network of affiliated structures (trade-unions, women's movements, etc.) that acted as transmitters of policy and mechanisms of limited feedback to the political elite. They did however establish another unusual feature in addition to the name. It was called the sextennio, which means a six-year term. Each President, who was the all-powerful figure in the PRI system, was elected for six years. He was elected without serious opposition, and the candidate was always chosen by the current president. In 1934, the new President that was elected was Lázaro Cárdenas. He was a populist intellectual who took the revolution more seriously than his predecessors and successors. The world was in the midst of a great depression. There was political ferment everywhere. In 1936, Cárdenas decide to nationalize the oil industry, almost entirely owned by U.S. firms. And Franklin Roosevelt, who had initiated the so-called good neighbor policy, decided not to intervene. This was a high point in Mexican power and in Mexican pride. There was another element on the Mexican scene. The French revolutionary tonality of Mexican intellectuals expressed itself also in a strong anti-clericalism. Mexico of course is a largely Catholic country, and the Church was widely perceived as a reactionary political force, supporting in Mexico (as in Spain - this was the moment of the Spanish Civil War) right-wing landlords. The PRI outlawed the wearing of clerical habits and in general restricted the rights of the Catholic Church. Furthermore, Mexico offered its country as a refuge for defeated world revolutionaries - the Spanish republicans after 1939, Trotsky (who was assassinated by the Stalinists in Mexico City). Mexican art too was "revolutionary" - notably Diego Rivera, Freda Kahlo, and Orozco. This moment of PRI "radicalism" was followed by a long descent from 1940 to today, as the PRI became more and more a corrupt set of functionaries with no particular political objectives, and they tended to make themselves into wealth-seeking businessmen. Some of them clearly became involved in narcotraffic. In the world revolution of 1968, the Mexican government was particularly repressive and slaughtered a significant number of students coming from the prestige national university (UNAM) and other schools. This slow process of liquidating the Mexican revolution reached a culminating point in the 1990's. Three things occurred. First, the Mexican government went far towards integrating the Mexican economy into being a lower-wage supply area of the United States via the NAFTA agreement, as well as denationalizing public enterprises. Secondly, the Mayan Indians in the state of Chiapas renewed the struggle of Zapata, calling themselves the Zapatistas. But they did this in an unusual way, having learned the lessons of the twentieth century. They did not seek state power. They did not even seek warfare with the central army. Rather, they sought to install themselves in village power, and to mobilize national and international support through an exceptionally able and remarkably successful political campaign. The government was forced to give in to important demands in the San Andrés agreement, which however the government has in fact refused to implement. Thirdly, the Mexican left seceded from the PRI and formed the Partido Revolucionario Democrático (PRD) under the leadership of the son of Cárdenas, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. In 1992, there was the first serious presidential election of the twentieth century. There were three parties in contention: the PRI, the PRD, and the Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN), a conservative party combining Catholic forces (upset with the anti-clericalism of the PRI) and business elements. PRI then seemed to be falling apart. Mexico seemed poised to have a more honest and social-democratic successor regime, one that would come to terms with the Zapatistas and hold the country together. It is generally believed that the PRD won that election, but that the PRI government stole it. An opportunity passed. Ever since, PRI has been maneuvering to survive, and by containing the PRD and limiting PAN, it seems likely to get a plurality in the 2000 elections. Today, in Chiapas, the PRI has mobilized "counterguerillas," and the army has been preparing to try to liquidate the Zapatistas by force. PRI has become a hollow political shell. Mexico is being internally polarized as a result of the change in economic policies. All it needs is a sharp economic turndown for the state to fall apart. What then will happen? It is anyone's guess. The military may try to assume power. There may be guerilla movements of a more old-fashioned kind in various provinces. Illegal immigration to the U.S. will expand notably and there will be no Mexican government to constrain it. The United States may begin to feel extremely uncomfortable with "anarchy" on its borders, and face the hard decision of whether or not to send troops in. The internal consequences of any kind of U.S. military action will be far greater than sending troops to the Persian Gulf or to Kosovo, or even to Vietnam. The world civil war could then come home to the United States. This is why Mexico is a time bomb. Immanuel Wallerstein [Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315. These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.] How to Stay on Top (15 October 1999)
The U.S. Senate has voted against ratifying the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
What is at issue? It's really very simple. Since 1945, the United States has had one unquestioned military advantage on the world scene: its clear superiority in nuclear weapons. There was a short moment in 1949 when it seemed this advantage was seriously challenged by the U.S.S.R., but the U.S. soon pulled ahead again. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, no other nuclear power even comes close to U.S. strength in this arena. What then is the problem for the United States? Again very simple. While the U.S. has more, stronger, better weapons than anyone else, the weapons that others have or could have are sufficiently powerful to wreak serious damage on the United States. What then can the United States do about this? There are only two possible courses of action. The U.S. can press forward to have ever stronger weapons (including weapons that would negate the effect of nuclear threats - the so-called nuclear shield). Or the U.S. can try to stop other countries from increasing the strength of their weapons, so as to retain the differential advantage the U.S. currently has. Of course, the U.S. can try both tactics, and for a long time it has. But the two tactics conflict with each other, and the U.S. has repeatedly been faced with the knowledge that it must choose. Those who choose the path of increasing U.S. nuclear strength have been mostly Republicans and are often called "hawks." Those who choose the path of interdicting the increase in the nuclear capacity of other countries have been mostly Democrats and are often called "doves." But hawks and doves is entirely the wrong image. Both groups wish to maintain U.S. military superiority. They are merely arguing about the most effective way to do this. If the objective is maintaining U.S. nuclear superiority, a good case can be made for both tactics. The case against the hawk tactic is that other countries will then continue to seek to increase their nuclear capacity and, even if they don't actually catch up with the U.S., they will be ever more capable of wreaking damage on the U.S., and of course on other, more local targets. The opponents to such tactics say it will increase the likelihood of accidents, deliberate local wars, and a possible world conflagration. The case against the dove tactic is that a test ban treaty is largely unenforceable, and of course there may be countries who won't even sign it. Therefore, it ties the hands of the U.S. military while allowing "rogue" states to pursue their efforts to develop nuclear weaponry. Both hawks and doves say about each other that the tactic the other proposes will end up by weakening the U.S. in the long run. They are probably both right. Let us review the history of this controversy. Initially, the U.S. was worried first of all about the Soviet Union, and secondarily about France and China. Of course, as we know, all three countries proceeded to engage in tests and create a nuclear arsenal. In point of fact, nothing much changed as a result thereof. Indeed, in the 1950's, some analysts began to say that what ensured that the "cold war" would not become a hot war was the fact that both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had a sufficient nuclear arsenal to wreak enormous damage on each other, and therefore neither side wished to start a war. This was called "mutual deterrence." What led the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to come to a detente in the 1960's and to sign a Test Ban Treaty was the reality of this stalemate (and therefore the folly of still more tests, which cost money and were toxic to the biosphere), and the wish by both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to keep further countries not entirely under the control of either side in the cold war (such as India) from developing a nuclear arsenal. Up to a point, this agreement seemed to work. In the 1980's, the two countries decided to go further along these lines, which is what culminated in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty under discussion now. But the world had changed. The cold war was over. Hence, the fear of the Soviet Union's nuclear capacity diminished considerably in the U.S. The end of the cold war also meant that the "bipartisan foreign policy" in the U.S., itself a product of the cold war, disappeared and was replaced by an open willingness to submit foreign policy issues to partisan discord and domestic political advantage. At the same time, the end of the cold war ended the ability of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to constrain politically a large number of countries that were partial or potential nuclear powers - India, Pakistan; Iran, Iraq; China; North Korea. Soon, it will be seen that the possibility may arise in Germany and Japan. One very interesting consequence of the Senate debate was an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times of Oct. 8, 1999. It was entitled "A Treaty We All Need," and was signed jointly by President Jacques Chirac of France, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Great Britain, and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany. There are three things to be noticed about this Op-Ed piece. It was probably the first major political declaration of the three leaders jointly. It was a direct intervention in U.S. politics, since it was an appeal to the U.S. Senate to ratify the treaty - an appeal, be it said, that seemed to persuade no one who was not already persuaded. But most significantly of all, it contained a publicly-stated threat. After noting that rejection would remove pressure from other heretofore non-ratifiers (e.g. Russia, China, India, Pakistan) to ratify, and that it would "encourage proliferators" - both standard arguments of proponents of the treaty, the three added that "rejection would also expose a fundamental divergence within NATO." NATO will not collapse tomorrow just because of this. But the political strains are getting greater daily, in every way. The United States is facing the limits of its power. If it ratifies such a treaty, it fears military decline. If it fails to ratify such a treaty, it may face an equal degree of military decline and a political setback as well. Immanuel Wallerstein [Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315. These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.] The Future of the University System (1 November 1999)
We tend to talk of the university as an institution whose origins are in medieval Europe. This is a nice myth. However, in reality, the medieval university ceased flourishing circa 1500 and petered out in the three centuries following that. What we have today was created virtually ab novo in the nineteenth century in western Europe and North America and diffused as an institution to the rest of the world, slowly for a century and spectacularly after 1945.
The modern university had several features which are distinctive. The faculty consists of full-time paid professionals, who are drawing the bulk of their income from their work in the university. The students are for the most part full-time and are pursuing specific degrees. The university is divided into faculties that are in turn divided into departments. Faculty and students tend to be assigned to particular departments, and departments are supposed to incarnate "disciplines," that is, circumscribed subject matter that is specialized and intellectually coherent. Universities are not only the major instrument of the reproduction of knowledge but also of the main locus of its production. This description of an ideal type needs to be historicized. As of 1750, what constitute today the "arts and sciences" were all taught within a single Faculty of Philosophy, in which professors held "chairs" - each of which had a specific title which was not necessarily that which would be held by a successor. It was about this time that there crystallized a deep split in the world of knowledge, to which we refer today as the "divorce" between science and philosophy, or as the "two cultures." It is important to understand how extraordinary this was. Nothing like it had previously existed in the Western world or indeed in any other part of the world. It was now being proclaimed that there were two entirely different modes of knowing. On the one hand, there was designated a so-called scientific mode in which one learned via empirical examination of reality and stated the results of one's examinations in generalizations as wide as the evidence permitted. And on the other hand there was designated a so-called humanistic mode in which one learned through hermeneutic empathy and in which generalizations were frowned upon. What resulted was a two-century-long epistemological feud, in which each side at the minimum scorned the other and at the maximum deprecated it as bearers of useless or irrelevant knowledge. Furthermore, whereas previously the search for the true and the search for the good and the beautiful were inseparable duties of the scholar, the two epistemologies divided up these tasks. Science assumed sole responsibility for the search for the true and the humanities were accorded sole rights over the good and the beautiful. The social sciences emerged as the domain of the study of social reality, a domain contested by the two epistemologies. The social sciences were torn apart by this so-called Methodenstreit between nomothetic and idiographic approaches to knowledge. Each side began to construct its citadels within the university system, creating appropriate faculties, within which were erected multiple departments representing supposed disciplines. Faculty and students were virtually imprisoned within these disciplinary boundaries, and a whole set of corollary institutions emerged to reinforce these boundaries: cursus of studies, degrees labeled by disciplines, journals bearing the names of the disciplines in which faculty from that discipline were expected to publish and only there, national and international congresses and associations of the disciplines, and even library classifications. The whole structure was in place as of 1945. By this time, science had won its prestige battle with the humanities, and was recognized as the superior form of knowledge, receiving social rewards not only in the form of honors but in the form of money. Science laid claim to being socially useful, indeed indispensable, in producing technology that fostered economic growth and permitted a better quality of life. However, as soon as this structure was finally in place, it began to suffer from overload. The separateness of the multiple disciplines began to be challenged as intellectually incorrect, as heuristically creating impediments to knowledge, and as socially harmful. Furthermore, the incredible expansion of the world university system in the period 1945-1970 created an enormous pressure for scholars to find niches in which to distinguish themselves. There began a process of massive "poaching" on neighboring "disciplines" in the search for such niches, and soon what had been clear separations between the "disciplines" as of 1945 became muddied arenas of overlap and confusion. In the meantime, the concept of two cultures began to be undermined from both ends of the epistemological divide. Within the natural sciences emerged the advocates of the sciences of complexity, who challenged Newtonian dynamics and all its corollaries: linearity, time-reversibility, determinism, equilibria. They began to argue for a science based on the opposite premises and talked of the "arrow of time" and of the "end of certainties." Within the humanities emerged the multiple advocates of cultural studies who challenged the traditional stance of the humanities with its emphasis on the importance of universal canons that were to be elaborated and transmitted. They insisted on the social context of all cultural production and reception, and therefore of its variability over time and space. What was happening is that both these knowledge movements were transforming the magnetic field of knowledge from one that was centrifugal to one that was centripetal. Their work has been pushing the world of knowledge towards overcoming the two cultures. At the same time, the world university system has been coming into a long-run financial squeeze. The global cost of tertiary education has become a major element of social allocation of wealth, and since 1970 the states and other donors of funds have been looking for ways to reduce the ever-expanding costs of tertiary education. One principal mechanism being proposed everywhere is what may be called the "high-school-ization" of the university system: fewer teachers for more students, simplification, standardization, and increased control of curricula, along with de-emphasis on research. This trend will probably not slow down over the next half century. This has begun to push leading scholars outside the university system - to institutes of advanced study, academies of science, private research structures, and work for large corporations. This tendency will probably accelerate in the next 25 years, stripping the university systems of some of their best scholars. More importantly, it may signal the end of the role of the university as the locus of the production of knowledge. This is neither necessarily good nor necessarily bad. But it does mean that, at a moment of fundamental epistemological reconstruction of the world of knowledge, the university may no longer be where the action is at. We will then need to wonder whether scholars will be sheltered in the new institutional settings from too great pressure to produce short-term advantage for their funders, whether the states or the private economic interests. The century ahead may be as great a reconstruction of the world of knowledge as was the period 1750-1850. Immanuel Wallerstein [Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315. These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.] South Korea and Nuclear Capacity (15 November 1999)
The New York Times, in its edition of Nov. 14, reveals a new concern of the United States government, that the government of the Republic of Korea is secretly proceeding to achieve nuclear weapons. The objective, the newspaper says, is that the government of South Korea wishes to strengthen its position politically both vis-a-vis North Korea AND vis-a-vis the United States.
We have here an interesting situation, emblematic of the geopolitics of the next quarter century. The governments of South Korea and the United States have been very closely allied in the world arena since 1945, and of course especially since the Korean War. So why would a close ally of the United States, and one still so dependent on the military umbrella of the United States, wish to strengthen itself vis-a-vis the United States? There could be many answers to such a question. One is obvious. All countries always wish to strengthen their positions in the geopolitical arena. But of course, to do so runs the risk of alienating a powerful ally and protector. Such a policy has costs. The costs must first appear to be worth it before a weaker country walks this path. Such a policy must necessarily be based on countering fears that are greater than that of displeasing the powerful patron. There are two fears that are clearly playing a role in the current situation. The first fear is that the United States might be ready to make some kind of political arrangement with the government of North Korea which the government of South Korea would feel would damage its interests. On the face of it, this may seem unlikely. A political arrangement with North Korea would be highly unpopular in the United States and subject to much debate in the U.S. Congress. Still, it is unquestionably true that U.S.-North Korean relations have moved in the last five years from unremitting hostility to cautious, if still hostile, negotiations. It is not inconceivable then that they might improve further. Given the dramatically bad economic situation of North Korea and its relative political isolation on the world scene (even from its erstwhile closest ally, China), what could have induced the United States to enter into these negotiations (however at arms lengths they are) with North Korea? The answer hits one in the eyes: the fear that the U.S. has of the potential nuclear capacity of the government of North Korea. Should it then be any wonder that the government of South Korea draws the obvious lesson that nuclear capacity is a crucial element in the current world geopolitical structure, and that if both North Korea and the United States have it but South Korea does not, South Korea's interests will become a secondary consideration for the other two. And it should then be equally obvious that, from the U.S. point of view, an enhanced potentiality in nuclear weaponry for South Korea is a danger they wish to avert. There is however a second fear, less immediate, that may underlie the thinking of the South Korean government. They may be looking ahead not five years but twenty-five years. Much is changing in East Asia, not merely in the economic arena but in the military and therefore the political arena. North Korea is not the only country to have been developing nuclear capacity. China of course has long had it, and in general China has been seeking to strengthen itself militarily in a serious way. And now, for the first time since 1945, there is serious discussion in Japan as to whether they should not renounce their constitutional abandonment of military power and perhaps obtain nuclear capacity themselves. No one doubts that Japan has the financial and research resources to achieve this rapidly, if they so decided. What is behind all of this increased emphasis on the separate military strength of each state in East Asia are two things: the anticipated decline of U.S. military capacity and involvement in the region; and the unstable political equilibrium of the region, which has three very knotty but very urgent problems to resolve: the reunification of Korea, the reunification of China, and the emotional reacceptance of the Japan of the twenty-first century by the Korea and the China of the twenty-first century. The government of South Korea does not intend to be left out of the negotiations on these questions and may well feel that nuclear capacity is what buys a seat at the table. (It should be noted that this logic applies to the government of Taiwan as well, and it may be surmised that they have been thinking of this possibility as well.) Will there be any other players in this geopolitical struggle in this crucial and powerful area of the world? Perhaps Russia, but first Russia would have to reconstruct itself as an integrated political system with a strong military force, and that is a question about which the future is still unclear. Perhaps the countries of Southeast Asia grouped together in ASEAN, but they may be too busy holding themselves together politically and maintaining their economic equilibrium to be able to spare the energy to become active players in the East Asian arena. In effect, the struggles in East Asia that will have so much impact on the kind of world we build in the next century will be at most spectator sports for the rest of the world, with the partial exception of the United States. The one thing of which we can be sure is that nuclear capacity will continue to proliferate, and very soon at an astonishing speed. We should all learn to live with this reality in our political psyches, for indeed we have no choice. It would be more useful to concentrate on the political solutions for the hard problems than to waste energy trying in vain to stem nuclear proliferation. The fact is that the dangers of interstate nuclear conflict are both lower and higher in East Asia than in any other region of the world today. They are lower for several reasons: there are only a few states involved; these states are large and relatively stable; the leadership of their regimes has not been volatile and has for the most part heretofore been acting with cold calculated rationality. On the other hand the dangers are far greater since, should conflict break out, there is no serious possibility that any outside force, including that of the United States, could in fact step in and impose its order on the situation. East Asia is not the Balkans. And if conflict were to break out, the level of destruction will indeed be awesome. What is striking about the present state of interstate relations in East Asia is that no one, no state, no statesman, is taking serious initiatives to initiate a process of real negotiations, multilateral negotiations among the states of the region. They all seem either too timid or too engrossed in their internal political dilemmas or too intimidated by the United States to launch such initiatives. But this may change. Immanuel Wallerstein [Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315. These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.] Physicians: Professionals, Businessmen, or Employees? (1 December 1999)
Once upon a time, physicians were free agents. They were among the last survivors of the old artisan class: persons who had a skill, ran their own solitary enterprise, and offered their services to the community at large. Up until a century ago, they were still largely trained by apprenticing themselves to a practicing physician. They were respected by their neighbors, and earned a reasonable living, but were seldom wealthy. They related to their patients as friends, counselors, and hopefully persons who could assist others in medical need. They traveled to sick person's homes and brought their implements and medicines with them. Their knowledge was in many ways limited but they knew something.
This no longer describes the physician, neither in North America or Europe, nor in Asia or Latin America. The first great change occurred about a century ago. Medical schools became modern teaching institutions and physicians were only recognized as such if they graduated from one of them. Their technical expertise grew. They became a closed guild and obtained a monopoly on the right to give serious health care. Hospitals became safer and more important in medicine and physicians sought to have access to them for their patients. The physician ceased to be a self-trained artisan and became a higher professional. Collective organizations of physicians came into existence to defend the interests of physicians. States began to control pharmaceuticals, and gave physicians the exclusive right to prescribe the more important drugs and medicines. A few physicians worked full time for hospitals or in armies, but most physicians continued to be independent practitioners, perhaps a little better paid. They still visited their patients. The world economic expansion after 1945 changed this pattern. The numbers of physicians expanded, but so did the demand, and so did more expensive equipment and pharmaceuticals. Wherever medical care remained private, physicians began to be businessmen. Their office structures expanded, as did their supporting staff. Their earning levels went up significantly. They ceased visiting patients. Patients visited them, and paid more. The politics of physicians went along with their evolving economic role. Physicians resisted government control, and when the political situation of the country led to national health services, they negotiated relative freedom and higher fees with governments. Even with national health services, physicians tended to retain absolute control of the work situation. They decided themselves on the diagnosis and the prognosis of health care. They used their medical judgment to make all the relevant medical decisions. There were two trends that upset the equilibrium. The first was the sharp expansion of demand. Populations everywhere demanded more health care, and more expensive health care, and some of it (when not all of it) was paid for by collective taxation. This actually made the practice of medicine more and more lucrative. The business side of health care began to escalate. If it was a profitable business, it could be more profitable from concentration, as was true of any other business. Concentration began to occur, in the form of physicians' collectives and of increased services in hospital contexts. Hospitals began to concentrate as chains. This then brought about the most recent transformation. The story of the United States is the most telling. The structure of health care in the United States has long been the most private, the one with least government involvement of any country in the world. The physicians were the relatively wealthiest in the world. They were also just about the most politically conservative. In the 1990's, the Clinton Administration sought to enact a very mild form of state-aided health insurance, just about the last country in the so-called developed world to seek to institutionalize a right to "universal" medical coverage. The physicians were strongly opposed to this idea. They claimed it would interfere in their relations with patients. At the same time, everyone was concerned with "rising health costs." A solution loomed on the horizon. Instead of national health insurance, the U.S. Congress encouraged the growth of s-called Health Maintenance Organizations (HMO's), which would be private and which would, it was claimed, by efficiency reduce health costs. HMO's were essentially private businesses, not necessarily run by physicians, which marketed health care. They became more and more concentrated. They had doctors attached to them. The HMO's discovered that one way to reduce costs was to control the health care that was dispensed by the physicians. All of a sudden, physicians discovered that they had ceased to be free professionals, and had ceased to control their work place. They were now employees, receiving in effect orders from managers. They also discovered that their incomes were reduced, since the fees they were paid amounted to less than the sum of the fees they used to earn by direct billing of patients. Employees are not professionals and they are not businessmen. They are employees. Last year, the American Medical Association, a notoriously politically conservative group, voted to encourage the unionization of physicians. In November of 1999, the U.S. government labor agency (NLRB) decided that hospital interns and residents had the legal right to unionize. And next year, will the physicians be on picket lines? This has already happened in many countries. The juggernaut of commodification has hit medical care and is rolling over the artisans. In the 1830's, it was linen-weavers; in the 1990's, it is physicians. The size of medical care structures grows larger and larger, and therefore of course more bureaucratic. De te fabula narratur. Immanuel Wallerstein [Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315. These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.] Seattle, or the Limits of the Globalization Drive (15 December 1999)
The decade of the 1990's has seen one long political drive to remove interstate barriers to the free flow of commodities and capital. This has been preached as the inevitable coming of globalization. The chief preachers have been the U.S. government, many of the largest transnational corporations, and a few interstate organizations. If preaching is to be effective, it must be translated into structural requirements which prevented the various states from succumbing to internal political pressures to protect their own enterprises or residents from the negative effects of such free flows.
Initially, the main instrument of pressure on states was the International Monetary Fund (IMF) which made its own financial assistance to governments conditional on their acceptance of such free flows (as well as on curbing various internal welfare state provisions). This instrument was at first effective, but the so-called Asian financial crisis brought the IMF itself under political pressure. What happened was that IMF requirements for aid during this crisis worsened the situation in a number of states and this had immediate political consequences, most spectacularly in Indonesia where the hitherto invincible Suharto regime was forced to abdicate. This led various conservative Western forces (the World Bank, Jeffrey Sachs. Henry Kissinger, George Schultz) to question the political wisdom of the IMF's policies. As a result, the IMF withdrew into the background. The locus of pressure shifted to the World Trade Organization (WTO). The U.S. government and the transnationals sought to get the WTO to draw up treaties that would make it impossible for signatory states to be protectionist. First, there was an attempt to adopt a Multilateral Accord on Investments (MAI), which would have tied the hands of the states in curbing the role of foreign investment in their states. Its adoption was quietly proceeding when a combination of uproar by social movements, opposition from some European governments (particularly France), and some governments of the South stopped the juggernaut. It was to overcome this double defeat that President Clinton hoped to overcome by getting the WTO to initiate at Seattle a new "Millennial Round" of negotiations on free flows. Seattle was chosen as a site because of the strong backing of multilaterals under the leadership of Bill Gates and because of the symbolic importance of the computer software industry. Seattle was to mark for Clinton a great achievement, a culmination of a series of free flows initiatives - most notably, the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) and the repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act. The latter was an internal U.S. constraint on the ability of banks to corner all financial activities, a constraint that had been enacted in 1932 because of the Depression. Clinton and the U.S. government tried their hardest. And after a week at Seattle, they had to admit total defeat, at least for the moment. No doubt, they may try again. But it was no small defeat. And it places in question the persistent arguments of all those, on the left and well as the right, who sing the tune of the overwhelming power of the U.S. government at the current time. Quite the opposite. Seattle showed that, even when the U.S. government throws all it has into a major international economic struggle, it runs into obstacles so great that it has to retreat. What were these obstacles? They were three. Let us start with the most important obstacle, and the one least mentioned in media analyses of the event. The U.S. position was strongly opposed by the European Union (EU) powers (including not least Great Britain) and Japan. Why was this? The answer is so simple that one is amazed that everyone is not talking about it. The economic interests of the United States are in direct opposition to those of both the EU and Japan. They have been in direct opposition for thirty years now and they will be even more in opposition during the next thirty. During the last thirty years, a period of global economic stagnation - and therefore of global high unemployment and primacy of financial speculation as a mode on ensuring profits - the Triad powers have been in a struggle to export unemployment to each other and to be the primary locus of speculative accumulation. Western Europe did best in the 1970's, Japan in the 1980's, and the United States in the 1990's. But the game goes on. And if the world-economy comes out of this stagnation into another productive expansion, the Triad will be in a competitive struggle to be the locus of the monopolies that will be the major beneficiaries of the expansion. Why have the media not noticed this? The media have concentrated on geopolitics to the detriment of observing the economic struggles. They have noticed that the EU and Japan have constantly given in to U.S. political pressure on questions such as the Gulf War, NATO expansion, and Kosovo. But they haven't noticed that, over the past thirty years, the EU and Japan have not given in on a single major economic issue (such as the Russian oil pipeline to western Europe, or the innumerable ways in which Japan limits access of U.S. corporations and banks to Japanese internal markets). And they weren't about to give in at Seattle about government subsidies to European farmers. The U.S. ran into a stone wall. If this wasn't bad enough, there were the street demonstrations which did indeed get much media coverage (often not all that accurate). It was not surprising that there were popular demonstrations. After all, free flows have been resulting in an ever greater economic polarization of real incomes throughout the world, including in the wealthy countries. What was surprising was the depth and breadth of the protests. This time, in addition to the usual groups of left-wing activists, there were two mainstream groups: the U.S. trade unions, and the middle class environmentalist movements. The trade unionists had a simple demand: an accord on minimal labor conditions worldwide as the price of free flows. And the environmentalists asked for an accord on minimal environmental protections enacted worldwide as the price of free flows. President Clinton could not afford to ignore such protesters, since labor and the environmentalists provide two of the indispensable pillars of a Democratic victory in the elections of 2000. So Clinton decided to swim with the tide, at least ostensibly, and he called upon the WTO to include provisions of the type the U.S. trade unions and environmentalist groups had demanded. And this Clinton demand ensured the firm revolt of the delegations of the South at Seattle. After all, in the present hyperpolarized world-economy, the one weapon the states of the South have in the fierce world market competition is that they can produce some items more cheaply than the countries of the North. And this is because their laborers are more poorly paid and because they spend less on environmental protection. If one removes these advantages, then what hope do they have for even keeping their heads above water? They know full well that there is not going to be some sort of worldwide economic redistribution, and they know that, at the moment, they are too weak to install serious protectionist barriers. So there it was. Clinton and the U.S. ran into a triple fierce opposition - from the other wealthy states (EU and Japan), from key supporters at home (trade unions and environmentalist groups), and from the governments of the South. Against two of these opponents, the U.S. might conceivably have prevailed. But all three together were too much. Will this lineup change significantly in the coming decade? This is doubtful. Immanuel Wallerstein [Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315. These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.] |