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Immanuel Wallerstein - 2000
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.
Century Past, Millennium Past (1 January 2000)
As we all celebrate the millennium, the media are filled with reflections about the past which are in fact statements about what is hoped for the future. Much of it is hype. Time magazine has decided that the man of the century is Albert Einstein, celebrating therewith the progress of scientific knowledge in this century. It is a safe choice, since Time can thus avoid a delicate choice between various political figures - they tell us the candidates were Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Mahatma Gandhi. But it is also a tribute to the magic of science, the God if there was one of the twentieth century.
The real question is not what we think in 2000 were the essential happenings of the 20th century or of the past millennium. The real question is what answer would be given in 2100 about these periods. I would bet on the following: The twentieth century will be remembered for three things - the hegemony of the United States; the political resurgence of the non-Western world; the world revolution of 1968. And the thousand years will be remembered for the coming into being of a capitalist world-economy, which may seem in 2100 to have been a less positive transformation than it does to many people in 2000, and which may even seem by 2100 to be classified as a phenomenon of the past. Henry Luce famously called the twentieth century "the American century." He said this circa 1945, and of course it was truest then. The year 1945 marked the triumphant end of a 70-80 struggle of the United States with Germany to assume the succession to British hegemony in the world-system. At its high point (1945-1960's), the United States could outproduce any country in the world, had the highest standard of living for its citizens, and obtained its way in the world political arena with ease. It was the strongest military power, and never had to prove it. It managed even to become the world center of cultural activity. Whether as model to emulate or object of fear and repulsion, its centrality in the world-system was universally recognized. The Cold War is not an exception to this, but rather its best confirmation. For the Cold War was a carefully choreographed program of symbolic rivalry hiding underlying collusive arrangements, and a recognition by the Soviet Union that they were unable to challenge the United States directly. To be sure, before 1945, the United States was on the ascendant but not yet hegemonic. And after 1970, the United States has been on the decline, but still as of 2000 the most powerful country in the world. So calling the twentieth century the American century is not mere rhetoric but an analytical statement devoid of moral content. To be sure, many propagandists wish to stop the story there. But this is not the whole story. It is also true that the entire century has been one of the resurgence of the non-Western world. We need to remember that the nineteenth century was the century of the final and total political submergence of the non-Western world, the culmination of a process that had begun in the late fifteenth century. In 1905, Japan defeated Russia. In the years leading up to the First World War, there were "modernizing" revolutions in Mexico, China, Afghanistan, Turkey/Ottoman Empire, Persia, and major political events in India, the Arab world, South Africa, the Philippines, and Cuba. The Russian revolutions (1905, and two in 1917 including and especially the Bolshevik revolution) are best appreciated as part of this upsurge against Western domination of the world. After 1917, the story goes on uninterrupted throughout the century. The meeting in Bandung in 1955 can be taken as the symbolic moment in which the non-Western world said quite loudly that it had to be taken seriously in world politics. That the non-Western world remains the oppressed two-thirds of the world-system even in 2000 does not mitigate the reality of this resurgence, which can be expected to grow ever stronger in the next hundred years, to the point where in 2100 it will be hard to believe how the world was organized in 1900. The great contradiction of the twentieth century is that U.S. hegemony and the resurgence of the non-Western world were coterminous. One would have thought that the first militated against the second, and vice versa. But not at all. To explain this, we have to come to the symbolic moment of 1968. What was behind U.S. hegemony and the resurgence of the non-Western world up to 1968 was the common belief of the protagonists of both happenings in the litany of hope embodied in the liberal centrist expectation that gradual, state-directed reformism led by experts would somehow bring about the end of economic and social polarities and achieve a democratic, more or less egalitarian world-system. But with the United States in unquestioned hegemonic status and the national liberation movements in power virtually everywhere in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, it began to be obvious in the 1960's that the expectations of the end of polarities was totally mistaken, that in fact polarization - both economic and social - was steadily increasing, and indeed would become spectacularly greater in the last 30 years of the century. Thus set in the great disillusionment - with the liberal centrist reformism of the world Establishment and with the self-styled revolutionary movements who put forward a similar program clothed in more radical rhetoric - and we have been living ever since the consequences of this great disillusionment. It has bred anti-statism. It has bred the defensive arming of "groups" against other "groups". It has bred fearfulness in place of hopefulness. It is the harbinger of the chaotic period into which we have entered. It is the great disillusionment symbolized and expanded by the world revolution of 1968 that puts into bold relief the great happening of the past thousand years, the creation of a capitalist world-economy. This creation, historically unexpected and defying the odds, is undoubtedly the most transformative human phenomenon since the invention of agriculture some 8-10,000 years ago. For it did two things which were fundamental. It made the globe into a single historical system. This did not happen immediately. But the logic of the capitalist system, its steady expansionism, the material rewards it offered for technological change, its destructiveness of alternative historical systems led to its incorporation of every remote corner of this planet into its operation. This did not fully happen until the middle of the nineteenth century. But the crucial thing to see is that nothing comparable had ever happened before, or could have happened before. The second great change was moral. The capitalist system is one is which the ceaseless accumulation of capital is not only possible, but legitimated and given social priority. Those who do not play by its rules lose out - economically, politically, and culturally. The genie, which was always there, was let out of the bottle. And all those who had kept it bottled up before then - religious leaders, rulers, and the masses of the world's population - stood by somewhat helplessly. Never did this genie seem so strong as in 2000. A few celebrate this; many deplore it; most people simply suffer it. The stability of this kind of system depends in large part on the passivity of most persons. This is where the disillusionment of 1968 and after comes in. Disillusion undoes passivity. So, in 2100, we may see the genie put back in the bottle. But we may not. We may see the planet more closely knit together than even now. But we may see quite the opposite. The real point is that we have entered a moment (a long 50-year moment) of historical choice. The outcome is totally uncertain. But the outcome can be affected by each of us, for the order that comes out of chaos is the result of moral and political struggle. It is on this that we should reflect as we enter the new millennium. 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.] Replacement Migration (15 January 2000)
The Population Division of the United Nations has just invented a new concept of which we shall be hearing a lot more in the coming decades: replacement migration. In the last decade at least, there has been a very concerned discussion in all the wealthy countries of the world - the United States and Canada, western Europe, and Japan - about the fact that the age distribution curve of the populations of these countries has changed radically in the last fifty years, and that persons over 65 are now a significant proportion of the national populations and that furthermore the percentage is growing steadily.
This fact has given rise to a public policy issue of very great importance to these populations. Persons 65 and older are normally retired from the work force, and for the majority a major part of their income comes from pension programs, both governmental and private. The public policy issue is usually phrased as follows: With a larger percentage of persons drawing from these pension funds and a smaller percentage of persons contributing to them currently, these programs seem destined to go bankrupt in 20-30 years. A number of solutions have been proposed. One is to start retirement at a later age. This idea is unpopular both with prospective retirees who do not wish to continue working longer and with young persons who are or would be unemployed as a result of the fact that persons would remain in their jobs for more years. Another solution is to reduce the amount paid out in pensions. This solution is also obviously unpopular with present and future retirees. A third solution is to have the employers pay higher sums into the funds. This solution is unpopular with the employers (including the states in their role as employers). So it has seemed that no solution commands enough political support anywhere to be adopted, and the systems slide towards bankruptcy. Why does this problem exist? Two reasons, essentially. One is that, as a result of better medical care and nutrition in the wealthy countries, persons are living longer than previously. And secondly, the rate of reproduction of the population in these states has been declining rapidly and seriously in the last fifty years, such that no wealthy country today comes even near replacing its population with new births. We live however in a world-economy that is highly polarized and getting more so. This means of course that the gap in income and living conditions between the wealthy and the poor countries is constantly growing. But so is the demographic gap. The poor countries have a far higher birth rate than the wealthy countries. These two facts are usually discussed as problems, problems for the poor countries. The world discourse on economic development is about how to raise the standard of living of the poor countries. And the world discourse on population control is about to limit the birth rates in the poor countries. For many persons, the solutions to these two problems are linked. A second major policy issue that is much discussed in the wealthy countries is the considerable increase in numbers of persons who seek to migrate there from the poor countries. In every wealthy country, there are large numbers of fearful people who feel that migrants tend to reduce the standard of living and the quality of life in the wealthy countries, and therefore should be kept out. They are thought to reduce the standard of living because they are said to take jobs away from persons in these countries, since they are willing to work for lower wages than the current residents. They are thought to reduce the quality of life because they are said to be responsible for increased crime and drug consumption rates. What has happened now is that the United Nations has discovered that not only are these migrants not primarily a negative influence on life in the wealthy countries but that they turn out surprisingly to be the somewhat magical solution for the problem of the prospective bankruptcy of the pension funds. It is all a function of maintaining the ratio of the working age population to the retired-age population. Migrants tend to be of working age (15-64 years). Such migrants can "replace" the persons not born in these countries because of low birthrates, and thereby raise the ratio. The UN report gives some striking figures for Italy and Germany. They estimate that the working age population of Italy will go down from 1995 to 2050 from 39 to 22 million. They estimate that the working age population of Germany will go down from 56 to 43 million. And of course the retired-age population will be going up steadily. In order the maintain the current numbers of persons of working age, Italy must take in 350,000 persons a year and Germany 500,000. However, the number of retired-age persons is constantly growing. If these countries wished to maintain a ratio of four working-age persons to one retired person (considered the desirable ratio), Italy and Germany would need to import many many more: 2.2 million persons per year between 1995 and 2050 for Italy and 3.4 million for Germany. So there it is. The wealthy countries must choose between allowing the standard of living of their retired-age persons (an ever-growing percentage of the whole) to go down considerably OR permitting what will probably seem at first an incredibly high number of annual migrants from the poor countries. Conclusion: it is difficult to become wealthy, and it is not so easy to continue to hold on to your wealth. One has to make certain sacrifices, like living in the same city as migrants from poor countries. Of course, this then opens the question, if the doors to migrants are flung wide open in order to save the pensions of the retirees in the wealthy countries, what are the political and social consequences of this - for the wealthy countries, for the poor countries, for the world-system as a whole? 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.] Indigenous Peoples, Populist Colonels, and Globalization (1 February 2000)
In the first month of the twenty-first century, a small drama was enacted in Ecuador, a country whose politics seem obscure to most people elsewhere in the world. This small drama however illustrated one of the key issues of the next fifty years. If the last half of the twentieth century was a period of so-called decolonization everywhere - that is, the end of colonial rule by European powers over non-European territories - it is now the turn of the "internally colonized" to make their voices heard.
What happened in Ecuador can be briefly summarized. In a country suffering from the highest inflation in Latin America and very high unemployment, the President, Jaime Mahaud, announced his solution - further integration into the world market via "dollarization," that is, pegging the Ecuadorian currency to the U.S. dollar. The cup of discontent overflowed. An organization representing the "indigenous peoples" of Ecuador (CONAIE) announced a march on the capital. After about a week, a large number of persons had arrived. A group of "populist colonels" in the armed forces supported them. Suddenly, a peaceful coup occurred. A junta of three persons assumed executive authority. The three-person junta was comprised of a populist colonel, the head of CONAIE, and a former Justice of the Supreme Court (representing presumably middle-class urban professionals). The junta thought it had the support of the army, at least their passive support. In about a day, the populist colonel was replaced by a less populist general. The U.S. sent envoys to make "suggestions" to this general, threatening the economic isolation of Ecuador. And one day later, he resigned, dissolved the junta, and convened the Congress not in order to reinstall the President (who had always refused to resign) but to make the Vice-President President. The populist colonel in the junta was arrested; the head of CONAIE and the justice of the Supreme Court went into hiding. The Vice-President, now President, announced that he would continue the economic policies against which CONAIE was protesting, and that he would seek to punish the army rebels. The U.S. government promptly recognized the new government. The head of CONAIE emerged from hiding briefly to announce that the army had betrayed CONAIE by breaking their solemn promises, that he would seek to negotiate with the new President, but that if, within 3-6 months, there were no changes, the situation might well deteriorate into civil war. A tempest in a teapot? Or a harbinger of things to come? How could a group of indigenous peoples overthrow a President? What are populist colonels? And why was the U.S. government so exercised about the events and so prompt to intervene? Let us start with the "indigenous peoples" - who are they? In Latin America, the answer is rather clear: this term refers primarily to populations called Indians who lived in the Americas before the European conquest. In a series of countries along the long Cordillera that runs from Mexico to Chile, such peoples are a large percentage of the population - almost always largely rural, very poor, and not allowed to participate actively in the political life of the countries. In Ecuador, such peoples are about 40-50% of the population. Ecuador is divided into three geographic zones: the Altiplano, where Quechua-speaking peoples live; the Amazonian region, with other peoples; and the Coast which has relatively few Indians but a Black population of ex-slaves. CONAIE had been able, over the past decade, to build a fairly strong organization with strength in all three zones, even if their greatest strength was in the Altiplano. They had been involved in local elections, and had been beginning to win some of them. Ecuador was one of four Andean countries, which have all had different forms of popular revolt in recent years. Colombia has been the scene of a almost 30-year long civil war, in which the rebels (FARC) have been waging a relatively classic insurrection and now control a good portion of the country. Peru was the scene of a civil war, led primarily by a less "classic" organization, using far more radical tactics than FARC - Sendero Luminoso. This organization has been largely suppressed by the Peruvian army after a ruthless campaign by President Fujimori. Venezuela was for a long time the most "parliamentary" of the four countries. Its politics were a battle between two centrist parties, one of Christian Democratic coloration and one claiming a Social-Democratic past. A few years ago, a revolt of a populist colonel was suppressed. Last year, this populist colonel, Hugo Chávez, swept the elections and moved quickly to suspend all the traditional structures, using an anti-intellectual rhetoric, and replacing them with a new Constitution and new structures, and won overwhelming popular support in a referendum (to the dismay not only of the middle classes but of the traditional left intellectuals). Ecuador had been the quiet spot, relatively speaking. It is quiet no longer. One can see why the U.S. government was so exercised. After a long struggle, Peru may be back in line for the moment, but in Colombia the government is in a shaky position, and in Venezuela, a populist colonel of uncertain trajectory is solidly in power. The U.S. obviously felt that an Ecuadorian junta could only weaken the U.S. position throughout the region. And the populist colonels, who are they? In Latin America, as in many parts of the world, the army is a means of upward social mobility. Many of the officers, from lieutenants to colonels, are from popular backgrounds and have not yet cut their ties to them. But such persons seldom make general. Generals tend to come from more oligarchic backgrounds. So every once in a while, these colonels (or lieutenants) make the leap to become "revolutionary." They are not reliably so, as CONAIE found out, but they can cause trouble, as the U.S. well knows. Some of the Ecuadorian colonels have now taken refuge in Venezuela. But the most serious problem was that the "indigenous peoples" were so well organized. They were the real threat. They demanded "more, sir", like David Copperfield. And they were quite clear that "globalization" was making their demands less, not more, possible. CONAIE had learned well from their brothers elsewhere - the Mayans who had been so brutally suppressed in long wars in Guatemala and El Salvador, the Chiapas Indians who have been using such intelligent tactics in their long struggle with the Mexican government (and who were denounced, just this week, by President Zedillo as persons with whom one couldn't negotiate). CONAIE knew that it couldn't undertake itself an armed rebellion - not yet, at least. They needed support, and turned to the army. They have been burned. They will try again. And they are being watched by others. Spokespersons for the Mapuche Indians of northern Chile said that the events of Ecuador was "a great experience from which we must all learn." And in Guatemala, the Defensoría Maya warned the government that they were tired of the systematic oppression and were going to take a lesson from what happened in Ecuador "in their untiring struggle...to end poverty, discrimination, and corruption." Will anyone listen to such words? Probably not, but then the "indigenous peoples" will simply continue to organize, and perhaps soon we may have more surprises like that of Ecuador. While this was happening, at the other end of the world, in India, President K.R. Narayanan made a nationwide television address on the eve of the 50th Anniversary of India as a constitutional republic. The President is the first "untouchable" (India's equivalent of Ecuador's "Indians") to serve in this ceremonial post. It is a post without power, but it is a symbol, and it was thought symbolic to have elected an untouchable. What did he say? "One-half of our society guzzles aerated beverages while the other has to make do with palmfuls of muddied water....Our giant factories rise from out of squalor; our satellites shoot up from the midst of the hovels of the poor." His conclusion? "Beware the fury of the patient and long-suffering people." 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 Head of the IMF: A Secret Radical? (15 February 2000)
Sometimes, when important persons take leave of their public life, they feel the need to make a bow to historical truth and seek to be remembered for more virtuous analysis than they normally had made earlier. This was the case when the last military man to be a president of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower, gave his farewell address in 1961. In that speech, he warned against the dangers that a "military-industrial complex" was coming to control the decisions of the U.S. government. This has been a theme ever since of the U.S. left but it has not been a theme frequently repeated by subsequent Republican politicians.
The story may turn out to be similar with the "farewell speech" of Michel Camdessus, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). On Feb. 13, 2000, the day before he was to leave office after 13 years (the longest term of any Managing Director), Camdessus addressed the Tenth United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in Bangkok. He said some very radical things. He started by noting what he called the paradox of the present world economic situation: "promise - unprecedented prospects in certain fields - but financial instability and 'exclusion,' the so cruel situation of the poorest and the anxieties of so many in the world." He said we must recognize that "there are serious reasons for this anxiety." He called on everyone to "recognize that poverty is the 'ultimate threat' to stability in a globalizing world." After all the speeches we have had from the IMF and its ideological consorts about the primacy of growth as an economic objective, Camdessus now tells us: "It is recognized that the market can have major failures, that growth alone is not enough, or can even be destructive of the natural environment or precious social goods and cultural values. Only the pursuit of high-quality growth is worth the effort." Camdessus italicized "high-quality." And he proceeded to define this term in language one usually hears from the critics of the IMF: "growth that can be sustained over time without causing...imbalance; growth that has the human person at its center...; growth...based on a continuous effort for more equity, poverty alleviation, and empowerment of poor people; and growth that promotes protection of the environment, and respect for national cultural values." And from this point, Camdessus moves on to virtual populism: "Popular support for stabilization and reform cannot be counted upon, unless the whole population. including the poorest - and by the poorest I mean those that not only are out of the loop, but even more are unable to contribute their experience - is able to participate in the formulation of the policies and, of course, in the benefits from those policies." Camdessus attributes the anxiety that is widespread to the fact that globalization "has not yet demonstrated that it is concerned enough, or capable of overcoming the great concern of our times." And that concern, he says, is poverty. As recently as the latest Davos conference, we were being assured that a rising tide raises all ships, and that globalization would prove of benefit to everyone. But no, says our secret radical, the Managing Director of the IMF, "the widening gaps between rich and poor within nations, and the gulf between the most affluent and most impoverished nations, are morally outrageous, economically wasteful, and potentially socially explosive." Widening gaps? There are those of us who have argued this for a long time, but only now have we had the assent of the IMF, at least the rhetorical assent. Perhaps the gaps have grown to be so wide and so obvious they can no longer be hidden from the blindest. Furthermore, says Camdessus, "poverty is no longer inevitable, if it ever has been..." What then should we do? Camdessus recommends a five-point program for the poor countries. Points two to four are standard gospel: sound macroeconomic policies, promotion of the free market, and a web of laws that support the functioning of markets. But see point number one: "country-driven strategies that make poverty alleviation the centerpiece of economic policy...." And point five: "well-targeted and cost-effective social safety nets, a shift in public spending towards basic social services in education and health care, and efforts to provide income-earning opportunities for the poor." And what does he recommend for the "development partners" of the poor countries? First of all, "unrestricted market access for all exports from the poorest countries, including the HIPCs [heavily-indebted poor countries]." And "backing up all the pledges to reduce poverty with financial support." The excuse of "aid fatigue," Camdessus says, "is not credible." And one more surprising suggestion: "restraining the sales of military equipment to sensitive regions; abolishing the provision of export credit for military purposes." To reassure us that he hasn't yet joined the ranks of the demonstrators in Seattle, Camdessus does end with a fairly standard list of four broad areas in which multilateralism should be enhanced: liberalization of trade, liberalization of payments, liberalization of capital movements, and (to guarantee the first three) the strengthening of the international financial architecture. However, even there, as an example of new architecture, he proposes replacing the G7-G8 Summit with a meeting of about 30 countries, all those "who have Executive Directors on the Boards of either the IMF or the World Bank," because this would be "a representative grouping of world leaders with unquestionable legitimacy." So obviously he feels that the G7-G8 does not have "unquestionable legitimacy." What are we to make of this speech, which will not pass unnoticed? I think we should not persuade ourselves that it means that the leaders of world capitalism have suddenly become egalitarians. Rather, we should view it as meaning that the intelligent among them are genuinely worried. But worried about what? About two things essentially: The first is a financial crash. In an interview following the speech, Camdessus said: "I am ringing the alarm bell to our member countries to tell them that we run the risk of a new financial crisis." He particularly pointed to the U.S. economy, whose "low rate of savings, rapidly growing current-account deficit and high stock prices were cause for concern." And there are "also worrying vulnerabilities in other parts of the world." And worst of all, all this, he says, is "combined with complacency." The second cause for worry is the widespread popular rejection of so-called globalization. It is this worry that is most fundamental. Camdessus furthermore is not alone. During the so-called Asian financial crisis of just a few years ago, the policies of the IMF itself were strongly criticized by senior world conservative figures like Henry Kissinger and Jeffrey Sachs precisely because the latter felt that IMF policies were neglecting the social consequences of its economic policies and would lead to populist disturbances, as they said it had already in Indonesia. Perhaps Camdessus was listening. The point is that when those in power are worried, there is usually something to worry about, for them. Camdessus is worried. 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 US and China: Enemies or Allies? (1 March 2000)
The United States and China have had a tumultuous relationship in the modern world. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, the young U.S. republic launched an early and important China trade, and U.S. Protestants sent their most competent missionaries to preach the faith in China. Sun Yat-Sen studied in the United States. And during the Second World War, the U.S. was the principal outside military support for China in their resistance to Japanese overrule. It was at U.S. insistence that China was included as one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council in 1945.
But when the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, the friendship seemed to disappear. The U.S. threw its protective fleet around Chiang Kai-Shek's Kuomintang which had retreated to Taiwan. And Chinese volunteers supported the North Koreans in the war that began in 1950. In the United States, the "China question" had begun: "Who lost China?" was the theme of those Americans who actively urged military action against the Communist regime. And in China, the United States was termed the leading imperialist power in the world as well as a "paper tiger." Cold war rhetoric between the U.S. and China exceeded in decibels even U.S.-Soviet Union rhetoric. Then things changed. China broke decisively its alliance with the Soviet Union. The Chinese began to engage in "ping pong diplomacy" with the United States. And suddenly, to the world's surprise, there was Richard Nixon in China sipping tea with Mao Zedong. Most commentators gave this a simple geopolitical explanation. Both powers wished to outflank the Soviet Union, which each regarded as the primary opponent, at least in the short run. And it was of course only Nixon and Mao, with their reputation as hardliners, that could have brought about such a dramatic reversal of rhetoric. What started as merely sipping tea together developed into a significant change in the form and degree of participation of China in the world-economy - ever greater, ever more open, ever more profit-oriented. This is what the United States seemed to want, and this is what China seemed to want. Neither Tienanmen nor the collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to slow down the pace of Chinese economic involvement in world trade or of improved political relations with the United States - until a few years ago. There was no single event that led to questioning this trajectory. Still, once again there seemed to be voices on both sides reviving the old rhetoric. The U.S. thought China was becoming too threatening about Taiwan. China did not in the least appreciate that the U.S. Air Force bombed its embassy in Belgrade. The U.S. said it was an accident, but the Chinese manifestly did not believe it. I have discovered that many people are returning to their question of more than a quarter century ago: will there be war between the U.S. and China, and when? The very question seems to me to miss the point of what is happening. Let us review the putative "alliance" between the two powers that was begun in the 1970's. It is certainly not based on formal ideological affinity. Indeed, it involves sweeping under the carpet the official ideological differences. The basis of the relationship has been primarily economic, what each side as its economic interests of the next 20-30 years, if not longer. What does the United States want of China? The primary economic problem of the United States for the next 20-30 years is how to maintain its central role as a locus of capital accumulation in a "triadic" world-economy in which it is engaged in very keen competition with western Europe and Japan. It will not be easy. When we enter the next major expansion of the capitalist world-economy (a new Kondratieff A-phase), it is by no means certain that the U.S. will be able to corner more quasi-monopolies of the new leading industries than its rivals. And since a triadic competition usually reduces to a dyad, it is possible to foresee a U.S.-Japan economic arrangement in opposition to western Europe. If this occurs, then this node will obviously need four things: an enlarged zone of capital investment, an enlarged zone of low-cost production, an enlarged consumer market for the new leading industries, and supplementary military strength. China offers all four in one fell swoop. It seems elementary that the U.S. would therefore give priority to including China in some zonal arrangement. This will be of course in Japan's interest as well, if not ever more. But given Japan's legacy of Chinese resentment, the U.S. must necessarily take the political lead in trying to bring this about. Now what are China's interests in the next 20-30 years? China has learned from its history that it can only be respected in the world if it is a unified state. The underlying political strength of the Chinese Communist Party resides in the fact that it restored such unification in 1949 after a long period of disintegration. Priority number one for the Chinese leadership is thus simply holding the country together. This explains both the firm political hand internally and the emphasis the Chinese government places on reintegrating Taiwan into the Chinese state. This also explains the effort and expenditure they are putting into building a powerful and modern armed forces. It is not that Beijing wishes to expand its zone of sovereignty. Rather it wishes to expand its zone of suzerainty, to revive an old expression long used in accounts of Chinese empires. The goal of political strength is pursued primarily in order to achieve economic strength. The Chinese leadership understands quite well how the capitalist world-economy works. They know that there are different ways in which a weak economic zone can be integrated into the commodity chains of the world-economy. The Chinese can be peripheral exporters who keep very little of the surplus-value they create. And this is precisely their great fear about the future. Or they can put in place various political mechanisms which will enable them to get and keep a larger slice of the world economic pie. This is their middle-run objective. So what is the noise of the last few years, the renewed rattling of swords, the heightened rhetoric of conflict? In a word, it is bargaining. The United States wants China to "open up" more and thereby be included in the World Trade Organization (WTO). China wants to get into the WTO, but on terms that will protect some of its nascent competitive industries. And this debate on economic terms takes place in multiple arenas and under many guises. Naval maneuvers in the China Sea or U.S. congressmen berating the China's record on human rights may be seen as part of the bargaining. Observe two things. China clearly seeks to maintain and expand ties with a number of middle-range powers around the world that are seeking to improve their nuclear arsenal. This annoys the United States, and China has been careful each time to go so far, and no further, or better put, to go so fast, and no faster. It fights U.S. resolutions in the Security Council, but in the end it abstains and does not veto them. And on the other hand, look at the current presidential race in the United States. As of now, there are four serious candidates: Bush and McCain as the possible Republican candidates, Gore and Bradley as the Democratic. These four candidates seek to differentiate themselves from each other. There is only one major geopolitical issue on which there seems to be tacit agreement - maintaining the approach to China that has been pursued by every U.S. president from Nixon to Clinton. So no war, only hard bargaining. 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 Austrian Extreme Right: Why the Fuss? (15 March 2000)
Austria is a small country in the center of Europe, wealthy but not at all powerful today either politically or militarily. It has been one of the most placid countries in the post-1945 world. All of a sudden, it is in the world headlines. The other 14 members of the European Union have officially suspended bilateral relations with its government. Many Austrians are in turn upset with the other Europeans. On the other hand, every Thursday evening, there is a protest march in Vienna against the government under the slogan of Widerstand (resistance). And, for the first time since 1945, Austrians are discussing openly their role during the Second World War. What has happened?
The facts are quite straightforward. In the last Austrian elections, on Oct. 3, 1999, an extreme right party, the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ), obtained 26.9% of the vote, the largest vote by far of any such party in any west European election since 1945. This party's platform was primarily racist and anti-immigrant, also anti-European, combined with a strong free enterprise line. The party actually came in second in the vote, nosing out the mainline conservative, Christian Democratic party, the ÖVP, by a few hundred votes. This was a shock to Austrians, and a shock to other west Europeans. No one was quite sure how to react at first. The shock to Austrians was that the comfortable political system they had put into place was shaken. For several decades now, the two mainline parties, the center-left Social Democrats, and the center-right Christian Democrats, had formed successive "national governments," obtaining until the early 1990's 90% of the vote, and dividing up the spoils in a system Austrians called the Proporz (which means quotas for each of the two mainline parties in all political and civil service posts). It seems Austrians had gotten tired of this cozy system, and in 1999, they brought it to an end. In a book brought out by the leaders of the Widerstand in the last month, the editor poses the problem thus: "Now we see finally that, in Austria, one of the richest countries in the world, what governs is hate." Austria is in some ways a very particular west European country in its relation to Nazism and Hitler. Germany has come to accept that it bears a moral responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi period. And in the last few years, various Allied countries, such as France and the Netherlands, have begun to admit that they share some of the guilt both because they had not prevented the rise of Hitler and even more because some of their citizens had joined in the Nazi crimes. Only Austria has steadfastly refused all guilt. Austria was incorporated into the Third Reich in 1938 in what was called an Anschluss. No doubt Austrians varied in their wish for this incorporation. But when Hitler marched into Vienna, the crowds cheered very loudly, and Austrians became Germans without any legal distinction, fully sharing the deeds and misdeeds of the Hitler regime. After the war, Austria was occupied by the four powers - the U.S., the U.S.S.R., Great Britain, and France - just like Germany, but as a separate state. In 1955, the four occupying powers signed a treaty with Austria, the so-called Belvedere Treaty, withdrawing their troops and guaranteeing Austrian independence on the basis of its military neutrality. At the request of the Austrians, the first clause of this treaty calls Austria "the first victim" of Nazism. This is a most dubious assessment of reality, but it has been the governing myth of Austrian politics ever since, and has prevented any discussion whatsoever within Austria of Nazism or of Austria's role in the Nazi regime. This has been a tabu subject, and there exists today probably more nostalgia for Nazi themes in Austria than in Germany. Jörg Haider, the leader of the FPÖ, has been adept at constant and clever allusions to this Nazi heritage, a source no doubt of the attractiveness of his party. His other theme has been the danger of migrants - from southern Europe, and now from east-central Europe. Despite this fact, after the 1999 elections, the negotiations between the mainline parties to form a new national government failed, and the Christian Democrats decided to form a coalition with the extreme right party. As soon as this happened, the other members of the European Union decided on the boycott of bilateral relations. Why did they react so strongly? The problem of the growing strength of the extreme right in European countries exists in most of them. Up to now, however, the maximum that any such party has received in the polls has been 15%, and in no country have they been accepted into the government. (Such a party did enter the previous Italian government, but only after having renounced its neo-fascist past before the elections.) What Austria did, what the Austrian mainline conservatives did, was cross a line that western Europe had drawn in the sand since 1945, the moral and political isolation of parties linked in any way to fascism. And the west Europeans governments were afraid not to react strongly. Had they not done so, they could not continue to refuse to make similar alliances with extreme right parties in their own countries. At this point, in Austria, there were two kinds of reactions. Many persons who were not necessarily partisans of the new government, felt that the boycott was illegitimate, and said that it was hypocritical, since extreme right parties existed in all the other countries as well. They refused to acknowledge that Austria had crossed a line, just as they refused to acknowledge that Austria had anything to apologize for during the Nazi period. But there were others, the Widerstand, who were saying: at last, it's out in the open. We must discuss the past, and we must fight racism in the present. Of course, the Austrians talking of hypocrisy are right in one sense. Austria is not a unique case. Racism is rampant in all of western Europe, as in North America and indeed throughout the world-system. Racism is a constitutive element of the capitalist world-economy. Nazism and the Final Solution represent only the ultimate consequence of the rhetoric, but they also represent an ultimate consequence that was never supposed to happen. The point of racism has always been to subordinate large groups of people, to keep them as cheap labor and political scapegoats. Wiping them out defies the logic of the capitalist system. The Nazi Final Solution was certainly not the first time large groups of people had been wiped out. But it was the first time this was done so publicly, so proudly, and with such avowed intent. So Nazism had crossed a line, and the rest of the world-system combated it, eventually. Austria raises the fear that the demon might be re-emerging. But it makes no sense to discuss the current situation in Austria without talking about the centrality of racism to our existing world-system. Today, in Europe, anti-Semitism may be a rhetorical tabu, as is anti-Catholicism in Protestant countries. But racism that refers to Muslims, to Blacks and Asians, to east Europeans, is openly practiced, and not only in Austria. So, in one sense, the Austrians are right. There is a good deal of hypocrisy in what the west Europeans have been saying. Indeed there is one subtext in the European boycott which is perhaps the worst. The west Europeans seem to be saying that ethnic hatreds may be normal in eastern Europe, and in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, but are unthinkable in western Europe, because western Europe is "too civilized" for ethnic hatreds. Austria had the misfortune of revealing this mythical self-description of western Europe for what it is, a dangerous self-deception. The Austrian imbroglio is just the beginning of a major self-reevaluation of European countries. In this sense, it has its positive side. In the meantime, the truly healthy forces are still weaker, in Austria and elsewhere in western Europe, than one would hope they were. 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.] What are Communist Parties Today? (1 April 2000)
The French Communist Party has just held an historic meeting in which it renewed its leadership. It was considered a great victory for Robert Hue, the current Secretary-General, who is generally considered someone who has wanted to expunge the last traces of a Stalinist past from the party, especially in the forms of internal organization of the party. He was opposed by a small group of "orthodox" Communists, who said that he was trying to "social-democratize" the party. Hue denied this, saying that the French Communist Party would not simply be a somewhat more left-wing social-democratic party but would stand for something distinctive.
It is not however clear to most observers, and perhaps not to Hue himself, what this something distinctive is. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there are no longer too many parties around the world that call themselves Communist parties. There remain such parties, of course, in the one-party states where they still govern, notably China, Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba. And while there are differences among these parties, they still more or less resemble the version the whole world knew before 1989. But in the east/central European states as well as in the states that constituted the U.S.S.R., almost all the ex-Communist parties have changed their names, and now have programs that seem "social-democratic" to many observers. For example, they almost all insist that they are in favor of permitting (indeed encouraging) private enterprise in their countries. The Russian Communist Party did retain the name, but their program too does not seem very "Leninist." The Czech party too refused to go along with the change in name, and has remained perhaps the most "orthodox" of these parties. Outside the countries that constituted the ex-socialist bloc, there are only a few countries in which Communist parties were (and to some extent still are) politically important. The largest such party was in Italy, and it has gone avowedly social-democratic. The group that refused to go along calls itself Refondazione Comunista. But it should be noted that this group includes many of the historically strongest anti-Stalinists. In South Africa, the Communist Party holds on to the name. It is a member of the government, whose world market policies are in the hands of Communist ministers, and these ministers are not exactly waving the banner of the nationalization of basic industries. So what do such parties stand for? First, let us note that they continue to get important percentages of the votes. In a number of the countries of east/central Europe and the former U.S.S.R., they have won elections and formed governments, without in any way trying then to reinstitute the pre-1989 structures, at least in most cases. Quite the contrary! The ex-Communist, still "socialist" President of Poland spoke strongly in favor of joining NATO, for example. In France and Italy, the parties get under 10% of the votes, but still enough to be taken into consideration in the formation of coalitions. And in South Africa, the historic alliance between the African National Congress (the clearly dominant party) and the South African Communist Party remains a political reality. If one asks why such Communist or ex-Communist parties get the votes they do, it seems clear that, in part, it is nostalgia on the part of a group of older persons and, probably in far larger part, because they represent a "social" protest vote against the worst ravages of the world capitalist system. These parties speak for the defense of the rights of workers and poor persons. But then so do social-democratic parties of more traditional lineage, for the most part. So even does the Democratic Party in the United States. So is there a future for such Communist parties? Or are they destined to merge into an enlarged social-democratic party, as many believe (and some fear) will happen in France in the next decade or so? Of course, the same question could be asked of the Green parties around the world, and especially in western Europe. What we are really asking about is the future of the world left in organized form. It seems clear that there are a range of positions in the world "left" parties, going from those who want to become centrist quite officially (Blair's Third Way) and those who wish to cut their ties with groups that even smell of "centrism," with a whole series of in-between positions as well as persons who insist on "ecumenicism." Furthermore, there are differences as to what base should be considered essential politically: the less well off, the workers, the "minority" ethnic groups, the women, or some combination of these. And once again, there are arguments between those who insist on making priorities among these groups and those who wish to be "ecumenical." We may not know for another decade how these debates, which are now quite active everywhere, will sort out. And therefore we may not know for another decade whether there is, or can be, any role for parties that call themselves "Communist" distinctive from that played by parties that eschew this name. At the present time, to be a Communist is almost a matter of historical sentiment, the embrace of a tradition of combat. And this embrace is exactly the reason why others refuse the appellation, because they associate it with Stalinist terror and Leninist centralized party structures. What being or not being a Communist today does not indicate is a particular political program, either in the short run or even in the long run. It may once again mean that, although for the moment there are no signs of it. But if being a Communist party does not come to represent more than a memory of the past (positive or negative), then there will not be much point to it. 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.] Vladimir, Tsar of all the Russias? (15 April 2000)
One year ago, Vladimir Putin was a name few people knew. Today, he is the President of Russia, having been elected by an overwhelming vote. And everyone seems to be discussing what this means: will he or will he not continue the so-called transition from Communism to a regime oriented to a free market, civil rights, and a representative, multiparty system? This is the wrong question.
The most obvious strength of Putin at the moment is that he is looking at the situation of Russia from a Russian point of view, unlike most of those who write about him. What has happened in Russia? The Communist regime, in existence for over 80 years, disintegrated totally in 1991. One reason was that it had lost popular legitimacy, and at the time only a minority of persons were actively unhappy about its collapse. Many more were genuinely hopeful that their situation and Russia's situation would improve as a result of the change. What is the net balance after nine years of Yeltsin in power? I ask this question, without imputing either praise or blame for Yeltsin or even suggesting that he was primarily responsible for this net balance. Four things have changed radically in the past decade. The first is that the U.S.S.R. no longer exists. That is, the fifteen constituent republics of the old Soviet Union are now independent states. The three Baltic states consider Russia a dangerous neighbor with whom they must deal, but in no sense a partner in anything. The other former Soviet republics have maintained somewhat more ambiguous relations with Russia, the details of which vary considerably. Up to a point, Russia continues to have considerable influence in Belorussia and the five states of Central Asia, and to a lesser degree in the Ukraine, Moldavia, and the three Caucasian republics. As for the former satellites in east/central Europe, they hold Russia at a distance, even formerly very loyal Bulgaria. They all believe rather that their future is linked to their putative ties to western Europe. The second big change is the state of the armed forces. The Russian armed forces, once at least a match for those of the United States, seem to be limping very badly. While they may still be second in strength worldwide after the United States, it is now a distant second. Their morale is low, their technical capacity diminished, and their military hardware falling into disarray. Furthermore, they no longer have the solid infrastructure of a strong scientific establishment to enable them to keep up technologically with the United States, either on earth or in space. The third big change is that of the economic institutions. Almost all of the state structures that undergirded the U.S.S.R. have been dismantled - sold off or rusting. They have been replaced by a mafia capitalism par excellence. The net result has been great economic uncertainty, the emergence of a very thin stratum of extremely wealthy persons who keep their money in Cyprus and own dachas on the Riviera. For most Russians, the consequence has either been extremely negative (especially for retired persons) or about the same. In the first years after 1991, most persons thought this was a temporary situation. Now, many are not so sure. And the fourth big change is the strength of the state machinery. The Communist regime was extremely strong, far too strong according to many persons. Its word was law, at least most of the time. Its repressive machinery was very efficient and, even after the terror of the Stalinist era was ended, the power of the state remained unchecked. Today, we edging towards the other extreme. Non-Russian ethnic areas threaten secession. Chechnya is the most obvious and the most violent case. But even ethnically Russian areas are now organized into de facto autonomous "baronies," whose leaders do more or less what they want and not what the central government wants. The central government cannot collect serious taxes, which of course weakens it still more. And at the individual level, the fears individuals had of a repressive state have been replaced by the insecurities individuals necessarily have in a somewhat anarchic state. Vladimir Putin is called upon to do something about all four changes: restore the international prestige and strength of Russia; reinvigorate the armed forces so that the world takes them very seriously again; establish an appropriate niche for Russia in the world-economy and improve the standard of living; and reestablish internal order and a reasonably strong central state. The list is formidable. What are his priorities? These are questions not so different from those faced by Russian tsars in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Western commentators are hoping (against hope?) that Tsar Vladimir will be a new Peter the Great - Westernizing, modernizing, and relatively peaceful. Or perhaps they are hoping for Catherine the Great - enlightened despot, reorganizer of the bureaucracy, exporter of raw materials to Great Britain. I suspect that, if he is thinking in such analogies, Putin sees his problems more as those of Boris Goudonov or of Ivan the Terrible. In 1992, in the U.S. Presidential elections that pitted the incumbent George Bush against Bill Clinton, Clinton's advisor, James Carville, is said to have launched the slogan "It's the economy, stupid." What he meant is that Bush was ignoring the fact that the U.S. economy was in bad shape, and that the economy was what the U.S. voters cared about most. As we know, and probably following this advice, Clinton won the election. In Russia, in 2000, the situation is very different. To Western commentators, one should say about Russia, "it's NOT the economy, stupid." The economy may be of primary concern to the Western world. But Putin, and probably the Russian people, do not think there is too much they can do about it in the next 10-20 years. They have more urgent problems. The main concern of Tsar Vladimir is to hold the country together and make of the Kremlin once again the real center of political decisions. This will not be easy. Putin started off by conducting a vigorous, but so far not all that successful, military campaign in Chechnya. It is obvious that his electoral support derived largely from that. Shout as many people do about the violation of human rights by the Russians in Chechnya, the issue as most Russians see it is the survival of the Russian state. No doubt they are acting ruthlessly and without the least concern for human rights, and quite possibly their tactics may not achieve their objective, but there is no doubt about Putin's priority. He will continue to move against Chechnya, although the tactics may possibly change. And more importantly, he will begin to move against the "baronies" in ethnically Russian areas. Here too one can predict his line will be a tough one, and one with an iron fist, if perhaps clothed in an occasional smile. But recreating a strong center is the single most important task for him. He may of course fail. More likely, he will succeed only partially. But try he will. The second task, linked to the first, will be the restoration of the strength of the armed forces. The problem is that he needs money to do this, and it is not clear where he will get this money. He will probably do it by squeezing the Russian population, as did Stalin and the tsars. But the squeeze will not be unpopular if he gets the results. Patriotic pride has served many a ruthless ruler. What he will not do too much about at first will be either foreign affairs or the economy. He knows well that, until he solves the first two problems, there is not too much he can do. So, if he is shrewd, and I think he is, he will try to hold these two arenas in neutral gear, neither moving forward nor backward, neither pleasing nor antagonizing the outsiders. Should he succeed in the first two tasks (a strong central state and a strong armed forces), then 10-20 years from now (he is still young), he can think again about foreign affairs and the economy. As for human rights, don't ask. 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 United States as Nuclear Champion (1 May 2000)
Somewhere back in ancient time, in the 1970's, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to reduce reciprocally their nuclear arsenals. At the time they were the two superpowers, and they thought it mutually advantageous to do this. It is not as though it had been easy to convince the hawks in the two camps that it was a good idea, but common sense finally prevailed on both sides.
In the 1980's Reagan had the wild idea that the United States should construct an impregnable missile defense shield. This proposal had two problems. It represented a violation of the nuclear agreement. And it seemed technically extremely difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. So Reagan's idea was not adopted. Then came the end of the Cold War. Russian nuclear capacity was diminished, but remained nonetheless significant. And nuclear proliferation continued to spread. Israel of course had been an unavowed nuclear power for a long time. So had South Africa, but South Africa renounced this capacity when the post-apartheid regime came to power. India and Pakistan had both been nuclear powers for some time as well, and publicly upgraded their capacity considerably in the 1990's. And the other "near-nuclear" powers all seemed to be maintaining their efforts to move forward, either immediately or potentially. Some were what the United States called "rogue states" - North Korea, Iraq, and Libya. Others were United States allies - South Korea, Japan, Germany, and perhaps Argentina. The U.S. government under Clinton tried to manage this situation in various ways - by bribing Russia and North Korea, by embargoing Iraq, by pleading publicly with India and Pakistan, and privately with Israel. And this policy worked up to a point. But the U.S. nuclear edge, although still enormous, seemed to be eroding slowly. So the Republican opposition in the U.S. revived the Reagan project, and has been pushing for it. And this time, the Democrats seemed less strong in their opposition than in the 1980's. The U.S. military seemed to want it, and they constitute a powerful lobby with great influence on the voters. Where we are at the moment is that Clinton is "considering" this possibility. In order to limit the political damage of such a unilateral revival of the nuclear arms race, the U.S. has been seeking an arrangement with Russia which would permit launching the nuclear missile defense shield project in a limited way in return for other concessions to Russian concerns. In this attempt, Clinton has just had two setbacks. On the one hand, Jesse Helms, speaking clearly for the Republican majority in the Senate, has announced that he would make sure that any agreement Clinton entered into with the Russians would not be ratified by the U.S. Senate. Helms has this power, and there will therefore be no such agreement. At the same time, the U.S. putative effort to create such a defense shield was unanimously, yes unanimously, disapproved at the United Nations conference on nuclear non-proliferation this past month. The unanimity included of course not only France but even Great Britain, the closes ally of the U.S. in world diplomacy. Aside from the fact that these two close allies of the U.S. think the project politically mad, it would also mean a relative diminution of their own nuclear capacity, since they would find it hard (or undesirable) financially to keep up. The U.S. would be surging ahead not only of "rogue states", and not only of Russia and China, but also of France and Great Britain. Clinton is completely boxed in. Isolated diplomatically to a degree never experienced in the last fifty years, and impotent domestically on this issue, nothing will be done this year. But after the elections? Obviously, it depends on the outcome of the Bush-Gore race. And who will win is not at all yet clear. Let us explore each possibility. If Gore wins, his position on these issues will not be very different from that of Clinton, and his constraints will probably be the same (unless miraculously there comes to be a Democratic majority in the Senate, which seems highly improbable). Can he come up with some clever new chess move which will improve the U.S. position in the nuclear game? Not impossible, but the chances are small. If Bush wins, the Republicans will have a big internal debate about the degree to which the U.S. can unilaterally ignore world opinion. Here too the outcome is uncertain. But it is likely that the U.S. will initiate something along the path of a nuclear defense shield. And if so, it is also likely that there will be diplomatic repercussions. One could predict for example that it might shake the whole NATO structure, and speed up immediately the construction of a European army independent of NATO. What seems almost certain is that neither a Gore policy nor a Bush policy is likely to slow down significantly nuclear proliferation. And the possible Bush policy might actually intensify the process. By 2010, we may have a world in which U.S. nuclear capacity is much more advanced, Western Europe much more unhappy with the U.S., and many more avowed and secret nuclear powers in the world. East Asia may become an area of intensive nuclear armaments (over and above whatever the U.S. maintains in the region). Will U.S. relative power be greater or less? I would guess less, and if not less in 2010, then almost certainly by 2020. For the cost of the nuclear race, which now weighs so heavily on everyone except the U.S., will by then have had a seriously negative impact on the U.S. budget as well. Will however all this nuclear proliferation mean that the weapons will actually be used? Here too we must be cautious in our assessments. Frankly, I have never thought that so-called rogue states were more likely to use nuclear weapons than the other states (what shall we call them - virtuous states?). They have the same worry about retaliation. Indeed, it is almost the other way around. A wealthy state like the U.S. may be the first to elaborate the kind of tactical weapons that will seem "restrained" enough to use, but actually extremely dangerous in terms of their long-run radiation effects. In any case, the political discussion has returned to being one between machismo and sanity. And one can never be sure that the sane prevail, especially as the world-system flounders amidst its long-run structural crisis. 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 United Nations - Can It Keep the Peace? (15 May 2000)
The fiasco of a United Nations peacekeeping force in Sierra Leone being captured and put out of commission raises once again the question of the possible and appropriate role of the United Nations in this exercise called "peacekeeping." When the UN was founded in 1945, the theory was that it would deal with "threats to the peace" by decisions of the Security Council which would be enforced, if necessary, by troops at its disposition.
Of course, this turned out to be an absolute fantasy. The five permanent members of the Security Council were seldom in agreement about major issues, and specifically each of the permanent members was ready to veto any proposal that seemed to impinge on its national interests. The Military Affairs Committee of the UN, provided for in the Charter, has never met. The only time the UN took a military action that went against the interests of a permanent member of the Security Council was in Korea in 1950. And the UN could do this only because the Soviet Union had made the tactical error of boycotting the meetings of the Security Council, an error it would never repeat. This did not however mean that the UN had no role to play. A different role was invented. There were some situations in which the five permanent members all preferred to see a calming of the waters. In these cases, and provided that the local parties in conflict also were ready for a calming of the waters, a truce of some kind could be arranged, and then UN contingents were sent in, ostensibly to monitor the arrangements but really merely to symbolize international endorsement of the truce. Normally, this required that contingents be drawn from countries that were not permanent members of the Security Council and therefore presumably somehow more "neutral." But it also required that the costs of the operations be borne by all the UN members, which means of course in significant proportion by the United States, a provision increasingly resisted by members of the U.S. Senate. In the past half-century, there have been numerous instances of such peacekeeping missions. Many of them have been quite successful, in the sense that the presence of these UN forces has contributed to maintaining these truces in the face of continuing local tensions. We almost never read about such successes in the newspapers, since the sign of their success is that nothing happens which warrants an item in the newspapers. But these are all cases where the local forces in conflict are somewhat exhausted and are essentially grateful to have the facekeeping presence of UN troops to legitimate their non-resumption of hostilities. UN peacekeeping problems of course vary with each particular situation. The Sierra Leone operation illustrates well however the general difficulties. A civil war has been going on in Sierra Leone for quite some time now. It has been particularly gruesome. There seem to be no real ideological issues dividing the two camps, and scarcely any "ethnic" issues. Rather, after several corrupt civilian governments and military coups, the central government structure, never very strong, seemed to collapse. A similar collapse of the center and subsequent civil was occurred first in neighboring Liberia, and in a sense spread to Sierra Leone. Various West African neighbors sought to intervene in various ways, and for various motives, but on different sides. For a while, a sort of peace was enforced by troops from several of these countries, particularly Nigeria which has a large and relatively effective armed forces. But Nigeria has tired of this role, and has turned inward to solve its own problems. Sierra Leone, to its misfortune however, is a country wealthy in mineral resources. It made civil war profitable. Military activity led to the control of diamond wealth which in turn supported arms purchases. Greed fueled the civil war, as it seems to have fueled the interventions of some neighbors. The crucial fact is, however, that Sierra Leone was of no strategic interest to any of the world powers, who have been unwilling to commit soldiers, money, or even much diplomatic effort to contain the damage. After a long period of doing nothing, the world decided to try to end the slaughter. To do this, it decided to ignore the inhuman ferocities committed by the troops. A shaky truce was brokered, and UN troops went in to "keep the peace." These troops however were from countries that were themselves too poor to sustain highly trained, well-equipped armed forces. And the UN troops were vastly outnumbered by the two factions in the civil war. So when one side, the one with less international legitimacy, decided that it was not getting its fair share of the spoils of the truce, it simply decided to start up the war again. The UN troops, far from being able to stop this, have themselves been disarmed by the rebels. The UN seems ridiculous, unable to stop the return of the group which performed savagery. Now, what is under discussion is not who is at fault, nor how to salvage the peace in Sierra Leone, but how to keep this fiasco from undoing the possibility of a UN role in the Congo and elsewhere. Africa is first ignored, then blamed for its own difficulties without a moment's thought to how the world-system's inequalities have fostered them. And when the Africans are not being blamed, then it is the fault of the United Nations. But the UN can do nothing without the permission of the major powers, and they are not really ready to explain to their people why they should send either armed forces or money or even diplomats to remote areas of the world. Oh yes, they may shell out a little cash so that Bangladeshi replacements can arrive earlier than otherwise, but this is scarcely serious involvement by the great powers. The British, the former colonial power, have sent in marines to neighboring Senegal, not to liberate the captured UN troops, but to evacuate their own nationals, if necessary In the meantime, someone is making money on the diamonds. 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.] Israel's Future (1 June 2000)
Thirty years ago or so, there used to be an Israeli joke which went like this: We don't know which Arab state will be the first to make peace with Israel, but we know the second - Lebanon. It turned out to be very bad analysis. Lebanon will probably be the last. This has to do with the fact that Lebanon is a complicated mosaic of peoples who had erected an even more complicated political arrangement of de facto quotas to keep the peace, except that the peace that was kept for a long time broke down severely more than two decades ago into full-scale civil war. That civil war gave both neighbors, Syria and Israel, an excuse to intervene directly into Lebanese internal affairs, sending in troops and keeping the peace their way.
Syria managed its role quite well, in that it now has effectively a veto power over all major decisions of the Lebanese government, which is not quite a puppet state, but is certainly far less than a vigorously sovereign one. Israel's intervention was far less welcomed and far less effective from Israel's point of view. Israel has for almost two decades occupied a strip of Lebanon along Israel's northern border, and has sustained a truly puppet Lebanese armed group to assist it. In the long run, this turned out to be Israel's Vietnam, costing many lives for objectives that began to seem pointless to the Israeli public. So, Ehud Barak thought he had a clever idea, announcing a year or so ago that Israel intended to withdraw unilaterally from its occupation in Lebanon. Israel hoped that this would aid coming to an agreement with Syria, by removing Syria's ability to use the Israeli occupation as a political bargaining chip. Israel expected the withdrawal to be accompanied by Syrian kudos and a United Nations agreement to send in "peacekeepers." But the talks with Syria broke down, and Israel was hoist by its own petard. It had to withdraw without any agreement with anyone. This withdrawal was not orderly but swift, leaving its Lebanese allies in the lurch. This permitted the Hezbollah (Shiite Muslims and Israel's harshest enemies in Lebanon) to occupy the area, claim a victory over Israel, and then take the high road by restoring order and making guarantees to other Lebanese communities, thereby establishing themselves as the heralds of Lebanese nationalism. The Syrians may soon regret that they did not take a more active role in the affair. Meanwhile, Israelis are not clear that they have gotten much out of what they thought would be a noble gesture. Barak has not been doing too well. So far, no kudos in Lebanon, no peace with Syria, and no final agreement with the Palestinians. Will there ever be one? The Israeli-Palestinian struggle has now gone on for 50 years, if not for 100, and both sides are exhausted. They want peace, but they both still think the other side should pay the largest price for it. Since the Israelis have the military strength and the current control of most of the territory, they are in the stronger bargaining position, and they know it. They are ready to make concessions, provided that each time Arafat makes bigger ones. Will this work? It depends on what we mean by it "working." Arafat is an old man and has clearly decided that he must do whatever it takes (or almost) in order to get a Palestinian state, however truncated, however limited in real power. He will probably accept a fake Jerusalem in the suburb of Abu Dis, and he will continue to allow the eternal postponement of the question of the return of Palestinian refugees. It is possible, though by no means sure, that, within a year, an agreement of this kind can be hammered out. But will it work, in the sense of creating a politically calm situation in the area? It seems doubtful. The sentiment of Palestinians, especially the refugees, is that they have now tried both major tactics of national liberation - armed struggle and diplomacy. And that neither has brought significant results. They are tired, bitter, unhappy, and for the moment a bit defeatist. But defeatism has the characteristic of not lasting too long. All one needs is a new generation a mere five years from now for the anger to boil up again in a renewed intifada, only this time under the cover of a sovereign Palestinian state, member of the United Nations. This is of course what those Israelis who are against any concessions whatsoever to the Palestinians are predicting. And they may be right. But they are right because a true compromise is not being tried. In the meantime, there are new generations in Israel as well - some far more genuinely peace-oriented, but some more sectarian than ever. And they have begun major internal battles among themselves, a real Kulturkampf. Anyone who thinks he can foresee how this will play out in 2010 is either a mad genius or a fool. But it doesn't look too good. 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 Decline of State Legitimacy (15 June 2000)
Most people tolerate the state they live in, and try to stay out of the way of the government. They are seldom enthusiastic about it, but they are also seldom in open rebellion. They accept that the government passes laws, and taxes them, and polices them. The fact that they accept these things is what we mean by saying that the population legitimates the state.
But legitimation is not a constant. Sometimes the degree of legitimacy is relatively high, and sometimes it is relatively low. In point of fact, if we look at the history of the modern world-system over some 500 years, we see that the legitimation of national governments by their populations was for a very long time on the rise. This was partly because, as state structures grew stronger, they could do more things for people that people wanted. And it was partly because, as a result of the changes in government structure that permitted more people to participate in choosing the leadership, ordinary people were more likely to think that the government authorities responded to their interests, at least partially. There are today, as there have often been, some states in which legitimacy seems to have broken down. Sometimes no one seems to legitimate the government. Perhaps Sierra Leone would be a good example at the moment, or Lebanon not so very long ago. Sometimes, a very large group contests actively the legitimacy of the government. We tend to call such situations one of civil war. A good example at the moment would be Sri Lanka or the Congo. It is clear that if a state has a relatively small budget because of its weak economic position, it is unlikely to have a government that can meet the needs of its population and therefore to be legitimated by them. This is exacerbated when there are some rich mineral resources to exploit, which can make it profitable for mafiosi to seize control of the state structure for their personal profit. However, it would be a serious mistake to consider this a problem only of zones that are peripheral regions of the world-system. The problem is far more widespread and serious for the operation of the world-system. One can see a pattern of growing delegitimation of the states in the wealthy zones of the world-system as well. This can be seen in such diverse phenomena as the decline of voting participation, the increase in tax evasion, and the privatization of security systems, not to speak of the rise of groups who contest state legitimacy on general grounds, and not merely because of specific political discontents. One has to look at this picture over a very longue durée. In the early days of the modern world-system, in the sixteenth century, states were generally very weak and generally not very legitimated. Absolute monarchs, in their various guises, sought to proclaim their authority over very recalcitrant local barons and subject populations. Some succeeded better than others. The states began to use the cement of nationalist sentiment to create a minimum level of legitimacy. This kind of nationalist cement only began to take hold seriously in the period following the French Revolution. The crucial element that transformed the situation was the rise of the concept that sovereignty resided in the people. Once this idea became widespread, the people were defined as the nation, and the nations became the supporting structures of the states. Nations did not descend from the skies; they were created. States and intellectuals worked hard at creating nations. Two of the most effective mechanisms were primary education and military service. Slowly, one language or one variant of a linguistic family, tended to become dominant, in large part through state pressure. Patriotism now became a leitmotiv of national life. There was however a big problem in the nineteenth century. The expansion of capitalist enterprise deepened a cleavage within the nation. Marx called this the "class struggle." Great Britain's Conservative Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, called it the "two nations." Whatever the formula, the reality threatened the entire project of legitimating the state structures. Curiously, both rightwing and leftwing forces worked not together but side by side to overcome this cleavage. The rightwing forces emphasized national unity again external enemies. This worked up to a point. Leftwing forces had no truck with patriotic jingoism. Instead, they emphasized the importance of taking control of the state structures themselves by the popular forces. They promised that, if this happened, the popular forces in power could transform the world, or more specifically the nation. What this did was to offer long-term hope. The popular movements promised their followers fundamental change. The price was the work of political mobilization and struggle in the present, to be rewarded by a better world in the future. This had the effect that the followers of popular movements saw the state, once it was in their hands or about to be, as a positive force for fundamental change. They therefore legitimated the state, at least the state when their movements were in power. So between rightwing pressures for patriotism and leftwing pressures to believe in the state that they would control, there was a growing faith in the states, throughout the world. And the states were thereby able to raise more money and provide more services. It was a cumulating process. The twentieth century undid what had been a long-term increase in legitimacy. The heavy loss of lives in the wars began to sour the attractions of patriotic jingoism. And the failures of popular movements, once they had obtained power, to transform the world as they had promised, began to sour the attractions of investing in the state as a mechanism of social transformation. In the last thirty years, there has been a steady disinvestment in the states, everywhere. This can be done in rightwing language, in talk about limiting the intrusion of the state on individual activity. Or it can be done in leftwing language, in talk about the rights of the local against the rights of the nation, in skepticism that anything good can come from states beholden to powerful interests. Whatever the language, the result is a decline in the legitimacy of the states, all the states. And with this decline comes a lowered ability of the states to perform their tasks, which further justifies still further negative views about the state. Hence less voting, less tax-paying, less reliance on the police. The result is an atmosphere of fear rather than confidence, and this gives rise to self-protection in the form of groups organizing against other groups. We see everywhere the rise of what be called the "barbed-wire complex," the construction of defenses around each household or group of households. It means a time of troubles, and not only in Sierra Leone. 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 Upheavals of June, 2000 (1 July 2000)
The month of June 2000 may go down in history as a major turning-point of post-1945 history, and few commentators seem to have seized on the importance of the events. The events to which I refer are Putin's visit to Germany and the summit of the two Koreas. It is not that they were not noticed, but the commentators tended to analyze them in Cold War terms, whereas their importance precisely is that they made Cold War terminology irrelevant.
It all starts with the fact that the U.S. has badly overplayed its hand, by reopening the question of a missile defense shield (see Comment No. 39, "The United States as Nuclear Champion"). The roots of this militarily very unnecessary move by the U.S. derives in small part from the usual desire of military leaders for the newest toys and in larger part to the vagaries of U.S. internal politics. The Republicans are desperate to win the presidency and decided that an old card that usually worked for them, more money for the military, would win them votes. And Clinton, true to his up to now very successful tactic of combating the Republicans by proposing the same thing they do, in somewhat watered-down terms, started the ball rolling. What the U.S. did not count on was how strong and how immediate the reaction of other countries would be. The Republicans expected Russia opposition and didn't care. Clinton thought he could assuage Putin. The U.S. (both factions) presented their proposals as dealing with the threat of "rogue states". They had North Korea particularly in mind. But they failed to think the proposal out. If the U.S. builds a missile defense shield, then other nuclear powers must either upgrade their own nuclear arsenal (which is costly) or find that whatever strength they now derived from their nuclear arsenal would become irrelevant. In short, the first losers would be not only Russia and China, but Great Britain, France, and by extension Germany (as part of a European defense force). So the first thing that has come to pass was what the U.S. has had as a nightmare for 50 years, a coming together of Russia and Germany. The German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, was deeply upset by Clinton's proposal. He considered it costly and dangerous, and said so. When Putin came to Berlin to agree and to offer cooperation on a European common missile defense, Schröder was ready to listen. Even so pro-American a German as Josef Joffe, editor of the influential Der Zeit, said that "a clumsy U.S. Goliath invites an alliance of Davids." And the British external affairs commissioner of the European Union said that Europe had to grow into a "serious counterpart" of the U.S. Europe was born in June 2000. Of course, we have been talking about Europe for 50-odd years now. But heretofore Europe has meant western Europe, not Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, dear to both Charles de Gaulle and Mikhail Gorbachev. Hitherto, the Germans would not really hear of it because of their post-1945 fidelity to the United States. Now it has been launched. A small step, but in the old Chinese adage, a journey of a thousand years starts with such small steps. What most commentators missed was a story in Le Monde on June 2, in which the French reporter, with access to German sources, revealed a quiet agreement between the French and the Germans. Up to now, the extension and expansion of "Europe" has been held up by the unanimity rule and by the equal vote for the big powers. The French had been the most insistent on retaining both. Now they agreed to the German desire to give Germany the extra votes its population size justifies and to work out a "qualified majority" system. This crucial step makes it possible to move forward not merely with east-central Europe but more importantly with Russia. Meanwhile, at the other end of the world, the dramatic summit between the presidents of the two Koreas occurred. No one quite expected this to occur even six months ago. Many thought it would never occur. Why did it occur now? On the one hand, Kim Jong-Il, the President of North Korea, which has been the ostensible primary target of the new U.S. plans, has decided to counter them by an astute mixture of threats and diplomatic overtures to China, to Japan, to Russia, and now to South Korea). President Kim Dae-jung of South Korea has been pushing for such a summit since he was inaugurated. Partly, he was serving the interests of South Korean businessmen, partly he wanted to be sure South Korea was not cut out of any U.S.-North Korean arrangement, and partly (maybe mostly) he thought this was the road to peace and eventual reunification. The U.S. was never happy about Kim Dae-jung's initiatives, but found them difficult to oppose. They simply didn't expect them to work. It seems likely that Clinton's announcement of a nuclear defense shield hastened interest in both Koreas in holding this summit. The North Koreans were anxious to vitiate the case for the U.S. missile defense shield. And the South Koreans were thinking a bit like the west Europeans, since they too are a "quasi-nuclear power." But consider the consequences. The first steps towards reunification have been taken. It will be a slow, difficult, winding process, but somewhere down the line it will occur - on what terms, one cannot be sure. One immediate consequence of the Korean summit has been to bring Taiwan and China one little step closer, as though they didn't want Korea to get a step ahead of them. Now if Korea unites and China unites, will the U.S. be able to continue the role it has been playing in East Asia? Very doubtful. Rather, we might see a China-Korea-Japan "alliance of Davids." This is not for tomorrow. But the U.S. has definitely overplayed its hand, and brought world geopolitical realignment into much more immediate prospect than it had been. 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 Elections: A Victory for What? (15 July 2000)
In Mexico, the party that governed Mexico for 71 years has just lost the presidential election, marking the end of a de facto one-party system. Who won? And what was won? This is an important question not merely for Mexico but for most of the world, since in the last decade or so, one-party systems, de jure and de facto, have been falling everywhere. Is this a worldwide victory for democracy? The answer must be yes in part and no in at least as great a part.
Let us start with the Mexican situation. The party that has been in power had the name, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). The name itself is symbolic. It represented "institutionalized" revolution. The revolution (or revolutions) to which the name refers is the national liberation of Mexico - from colonial rule, from dependency on the United States, and from the heavy hand of the Catholic Church. But of course, the actual revolution or revolutions occurred a long time ago; that is why this is a revolution that was "institutionalized." In this sense, Mexico was a world leader in twentieth-century revolutions (it can date its from 1910) but of course not the only one that succeeded in coming to power. These movements all represented political opposition to a world-system in which surplus-value flowed to the core zones and the periphery suffered from increasing polarization. In Mexico, this revolutionary thrust reached perhaps its acme under the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas from 1934-1940. Cárdenas pursued land reform, nationalized the (U.S.-owned) oil industry, and provided unyielding support to Republican Spain against the Fascist onslaught. He also was imbued with the anti-clerical spirit of the revolution and severely limited the role of the Catholic Church in Mexican society. Mexican politics has been moving steadily to the right for the sixty years since 1940, but along two somewhat separate lanes. On the one hand, successive PRI presidents (under the law, they were only each permitted one six-year term. but in practice each could choose his successor) drew steadily closer to the United States, particularly in the economic arena. This was especially true in the last 20 years. The current PRI president, Ernesto Zedillo, considered himself part of the Third Way of Blair, Schroeder, and Clinton, which might be termed the watered-down version of neo-liberalism. An opposition party has been legal in Mexico for half a century. It is called the Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN). Its roots are in the so-called Cristero rebellion of the 1920's, in which Catholics fought the Mexican government because of its anti-clerical policies. PAN was long considered a right-wing party promoting conservative Catholic values and policies. About a decade ago, some PAN members began to emphasize right-wing economic issues more strongly than right-wing social issues, without of course renouncing the latter. The victorious PAN candidate for president, Vicente Fox, embodied this new tendency. It was this emphasis on economic issues that enabled PAN to move beyond its limited traditional clientele and capitalize on the widespread anti-PRI sentiment in the electorate. The revolt against PRI is understandable to anyone who has observed what happens in one-party situations with a national liberation movement in power for a long time. PRI had long since become tired ideologically and corrupt politically. It relied on its machine, its largesse, and the loyalty of older voters for its maintenance in power. In the 1980's, the remaining holders of the revolutionary flame in PRI seceded under the leadership of Cuahtémoc Cárdenas, to form the Partido Revolucionario Democrático (PRD), which was able to rally to its side many left intellectuals who had seceded individually from PRI long before. What are the issues today in Mexico? Again, they are familiar ones around the world. Issue number one is how Mexico will deal with the world-economy. Here PRI and PAN are virtually on the same wave-length, a right-of-center wave length. To this PRD opposes a left-of-center wave length. This picture explains why when, in a three-party contest in 1988 in which, according to most observers, PRI stole the election from Cárdenas who won it, the U.S. said nothing, but when in 2000, in another three-party-contest PAN won the election, the U.S. hailed this as a victory for democracy and praised the present PRI president, Zedillo, for permitting a free election. Issue number two are the social issues. They are not at the forefront presently, but they are very much in the background. Fox, the PAN candidate, played down this issue, so that he could pick up center votes. But he is a committed social conservative, committed for example to limiting or eliminating abortion, and anti-clericalism still is an underlying theme of PRI. What we are seeing here is the world-wide tension on the right of center, between economic and social conservatives. Issue number three is the rights of the large, oppressed Indian minority (actually majority) in Mexico. The great symbol of their struggle at the moment is the neo-Zapatista movement in Chiapas. PRI has reneged on the San Andrés agreements, which had been designed to permit a reasonable amount of autonomy to the Indian communities. PRD has been struggling to get the government to honor these agreements. PAN's policy has been somewhat ambivalent. Fox says he will implement them. We shall have to see not only if he does this, but how. The results of the election give us two houses of Congress, in which neither PRI nor PAN have a majority, and the swing votes are with the PRD. It is not clear what PAN will do. PRD does not seem in the mood to support them. It wishes rather to establish itself as the strong opposition. PRI is in turmoil. There are segments who feel close to PAN, as well they should. They probably include Zedillo himself. There may be a few left who feel close to PRD. The majority of the party appartchiks are close only to a lust for power. PRI has no solid ideological position, and may well split up in three pieces. If a large enough chunk goes to PAN, PAN could establish itself solidly for six years as a neo-liberal government. Then what? Well, then, its policies will either pay off for the ordinary Mexicans who shifted their votes from PRI to them, or it will not. What we have learned by watching the post-revolutionary regimes in erstwhile Communist countries, but also in Asia and Africa, is that neo-liberalism often sounds good after the many negatives of a tired erstwhile national liberation movement government. But neoliberalism often looks less good in a peripheral country after five years or so, and many voters start yearning for a more socially-oriented government. The very same month of the Mexican elections there were elections in far-off Mongolia. Mongolia had been governed by the Communist Party for some 70 years, which in the post-1989 atmosphere was thrown out by a group of young, energetic neoliberals. In 2000, the now "reformed" Communist Party swept the elections, getting all but three seats in the legislature. Were the Mexican elections a victory for democracy? Were the Mongolian elections a victory for democracy? 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.] Israel-Palestine: Can There Be Peace? (1 August 2000)
Whenever there are long-lasting politico-military struggles about basic political structures, it often seems that peace (that is, a more or less lasting constitutional compromise) is not merely elusive but virtually impossible. In the last 50 years, we have had four such continuing struggles that have been painful, bloody, quite visible on the world scene, and seemingly impossible to resolve. They are not the only ones, but a comparative look at the so-called peace processes of these four might be helpful. The latest talks between the government of Israel and the Palestinians that took place in July 2000 seemed to have failed. It might be worth looking at this failure in the light of three other struggles: South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Korea. In none of these cases was an outright military victory of one side over the other achieved, although of course each side in each struggle has tried that path.
Today, South Africa is everyone's comparative success story. In fact, the story is remarkable in that, in the 1980's, most observers would have guessed that this was the most intractable conflict of all. It seemed there was no way to bridge the gap between the Afrikaner minority who wished to continue to rule under a system in which the majority were excluded from political rights and the African National Congress (ANC) who insisted on one person, one vote. Although. right up to the end, the apartheid regime was undoubtedly much stronger militarily, it seemed suddenly to give in entirely. What was the compromise and what was the context? The most important element of the context was the fact that world public opinion was totally hostile to the apartheid regime. It is exceptional in such struggles that one side is so unequivocably favored by outsiders over the other. It has certainly not been true in the other three cases in question here. The final compromise was quite straightforward. The ANC got its political objective: one person, one vote, and therefore of course an ANC government. What did the White minority get in return? Three things: guarantees in the economic arena for existing business structures (including land rights); de facto amnesty for all those officials in the apartheid regime who committed atrocities; relegitimization in the world arena of Whites in their professional activities. Will the compromise hold over time? It seems probable for the moment. In the case of northern Ireland, the compromise solution is not yet totally consummated, but a framework has been established. What did the IRA get? They got political rights for Catholics within a northern Ireland structure. They got symbolic gestures towards greater inter-Irish collaborative structures. And what did the so-called Unionists, representing the Protestant half of the population, get? They got de facto assurances that northern Ireland would not become part of Ireland, but would remain in relationship with Great Britain, and they got a process of disarming the IRA. In short, the IRA seemed to get a less good deal from its point of view (since its objective was a reunified Ireland) than the ANC in South Africa did from its point of view. But the demographics are different. In South Africa, the Black Africans are 80% of the population. In northern Ireland, the Catholics are about half. And Korea? Here the peace process has just begun. It is not in the least clear what would be the basis of a lasting political compromise. However, the very fact of starting down this path just this year has startled the world. The eventual outcome will probably be closer to the northern Irish type of compromise than to the South African. It is too early to envisage the real terms of a deal. Israel/Palestine today presents a picture that is somewhere between South Africa and northern Ireland. The compromise towards which both sides are inching (and of course may never achieve) seems to be the following: There will be a Palestinian state, with most of the land Israel conquered in the 1967 war, and there will be some kind of division of Jerusalem. The Israelis will have given up their long insistence on no Palestinian state and no division of Jerusalem. The Palestinians will have given up their claims to the rest of Israel and the repatriation of a substantial number of Palestinian refugees. Are these solutions just? Justice is not merely in the eye of the beholder, but is something whose definition changes with fatigue. There is no question that fatigue plays a large role in these compromises. People get tired of the carnage of continual struggle, and a majority comes to swallow de facto solutions that once seemed unthinkable. Fatigue is of course the outcome of failed military prowess. And fatigue is abetted by the impatience of the rest of the world, which also gets tired of these struggles, even when they have been long committed to one side or the other. Do such compromises last? It all depends on what happens in the larger world scene in the 50 years following. The passionate struggles between the Dutch and the Spanish in the sixteenth century ended in a truce in 1579, whose lines have held, more or less, until today. Who today is passionate about this struggle? More close to the present, the Franco-German struggles of more than a century seem today a story of the dim past. But other compromises have been more fragile, for example, that between India and Pakistan. And historic compromises can get unstuck in spectacular ways. The compromise of Yugoslavia in two successive versions (monarchical and Communist), which seemed to work so well, fell apart totally after 70 years. So, will Israel and Palestine come to terms in the next two months or so? The odds are at best 50-50. The problem seems to be, for the moment, that the fatigue factor is not sufficiently high for the two political leaders to carry their own sides on a compromise solution. But it is also true that the window of opportunity for compromise can easily pass, and knowing that can often get both sides to some last-minute dramatic arrangement. Are such last-minute arrangements good for the people involved and for the larger world? One's answer usually depends on how fatigued one is. There are certainly no solid objective criteria by which we can judge these so-called solutions. 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.] Do Trade-Unions Have a Future? (15 August 2000)
Since the early 1970's, there have been endless numbers of persons - scholars, journalists, and trade-unionists - who have noted, and in many cases, bemoaned the decline of trade-unions. This was based on the undoubted statistic that trade-unions in the wealthiest countries in the world - North America, western Europe, Japan - have been declining, often in absolute membership figures and certainly as percentages of the employed population. Over 25 years, the decline of trade-unions and therefore of trade-unionism became an accepted truism. But in the last five years, there has been a beginning of a revisionist view about trade-unions. What has been happening?
We should start with the actual history of trade-unionism in the world-system. The existence of workers' organizations which seek to obtain better wages and conditions for their members by organizing at the workplace begins in its modern form in the early nineteenth century mostly in western Europe and North America. The earliest such organizations were located in new industrial urban centers, where traditional artisans were being displaced by the introduction of machinery that permitted employers to hire less skilled and therefore lower-paid workers. Trade-unionism had a difficult road to hoe throughout the nineteenth century. Employers, backed almost always by the state machineries, refused to recognize them and used force and intimidation to keep them from being implanted. With the rise of socialist and labor parties in the late nineteenth century, trade-unions tended to make common cause with such parties, and slowly to make some headway. The skilled artisan base of trade-unionism diminished and trade-unions came more and more to recruit all industrial workers, and therefore to be stronger in their ability successfully to struggle with employers and the states. Trade-unionism began to spread, but weakly, outside its loci of origin, and weak organizations began to be formed in other parts of the world. It was not, however, until the end of the Second World War that trade-unions achieved a generalized social legitimacy and legal rights in the industrialized countries. Indeed, the generalized legitimacy became so great that even conservative parties accepted a possible role for trade-unions. And having trade-unions in a country became a sign of modernity. Almost every country, even if the regime was entirely authoritarian, allowed the establishment of trade-unions (often of course puppet trade-unions). To have a trade-union federation in a country was on a par with having a national flag, a national anthem, and a national airline. And trade-unions did accomplish something for the workers they organized. In the wealthy countries, they achieved significant increases in wage levels and far better working conditions. Even in authoritarian countries, they became mechanisms of a controlled "welfare" program. As long as the world-economy was in its stage of overall expansion and high profits from productive activity, that is, roughly between 1945 and 1970, trade-unions seemed to flourish. Then came the big Kondratieff downturn we have been living in since the 1970's. Profits from productive activity were way down, and many industries began to relocate to lower-wage areas, where trade-unions were far weaker. As the industries (such as steel or automobiles) relocated production, the trade-unions in the countries from which the relocations were occurring (North America, western Europe, Japan) found that they lost members. In part they lost members because their members lost jobs. And in part they lost members because they had to make concessions to keep the industries from still greater relocation, and the members did not feel that trade-unions were serving them that well. There was another factor that contributed to the "decline" of trade-unionism, an ideological factor. Since the late nineteenth century, trade-unions and socialist parties had always insisted on the political primacy of the class struggle, and felt quite strongly that attention to "other" problems - the plights of minorities, or women - were diversions from the central issue. And that it served the interests of the employers to divide the working classes. But in the 19o60's, with the new aggressive stance of the women's movement, and the anti-racist movements, people in these movements began to feel that it was the trade-unions who stood with their oppressors, and were part of the problem, and not their allies. These real phenomena were the source of the analyses of the decline of trade-unionism. The problem with such analyses were that they were short-term and too narrow in their geography. Let us start with geography. The relocation of industries to other parts of the world led within a decade to the rise of relatively strong trade-unions in these "newly-industrialized" areas - such as Korea, or South Africa, or Brazil. And such newly-strong trade-unions began to have a real impact on the economic and political structures in these countries. Looked at on a world scale, the lessened role of the trade-unions in the wealthy countries was compensated for by their increased role in these other countries. Secondly, the decline of the trade-unions in the wealthy countries was directly linked to a conjunctural (and therefore passing phenomenon), the worldwide economic stagnation of productive profits. It has always been the case that towards the end of such a so-called B-period, there is a revival of labor militancy. And we have been seeing that in the United States, in France, and indeed throughout the wealthy world. This is the source of the recent "revisionism" about trade-unions. Finally, there are two other elements to put into the picture. The strongest opposition to trade-unionism has always been among "independent" workers, that is, those who worked for themselves. It was when the artisans lost this independence that they began to see a decline in income and therefore began to unionize in the early nineteenth century. Today it is the free professionals, who have always been relatively wealthy, who are losing their independence, and therefore seeing their income decline, and therefore beginning to think about unionization. Spectacularly, for example, in the last 2-3 years, there has been the beginning of unionization among medical doctors in the United States, who find that today they are working for the insurance companies rather than for themselves, and are therefore earning less, as well as losing control over their working conditions. This process will continue. Finally, just as the trade-unions learned that they could not limit themselves to organizing skilled workers but had to unionize the semiskilled and the unskilled, so now they have learned that they cannot limit themselves to organizing male workers nor only those from the majority ethnic group of the country. They are finding that the work force is filled with women and with "minorities" or migrants, and they are beginning to organize them in a serious way. And this changes their politics and their alliances. Witness the events in Seattle in 1999. This kind of reformed trade-unionism will probably play a much larger role in the next thirty years than it has played in the last thirty years. 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 US Elections and the Rest of the World (1 September 2000)
The rest of the world is watching the U.S. elections with interest, some concern, and the knowledge that what happens in the U.S. matters to them. But are the U.S. elections taking account of the rest of the world? Not to any significant degree.
Anyone who watched the successive Republican and Democratic nominating conventions cannot but be struck by the fact that there was scarcely a mention of the rest of the world in either convention. And the campaign, which is becoming passionate and lively, has not really made any foreign policy issue central. What the candidates are discussing is what to do with the present and prospective surplus in the U.S. national accounts. There are five kinds of expenditures being debated: education, health, life-time income (social security), defense, and tax abatement. No doubt there are important differences between the two parties on these questions, but except for defense (so far the least debated issue) they are all internal U.S. questions - how to divide up the booty within the world's richest country, or in the language of both candidates, how not to leave any one (that is, any U.S. citizen) behind in what is now seen as a period of exceptional prosperity. How do we explain this extraordinary self-preoccupation of the most powerful nation in the world today? There are some obvious reasons. The United States has a long isolationist tradition, deeply ingrained in the national psyche. It was overridden between 1940 and 1989 by what was seen as serious menaces to U.S. national interests - first the Axis powers, then the Communist bloc. Neither of these external foes now exists, or exists in a form serious enough to lead U.S. public opinion to support spending large amounts of money to do anything about it. Since 1989, various groups in the U.S. have tried to demonize the remaining Communist states (North Korea, China, and Cuba) and the asserted threat of Islamic fundamentalism (these days incarnated by Osama bin Laden). But the U.S. public, to the extent that it follows these issues at all, tends to yawn, except for specific interested segments of the public. Furthermore, insofar as one can say that the U.S. government has a clear foreign policy on the questions related to these states (nuclear proliferation, human rights, terrorism), there does not seem to be any significant difference between the dominant view in the two parties. Both Gore and Bush for example are committed to a cautious policy towards China. Both Gore and Bush seek to limit nuclear proliferation everywhere by a kind of "finger-in-the-dike" policy, offering threats, bribes, and persuasion on all and sundry, with limited effect, be it said. Both Gore and Bush are wary about the prospect of sending U.S. troops anywhere, to do anything. Both Gore and Bush are committed to defend Israel, but wish the Palestine question would be settled somehow. Both Gore and Bush want to have better relations with Mexico, but not really at the price of opening the borders significantly. Both Gore and Bush wish that the Europeans (and Canada) would stop trying to act so independent of the U.S. and neither is sure what to do about it. It is not that these policies have no critics. The dominant positions in each party, which are so similar, have their strong critics within the party, but the strong critics remain a minority and basically ineffectual. I think it can fairly be said that whether the one or the other wins the election will make only a marginal difference in U.S. foreign policy. It will make a lot of difference internally, to be sure. And of course that might have a long-run effect on the rest of the world, but the effect will not be immediately visible. What Gore and Bush believe in above all is furthering the full access of U.S. capital to investments everywhere, which both are convinced will be good for the U.S. And both believe that what is good for the U.S. is automatically good for the rest of the world. Actually, behind their upfront optimism about the economic future of the U.S., both are in fact somewhat worried. And their worry reflects the worries of U.S. public opinion. We have a curious situation in the U.S. now in many ways. Rarely have things seemed so good to so many as in the last five years. It should be remembered, however, that this is true only of the last five years. In 1992, George Bush lost to Clinton because of the state of the economy (downsizing and the size of the national debt). In 1982, when Reagan was President, the Democrats swept the Congressional races because of the state of the economy (unemployment). In 1980, Reagan nosed out Carter largely because of the state of the economy (stagflation). And in 1973, most Americans were convinced that Libya was about to buy the United States (the oil price rise). This may not be how economists analyze what happened, but it is how the U.S. public thought about it. Most Americans are happy things are now going so well. But most of them are also waiting for the other shoe to fall, for the bad times just down the road. This is why so many have been suddenly responsive to the "populist" rhetoric of Gore. This is why Bush is talking a centrist language, so-called "compassionate conservatism," so unusual for a Republican candidate. This ambivalence - confidence mixed with nervousness - means that no one has much energy for the problems of the rest of the world. Yes, the Republicans have relaunched their old vote-getter, more funds for the military. The Democrats have responded by saying, okay a little more. It's doubtful this debate is going to swing too many votes. But yes, if the Republicans win, they will be a little less concerned about violating the ABM Treaty than the Democrats. Still the actual difference may only be rhetorical, and the protagonists of Realpolitik seem to be dominant among Bush's main foreign policy advisors, as among Gore's. When Eisenhower became President in 1952, his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, talked "rollback" in place of "containment," but the very next year, when Russian troops were in the streets of East Berlin, Dulles practices "containment" and not "rollback." And again in 1956, and again in 1968, and again in 1981. One should be hesitant to take rhetoric too seriously. What this whole current de-emphasis on foreign policy in the U.S. elections really suggests is that the U.S. is adrift on the world scene - not sure how to promote its own interests, not to speak of the world's interests. The policies are both cautious and heavyhanded, without however a clear vision of what is happening globally, and with a naive faith that somehow the good guys and the market always win in the long run. And that the U.S. is the most wonderful, and the luckiest, country in the world. One would very much like to hear what the rest of the world is saying in the privacy of their inner councils - in Beijing and Tokyo, in Paris and Berlin, in Pretoria and Brasilia. I don't think either Gore or Bush would be too pleased, if they knew. 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 United Nations Millennium (15 September 2000)
The United Nations Millennium Summit from Sept. 6-8, 2000 assembled some 150 monarchs, presidents, and prime ministers, each to give a five-minute speech on the present and future of the United Nations. As on every such occasion, we are led to reflect on the efficacy and the adequacy of the United Nations as an institution. What does it really do? Does it matter? Is it merely a showcase for speeches? These questions have been asked from its very inception in 1945.
The usual answer from U.N. spokespersons and enthusiasts is to point to two major achievements: its peacekeeping role, and the specialized agencies and their concrete work in a multitude of functional arenas. As to the latter, there has no doubt been much useful work in fields like health, education, and civil aviation, despite lots of waste and despite obstruction coming from various sources. But peacekeeping? The record seems much more mixed. In a large number of areas, when a truce has been finally and truly achieved by the contending parties, inviting in a United Nations peacekeeping force is seen as a guarantee, largely because it makes visible possible violations of the truce. One shouldn't sneer at this. But if the truce is shaky, contending parties have not hesitated to evince the U.N. or even to attack its peacekeeping units. And there hasn't been too much the U.N. has been able to do about it. The fact is that the U.N. has little money and no troops of its own, and is totally dependent on the will of the others in order to carry out its tasks, even if these tasks have been duly voted by the Security CoUncil or the General Assembly. In fact, let's be frank. The U.N. has been dependent from the beginning on the good will of the U.S. government. When the U.S. has foUnd the U.N. role useful, the U.N. has obtained the necessary resources and political support to carry it out. And otherwise, not. Let us review U.N. history from the beginning. The United Nations was the name of the victorious coalition of powers who defeated the Axis powers during the Second World War. It was at the Yalta Conference that the so-called Big Three - the United States, the United Kingdom and the U.S.S.R. - made the deal which governs the structure of the United Nations to this day. The heart of the deal was that all important decisions were to be made by the Security Council, and there the Big Three (plus by political courtesy France and China) were to have veto power. The way this was supposed to work in practice was via the preservation of what was then called Big Three Unity. Well, Big Three Unity broke down in less than a year. Churchill proclaimed at Fulton, Missouri in 1946 that we were in the middle of a cold war, and the U.N. lived in that shadow thereafter. When in 1950, the U.N. refused to recognize the People's Republic of China as the rightful holder of the U.N. seat for China, the U.S.S.R. decided to boycott the meetings of the Security Council. This turned out to be a terrible tactical error. It permitted the U.S. to get a Security Council vote condemning North Korean aggression in South Korea, and putting the U.S.-led military resistance under the aegis of the U.N. The U.S.S.R. returned to the table immediately, but it was too late to affect the Korea situation. Since they were now back with their veto power, the U.S. knew it could get no more useful votes out of the Security CoUncil, so it launched a program to strengthen the formal powers of the General Assembly, where the U.S. commanded an easy majority. This worked somewhat Until 1955, when the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. made their first steps to detente, which included admitting a large series of applicants for membership to the U.N., these applicants having previously been barred by mutual vetoes of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. In 1960, 16 African states became independent - the Year of Africa - and suddenly the voting patterns in the General Assembly changed. The U.S. and its reliable friends were now in a minority. The General Assembly became the playground of the Third World, who could pass all sorts of (unenforceable) resolutions with their votes (and a fortiori if they could also get the votes of the Soviet bloc). From this moment on, the U.S. cooled on the United Nations. It was a slow but steady process - of reducing financial support, of reducing rhetorical commitment, and of general badmouthing of the U.N. not only by the U.S. Congress but by the U.S. press. U.S. hostility to a U.N. that it could no longer control increased right up to the so-called end of the cold war in 1989. In 1991, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and suddenly all five permanent members of the Security CoUncil were willing to vote for (or at least abstain on) resolutions condemning Iraq. The U.S. again organized the military resistance (as sit had in the Korean War), and once more did so Under the aegis of the U.N. Once again, the U.N. was painted favorably by the U.S. government and the press, although the U.S. Congress was less ready to reverse its continuing hostility. But this momentary pro-U.N. stance faded quickly. The U.S. would discover that it could not count on the continuing support of the other permanent members of the Security Council (except Great Britain), and they began to find the U.N. a constraint rather than a useful tool. When the Kosovo crisis became urgent, the U.S. was allergic to involving the U.N. in any way. Instead, they organized their military resistance Under the aegis of NATO. That they would soon find NATO less than fully reliable is true, but another story. So here we are in 2000, celebrating the U.N. at the Millennium. Can it do anything important? Not very much. As long as it is critically dependent on U.S. support, and it still is, it is nothing more than a very occasional tool of the U.S. When and if other powers are ready to fund the U.N. adequately and allow it to create some relatively independent military strength, the story might change. Until then, not. 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 Politics of Euroskepticism (1 October 2000)
On Sept. 28, 2000, Denmark voted not to join the euro. This is the latest manifestation of a persistent Euroskepticism. Denmark has been strongly marked by it, but it exists to some extent in most European countries, but has been particularly strong in the Mordic countries and Great Britain. What has been behind this reluctance to move forward with Europe among a large minority of Europeans?
The movement for European unity first took root in the early postwar years, largely among centrist politicians in France, Germany, Italy, and the Low Countries. There were two motivating elements in the early period. One was a strong desire to end forever the century of military combats between France and Germany. The second was a sentiment of anti-Communism and the desire to establish a military force to oppose what was seen as a Soviet thrust to expansion westward in Europe. Both these motives served U.S. interests and the movement therefore got strong support from the U.S. government. Because of the strong anti-Communist intentions, the movement was strongly oppposed by western European Communist parties and various small left parties who were outside the orbit of the Social-Democratic parties who were strong supporters of the movement. In general, conservative parties supported the movement as well because of its anti-Communist tonality and because of U.S. support, although there was occasional nationalist resistance to the idea of an eventual federal union. We've come a long way from the situation of the 1950's in Europe. The first change was that, with the "success" of early economic cooperation, the Europe that was originally six countries decided it should expand. Expansion was a welcome idea in the three southern European countries of Spain, Portugal, and Greece, which all shared two characteristics. They were coming out of dictatorships in the 1960's and thought that integration into Europe would ensure the maintenance of a more liberal political structure. And they were all relatively poor and thought that entry into Europe would serve their economic "modernization" well and in general raise their standards of living. These two results were in fact accomplished for these three countries, who are today (along with Italy) the unqualified enthusiasts of Europe. Europe also sought to expand northwards to include in Great Britain, Ireland, the three Nordic countries, and Finland. Of these six, only Ireland and Finland have been enthusiastic - Ireland for the same economic motivations as the southern European countries and with the same economic consequences, and Finland in part for economic reasons and in part to consecrate their delinking from a post-Soviet Russia. Great Britain was always reserved, especially about half of the Conservative Party, the Thatcherite wing. There were two reasons for this. One was old-fashioned nationalism. Why should the U.K. throw in its lot with the dubious French, the formerly antagonistic Germans, and the backward Mediterraneans? The second reason however was less avowed. The United States had lost its enthusiasm for a united Europe. It was beginning to see Europe as a rival rather than as a satellite. And while the official line of the U.S. has to this day remained pro-European unity, the unofficial line was consierable coolness, especially any suggestion of an independent and unified European military force. The British have vaunted, since the second World War, their "special relationship" with the U.S. It seemed their last hold on imperial glory that had become so tarnished. And the "specialness" of the relationship was that the U.S. and the U.K. worked together more closely on geopolitical issues (and indeed on military ones) than either did with France or Germany. The Thatcherites did not want to give this up by seeming to integrate thoroughly into Europe. It was indeed the awareness of this British attitude that led General de Gaulle to oppose for a long time any link-up of Europe with Great Britain because he saw Great Britain as the Trojan horse of the United States within Europe. the evolution of de Gaulle's own views to Europe, and consequently of the Gaullists in France, is important to notice. De Gaulle was anti-Communist to be sure but also deeply suspicious of the U.S. and anxious to include Russia (not Communism) into geopolitical arrangements. Initially, therefore. the idea of a U.S.-endorsed anti-Russian Europe was anathema. But he was also convinced that Franco-German reconciliation was the keystone to restoring France's role in the world-system. And he understood that a strong western Europe would not serve U.S. interests in the long run. He understood this better in the 1960's than did the U.S. authorities. So he warmed up to his kind of Europe and was precisely for that reason wary of a British entry into the European family. The story in the Nordic countries was rather different. There was opposition on the right and on the left. The right was opposed for the usual reasons - nationalism, fear of migrants, contempt for southern Europe. But the left (or parts of it) have been opposed for quite different reasons. Europe, they said, would be an imperialism power vis-a-vis the Third World. Scandinavia, they said, was at least Social-Democratic. A united Europe might be more fiscally conservative and threaten the welfare state. And Europe was insufficiently democratic. The last charge is of course true but the solution is clearly to increase the federal unification which would create a normal elected executive and thereby overcome the "democratic deficit." Finally, there is a hidden racism, a sense of moral superiority vis-a-vis the continental Europeans. One last word on expansions. Since 1989, there has been discussion of expansion eastwards into ex-Communist east-central Europe. In general, these countries want to be included, for two reasons. The first is the economic motivation that led to southern European enthusiasm. The second however is to turn their back definitively on Russia and assert themselves culturally and politically as westerners. The second reason leads them to want to be close both to western Europe and to the United States. Both sets of motivations arouse wariness in western Europe. Western Europe is not sure it want to pay the financial bill of including in these countries. And they are not sure they want a group who will restrain them from moving forward towards political independence from the United States. Where are we today? European customs unification has been achieved, uniting 15 countries. European monetary union has united 12 of them. It was this step that Denmark, one of the 15, refused to make in this latest vote on joining the euro. The so-called Schengen agreement, permitting free movement across borders, unites a smaller group. And the putative European army unites a still smaller group. A serious move to political federation is not on the short-term horizon. A military agreement would probably have to precede it. And in any case, political federation would probably have to envisage going forward without northern Europe. So, for the moment, the U.S. is spared the creation of a serious geopolitical rival, thanks in fact primarily to the voting patterns of parts of the Nordic left, ironically the most anti-American parts, who have provided the crucial margin of votes to keep Denmark, Norway, and Sweden from taking the plunge into Europe that would bring them in line with France, Germany, Italy, and the Low Countries - the original siz and still the heartland of the movement. 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 Collapse of a Peace Process (15 October 2000)
It seems quite clear that the so-called peace process in the Middle East is now over. One can date its either from the Oslo agreements between Israel and the PLO in 1993 or from the Camp David agreements in 1978 between Israel and Egypt. In either case, the present reality is the same. It has always been a shaky process, as are inevitably all such attempts to end fierce and passionate conflicts in which neither side can win a definitive military victory. The hawks on each side always say they don't trust the other side, and now in this case they will say they are vindicated.
The situation in Israel/Palestine is at root quite simple. Two groups who consider themselves "peoples" - the Jews and the Palestinians - laid claim to the same territory, in each case on the basis of long historical connection. Ultimately, the only solution to such a conflict is either a joint state (either unitary or binational) or partition. The former solution having been firmly rejected, the latter has been tried twice, first in 1948 and most recently in 2000. The discussions at Camp David in 2000 reached agreement on what the partition lines should be everywhere except for one small hill in Jerusalem, a hill however replete with symbolic meaning for both sides. Both sides insisted on sovereignty over this hill. It was too small to divide. So one side or the other had to give. Neither was ready to do this. There is no analytically correct or even just solution to such a debate over a hill. Either one works out a solution both can accept, or one does not. In this case, one didn't. And at that point, the whole process began to disintegrate. The hawks provoked. The doves became indecisive. The killings began, and escalated. And everyone who thought they were in power in the various states - Barak, Arafat, Clinton, Mubarak, Abdullah for a start - saw how little real power they had in such a situation. Some "peace processes" work. South Africa seemed to work. Some are today somewhere in the middle of the process. They may work - Northern Ireland, Korea, Bosnia. Some haven't even really started - Chechnya/Russia, Chiapas/Mexico. And some break down, more or less definitively. I fear that Israel/Palestine, or Israel/Arab world now joins this lugubrious list. At this moment, everyone seems to be in the middle of deciding who is at fault in the breakdown. I have my views too, but does it matter? The real question is what happens next. And here we cannot be certain. But there are some likely developments. If the war continues, and we are in a war already, it will probably escalate. It is true that on Oct. 16, there will be a summit in Egypt to seek a truce, and then possibly a resumption of talks. But since both sides have hardened their positions since the failed Camp David discussions, it is hard to see how this will stop the war. At some point soon, the Palestinian Authority will proclaim a Palestinian state. It will be recognized by other Arab states of course, and probably a number of other states in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It will not be recognized by the United States. The European Union states will be embarrassed, and may divide on this issue. The Israelis have already made it clear what they would then do. They will either reoccupy any areas of Gaza and the West Bank where they do not still have troops, or (probably less likely) they will simply reoccupy some of these areas, where there are Jewish settlements for example. They will arrest persons linked to the Palestinian Authority, and the various movements. Yasser Arafat may find himself in exile once again. There will be a government of national union in Israel. It is already in the works. And if there is one, the Likud will be calling the shots. The war may spread beyond the boundaries of Israel/Palestine, though those in power will try to keep this from happening. But can they? In any case, the moderates will be eliminated in both camps, by ouster or by assassination. In the process, Saddam Hussein will be reincorporated fully into the Arab political process. The various Islamist groups (and their counterparts among the Jews in Israel) will be strengthened. The governments of Egypt and Jordan will be in danger. If the war spreads, the possibility that nuclear weapons will be used should not be ruled out. The war may spread beyond the Middle East. Already there are signs in France, a country that has both Jewish and Arab residents in significant number, that violences could occur there. And if there, why not elsewhere? The power of such passions to enflame persons across the globe is not to be minimized. The United States? Its authority in the region will be greatly diminished. Those it considers its friends may not survive at all, or if they do, they may become much less friendly. Both Bush and Gore have declared the defense of Israel a U.S. national interest. But what will the U.S. really do? They can and will send money and arms to Israel, and they will support it diplomatically. But it seems virtually impossible that they would send troops. And if they don't send troops, their ability to affect the developments will be small. The U.S. will find itself under attack in many parts of the world, via what is called terrorism. The U.S. will huff and puff, and quite possibly retaliate, but that will be at best only partially effective, and of little use to those who die in the process. It is possible that mediators will put themselves forward. France and Russia yearn to play this role, which is and will remain unappreciated by both the U.S. and Israel. It seems unlikely that, in the short run, France and Russia can play a big role. Norway is another candidate, but Norway has nothing but moral prestige to offer. And in conflicts of this severity, the value of moral prestige is limited. So, we are in for a cascading degradation of the situation - countless deaths and cruelties, a dark horizon for everyone in the region, and perhaps beyond. There will of course be enormous negative economic effects - from the physical destruction, from the decline of production and trade, from the increased investment in armaments, from the non-investment of resources. As other areas have discovered in such situations, it takes a long time to pull oneself out of the holes such destructive conflicts engender. And where will this all end? Who knows? It could be the destruction of the State of Israel. It could be Israeli military occupation not only of Israel but of some neighboring areas. It could be endless guerilla warfare. And perhaps twenty years down the line, exhaustion will set in, and there will be some continuing truce again. The basic issue is that Israel cannot survive without some acceptance as a legitimate state by its neighbors. Its entire foreign policy for the past thirty years has centered around achieving this. The breakdown of the peace process is also the breakdown of this kind of legitimation. Whether it can be reinitiated in the future is uncertain. 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 Nobel Peace Prize and Korean Reunification (1 November 2000)
President Kim Dae Jung of the Republic of Korea was awarded this year's Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to reduce tensions on the Korean peninsula. Korea is one of four nations that were structurally divided as a result of the Cold War: China, Germany, Korea, and Vietnam. In all four countries there was, from the outset, a combination of strong emotional desire for reunification and strong ideological conflict between the two political structures. Each situation had its peculiarities.
Two of the partitions have now been resolved: Germany and Vietnam. In the case of Germany, the East German state, the German Democratic Republic, was fatally delegitimated by the wave of transformation that hit eastern Europe's Communist bloc in 1989. When the Berlin wall crumbled, and Chancellor Kohl of the Federal Republic of Germany offered a straightforward incorporation of East Germany into the Federal Republic, the offer was rapidly taken up, and German reunification occurred. This was reunification of West German terms. The offer seemed irresistible to East Germans not merely because of nationalist sentiment but because West Germany seemed incredibly prosperous and the reunification offer was sweetened by provisions that seemed very economically advantageous to individual East Germans. Since, however, the reunification took place on West German terms, the East Germans were able to protect neither their positions nor their factories. Essentially, all state institutions in East Germany were dismantled and there were purges of the civil service. There were widespread purges also in such para-state institutions as universities, art institutions, and hospitals. In many of these institutions, the purged personnel were replaced by persons coming from West Germany. There is some feeling today that East Germany was "colonized" by West Germany. As for production structures, they were privatized and in many cases shut down. The replacement structures have not always lived up to expectations, and the east German areas still have high levels of unemployment. There remains an economic gap between the standards of living in western and eastern Germany, even though today the two zones comprise one country. On the other hand, the cost to West Germans of the economic advantages they gave to East Germans has been far higher than they anticipated, and has caused some grumbling, if not regret. The second reunification, Vietnam, was quite different. Here there was a war, a civil war if you wish, and one in which outside powers were quite involved. In particular, the United States sent large numbers of troops to assist the government of South Vietnam, the Republic of Vietnam. As we all know, in the end, the war was won by the North Vietnamese state, forcing the United States to withdraw, and reunifying Vietnam by force. Here too, as in Germany, there was a purge, but a much more severe one in terms of individual consequences for persons who had been associated with the South Vietnamese state. One consequence, unlike Germany, was that there were many refugees from South Vietnam. The more successful ones resettled in the United States and other Western countries. The less successful ones became the boat people who attempted, usually with minimal success, to resettle elsewhere in eastern Asia. The division in China has three aspects quite different from the other three cases. As a result of the civil war, which the Chinese Communists won, the Kuomintang state and its officials retreated to Taiwan and continued to claim to be the legitimate government of China. Eventually, they lost all significant diplomatic recognition, even from the United States. However, since Taiwan was an island, it has been difficult to resolve the division by force, especially since the United States has guaranteed the government in Taiwan against military action by the mainland government. This is difference number one, a border that is of water. The second difference from the other cases of cold war division is that Taiwan has an indigenous population who are not Han Chinese. There has been a strong independence movement on the island, and in the most recent elections, for the first time, a president was elected who had the backing of the Taiwanese movement and did not have the backing of the Kuomintang, whose strength remains among those persons who are Han Chinese ethnically and quite often refugees from the mainland. The third difference is demographic. All three other cold war divisions created two states of roughly the same area and population. But here we have a population giant, mainland China, facing a smaller albeit sizeable state in Taiwan (but its size pales beside that of mainland China). Taiwan is however today a quite wealthy state, and with this wealth is able to maintain significant armed forces. Mainland China is offering reunification on the same terms it offered Hong Kong - a sort of 50-year guarantee that, if Taiwan were to rejoin mainland China peaceably, its institutions would remain intact for 50 years. Neither the Kuomintang groups nor the Taiwanese nationalists seem anxious to consider these terms seriously. For the moment, there are no active negotiations. Today, for the first time, there are serious discussions between the governments of South Korea and North Korea. It was because he helped to make this possible that President Kim was given the Nobel Peace Prize. But the situation is not an easy one. The regime in North Korea retains the most traditionally Stalinist mode of organization (politically, economically, and culturally) of all those who have proclaimed themselves Marxist-Leninist since the Second World War. In addition, it seems to be in an extremely difficult economic situation, with widespread hunger and undernourishment. It has few real friends diplomatically. The closest friend is probably the People's Republic of China, and even with China there are some strains. The one strong card the North Korean state has in their suit is military strength, and in particular the degree to which they have been able to make progress in nuclear weapons. It is this military strength that has led the United States, after decades of unremitting hostility and boycott, to enter into serious diplomatic discussions with North Korea. There is even the prospect that, in the next year or two, the two countries will exchange ambassadors. But whatever happens, North Korea seems determined not to go the way of East Germany. As for the government of South Korea, they seem to be motivated by a mixture of factors: one, fear that they will be left out in the wake of direct North Korean-United States negotiations; but perhaps even more, the opportunity of moving forward seriously to closer relations that could eventually lead to peaceful reunification. The South Korean government is held back by two factors. Not everyone in South Korea wants to move ahead. And South Korea is not sure that the two previous reunifications have worked all that well. Above all, they do not think they have the money that the West German government had to invest in the project, and therefore are wary of Germany as a model. So, it will not be easy at all to make significant progress. And undoubtedly, if Korean reunification were to occur, it would not resemble in its form with the German or Vietnamese or putative Chinese versions. What can be said is that Korean reunification would probably have a far greater impact on the geopolitical scene than any of the others. It would transform the relations of China and Japan by intruding a powerful third actor on the regional scene. It might thereby actually assist in the establishment of a strong east Asian bloc on the world scene. So the Nobel Peace Prize was given in the hope that opportunities will be intelligently seized - a prize of encouragement. 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 US Presidential Elections: An Interim Report (15 November 2000)
As I write, the election results are not yet definitive, and may not be so for a while yet. There are three issues: where we are at, how we got there, and what difference it makes.
Where we are is simple in outline, and complicated in detail. About 100 millions votes were cast. Al Gore has a lead of some 200,000 votes, which is 1/5 of 1%. But U.S. presidential elections are not decided by popular vote. Instead, there is an Electoral College, whose "electors" are chosen by each state, and who vote in mid-December. Winning the majority in a state gives you the votes of that state. At the moment, 47 of the 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, have awarded their electoral college votes. Three states are still in the balance: Florida, New Mexico, and Oregon. Gore is leading in New Mexico and Oregon and it is expected he will win their votes. This makes the Electoral College vote so close that the 25 electors of Florida will make the difference. As of Nov. 14, the official count in Florida, where over 6 million persons voted, is that George W. Bush is exactly 300 votes ahead. However, there are still some 4000 overseas votes to be counted, the deadline being Nov. 17, and in these the guess is that Bush will do better than Gore. And Palm Beach County is conducting a manual recount. There are reasons to believe that this recount may favor Gore, and may be enough to make the difference. However, it is not sure that this recount will be taken into consideration. A court case looms, which will decide this. In addition, two other counties may recount manually. In any case, the Palm Beach recount will probably take a week. So the actual figures are uncertain, and the legalities are uncertain as well. There are a host of other possible developments, too numerous to outline, and it is not at all sure that any of them will come into play. What should be noted is that the disputed counts are a question of errors in the procedure or faulty voting mechanisms. No one to this point has suggested any question of fraud or malfeasance in office. Errors are normal, and people usually ignore them, because they don't really change the results. This time, because everything is so close, every error does indeed make a difference in the final result, which is why there is so much energy being put into the issue of the recount. How did we get there? The first thing that must be noted is that this is an extremely close election. But most elections in the U.S., and indeed throughout the Western world, are close. They are simply seldom this close. The elections are close because the basic system is that there are two parties or two coalitions in each country, one right of center and one left of center. This means that the parties or coalitions have a perpetual political dilemma, how to attract "undecided" voters in the center of the political spectrum without losing their own base, especially that part of the base which is more to the right or more to the left. So we often get what we got in the U.S. this time: two candidates pushing a centrist agenda, with covert appeals to their more militant supporters. The net result usually is that elections are only exciting to the true centrist voters if the candidates are exciting. And neither Bush nor Gore was able to fire up these voters, who voted for them, if they did, with hesitation and low passion. However, the militant supporters are militant, and they tended to vote strongly for their candidate. The breakdown in the U.S. of militants is rather straightforward and quite traditional. The militant Republicans tend to be better off economically, more conservative in their social mores, and a clear majority among white males. The militant Democrats tend to be less well off economically, often more liberal in their social mores, and a clear majority among females, "minority" groups (Blacks, Hispanics, Jews), and union members. In addition, there is the problem of "third" parties. The U.S. electoral system, unlike the system used in most European countries, is particularly hostile to third parties. They emerge, usually for a single election, to "punish" one of the two major parties. In 1912 and 1992, such parties took enough votes away from the Republicans to elect a Democrat. This year, the Green Party may have made the difference. Certainly, without it, the Democrats would have carried Florida easily. Does all this make a difference? That is really two questions. Does the turmoil of the electoral count this year make a difference in the politics of the coming years? And does who is the actual winner make a difference? The answer to the question about the impact of the turmoil is that it may make some difference. It further erodes the legitimacy of the U.S. state, which has been undergoing a process of erosion for some 30 years now. Tempers are up because of the recount process. And whoever ultimately loses will undoubtedly feel grumpy, maybe even cheated. But the United States bounced back remarkably well from the high passions of the Clinton impeachment debate, and the country could forget about Florida by next year. So we come to the crucial question, does it matter if it is Gore or Bush? The answer has to be yes and no. Let us start with the no. I have already argued (Comment No. 47, Sept. 1, 2000, "The U.S. Elections and the Rest of the World") that U.S. foreign policy will be essentially the same with either candidate. There are nuances, no doubt. And it is true that this electoral turmoil will further weaken the U.S. political position in the rest of the world, but not dramatically. The U.S. President is extraordinarily powerful in the U.S. political system, but he does need to get legislation through Congress, and that is never easy even if his party commands better majorities than we have this time. The counting on the voting for the Senate and the House of Representatives is also not yet fully completed, but the Republicans will hold an extremely slim majority in both houses. Either Bush or Gore will have to water down proposals considerably to get them through. This holds especially for the more important legislative issues on which they differed: tax reduction, widening of health coverage, changes in the social security system. This brings us then to those matters a President can more or less (I emphasize more or less) decide by himself. One issue everyone has talked about is the nomination of Supreme Court judges (and of course of the federal judiciary in general). Here who wins clearly makes a difference. A Bush win will undoubtedly push the U.S. judiciary, and the Supreme Court in particular, in a more conservative direction, and for a long time. A Gore victory will more likely keep the status quo in the judiciary. The single more controversial judicial issue still before us is abortion, and it is clearly the fear of a lot of people that a Bush court will overturn the key decision, Roe v. Wade. But there are many other judicial issues which matter as well. The President also appoints the members of the regulatory agency boards. And here a Bush victory will undoubtedly mean reducing or eliminating pressure on Microsoft, on the tobacco companies, and on the pharmaceutical companies. There are also decisions on the environment. And Bush has already announced that he will allow oil drilling in Alaska fields to which environmentalist groups and Gore are strongly opposed. So, the militants had some reason to be militant. But the centrist voters (undecided, bored, disinterested) had some reason to feel undecided and indifferent as to the results. 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.] Not with a bang but a whimper (1 December 2000)
T. S. Eliot famously wrote, "Here is how the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper." I was reminded of this verse when President Clinton visited Vietnam this month. It was an absolutely remarkable visit. The first remarkable thing is that it was made at all. The second remarkable thing is that hardly anyone noticed that he went. The U.S. public was so absorbed in the continuing melodrama of the undecided presidential election that Clinton's visit barely made the television broadcasts. In Vietnam, the government was frostily polite. Popular response seemed to be more favorable, more so in Saigon than in Hanoi.
But consider this. What the U.S. calls the Vietnam War and what the Vietnamese call the American War was by far the biggest event in the political life of both countries in the past 50 years. The cost in lives and money was incredibly large. And the political passions could not have been more intense. The War divided both countries and left a permanent mark on both their psyches. And here we are, in 2000, seeing the two countries saying in effect to each other, well, let's just move on, improve economic relations, and act as though nothing really happened. One has to wonder why there ever was a war. For example, take the results from the U.S. point of view. Suppose the U.S. in 1955, after the Geneva accords, had not created obstacles to the free elections that the accords stipulated, and which everyone thought at the time the Viet Minh would win. The U.S. didn't allow this to happen because they said this would mean a Communist victory in Vietnam, and that a Communist victory would set in motion "falling dominos," meaning that other countries (like Laos and Cambodia) would then become Communist, and perhaps still others beyond them. So, there was a war. And despite the U.S. troops, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia all did become Communist states, like China before them. The real question, I suppose, is so what? China today is indeed ruled by a Communist Party. But it is also very involved in the networks of the world-economy, permits U.S. investment within China, and has sometimes tense but not unfriendly relations with the United States. Vietnam today (as Laos and Cambodia) are trying to emulate, more or less, the transformations in China. So in 2000 we have arrived at a result the U.S. wanted in 1955, and it seems we might have arrived at the same result had the U.S. never opposed those elections and never fought a war. Now, look at the same question from the Vietnamese standpoint. What did the Vietnamese want in 1955? They certainly wanted national sovereignty, a sense that Vietnam was run by Vietnamese and could play its appropriate role in the world. The leaders of the Viet Minh also wanted to create a socialist society. But what did they mean by this? One that would be more developed economically, more autonomous economically, and more egalitarian internally. So they fought a war to achieve these ends. The fact is that they achieved none of these ends. The explanation is in part that fighting the war was so costly that it impeded these objectives. But that is only part of the explanation, since other countries that went down the path they did, but without fighting a war, also did not really achieve those ends. The Vietnamese seem to be trying to achieve these ends now by trying a different path, which is why they invited President Clinton to visit. So, from their point of view, too, was the war worth it? Of course, counterfactual history always leaves out the reality that alternative options may not have been real options at the time. It also leaves out the possibility that taking alternative paths may have had consequences that would have made the situation in 2000 far worse for either or both of the countries than it is now - not to mention the consequences for the rest of the world. But one still has to reflect on the pitiably small benefits both countries obtained from the war. Let us turn our attention to another war. Afghanistan, some twenty years ago, had an internal coup that brought to power a Communist government. The U.S. supported an armed revolt against this government by mujahiddin. The Soviet Union sent in its troops to support the government of Afghanistan. The war dragged on, in many ways parallel to the Vietnamese-American War. Indeed, in the press at the time, the war began to be called "Russia's Vietnam." This referred to the fact that the war seemed unwinnable and there was growing opposition within the Soviet Union to involvement. In the end, the Soviet Union withdrew its troops and the Communist government fell to the mujahiddin. The fiasco in Afghanistan was one factor, of course not the only one, in the process that led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The U.S. seemed in a sense to recoup in Afghanistan what it had lost in Vietnam. But did it? As we all know, what followed in Afghanistan was a long civil war among the victorious mujahiddin. The ultimate winners were the Taliban, who established an ultra-integrist version of Islam in the country, particularly devastating to the women of the country. One has to remember that the Communist government had established the most "Western" kind of government in Afghan history, and in particular had done much to improve the situation of women, as well as to advance education and health facilities. The greatest irony is that the U.S. financed and encouraged politically the rise of the mujahiddin. The fighters were recruited not only among Afghans but among Moslems in many other countries. After the collapse of the Communist government, the non-Afghan mujahiddin returned to their countries of origin where, using the training the U.S. had provided them, they created para-military structures in many of them. They became a force in countries like Algeria and the Sudan. Above all, they created cadres in a trans-national structure controlled by a now familiar personage, Osama bin Laden. For Osama bin Laden, the Communist enemy is today a historical memory. The United States, however, is considered to be a present-day and continuing enemy against which Osama bin Laden (and many others) are waging an unremitting struggle. The U.S. has suffered attacks from this group, which it considers a band of "terrorists" and clearly thinks of them as a major political problem. So, one has to ask, suppose the U.S. had not encouraged a revolt against the Communist government of Afghanistan. Would President Clinton be visiting Afghanistan today, encouraging increased economic participation in the world-economy? And would he have been received at least as well as he has been in Vietnam? No U.S. president can visit Afghanistan under the Taliban. For one thing, the U.S. refuses to recognize the Taliban government as the legitimate government, despite its de facto control of the territory. And would the Soviet Union have collapsed in any case, even if there had been no war in Afghanistan? And would Afghanistan have been better off today were there a Communist rather than a Taliban government? We shall never know, but one has to wonder. So, perhaps not the world but the last 50 years may be ending with a whimper. 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.] Democracy and the Vote (15 December 2000)
Thirty-six days after counting, and not counting, the votes, the United States of America has a President-Elect. The two candidates made speeches, one of concession and one of victory, in which both emphasized the importance of "coming together" and celebrating the United States as a country that lives under the law, a country that is democratic.
The U.S. takes great pride in claiming to be the most democratic country in the world. The U.S. preaches democracy to the rest of the world and asserts that its foreign policy is intended, in the words of Woodrow Wilson, to make the world safe for democracy. The U.S., in recent years, has sent "observers" to electoral processes in many countries, to ensure that their voting processes are democratic. But what do we mean by democracy, and why is it a virtue? When the word was first used extensively in political rhetoric, which was in the first half of the nineteenth century, it was an extremely controversial word. It was a word of the left, even of the far left in politics. For the majority, it had a bit of the tonality that the word "Communism" had in the second half of the twentieth century. Somewhere along the historical track, the discourse shifted. Democracy became a term embraced by an ever-wider swath of the political spectrum, and after 1945, everyone was in favor of democracy. The resistance to the term in the beginning was in what it seemed to represent - that the demos, the ordinary people, would make the political decisions, would dominate the state apparatuses. This seemed very radical. It probably still does. The reason the word became acceptable was that many people began to redefine it. One of the features of the period from circa 1850-1950 was the extension of the suffrage, until it became theoretically universal almost everywhere. I say theoretically and will return to that. Democracy came to be defined as the holding of free and fair elections. Now, free and fair elections are certainly a necessary element in a democratic state, but they are far from the whole story. By limiting the definition of democracy in this way, many people sought to pull its fangs and let us forget about the idea that ordinary people would make the political decisions. Of course, defined in this way, as the holding of free and fair elections, we could come up with the generalization that this occurs primarily in North America and western Europe, and only occasionally in other parts of the world, which are less modern or less civilized or less something. There have always been two views about elections in the United States. There is the official rhetorical view, that the U.S. is a model country in regard to elections. The fact is that this official rhetoric is probably given credence by one-third to one-half of the American people. And then there is the cynical view, that stealing votes and preventing people (who are not on your side) from voting is the absolutely normal way of doing things, that everybody does it and that, as long as it doesn't create a public scandal, no one ought to say anything about it. This is the view of hard-bitten journalists and Realpolitiker political scientists and probably most professional politicians. It is also the view of the underclasses, who are the most burnt by such processes and has been expressed very vociferously during this recent period by African-Americans in particular. Let us review what happened in this election. There were two candidates competing who both tried to appeal to centrist voters, and who each also tried in addition to secure what was called their base (right-wing for Bush and left-wing for Gore). Neither candidate was charismatic. The result was that the election was extremely close. Gore beat Bush in the popular vote, but by only circa 300,000 votes out of approximately 100 million. Since the U.S. has a mode of indirect election via the Electoral College, the popular vote doesn't count. In the Electoral College, Bush has 271 and Gore 267. However, in the crucial Florida election, Bush had only a lead of only 537 votes (out of 5 million) in the final accepted tally, and without Florida, Bush would have lost. So it was close, indeed. As a result, we have a month-long debate in the U.S. about whether the vote was "free and fair." There were many aspects to this debate. Were the votes counted correctly? Were there forms of balloting (each county using different methods) that led the voters into mismarking the ballot? Were some votes counted that should not have been counted? Were some persons prevented from voting because, although they were registered, their names were not on the voting register? Were some persons intimidated into not voting? The Gore camp concentrated on the first issue, were the votes counted correctly? They asked for hand recounts. In the end, this is what the Supreme Court of the U.S. denied the Gore camp, by a 5-4 vote. The Gore camp concentrated on this issue because it was sufficient to make the result they wanted likely, and because it was the easiest to litigate. Morally, it was not necessarily the most important. To be sure, we can take the position that all the mistakes were peccadilloes and almost unavoidable. And normally everyone would have been satisfied with such an analysis. But when the margin is 537 votes out of 5 million, and these 500 votes mean the Presidency of the United States, it is understandable that the issue was contested. Two questions become thereupon obvious: What are the consequences of this election for the United States? What does it tell us about democracy? We do not know yet the full answer to the first question. The 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court is seen by many people (perhaps half the population) as a decision made on political grounds papered over by juridical rhetoric. This seemed to be the view of the dissenting justices, who talked of a "self-inflicted wound" to the Court and the nation, and who denied any legitimacy whatsoever to the refusal to permit a recount to continue. Gore and Bush now say that they will try to repair the damage and be "bipartisan" and this may have some effect. One wonders, however, why one should bother to be partisan if one is going to be bipartisan. The fact is that the Republican majority in the two Houses of Congress is now extremely narrow. And more importantly, political passions were aroused in this election that turned the tepid pre-election atmosphere into a post-election fervor which threatens to last until 2004 and perhaps beyond. But what about democracy? It has become clear in this situation that the random errors in vote counting are not random. The voting machines in lower class/non-White counties tend systematically, for simple reasons of the economics of the tax base, to be poorer than those in the other counties, and therefore the votes that aren't counted tend to be those of the underclasses. But one could raise other questions. We do not have universal suffrage in the United States. For example, in many states, all persons who have been convicted of a felony may not vote. This adds up to a lot of people, and they are disproportionately from the underclass. I leave out the question of non-citizens, a growing group. Furthermore, something like 50% of the eligible voters do not vote, and this 50% is drawn disproportionately from the underclasses. We should be asking why they don't vote. And even more, what we can do to get them to vote. If democracy is free and fair elections, then we have a long way to go to get there. If democracy is even more than that, we have an even longer way to go. |