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Immanuel Wallerstein - 2003
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.
Northeast Asia in the Coming Decade (1 January 2003)
While the world's attention in 2002 has been largely concentrated on Iraq, an even more crucial arena of the world-system, Northeast Asia, has seen extremely important developments in the past year. China has witnessed a passing of the guard to a somewhat younger generation. Japan has seen a slow and quiet pulling away from the U.S. that parallels that of Germany. And Korea has been the site of two events that promise to transform the situation in the region and the world.
North Korea has reacted to President Bush's tough line - ceasing negotiations and listing North Korea as part of the "axis of evil" - with a demonstration that two can play at that game. The North Korean government announced successively that it has weapons of mass destruction, that it is putting its nuclear reactor back on line, and that it has disabled the nuclear detection devices of the International Atomic Energy Agency. And at the very same time, South Korea has elected Roh Moo Hyun, the candidate of the Millennium party dedicated to maintaining the "sunshine policy" of President Kim Dae Jung. True the election was close, but until recently, Roh Moo Hyun was expected to lose the election to a more conservative candidate, one hostile to the "sunshine poli-cy." The tide of anti-Bush feeling no doubt helped Roh to win, as it had helped Gerhard Schroeder in Germany earlier this year. In the short run, both forms of defiance of U.S. policy mark a setback for President Bush. He may be thinking that he will get to the Korean issues, once he has solved the Iraqi situation and ousted Saddam Hussein. But the reality is that he can do little. His choice in the case of North Korea is negotiate or fight. And much as he doesn't want to negotiate, fighting is not a strong option. For one thing, the last war ended in a draw. And even if the world situation, politically and militarily, has changed from fifty years ago, it is by no means sure that the U.S. could do better this time. What is sure is that a war would find both South Korean populations and the U.S. troops stationed there highly vulnerable to sudden death. But if North Korea can force the U.S. to the negotiating table, it will be seen as a humiliation to President Bush. What President Bush is counting on, apparently, is that the neighbors of North Korea - South Korea, Japan, China, and Russia - will join the U.S. in getting North Korea to dismantle its nuclear program prior to any negotiations. It is however unlikely that the neighbors will invest too much effort in getting behind the Bush plan, even if they too would like to see North Korea's program dismantled. And in any case it is most unlikely that North Korea will cede to such pressures. What is more likely is that U.S. pressure will lead to strong internal divisions in South Korea, Japan, and even China. It would be a mistake to discuss this situation only in terms of the immediate issues. It would be more useful to consider what are the longer-term concerns of the three historic zones of Northeast Asia - China, Korea, and Japan - and how the three sets of zonal concerns interact with each other. China's priorities seem quite clear: hold the country together, strengthen its military, strengthen its share in world production, and reincorporate Taiwan. Furthermore, I would argue that I have listed them in order of importance for the Chinese government. In all four spheres, the Chinese government has made important progress in the last decade, and is likely to continue to make progress in the decade to come. Nonetheless, should it falter in the first objective - holding the country together - the other three would become virtually impossible. And while the Chinese government has been doing well in this regard, it knows that it faces continuing dangerous situations internally. For Korea - North and South - the primary issue is and will remain reunification. But reunification on whose terms and at what price? Both governments are determined not to make basic political concessions, and without some change reunification is impossible. Economically, North Korea seems to be in desperate disrepair, while South Korea is worried about maintaining its relatively good position in the world-economy, which is threatened both by world economic downturn and the enormous costs of any approach to reunification. The German experience is very much to the fore of South Korean collective consciousness. I suppose South Koreans devoted to a sunshine policy could hope for a North Korean Gorbachev, but what would happen if one appeared on the scene is very uncertain. As for Japan, the main political mood of the present is absolute uncertainty about what to do and the sense that, if one is unsure where to head, the best thing to do is nothing, or very little. There are two main doubts: how to recuperate the sense of world-economic dynamism Japan displayed in the 1970s and 1980s; and whether or not to become a normal military power, and with that, to become a semi-independent political actor on the world scene. The reality is that the dilemmas facing the three zones of Northeast Asia are not soluble separately. They are intertwined because the lasting influence of Northeast Asia on the world scene is dependent on their ability to come together as a region economically, and thereby to form a cooperative triangle in the political and military arenas. This means not only solving the internal dilemmas of each but resolving very acute historic quarrels. Neither Korea nor China have forgiven Japan its aggressive policies in the first half of the twentieth century. Japan still suffers from a lingering sense of cultural debt to China and even to Korea, and all its recent achievements have not totally overcome the sense of unspoken inferiority. And China and Korea remain quite wary of each other. Nonetheless, the three zones have a great deal to offer each other, and do share not merely geographic contiguity but a common cultural heritage not very different from the kind of common cultural heritage that west European countries use as a mode of bonding. But it is the geopolitics of the situation that is in the forefront. In an era of U.S. hegemonic decline, northeast Asia is in competition less with the U.S. than with western Europe as the major locus of capital accumulation in the half-century to come. And in an era of world-systemic transition, northeast Asia will not be able to hold its own unless it can grapple with the problem of global inequality and the demands of the South for a qualitatively different kind of world-system. Facing either issue, that of the loci of capital accumulation and that of overcoming the polarization of the existing world-system, northeast Asia will not be able to play the kind of role it manifestly wishes to play without coming together in some form. And its coming together is dependent on the ability of the three zones to resolve their current dilemmas and to help each other resolve them. 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.] Can War Be Averted in Iraq? (15 January 2003)
The simple answer is no, because the U.S. hawks won't take anything the Iraqis say or do as an acceptable reason to call off the war dogs. I feel we are in the midst of the novel by Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Crónica de una muerte anunciada), a story of death as a social ritual. The United States is going to war with Iraq primarily in order to go to war with Iraq. It is for this reason that nothing that the inspectors say, nothing that the other members of the Security Council (including Great Britain) say, certainly nothing that Saddam Hussein may say will make any difference.
The war with Iraq was publicly requested during the last years of the Clinton administration in a statement of some 20 hawks, including Cheney and Rumsfeld. We now know that within days of the Sept. 11 attack, President Bush gave his imprimatur to such a war. All the rest has been pretense and maneuvering. The open defiance of the United States by North Korea in the last three months, and the evasive response to this defiance by the U.S. government, provide further evidence that the real issue is not Iraq's non-compliance with various UN resolutions. So, why do Bush and the hawks feel that a war is essential? They reason in the following way. The United States is not doing so well these days. In the words of some analysts, the U.S. is in hegemonic decline. Its economy is in an uncertain state. Most of all, it cannot be sure that it will outcompete western Europe and Japan/East Asia in the decades to come. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has lost the major political argument it had to persuade western Europe and Japan to follow all its political initiatives. All it has left is an extremely strong military. Madeleine Albright, when she was Secretary of State, became at one point furious at the reticence of some of the high-ranking military to endorse her view of what should be done in the Balkans, and is reported to have said, "What is the point of having the strongest military in the world, if we can never use it?" The hawks make that viewpoint the centerpiece of their analysis. They believe that the U.S. has the strongest military in the world, that the U.S. can win any military encounter it undertakes, and that U.S. prestige and power in the world-system can only be restored by a show of force. The point of the force is not to achieve regime change in Iraq (probably a minor benefit, considering what might replace the current regime). The point of using the force is to intimidate the allies of the United States, so that they stop their carping, their criticisms, and fall back into line, meekly as the schoolchildren they are considered to be by the hawks. The Bush administration has not been divided between unilateralists and multilateralists. They are all unilateralists. Those we call "multilateralists" are simply those who have argued that the U.S. can get its position formally adopted by others (the U.N., NATO), and that, if such resolutions are adopted, the policy is that much easier to implement. The "multilateralists" have always said that, if they fail to get the votes in the U.N. or elsewhere that they need, the U.S. can always go it alone. And the so-called "unilateralists" have bought this line because of the reserve clause. The only difference between the two groups is their estimate of how likely it is to get others to support the U.S. line. What we have therefore is a multilateralism that takes the form: the U.S. is multilateral to the degree that others adopt the U.S. unilateral position; if not, not. The basic problem is that the hawks really believe their own analysis. They believe that once the war in Iraq is won (and they tend to think this will be done relatively easily), everyone else will fall into line, that the whole Middle East will be reconfigured to the desires of the U.S. hawks, that Europe will shut up, and that North Korea and Iran will tremble and therefore renounce all aspirations to weaponry. The whole world is yelling at the U.S. that the situation is far more complicated than that, that a U.S. military invasion of Iraq will probably make the world situation worse, and that they are reaping the whirlwind. They do not listen, because they do not believe that this is so. They are impressed with the power of the bully. It is called hybris. The folly of this war that has been so abundantly foretold is that, in addition to causing untold and essentially unnecessary suffering for all sorts of people (and not only in Iraq), it will actually weaken the geopolitical position of the United States and diminish the legitimacy of any of its future positions on the world political scene. We are living in a truly chaotic world, and U.S. pretensions to an impossible "imperium" amount to increasing the speed of an automobile going downhill with brakes that are no longer functioning properly. It is suicidal, and not least for the United States itself. 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.] France is the Key (1 February 2003)
During the Second World War Winston Churchill said that the greatest cross he had to bear was the Cross of Lorraine (the symbol of Charles De Gaulle). After 1945, the United States came to feel that this had become its cross. France has consistently pursued a "Gaullist" foreign policy under all its postwar governments, whether led by De Gaulle, Gaullists, or anyone else. The essence of the Gaullist foreign policy is that France, while part and parcel of the "West," has asserted the right to its own views of how to achieve world order, and has insisted that the United States, as the most powerful Western country, has to take France's views into account. France, unlike any other of the allies of the United States, has always sought to refuse a "unilateralist" leadership by the U.S. in a meaningful way.
Over the past fifty years, the United States has tried everything it could to dissuade France from this attitude: sweet talk, forceful pressure, conspiracy, and huffing and puffing. Nothing the U.S. did seemed to change France's basic stance. When recently Donald Rumsfeld contemptuously dismissed "old Europe," it was France he had uppermost in mind. In the past, the United States has counted on Germany to moderate France's views, or at least not to go along with her. It is thus with enormous displeasure that the Bush administration has observed the Schroeder/Fischer turn in German foreign policy. The U.S. hawks feel betrayed. So, it is particularly galling to the U.S. that today France is the key to whether or not the forthcoming U.S. invasion of Iraq will be considered "legitimate" by the majority of people in the western world, and even beyond it. If France goes along with the U.S., however reluctantly, the war will be considered in the world something sanctioned by the United Nations and therefore by that mysterious entity, the "world community." If France refuses to go along, she brings with her not only Germany but Russia, China, Canada, and Mexico - a powerful line-up. Japan has let it be known that it will follow "world opinion," meaning quite obviously only if the U.S. can get U.N. cover. France even determines the position of Great Britain. In The Independent of Jan. 30, Donald Macintyre wrote an article with the headline "Blair is playing for high stakes, and he needs Chirac to come to his rescue." Macintyre discusses the difficulties Blair is having at home, the "threatened revolt" in the Labour Party, and says that whether it comes off or not depends on France's position. "It's not too glib to say that [Blair's] future may be decided not in the White House, nor in No. 10 [Downing Street, the residence of the British Prime Minister], but in the Elysée [Chirac's official residence]." What gives France this power? It is certainly not France's moral rectitude. France is as willing as the United States to send troops to defend its interests. Its current intervention in the Côte d'Ivoire, and its current difficulties there as a result of this intervention, are testimony to France's continuing role as a mini-imperial power in Africa. Nor is it because France is somehow anti-American in its inner soul. No doubt there is a good deal of anti-American sloganeering in France (but then there is a good deal of anti-French sloganeering in the United States). Nevertheless, in general, the French (both elites and ordinary people) find much to appreciate in the United States, remember the U.S. role in the two World Wars with gratitude, and share most basic values and most basic prejudices with the United States. What gives France this power is the sense, throughout the world, that the United States is often, as we say in good American slang, "too big for its britches." And this is especially true now that the hawks have taken over the U.S. government. France's resentment at this, France's desire to limit the effects of U.S. arrogance, is shared just about everywhere in the world, with very few exceptions. So when France resists U.S. pressures, as they are now doing, they are cheered on in private by all the governments who don't dare do the same or don't dare to do it quite as loudly - like Egypt or Korea or Brazil, or indeed Canada. Actually, the U.S. government is aware of France's political power. This is why Colin Powell was able to convince Bush to go the United Nations in the first place, and why the U.S. is coming back to the United Nations next week to present some "evidence" about Saddam Hussein. The U.S. doesn't believe that this "evidence" is what will convince anyone. Rather the U.S. believes that presenting the evidence will give France the excuse to follow what the U.S. government thinks are France's economic interests. The reasoning of the U.S. administration, about which they talk in the press almost openly, is that France will say to itself the following: 1) The U.S. will go into Iraq no matter what. 2) The U.S. will win easily. 3) If France sends troops, however unimportant militarily, France will be allowed to participate in the division of the spoils (oil); but if France stays out, she will be excluded. The U.S. hawks are thus making a "crude Marxist" analysis of France's foreign policy - a one-to-one short-term correlation between economic gain and political position. But crude Marxism never works, because nothing is one-to-one and the short-term is, as Fernand Braudel said, "dust." The problem, seen from France's point of view, and more particularly from Chirac's point of view, is posed quite differently. First of all, French public opinion (as all of west European opinion) is very largely opposed to the war and highly skeptical of U.S. motives, both short-term and long-term. The French left has lined up solidly against the war. The extreme right, for other reasons, has done so as well. And the French conservative party in power, the UMP, is split down the middle between those who buy the U.S. argument and favor a "Blairite" foreign policy and those who remain "Gaullist" in spirit. Chirac has therefore kept his options open. He has to weigh the political consequences internally. If he makes a mistake, it could have a long-term negative effect both on the future of his party, which he has just recently managed to consolidate into a powerful force, and on France's efforts to create a strong and independent Europe. Secondly, Chirac is not at all certain of a swift U.S. military victory. Too many military figures around the world are skeptical, and they probably include some of the top French military. Thirdly, Gaullism has worked thus far, and Gaullism has always involved a delicate balance. France does not want to cut itself off from the U.S. But for once France is scarcely isolated in its resistance to U.S. action. This doesn't seem the moment to abandon a Gaullist stance. The United States, as could be expected, is playing all its cards. It has lined up five of the present fifteen members of the European Union to say in a collective letter that they support the U.S. position. Of course, these five governments had already said the same in effect. But the joint letter is meant as pressure on France. In effect, the U.S. is trying to convince the French that if they don't go along, the U.S. will actively try to break up Europe. The U.S. has a second threat in its arsenal. If France's "soft power" is its incarnation of a worldwide discomfiture with U.S. unilateralism, its "hard power" is its veto in the Security Council. So, the U.S. is saying that if the U.S. doesn't get the backing it wants from the United Nations, it will marginalize the role of the Security Council and thereby reduce France's "hard power." But of course the veto power of France is of not much use if France can never use it, for fear that the Security Council would become irrelevant. The U.S. thinks France needs the U.S. badly. It may however well be the case that it is in fact the U.S. that needs France badly. Whatever France's decision, the ultimate consequences may in part be determined by the actual war. A war easily won will tend to reward all those who went along with the U.S. A war that drags out will no doubt punish all those who went along with the U.S. However, a war unilaterally won, even if won quickly, may hurt as much as help the U.S. A war "multilaterally" will do less damage to the U.S. position. Nelson Mandela warns the U.S. it is heading the world towards a holocaust. The hawks are absolutely deaf. The fact is that, as a result of its Gaullism, France is the only country in the world today that can have any significant impact on the U.S. geopolitical position - not Great Britain, not Russia, not even China. This is not because France is so strong, but because she pushes consistently for a multipolar world and thereby incarnates a strong world force. That France would herself be a direct beneficiary of such a geopolitical transformation is far less important to most people in most countries than the fact that France might succeed to some degree to create something they all want. We shall soon know how France plays its cards. And the whole world will feel the difference. 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 Righteous War (15 February 2003)
George Bush is about to lead the valiant troops into battle in righteous war against the despotic tyrant. He will not turn back, no matter what pusillanimous or venal European politicians, major religious figures around the world, retired generals, and other erstwhile friends of liberty and the U.S. may think or do. Never has a war had so much prior discussion and so little backing from world public opinion. No matter! The decision for war, based on a calculus of American power was made in the White House a long time ago.
We have to ask ourselves why. To begin with, we have to lay to rest two major theories about the motivations of the U.S. government that have been insistently put forth. The first is that of those who favor the war. They argue that Saddam Hussein is a vicious tyrant who presents an imminent danger to world peace, and the earlier he is confronted the more likely he can be stopped from doing the damage he intends to do. The second theory is put forward primarily by opponents of the war. They argue that the U.S. is interested in controlling world oil. Iraq is a key element in the edifice. Overthrowing Hussein would put the U.S. in the driver's seat. Neither thesis holds much water. Virtually everyone around the world agrees that Saddam Hussein is a vicious tyrant but very few are persuaded he is an imminent danger to world peace. Most people regard him as a careful player of the geopolitical game. He is accumulating so-called weapons of mass destruction, to be sure. But it is doubtful he would use them against anyone now for fear of the reprisals. He is certainly less likely, not more likely, to use them than North Korea. He is in a tight political corner and, were absolutely nothing done, he would probably be unable to move out of it. As for the links with Al-Qaeda, the whole affair lacks credibility. He may play tactically and marginally with Al-Qaeda, but not one-tenth as intensively as the U.S. government did for a long time. In any case, should Al-Qaeda grow stronger, he is near the top of their list for liquidation as an apostate. These charges of the U.S. government are propaganda, not explanations. The motives must be other. What about the alternative view, that it's all about oil? No doubt oil is a crucial element in the operation of the world-economy. And no doubt the United States, like all the other major powers, would like to control the oil situation as much as it can. And no doubt, were Saddam Hussein to be overthrown, there might be some reshuffling of the world oil cards. But is the game worth the candle? There are three things about oil that are important: participating in the profits of the oil industry; regulating the world price of oil (which has such a great impact on all other kinds of production); and access of supply (and potential denial of access to others). In all three matters, the U.S. is doing quite well right now. U.S. oil firms have a lion's share of the world profits at the present time. The price of oil has been regulated to U.S. preferences most of the time since 1945, via the efforts of the government of Saudi Arabia. And the U.S. has a fairly good hold on the strategic control of world oil supply. In each of these three domains, perhaps the U.S. position could be improved. But can this slight improvement possibly be worth the financial, economic, and political cost of the war? Precisely because Bush and Cheney have been in the oil business, they must surely be aware of how small would be the advantage. Oil can be at most a collateral benefit of an enterprise undertaken for other motives. So why then? We start with the reasoning of the hawks. They believe that the world position of the United States has been steadily declining since at least the Vietnam War. They believe that the basic explanation for this decline is the fact that U.S. governments have been weak and vacillating in their world policies. (They believe this is even true of the Reagan administration, although they do not dare to say this aloud.) They see a remedy, a simple remedy. The U.S. must assert itself forcefully and demonstrate its iron will and its overwhelming military superiority. Once that is done, the rest of the world will recognize and accept U.S. primacy in everything. The Europeans will fall into line. The potential nuclear powers will abandon their projects. The U.S. dollar will once again rise supreme. The Islamic fundamentalists will fade away or be crushed. And we shall enter into a new era of prosperity and high profit. We need to understand that they really believe all of this, and with a great sense of certitude and determination. That is why all the public debate, worldwide, about the wisdom of launching a war has been falling on deaf ears. They are deaf because they are absolutely sure that everyone else is wrong, and furthermore that shortly everyone else will realize that they have been wrong. It is important to note one further element in the self-confidence of the hawks. They believe that a swift and relatively easy military victory is at hand - a war of weeks, not of months and certainly not of still longer. The fact that virtually all the prominent retired generals in the U.S. and the U.K. have publicly stated their doubts on this military assessment is simply ignored. The hawks (almost all civilians) do not even bother to answer them. One doesn't know, of course, how many U.S. and U.K. generals still in service are saying, or at least thinking, the same thing. The full-speed-ahead, torpedoes-be-damned attitude of the Bush administration has already had four major negative effects on the world position of the United States. Anyone with the most elementary knowledge of geopolitics would know that, after 1945, the one coalition the United States had to fear was that of France, Germany, and Russia. U.S. policy has been geared to rendering this impossible. Every time there was the slightest hint of such a coalition, the U.S. mobilized to break away at least one of the three. This was true when DeGaulle made his early gestures to Moscow in 1945-46, and when Willy Brandt announced the Ostpolitik. There are all sorts of reasons why it has been quite difficult to put together such an alliance. George Bush has overcome the obstacles and achieved the realization of this nightmare for the U.S. For the first time since 1945, these three powers have lined up publicly together against the U.S. on a major issue. U.S. reaction to this public stand is having the effect of cementing the alliance further. If Donald Rumsfeld thinks that waving the support of Albania and Macedonia, or even Poland and Hungary, in their face sends shivers up the spines of the new trio, he must be very naive indeed. The logical riposte to a Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis would be for the U.S. to enter into a geopolitical alliance with China, Korea, and Japan. The U.S. hawks are making sure that such a riposte will not be easily achieved. They have goaded North Korea into displaying its teeth of steel, offended South Korea by not taking its concerns seriously, made China more suspicious than before, and led Japan to think about becoming a nuclear power. Bravo! Then there's oil. Controlling the world price of oil is the most important of the three oil issues mentioned earlier. Saudi Arabia has been the key. Saudi Arabia has done the work for the U.S. for 50 years for a simple reason. It needed the military protection of the U.S. for the dynasty. The U.S. rush to war, its obvious ricochet effect on the Muslim world, the open disdain of the U.S. hawks for the Saudis, the virtually full support for Sharon have led the Saudis to wonder, out loud, whether U.S. support is not an albatross rather than a mode of sustaining them. For the first time, the faction in the royal house that favors loosening its links with the U.S. seems to be gaining the upper hand. The U.S. is not going to find easily a substitute for the Saudis. Remember that the Saudis have always been more important for U.S. geopolitical interests than Israel. The U.S. supports Israel for internal political reasons. It has supported the Saudi regime because it has needed them. The U.S. can survive without Israel. Can it survive the political turmoil in the Musim world without Saudi support? Finally, U.S. administrations have been valiantly trying to stop nuclear proliferation for fifty years. The Bush administration has managed in two short years to get North Korea, and now Iran, to speed up their programs, and not to be afraid to indicate this publicly. If the U.S. uses nuclear devices in Iraq, as it has hinted it may, it will not merely break the taboo, but it will ensure a speedy race of a dozen more countries to acquire these devices. If the Iraq war goes splendidly for the U.S., perhaps the U.S. can recuperate a little from these four geopolitical setbacks. If the war goes badly, each negative will be immediately reinforced. I have been reading recently about the Crimean War, in which Great Britain and France went to war against the Russian tyrant in the name of civilization, Christianity, and the struggle for liberty. A British historian wrote in 1923 of these motives: "What Englishmen condemn is almost always worthy of condemnation, if only it has happened." The Times of London was in 1853 one of the strongest supporters of the war. In 1859, the editors wrote their regret: "Never was so great an effort made for so worthless an object. It is with no small reluctance that we admit a gigantic effort and an infinite sacrifice to have been made in vain." When George Bush leaves office, he will have left the United States significantly weaker than it was when he assumed office. He will have turned a slow decline into a much speedier one. Will the New York Times write a similar editorial in 2005? 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 Aftershock (1 March 2003)
If the attack on the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001 can be considered to have been a political earthquake for the American people, the U.S. is now suffering from the aftershock. The most recent and most dramatic instance of that aftershock has come from across the Atlantic and reveals the tectonic shift that has gone on largely unnoticed in the last decade.
What was so unsettling about Sept. 11 was the fact that the U.S., for the first time in its history, felt vulnerable. A direct assault of such magnitude within the continental United States had been previously unknown and unthinkable. The immediate response of most of the rest of the world - all of whom had lived with such kinds of vulnerability for a long time - was massively sympathetic. Remember the now classic editorial in Le Monde of Paris the day after: "We are all Americans now." In less than 18 months, the Bush administration has squandered all that sympathy and now finds itself diplomatically isolated. This is the second great shock, the aftershock of Sept. 11. Since 1945, the United States has pursued its global policies with the assurance that it had secure allies - western Europe, Canada, Japan and South Korea. However much one ally or another had reservations about this or that policy, and however much the fuss they may have made (a tactic for which France was particularly famous), the United States always counted on the fact that, when the moment of decision came, these allies would be behind the United States. Up until February 2003, the U.S. government has been sure that such deferral to their leadership in world affairs by the allies was a constant on which they could rely. Suddenly this has changed. France and Germany are now leading a "coalition of the unwilling," supported by Russia and China, and overwhelmingly by world public opinion. When the massive peace demonstrations occurred on Feb. 15 across the world, the largest demonstrations were in the three countries that have most ostentatiously supported the U.S. position on Iraq - Great Britain, Spain, and Italy. In the beginning of March, the U.N. Security Council is going to vote on a U.S.-British-Spanish resolution to legitimate military action against Iraq. They are being met by a French-German-Russian "memorandum" which, in effect, says that there is no justification yet for military action. It is very doubtful that the U.S. resolution can get the nine votes it needs, even if there is no actual veto. The immediate result has been a shouting match between the U.S. (with Great Britain) and France and Germany. It has been much more shrill on the U.S. side than on the Franco-German side. Jacques Chirac, a conservative politician who has spent time in the U.S. and who has long been considered one of the French political leaders most friendly to the U.S., is being vilified and even demonized. How has the relationship of Europe and America deteriorated to the point that the press is asking whether it can ever be repaired, whether we are in the midst of a divorce? To understand that, we have to take the story from the beginning, that is, from 1945. In 1945, the United States was all-powerful, and western Europe was suffering badly from the economic destruction of the war. Furthermore, a good 25 percent of western Europe's population was voting for Communist parties, and most of the others genuinely feared that the combination of their internal Communist parties plus the immense Red Army, stationed in the middle of Europe, represented a real threat to their survival as non-Communist states. The alliance of western Europe with the United States, concretized in the creation of NATO in 1949, had the strong support of a majority of the population which feared U.S. isolationism more than U.S. imperialism. The U.S. encouraged and supported the establishment of European transnational structures, primarily as a way of making acceptable to the French an involvement of west Germany in the alliance structures. By the late 1960s, the material and political base of European enthusiasm for the Atlantic alliance began to fritter. Western Europe had revived economically and was no longer dependent on the U.S. Quite the contrary! It was becoming an economic rival. The internal strength of the Communist parties began to dissipate. A Soviet threat began to seem quite distant. Meanwhile, U.S. enthusiasm for European institutions began to wane, as a strong Europe began to seem a risk for the Atlantic alliance. The U.S. encouraged British adhesion, in the hope of diluting Europe (as indeed de Gaulle charged at the time). And later, the U.S. would press for rapid expansion "eastwards" in a similar hope. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989/1991 represented a disaster, from the point of view of U.S. control over its allies. It undid the major justification for U.S. leadership. Of whom was western Europe supposed to be afraid now? The U.S. searched for a substitute for the Soviet Union to offer western Europe as a reason for faithful adherence to U.S. leadership. Basically, what the U.S. offered was the class interest of the "North" against the "South" - the common interest of the U.S. and western Europe in global order, neoliberal globalization, and military containment of the countries of the "South" (that is, continued and intensified insistence on no nuclear proliferation). These were common interests, indeed, but none of them posed the urgency of the erstwhile Soviet military threat. And western Europe felt that its approach to particular problems was at least as intelligent and useful as that of Washington. In the days of the first President Bush and of Clinton, these differences led to serious arguments, but the arguments remained civil. Along came the hawks of the second President Bush. They were not interested in debating the fine points of what to do in Iraq, Palestine, or North Korea. They felt they knew what to do and they were anxious to make sure that western Europe accept, as it had once upon a time, the unquestioned leadership of the U.S. They inherited an old American contempt for the Europe the immigrants had left behind. However, the geopolitical realities are quite different today. Western Europe feels that Bush's policies in Iraq are as much aimed at them as at Saddam Hussein. They see Bush trying to destroy the possibility of a strong and politically independent Europe, at precisely a very delicate moment in the constitutional construction of this Europe. Furthermore, the defeat of the Socialists in France and the victory of the Social-Democrats in Germany were both serious setbacks for Bush. The defeat of the Socialists in France allowed France, with its curious constitution, to have a president who had the authority to be decisive, because he didn't have to share power with a prime minister of another party. Chirac saw France's interest in asserting its Gaullism unreservedly. In this Chirac has the overwhelming support of French public opinion and politicians, which a Socialist prime minister would never have had. In Germany, on the other hand, only a Social Democratic-Green coalition could have taken the clear stand the government has taken, and found it politically rewarding. All the bluster of Rumsfeld about how "old Europe" was isolated has been shown to be unfounded. There is not a single country in Europe, including eastern Europe, where the polls are not against the U.S. position. The U.S. that advocates preventive wars and would engage in them unilaterally is seen as a far greater danger than an encircled and constrained Saddam Hussein. Europe is not anti-American, but it is definitely anti-Bush. Meanwhile, the same thing is happening in East Asia, where Japan, South Korea, and China are aligned against the U.S. approach to handling North Korea. We shall never go back to the old ways. What will happen now depends a lot on the actual military process of the Iraq war. Europe may emerge much strengthened or in tatters. But U.S. ability to count on automatic support from western Europe and east Asia is probably gone forever. 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.] Bush Bets All He Has (15 March 2003)
The United States is in deep trouble. The President of the United States has taken an enormous gamble, and done it from a fundamentally weak position. He decided a year ago or so that the U.S. would make war on Iraq. He did this in order to demonstrate the overwhelming military superiority of the United States and to accomplish two primary objectives: 1) intimidate all potential nuclear proliferators into abandoning their projects; 2) squash all European ideas of an autonomous political role in the world-system.
Thus far, Bush has been magnificently unsuccessful. North Korea and Iran (and perhaps others as yet unobserved) have actually speeded up their proliferation projects. France and Germany have shown what it means to be autonomous. And the United States is not able to get any of the six Third World countries on the Security Council to vote a second resolution on Iraq. So, like a reckless gambler, Bush is about to go for broke. He will launch a war in a very short time, and bet that he can achieve an overwhelming and rapid victory. The bet is very simple. Bush believes that if the U.S. does achieve this kind of military result, both the proliferators and the Europeans will repent of their ways and accept U.S. decisions in the future. There are two possible military outcomes: the one Bush wants (and expects), and a different one. How likely is it that Bush achieves the rapid capitulation of the Iraqis? The Pentagon says they have the weaponry and will do it rapidly. A long list of retired generals, both American and British, have voiced their skepticism. My guess (and for me that is all it is) is that the outcome of rapid, total victory is not very likely. I think that a combination of the desperate determination of the Iraqi leadership plus an upsurge of Iraqi nationalism plus the announced unwillingness of the Kurds to fight Saddam (not because they don't hate him but because they distrust profoundly U.S. intentions with regard to them) will make it extremely difficult for the U.S. to end the war in a matter of weeks. It will probably take many months, and once it takes many months, who can predict where the winds will blow, first of all in British and then U.S. public opinion? Nevertheless, suppose the U.S. wins quickly. I would say that, at that point, Bush comes out merely even - not a winner, but not a loser. Why do I say that? Because a victory will leave the geopolitical situation more or less where it is today. First of all, there is the question of what happens in Iraq the day after victory? The least one can say is that no one knows, and it is not at all clear that the U.S. itself has a clear vision of what it wants to do. What we do know is that the interests at play are multiple, diverse, and totally uncoordinated. That is a scenario for anarchic confusion. For the U.S. to play a significant role in the postwar decision-making will require a long-term commitment of troops and a lot of money (really a lot of money). Anyone who looks at the U.S. economic situation and the internal politics of the U.S. knows that the Bush administration would have a very hard job leaving troops there very long and an even harder job obtaining the money it would need to play the political game. In addition, all the other problems facing the world would remain intact. First of all, there would be even less likelihood than now that there could be any progress towards the creation of a Palestinian state. The Israeli government would take a U.S. victory as vindication for its tough line, and simply make it tougher. The Arab world would get even angrier, if that's possible. Iran certainly will not stop its drive for nuclear proliferation. Iran will probably, on the contrary, be feeling its oats in the region with Saddam Hussein out of the way. North Korea would step up its provocations, and South Korea would get even more uncomfortable with its U.S. ally and the latter's penchant for military action. And France is likely to dig in for the long haul. So, as I say, a rapid U.S. military victory in Iraq would leave us with the geopolitical status quo - which is certainly not what the U.S. hawks intend. But suppose the military victory is not rapid. What then? In that case, the whole operation is a geopolitical disaster for the U.S. Pandemonium will break out, and the U.S. will have as little influence on its future outcome as say Italy, which is to say not very much at all. Why do I say that? Think of what will happen, first of all in Iraq itself. Iraqi resistance will turn Saddam Hussein into a hero, and he will certainly know how to exploit that sentiment. The Iranians and the Turks will both send their troops into the Kurdish north, and probably end up fighting each other. The Kurds may side for the moment with the Iranians. If that happens, the Shiite groups in the south of Iraq will keep their distance from the U.S. military efforts. The Saudis may offer themselves as unwelcome mediators, and will probably be rejected by both sides. Elsewhere in the region, the Hezbollah will probably attack the Israelis, who will riposte and probably try to occupy southern Lebanon. Will the Syrians then enter that war, to try to save the Hezbollah and, more generally, their role in Lebanon? Quite possible, but if so, the Israelis will bomb Damascus (maybe with nuclear weapons). Will the Egyptians then sit still? And oh yes, there is that fellow, Osama bin Laden, who will no doubt be doing the usual thing he likes to do. And Europe? There will probably be a major revolt in the Labor Party in the U.K., which might end up with a split in the party. Blair might take his rump out and form a national emergency coalition with the Tories. He would still be Prime Minister, but there would be great pressure for new elections, and Blair would probably lose, and lose badly. And then there is the little matter of the warning Blair received from legal advisors that, if the British went into Iraq without U.N. explicit endorsement, he could be brought up on charges before the International Criminal Court. Aznar's electoral prospects in Spain have become similarly doubtful, given extensive opposition within his own party to Spain's position. Berlusconi and the East/Central Europeans will start to get very cold feet. Meanwhile, in Latin America, one will say goodbye to the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA, or in Spanish ALCA). Instead, Lula will press for the reinvigoration of Mercosur as a trade and currency structure, and might even get Chile to come into it. Fox will be in deep trouble in Mexico. In Southeast Asia, the two largest Muslim nations (Indonesia and Malaysia), both of which presently have governments essentially friendly to the U.S., may try to emulate Europe in creating a zone of autonomous action. There will be great pressure on the Philippine government to send the U.S. military home. And China is likely to tell Japan that it had better loosen its political ties with the U.S. if it expects to continue to have an economic future in the region. In early 2004, where will all this leave the Bush regime? It will leave it facing a rapidly growing antiwar movement in the United States, which might actually swing the Democratic Party into a real opposition to Bush's global policies. Not easy, but quite possible. If so, the Democrats could probably win the elections. If all this happens, Bush will indeed have achieved regime change - in Great Britain, Spain, and the United States. And the United States will no longer be regarded as an invincible military superpower. So, to resume, if Bush wins, he faces a geopolitical status quo, which is far less than he wants. And if he loses, he really loses. I would say the odds are not very promising. The historians will record that there was no need for the U.S. after September 11 to put itself in this impossible position. 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 End of the Beginning (1 April 2003)
At a turning-point in the Second World War, someone asked Winston Churchill whether the battle marked the beginning of the end. And he replied, famously, no, but it might be the end of the beginning. With the Iraq War, the world is marking the end of the beginning of the new world disorder that has replaced the world order dominated by the United States from 1945 to 2001.
In 1945, the United States emerged from the Second World War with so much power in every domain that it quickly established itself as the hegemonic power of the world-system and imposed a series of structures on the world-system to ensure that it functioned according to the wishes of the United States. The key institutions in this construction were the United Nations Security Council, the World Bank and IMF, and the Yalta arrangements with the Soviet Union. What enabled the United States to put these structures in place were three things: 1) the overwhelming edge in economic efficiency of U.S.-based productive enterprises; 2) the network of alliances - especially NATO and the US-Japan Security Treaty - which guaranteed automatic political support of U.S. positions in the U.N. and elsewhere, reinforced by an ideological rhetoric (the "free world") to which the allies of the U.S. were as committed as it was; and 3) a preponderance in the military sphere based on U.S. control of nuclear weapons, combined with the so-called "balance of terror" with the Soviet Union which ensured that neither side in the so-called Cold War would use these nuclear weapons against the other. This system worked very well at first. And the U.S. got what it wanted 95% of the time, 95% of the way. The only hitch was the resistance of those Third World countries not included in the benefits. The most notable cases were China and Vietnam. It was China's entry into the Korean War that meant that the U.S. had to satisfy itself with a truce at the line of departure. And Vietnam in the end defeated the United States - a dramatic shock to the U.S. position politically, and economically as well (since it caused the end of the gold standard and fixed rates of exchange). An even greater blow to U.S. hegemony was the fact that, after twenty years, both western Europe and Japan had made such strides economically that they became roughly the economic equals of the United States, which launched a long and continuing competition for capital accumulation between these three loci of world production and finance. And then came the world revolution of 1968, which fundamentally undermined the U.S. ideological position (as well as the spuriously oppositional Soviet ideological position). The triple shock - the Vietnam war, the economic rise of western Europe and Japan, and the world revolution of 1968 - ended the period of easy (and automatic) U.S. hegemony in the world-system. U.S. decline began. The United States reacted to this change in the geopolitical situation by an attempt to slow down this decline as much as possible. We entered a new phase of U.S. world policy - that conducted by all U.S. presidents from Nixon to Clinton (including Reagan). The heart of this policy was three objectives: 1) maintaining the allegiance of western Europe and Japan by brandishing the continuing menace of the Soviet Union and offering some say in decision-making (so-called "partnership" via the Trilateral Commission and the G-7); 2) keeping the Third World militarily helpless by trying to stanch so-called "proliferation" of weapons of mass destruction; 3) trying to keep the Soviet Union/Russia and China off-balance by playing one off against the other. This policy was moderately successful until the collapse of the Soviet Union, which pulled the rug from under the key first objective. It was this new post-1989 situation which permitted Saddam Hussein to risk invading Kuwait, and enabled him to hold the United States to a truce at the line of departure. It is this post-1989 geopolitical situation that permitted the collapse of so many states in the Third World and forced both the United States and western Europe to engage in basically unwinnable attempts to prevent or eliminate fierce civil wars. There is one other element to put into this analysis, which is the structural crisis of the world capitalist system. I have no space here to argue the case, which is made in detail in my book Utopistics, or Historical Choices of the Twenty-first Century, but I will resume here the conclusion. Because the system we have known for 500 years is no longer able to guarantee long-term prospects of capital accumulation, we have entered a period of world chaos - wild (and largely uncontrollable) swings in the economic, political, and military situations - which are leading to a systemic bifurcation - that is, essentially a world collective choice about the kind of new system the world will construct over the next fifty years. The new system will not be a capitalist system, but it could be one of two kinds: a different system that would be equally or more hierarchical and inegalitarian; or one that will be substantially democratic and egalitarian. One cannot understand the politics of the U.S. hawks if one does not understand that they are not trying to save capitalism but to replace it with some other, even worse, system. The U.S. hawks believe that the U.S. world policy pursued from Nixon to Clinton is today unviable and can only lead to catastrophe. They are probably right that it is unviable. What they wish to substitute for it in the short run is a policy of premeditated interventionism by the U.S. military, as they are convinced that only the most macho aggressiveness will serve their interests. (I do not say serve U.S. interests, because I do not believe that it does.) The successful attack by Osama bin Laden on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, propelled the U.S. hawks into a position where they, for the very first time, controlled the short-term policies of the U.S. government. They immediately pushed the necessity of a war on Iraq, seeing it as the first step in implementing their middle-term program. We have arrived at that point. The war has begun. That is why I call this the end of the beginning. Where do we go from here? That depends in part on how the Iraq war plays itself out. One week into the war, it is clearly going less well than the hawks had hoped and anticipated. It seems we are likely to be in for a long, bloody, drawn-out war. The U.S. will probably (but not at all certainly) defeat Saddam Hussein. But its problems will only then mount. I detailed my views on these problems in my last commentary (Mar. 15, 2003) entitled "Bush Bets All He Has." The fact that it goes badly for the U.S. hawks will make them only more desperate. They are likely to try to push harder than ever on their agenda, which seems to have two short-term priorities: combat with potential Third World nuclear powers (North Korea, Iran, and others); and establishing an oppressive police apparatus inside the United States. They will need to win one more election to secure these two objectives. Their economic program seems to be one that will bankrupt the United States. Is this totally unintended? Or do they want to weaken some of the key capitalist strata within the United States, whom they may see as hindering the full implementation of their program? What is clear at this point is that the world political struggle is sharpening. Those who cling to the U.S. world policy of the 1970-2001 period - the moderate Republicans and the Democratic Establishment within the United States, but also in many ways the western European opponents of the hawks (for example, both the French and the Germans), may find themselves forced to make more painful political choices than any they have had to make up to now. By and large, this group has lacked middle-range clarity in their analysis of the world situation, and they have been hoping against hope that somehow the U.S. hawks will go away. They will not. The hawks can however be defeated. 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.] Shock and Awe? (15 April 2003)
The U.S. hawks promised us "shock and awe." Have they accomplished it? They think so. But whom were they supposed to shock and awe? Most immediately, the Iraqi regime and its internal supporters. The U.S. did win the war militarily quite rapidly, and those of us (many military figures, but also me) who had predicted that a long difficult war was the greater possibility were proven wrong. The relatively quick victory does however, it should be said, undo the argument of the hawks that the Iraqi regime posed a serious military threat to anyone.
Does it follow that those of us who thought the war a folly were wrong on everything else? I don't think so. In my Foreign Policy article (July/August 2002), I opened with the following sentences: "The United States in decline? Few people today would believe the assertion. The only ones who do are the U.S. hawks, who argue vociferously for policies to reverse the decline." The hawks now think they have succeeded in doing this. They are awash with inflated self-confidence. They seem to have adopted Napoleon's motto, "L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace." It worked for Napoleon - for a while. They didn't even wait for the end of the fighting to begin a campaign against Syria - chosen in part because it doesn't have a policy friendly to the U.S., plays a key role in the Middle East, and is militarily virtually helpless. Not having found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (at least to date), the U.S. government is now suggesting that they are to be found in Syria. Rumsfeld has designated it a "rogue state." President Bush has some simple advice to the Syrians: They should cooperate with the U.S. Having moved on from Afghanistan to Iraq without achieving anything there other than the overthrow of the previous regime and turning over power to a series of local warlords, will the U.S. now do the same in Iraq, moving on to elsewhere? Quite possibly. And if Syria is next, what comes after Syria? Palestine and Saudi Arabia, or North Korea and Iran? No doubt fierce debates about priorities are going on right now in the inner councils of the U.S. regime. But that the U.S. will now move on to further military threats seems not to be in question. The regime seems to be sure that they have (and ought to have) the world's future in their hands, and they have exhibited not the least sign of humility about the wisdom of their course of action. After all, how many troops does the Pope have, as Stalin famously said? Still, one should look at the priorities they seem to have established. Number one seems to be reconfiguring the Middle East. This includes three key elements: eliminating hostile regimes, undermining the power (and perhaps the territorial integrity) of Saudi Arabia, and imposing a solution on the Palestinians by getting them to accept a Bantustan regime. This is why they have immediately raised the issue of Syria as a new "threat" to the security of the United States. While this Middle Eastern reorganization is going on, the U.S. would, I believe, prefer to freeze the situation in Northeast Asia. Immediate military action is risky, and the hawks hope to use China to persuade the North Koreans not to go further in their nuclear quest. One might think of this as a temporary truce. Such a truce would allow the U.S. hawks time to deal with other matters first, North Korea later when their hands would be freer. For they have no intention of allowing the North Korean regime to survive. My guess is that priority number two is the home front. The hawks want to shape the U.S. government budget so that it has no room for anything but military expenditures. And they will move on all fronts to cut other expenses - by reducing federal taxes, and privatizing as much of social security and medicare as they can. They also want to limit the expression of opposition - to give them a freer hand to deal with the rest of the world, and to ensure their perpetual hold on power. The immediate issue is making permanent the so-called Patriot Act, which has a clause that causes it to expire in three years. Thus far, the Patriot Act has been used primarily against persons of Arab or Moslem identity. But the federal authorities can be expected steadily to expand its reach. On both these fronts, the 2004 elections are crucial. Europe is probably priority number three. It seems to the hawks harder to break the back of Europe than that of the Middle East or of the U.S. opposition. So they will probably wait a bit, counting on spreading enough shock and awe so as to weaken fatally the will of the Europeans. In their spare time, the U.S. hawks may ask that troops be sent to Colombia, that the U.S. consider a new invasion of Cuba, and otherwise flex its muscles around the globe. One must say, the U.S. hawks think big. L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace. In that same Foreign Policy article, I said: "Today, the United States is a superpower that lacks true power, a world leader nobody follows and few respect, and a nation drifting dangerously amidst a global chaos it cannot control." I reaffirm that assessment today, specifically in the light of the U.S. military conquest of Iraq. My view is based on my belief that U.S. decline in the world-system is structural, not conjunctural. It cannot be reversed. To be sure, it can be managed intelligently, but that is precisely what is not happening now. The structural decline has two essential components. One is economic, and one is political/cultural. The economic component is really quite simple. In terms of basic capabilities - available capital, human skills, research and development - western Europe and Japan/East Asia are at a competitive level with the United States. The U.S. monetary advantage - the dollar as a reserve currency - is receding and will probably disappear entirely soon. The U.S. advantage in the military sphere translates into a long-term disadvantage in the economic sphere, since it diverts capital and innovation away from productive enterprises. When the world-economy begins to revive from its now quite long-term stagnation, it is quite likely that both western European and Japanese/East Asian enterprises will do better than U.S.-based enterprises. The U.S. has slowed down this creeping economic decline relative to its major competitors for thirty years by political/cultural means. It based its claims to do this on residual legitimacy (as the leader of the free world) and the continuing existence of the Soviet Union. The collapse of the Soviet Union undermined these claims severely and unleashed the growing anarchy of the world-system - "ethnic" wars in the former Soviet zone, civil wars in multiple African states, the two Gulf wars, the expanding cancer of Colombian civil war, and the severe economic recessions in a number of Third World states. Under Reagan, George Bush father, and Clinton, the U.S. continued to negotiate with western Europe and Japan/East Asia to keep them more or less on the same side in what have been essentially North-South struggles. The hawks under George Bush son have thrown aside this strategy and substituted one of unilateral machismo. The backs of everyone else are up everywhere, and the U.S. victory over Saddam will get them further up, not despite the fact that but precisely because they are so terrified. On legitimacy, note two things. In March, the United States had to withdraw a resolution from the U.N. Security Council. This was an issue that was really important to the U.S. and in which it invested all its efforts, including repeated telephone calls by George Bush to leaders around the world. It was the first time in 50 years that the U.S. was unable to get a simple 9-vote majority on the Council. This was humiliation. Secondly, notice the use of the word "imperial." Up to two years ago, to speak of imperialism was the reserve of the world left. All of a sudden, the hawks started to use the term with a positive connotation. And then, western Europeans who were not at all on the left began to use the term, worrying that the U.S. was being imperial. And since the collapse of Saddam Hussein, suddenly the word is found in almost every news story. Imperial(ism) is a delegitimating term, even if hawks think it is clever to use it. Military power never has been sufficient in the history of the world to maintain supremacy. Legitimacy is essential, at least legitimacy recognized by a significant part of the world. The U.S. hawks have undermined the claim of the U.S. to legitimacy very fundamentally. And thus they have weakened the U.S. irremediably in the geopolitical arena. 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.] Does the Western World Still Exist? (1 May 2003)
This is not a question about cultural history, but about contemporary geopolitics. From 1945-2001, few persons doubted that there was something in the world political arena we could call the "West" or the "the Western world." To be sure, there were some quibbles about who was included in it. Some countries were obviously part of it: the United States; the western European states; and Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. But at the fringes, there was argument. Was "eastern" Europe part of the Western world? Was Turkey? And what about Japan? Was it an honorary member of the West, as in the definition of the apartheid regime of South Africa, which designated the Japanese as "honorary Whites"?
But since the Bush regime embarked on its unilateral and macho march through the planet, relations of the United States and "Europe" have become strained. And the world's politicians and media have come to recognize that the geopolitical unity of the "West" is no longer a self-evident proposition. After the U.S. conquest of Iraq, Tony Blair has set himself the public task of restoring the unity of Europe and the United States, which of course means that it is a task that requires effort, one whose prospects are uncertain. The New York Times Sunday Magazine Section of April 27, 2003 contains two articles, both by British publicists. They have very different tones. One is by Timothy Garton Ash and is entitled "How the West Can Be One." And the other is by Niall Ferguson, and he uses the very different title of "The Empire Slinks Back." A close reading of the two articles reveals the nature of the debate between the erstwhile Establishment center and the newly-powerful far right. Ash is the Director of European Studies at St. Antony's College at Oxford and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford (hardly a locus of radicalism). He is well-known for his extensive writings on east-central Europe, both before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He writes what is called a "plaintive letter" to his "dear American friends." The opening line is: "We must put the West together again." The article concentrates on two issues - the Middle East, and France. His views on the Middle East are quite similar to the ones Blair has been espousing publicly. In particular, he emphasizes the importance of creating a "viable Palestinian state." On France, he believes they did act in his view in an "outrageous" manner concerning the Iraq war. But he says, nonetheless, that "the French-bashing in Washington has gone too far," since "Churchill was right: the Europe we want cannot be built without France." He pleads for a "less arrogant United States." When we turn to Ferguson's article, the tune is quite different. Like Ash, he has links on both sides of the Atlantic. He is a professor of financial history at New York University as well as a senior research fellow of Jesus College at Oxford. His subtitle is "Why Americans don't really have what it takes to rule the world." And he deplores this. He accuses the United States of a "chronically short time frame." He is afraid that Americans "lack the spine for long-term administration," which he says the British had in their heyday. He notes that a segment of the British elite were willing to "spend their entire working lives...far from the land of their birth, running infernally hot, disease-ridden countries." In contrast, "the products of America's elite educational institutions are the people least likely to head overseas, other than on flying visits and holidays." His conclusion? "So long as the American empire dare not speak its own name - so long as it continues this tradition of organized hypocrisy - today's ambitious young men and women will take one look at the prospects for postwar Iraq and say with one voice, "Don't even go there.'" So Ash despairs that the United States will take the imperial path, unilaterally and arrogantly. And Ferguson despairs that the United States will not take the imperial path, which requires that they persistently occupy infernally hot, disease-ridden countries. Who is right? As in so many of these arguments, both are right. Ash is right that the United States cannot successfully go it alone - militarily perhaps, but not politically. And Ferguson is right that the U.S. elite is absolutely unready to serve as "District Officers" in the Third World. Ash is pleading with the Bush regime to return to the foreign policy of yesteryear, based on a meaningfully collaborative Atlantic alliance. Ferguson is pleading with them not to do so, and to shed the hypocrisy of pretending to be starry-eyed idealists amidst a sea of terrorists. It seems to me likely that neither will get the U.S. policy for which they are pleading. The U.S. hawks will veto, have already vetoed, doing what Ash asks the United States to do. On the other hand, the U.S. hawk policy is over time politically unacceptable not only to the American electorate but to the U.S. elite, for precisely the reasons Ferguson adduces. Most Americans feel more comfortable being isolationist than being imperial overlords, however much they relish splendid military victories. While the United States agonizes politically about its future world policy (and despite Bush's current high ratings in the polls, which are quite transitory, the United States is indeed agonizing over this question), Europe will continue painfully to construct itself - as Europe, not as a part of the "the West" or of the "Atlantic world." How can I say this when, at the moment, the United States seems far more politically unified than Europe, which seems to be in a state of acute and overt internal conflict? There are really two reasons. One is economic, and one is cultural. The economics are rather simple to expound. On the one hand, Europe shares with the United States its interests in maintaining the present core-periphery split in the world-economy, with all the advantages that structure provides for the North. On the other hand, Europe is clearly an economic rival of the United States, and this rivalry will become more intense in the coming decades. So Europe has to balance its gains from a common front of the North in such arenas as the World Trade Organization, and its losses from a continuing economic advantage to the United States over it because of the role of the dollar, sustained as it is by U.S. military and political pressures on Europe. If Europe fails to break the privileged role of the dollar, it is doomed to second-place status. Europeans are smart enough to realize this. Will they then sacrifice their class interests as integral members of the "North," if they have a major fight with the United States? Not necessarily, because they believe that U.S. strategy as the North is less efficacious than the one they wish to pursue, and that the U.S. position on North-South questions is compromised by their simultaneous struggle against Europe. Europe thinks that a different North-South policy is not only in their own best interests but in that of the United States as well (even if the U.S. doesn't realize this). It seems likely therefore that Europe will not call off its economic struggle with the United States, which revolves around both international financial arrangements and investments in new leading products. And in order to pursue their economic interests, Europe will now construct an independent military force, against which both Blair and Powell have recently once again voiced their vigorous opposition, an opposition tinged with considerable concern that they will not be able to stop it. As for the cultural factor, we have to go back a bit in history. The United States is culturally an offshoot of Europe. And up until 1945, both in Europe (including, if not especially, Great Britain) and in the United States, Europe was the elder brother. The post-1945 realignments turned Europe into the younger brother. And they have never really appreciated this turnaround. Europeans by and large swallowed it during the Cold War. But Europeans see no need to swallow it any more. Here, even the most conservative Europeans share the sentiment. Notice the cultural disdain in Ferguson's arguments. Actually, his disdain is little different in terms of cultural politics than Ash's plaintiveness. Ash is simply more polite. Europe's cultural pride is by and large absolutely incomprehensible to most Americans. It always has been. The French-bashing so prevalent today is not anti-French; it is anti-European. And the Europeans know it. Ash is not alone in seeing this clearly. Does the West still exist? It hasn't disappeared entirely in geopolitical terms, but it does seem incredibly weakened. 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.] Empire and the Capitalists (15 May 2003)
No doubt, George W. Bush thinks he is in the forefront of those sustaining the world capitalist system. No doubt, a large part of the world left thinks that too. But do the great capitalists think so? That is far less clear. A major warning signal has been launched by Morgan Stanley, one of the world's leading financial investor firms, in their Global Economic Forum. Stephen Roach writes there that a "US-centric world" is unsustainable for the world-economy and bad in particular for the United States. He specifically takes on Robert Kagan, a leading neo-con intellectual, who has been arguing that American hegemony can only increase, particularly vis-a-vis Europe. Roach could not agree less. He sees the present world situation as one of "profound asymmetries" in the world-system, one that cannot last.
What is Roach's argument? The world has been in a "great disinflation [marvelous euphemism] from 1982 to 2002" - a salutary appraisal so different from the usual crowing about the strength of the U.S. economic position in the world-economy. "And now the unwinding of a new disequilibrium is at hand - the rebalancing of a U.S.-centric world." Why? First of all because of the "ever-widening disparities in the world's external accounts." He says that "as the United States squanders its already depleted national saving" and "as the rest of the world remains on a subpar consumption path," the situation can only get worse. Finally, the conclusion: "Can a saving-short US economy continue to finance an ever-widening expansion of its military superiority? My answer is a resounding 'no.'" What will therefore happen? The "prices of dollar-denominated assets compared to those of non-dollar-denominated assets" must fall, and fall drastically soon. Roach estimates: "a 20% drop in real exchange rates and nearly double that in nominal terms, higher real interest rates, reduced growth in domestic demand, and faster growth overseas." He ends his piece by saying that "the world is not functioning as a global economy" (so much for the globalization theorists). and that "for a lopsided global economy, a weaker dollar may well be the only way out." In short, Roach is arguing that the macho militarism swagger of the Bush regime, the dream of the U.S. hawks to remake the world in their image, is not merely undoable, but distinctly negative from the point of view of large U.S. investors, the audience for whom Roach writes, the customers of Morgan Stanley. Roach is of course absolutely right, and it is noteworthy that this is not being said by some left-wing academic, but by an insider of big capital. Seen in longer historical perspective, what we are seeing here is the 500-year-old tension in the modern world-system between those who wish to protect the interests of the capitalist strata by ensuring a well-functioning world-economy, with a hegemonic but non-imperial power to guarantee its political underpinnings, and those who wish to transform the world-system into a world-empire. We had three major attempts in the history of the modern world-system to do this: Charles V/Philip II in the sixteenth century, Napoleon in the beginning of the nineteenth century, and Hitler in the middle of the twentieth century. All were magnificently successful - until they fell flat on their faces, when faced by opposition organized by the powers that ultimately became hegemonic - the United Provinces, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Hegemony is not about macho militarism. Hegemony is about economic efficiency, making possible the creation of a world order on terms that will guarantee a smoothly-running world-system in which the hegemonic power becomes the locus of a disproportionate share of capital accumulation. The United States was in that situation from 1945 to circa 1970. But it's been losing that advantage ever since. And when the U.S. hawks and the Bush regime decided to try to reverse decline by going the world-imperial path, they shot the United States, and U.S.-based large capitalists, in the foot - if not immediately, in a very short future. This is what Roach is warning about, and complaining about. But doesn't the Bush regime give these capitalists everything they want - for example, enormous tax rebates? But do they really want them? Not Warren Buffett, not George Soros, not Bill Gates (speaking through his father). They want a stable capitalist system, and Bush is not giving them that. Sooner or later, they will translate their discontent into action. They may already be doing this. This doesn't mean they will succeed. Bush may get reelected in 2004. He may push his political and economic madness further. He may seek to make his changes irreversible. But in a capitalist system, there is also the market. The market is not all-powerful, but it is not helpless either. When the dollar collapses, and it will collapse, everything will change geopolitically. For a collapsed dollar is far more significant than an Al-Qaeda attack on the Twin Towers. The U.S. has clearly survived the latter. But it will be a vastly different U.S. once the dollar collapses. The U.S. will no longer be able to live far beyond its means, to consume at the rest of the world's expense. Americans may begin to feel what countries in the Third World feel when faced by IMF-imposed structural readjustment - a sharp downward thrust of their standard of living. The near bankruptcy of the state governments across the United States even today is a foreshadowing of what is to come. And history will note that, faced with a bad underlying economic situation in the United States, the Bush regime did everything possible to make it far worse. 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.] Lunacy, or Policy? (1 June 2003)
When the very Establishment, very responsible Financial Times, the representative newspaper of big capital, runs an editorial whose title is "Tax Lunacy" and whose subtitle is "The US administration throws prudence out of the window," you know that they must be very upset. The editorial concludes on this somber note: "For [the more extreme Republicans], undermining the multilateral international order is not enough, long-held views on income redistribution also require radical revision. In response to this onslaught, there is not much the rational majority can do: reason cuts no ice; economic theory is dismissed; and contrary evidence is ignored. But watching the world's economic superpower slowly destroy perhaps the world's most enviable fiscal position is something to behold."
So while Bush and company are crowing about their victories in Iraq and in the U.S. Congress, and much of the world left writes in a tone of desperate dismay about these successes, perhaps we should look at the deep fissures within all those forces that might be termed "right of center" - worldwide, in the United States, and among the capitalist strata. First the signs of the fissure. Henry C.K. Liu, chair of a New York-based investment group, writes in Asia Times an article entitled "US dollar hegemony has got to go." The director of investment research for Citigroup Private Bank notes that the ASEAN + 3 countries (Southeast Asia, Japan, China, and South Korea) are in the process of developing so-called "cross-border debt instruments" (which means debts denoted in their own currencies rather than in U.S. dollars), and calls this a "massive hammer poised above the U.S. economy." He foresees that creating an Asian Currency Unit could force the United States into a "major debt workout," and actually lead the U.S. Treasury eventually to issue bonds not in U.S. dollars, but in Asian currencies. On the European front, Christoph Bertram, the director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, and a previously strong Atlanticist, writes an article, again in the Financial Times, entitled "Germany will not become America's vassal." He charges George Bush with full responsibility for this shift in German opinion, and foresees that the European Union will have to "[tie] members together irreversibly in defence, as the euro has done in monetary policy." And in the United States, James Carroll, writing in the Boston Globe, talks of the weather change in America, "a nation so adrift that it dares not look twice at its real condition." The latest peroration of Senator Byrd (who up to two years ago was never considered a radical or even a liberal Democrat) ends with: "And mark my words. The calculated intimidation which we see so often of late by the 'powers that be' will only keep the loyal opposition quiet for so long. Because eventually, like it always does, the truth will emerge. And when it does, the house of cards, built of deceit, will fall." Senator Byrd made his speech on May 21. Just six days later, Secretary Rumsfeld, in his speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, made his now widely-noted observation that Iraq's alleged stock of weapons of mass destruction "may never be found." Rumsfeld said that perhaps the Iraqis destroyed them "prior to the conflict." Since the U.S. and the U.K. predicated their entire case for speedy and unilateral action on the menace these weapons posed, this is quite an admission, forced no doubt by the reality that the weapons simply have not been found so far. It may take a while for U.S. public opinion to absorb this admission and react to it. But Tony Blair found himself immediately in trouble. In the British system, it is a cardinal sin to "mislead" Parliament, and he is currently under fire (and perhaps more than that) for just this as a result of Rumsfeld's speech. His response thus far is, wait some more. Blair needs to find those weapons far more than Rumsfeld. The question is then whether this is really lunacy, or deliberate policy. I believe it is deliberate and intended, although I agree it is lunacy. To understand how the U.S. hawks and their allies think, we have to go back two centuries. The French Revolution really shook up the world cultural scene. For here was a group which came to power dedicated to the proposition that the government had the right to, and should, impose radical change on the social system, in the name of the "people" who were "sovereign." Furthermore, these two ideas - that political change was a "normal" phenomenon and that it was the "people" who were sovereign, caught on rapidly throughout the world, and indeed have never gone away since. There was an immediate reaction to these disturbing concepts (and linked actions). This is where we get the term "reactionaries." Edmund Burke in England and Joseph de Maistre in France wrote books fundamentally challenging the whole doctrine, and asserting the enduring social and moral value of "traditional" authorities. The Jacobins were ousted after a few years, but Napoleon continued the Jacobin thrust, albeit in a very distorted form. At last, in 1815, the Counterrevolution had definitively won. It was the time to restore order in Europe and the world. Prince Metternich constructed a Holy Alliance whose policy was to meet all disorder with massive repression. Not all the forces of order agreed with Metternich. In England, slowly but effectively, Sir Robert Peel led the Tories down the path of timely and limited concessions, notably the Reform Act of 1832. And there were similar attempts in France, notably the Revolution of 1830 which ousted Charles X and brought Louis-Philippe, the "citizen-king," to power. The decisive turning-point was the world revolution of 1848, which came as an enormous shock to the "reactionaries." The now elderly Metternich was turned out of office. A "social" revolution occurred in France, seeking to assert the rights of the "workers." And throughout central, eastern, and southern Europe, it was the "springtime of the nations." Of course, as we know, these many revolutions all failed within a short time, and were then met with renewed and very strong repression. But the forces right of center had learned their lesson. They decided to go down the path of Peel, and accept the necessity of "concessions" in order to forestall worse. The following decades saw the rise of what historians call the "enlightened conservatives" - Disraeli in Great Britain, Napoleon III in France, Bismarck in Germany. From then on, conservatives became merely a somewhat more prudent version of centrist liberalism. In fact, in order to head off the growing strength of "radical" left movements, conservatives were often more ready to use the state to enact changes than the centrist liberals: the extension of the suffrage by Disraeli, the restoration of trade-union rights by Napoleon III, the beginnings of the welfare state by Bismarck. These policies prevailed among conservative political groups until the world revolution of 1968, which dethroned the dominant centrist liberals, and "liberated" those who considered themselves the "true" right from the heavy hand of the "enlightened conservatives." The rise of the "true" right may be found in the very partial Thatcher takeover of the British Conservative Party and the very partial Reagan takeover of the U.S. Republican Party. The current Bush regime has transformed this partial takeover into a total takeover. The U.S. hawks are the revival of Metternich and his unabashedly reactionary policies: their macho unilateralism on the world scene, and their truly serious attempt to dismantle the welfare state in the United States. This is why the Financial Times says that "reason cuts no ice" with them. And this is why the heirs of Sir Robert Peel worldwide are so very upset. For just as Metternich's policies led to the disaster for the world's conservative forces that occurred in 1848, so Peel's heirs fear (and expect) that Bush's policies will do the same, and worse. And that the disaster is on the horizon. Maybe one day in the future, there will be an Armageddon between left and right. But in the immediate present, look for a showdown between the Metternich faction and the Peel faction of the forces right of center. The Metternich faction think that the stake is world order. The Peel faction think that the stake is the survival of a capitalist system. 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 Road to Nowhere (15 June 2003)
President Bush launched the "road map" to peace in Israel/Palestine in Aqaba this month, and within days the road map seemed to be in tatters. There is an old Chinese saying that "if you don't know where you're going, all roads lead there." The Bush administration officially, and probably unofficially, has not the slightest idea where it's going. The official U.S. line is that it is trying to facilitate negotiations, and will accept whatever is acceptable to both sides. The U.S. claims it is merely trying to lay down the necessary steps that will lead both sides to final and definitive negotiations.
President Bush has said for two years that he didn't want to engage himself personally in such negotiations, something President Clinton had done extensively (as had President Carter). But now he has done it. Why? Perhaps merely because he had promised a lot of people that, once Iraq was conquered, he would do something significant. He had promised Blair. He had promised the so-called moderate Arab leaders. And he had probably promised Powell. To call the first meeting, he counted on two things. The Palestine Authority officials are desperate to achieve something, almost anything. Otherwise they are history. Sharon is anxious to keep the United States 99% on his side, and thus had to make gestures. So they met, made absolutely minimal steps towards each other, went home, and within days there was more violence than ever. Let us be serious. Where is everyone 55 years after the creation of the State of Israel? The Palestinians are feeling abandoned by the world, and incapable of wrenching any concessions of consequence from the Israeli government. A sovereign Palestinian state, they fear, is simply not on the horizon in the coming decade. Those who stand for unmitigated struggle and the elimination of the State of Israel - Hamas for example - are coming to be the only important players on the scene. No doubt a majority of Palestinians would prefer an end to violence, but most of them don't believe they will get anywhere politically if they do end their violence. This gloomy assessment is matched on the Israeli side. Polls show that perhaps 60% of the Jewish Israelis would give up the settlements and go back to the 1967 borders in exchange for permanent peace. But the same polls show that of this 60%, perhaps half or more no longer think such an offer would achieve the peace they want. And therefore, in practice, they are not ready to make the offer, or not ready any more. It is quite clear that whenever Sharon or Abbas show the slightest inclination to adopt a compromise position (largely to please Bush), they face very strong, and quite passionate, opposition in their own community, opposition strong enough to derail even virtually meaningless compromises. Actually, the same is true of Bush. When he pulled back from 99% support of the Israeli position to 98%, he ran into a firestorm in the United States. What we have is a situation in which not only the most intransigent forces on the Israeli side have the upper hand and the most intransigent forces on the Palestinian side have the upper hand, but the most intransigent pro-Israeli forces in the United States have the upper hand. Far from easing the situation, the U.S. conquest of Iraq has hardened the situation, as was easy to predict. So we are at an absolute political stalemate. And fairly soon, everyone will admit it. What then? What follows is scarcely good news for anyone. The Israelis will use more and more force, and may start a process of expulsions. Since they have the power at the moment, they will prevail, in the sense that they will continue to occupy the entire area, and control it more or less under martial law. The Palestinians will continue to respond as they have been responding. In the short run, the intifada will change nothing. For such violence to change anything, there must be a responsive world out there, and there really isn't. But then the Israel/Palestine struggle will blend into a pan-Arab or pan-Muslim series of disorders, from Morocco to Indonesia, and most pertinently and most immediately in Iraq, Lebanon, and Egypt. And when this happens, then the survival of the State of Israel will be in peril, truly in peril, for the first time since 1948. The Arabs will say that the Jews have been expelled from the area twice before, and they will make it a third time. Can anyone do anything at this point that would really change such a scenario? Probably the United States still has the power to do something. But that would require such a 180-degree reversal of U.S. policy, and especially of the Bush version of this policy, that it is virtually unthinkable. For a reversal in this particular area could not occur without a reversal in so many other areas that it would represent an earthquake in geopolitical realities. I was not always such a pessimist. In the late 1980s, I expected that a two-state accord not only was possible but would be reached. I remember predicting, quite incorrectly, that this would occur much before an end to the apartheid regime in South Africa could occur. The world has squandered the possibilities in Israel/Palestine. And most participants and observers are spending their energy these days pointing fingers at who is responsible. After the bloody debacle, will it matter? Is anyone listening, or thinking about it? Is everyone so certain they can prevail without fundamental change in their positions? They seem to be. 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.] Common Sense About the Missing Weapons (1 July 2003)
The inability of the United States to find Iraq's famous stock of "Weapons of Mass Destruction" (or WMD as the newspaper headlines call them) has gotten embarrassing for the Bush regime, and even more so for Tony Blair (as well as the Spanish government). In the rush to justify war, it seems clear that the very least that can be said is that the U.S. and U.K. governments overstated their case, perhaps lied outright.
How important is this? And what does this mean? There are a number of questions intertwined in this discussion. One is how many, if any, weapons did Saddam Hussein really have, and when did he have them? A second is, if there were weapons, why didn't he use them? A third is, if there were weapons, where are they now? A fourth is how important the issue of the weapons really ever was for Bush and Blair? A fifth is whether or not the world is now safer from whatever menace these weapons were supposed to have posed, now that U.S. troops are in Baghdad. This is a tangled skein of questions, and it is in the interest of many people to keep it tangled, and thus resistant to analytic criticism. How many weapons did Hussein have? Rumsfeld is now saying that before the war no one (not even the critics of U.S. policy) doubted that he had some, so why all the gloating now about the absence of discoveries? The weapons were there, they are there, and they will be found, says he. He's of course partially right. Very few persons did ever doubt the existence of some weapons. I myself did not doubt it. The question is whether the weapons represented a significant and imminent threat to the world. The U.S. insisted that they did, and most of the rest of the world disagreed about this assessment rather strongly. Now it seems Saddam may really have liquidated most, if not all, of such weapons as he did have in the months before the war started. No doubt he was under pressure to do so. But then this was just what Hans Blix and the French government had been arguing, when they said that the U.N. inspections were "working." It seems the U.S. has now been able to uncover one Iraqi scientist who admits that detailed documents concerning the construction of nuclear weapons were buried in his garden - over a decade ago. And it seems he says that Saddam ordered this because he was planning to put the plans in operation once sanctions were lifted. That sounds possible to me. But so what? We'll come back to that question. Did Saddam indeed have operational weapons? Remember Tony Blair told Parliament that he could put them into the field in 45 minutes. If so, why then didn't he use these weapons? Surely, using them would have had at least some military impact. There is no good answer to this question if we assume the scenarios of which the U.S. had been warning. Maybe, Saddam was cleverer than that. Maybe he figured that he would lose the immediate military battle whatever he did, and the important thing was not to lose all his strongest supporters in the process. In this case, maybe he told them all to melt away, after which they could launch or encourage a looting operation with the double purpose of sowing disorder and of destroying infrastructure and records. This might then create a major mess with which the U.S. was politically incapable of dealing (given the complexity of Iraq's social tensions). And then he could start a draining guerilla war. Too clever, you say? Perhaps. Maybe the U.S. just ended up with the same results without any planning on Saddam's part. If he had these weapons, where are they now? A batch of plans in a garden and two trucks that might possibly have been used to make biological weapons in the future (and which in any case had been sold to Saddam by the British) is not very much to show for two months of search. I know Iraq is a big country, but presumably the U.S. armed forces are capable of making searches, especially if the U.S. had in its possessions before the war started, as they claimed they had, intelligence on where these weapons were. Are these arms in Syria? Unlikely. If they really were, we'd probably have seen the U.S. army go in there by now. Will they turn up in a desert underground site? Perhaps. Why then is the U.S. unwilling to let the U.N. inspectors look for them? It doesn't smell very good. But was the U.S. ever really interested in whether Iraq had such weapons? The answer is both no, and yes. No, in one very important sense. The U.S. hawks wanted to invade Iraq in order to invade Iraq, that is, in order to show the world that the U.S. could and would invade Iraq, just for being a nasty, anti-American focal point in the Middle East. Even if every member of the Bush regime knew for absolute certain that there were not and never had been any weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. would still have invaded Iraq. After all, Wolfowitz did say that the emphasis on these weapons was just a bureaucratic convenience, meaning it was the kind of argument that might persuade hesitant persons in the U.S. Congress and among the public to support the action, but was never the real reason. But yes, the U.S. was concerned about weapons of mass destruction, in the sense that the U.S. is determined that no other country or force in the world be in a position to constrain it in any significant way, and certainly not militarily. This means, as I have been repeatedly saying, that the U.S. cannot tolerate any form of European Union that would be politically independent of the U.S. And the U.S. cannot tolerate that any other country have nuclear weapons. Of course, some other countries - the U.K., Russia, France, China, India, Pakistan, and Israel - already do. And the U.S. knows there is just so much they can do to turn back the clock. But the U.S. policy is to stop any other countries who are conceivably in a position to develop such weapons over the next decade from doing so. This is not merely North Korea and Iran, nor even only Libya, Egypt, and Algeria. It is also Japan, South Korea, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Belarus, Germany, South Africa, Brazil, and Argentina. This is a long list, but there are quite possibly dozens more. The reasoning of the U.S. is really quite simple. The damage that can be done by even one small atomic bomb dropped in the course of warfare is sufficient to make the price of U.S. military action very high, perhaps too high. There is much talk these days of asymmetrical warfare, meaning that the U.S. is so far ahead of any other country in terms of military weaponry that it necessarily must win any encounter. But the so-called WMD can undo that asymmetry, especially given the political impact the use of such weapons by others against the U.S. would have on U.S. public opinion and its willingness to sanction warfare. So, it is understandable that the U.S. tries so hard to stem proliferation. Nonetheless, one has to say that this attempt is a quixotic quest if there ever was one. For one thing, changing governments (regime change) does not solve the problem in the least. We need to remember today that Iran's nuclear program was started not by the ayatollahs but by the Shah whom the U.S. put into power, and was abetted by the Israelis, who saw Iran as a constraint on Iraq. We have to remember that Iraq's biological warfare program was aided and abetted by the British and the Americans when they saw Iraq as a constraint on Iran. And so on. The U.S. invasion of Iraq has not slowed down but speeded up the programs to create WMD capacity everywhere. Meanwhile, the U.S. is now caught up in a long, draining occupation of Iraq, with lessened, not increased, ability to protect its interests across the world. On June 30, the Financial Times was querying whether Iraq had become Bush's Chechnya. And Bush's cynical use of the WMD issue vis-a-vis Hussein will catch up with him, as U.S. soldiers come under increasing fire in the guerilla war that has started. George W. Bush will learn the lesson of every ruler. There are limits to power, especially if it is not used prudently and intelligently. Seldom, in recent history, has it been used so extravagantly and so recklessly. 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.] When Will Bush Fall? (15 July 2003)
Bush's days are numbered. He is in serious trouble, and the trouble will not go away. The tissue of justifications for the Iraq invasion is fraying bit by bit. Both he and Blair have had to retreat on some of the more egregious statements. The famous weapons of mass destruction are nowhere to be found. And if some turn out, deeply buried somewhere, all that will prove is that the weapons were not readily usable in a war - certainly not in the famous 45-minute interval of Tony Blair. The aluminum tubes seem to be exactly what Saddam Hussein said they were, material for rockets. The asserted ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda were always improbable and no evidence has been adduced to confirm them. Bush has now laid the blame on the CIA, while the Republican chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee is accusing the CIA of leaking material to embarrass President Bush. The thieves are falling out.
The U.S. lived through this scenario once before, and not too long ago. The Watergate coverup of President Nixon worked at first, with only partisan sniping for a long while. But when Nixon tried to point the finger at fall guys (remember John Dean), they started to reveal the truth. Nixon did win his reelection. He held out that long. But in the end, he had to resign the presidency when a successful impeachment was imminent. Of course, the two situations are quite different in their details. But there are certain striking similarities. They both took place within the context of the ambivalence of U.S. public opinion about a war. They both involved presidents who were willing to use all the instruments at their command to ram through policies and intimidate opponents. They both had persons around them who were masters at stonewalling. Vice-President Cheney must have taken lessons at the feet of Nixon's Attorney-General John Mitchell. In politics - world politics, national politics, local politics - you can get a lot of support if you're winning. But the support often flies away as soon as you start to be losing. Bush promised the U.S. and the world a transformation of Iraq, indeed of the Middle East, if only Saddam Hussein could be ousted. At this point, about three months after the military collapse of the Iraqi regime, what is the situation in Iraq? Every day, American soldiers are being killed by what is clearly a guerilla action of some consequence. Iraqi policemen, newly-appointed by the U.S. occupiers, threatened to resign if U.S. soldiers did not quit their police station, feeling their lives were in danger for too close association with the U.S. army. Apparently, U.S. soldiers are not seen as protectors of those who cooperate with them but as a force association with which endangers one's lives. The U.S. occupiers have been unable to restore even a minimum of electricity in the urban centers of Iraq. Frankly, I am amazed by this. One would think that the U.S. government could assemble the necessary engineers, fly in the necessary equipment, and supply the necessary protection to the engineers so that electricity could be restored in a week or two. Is it too expensive? Are there other priorities? Does the U.S. not think this is important? Ordinary Iraqis think it's the number one priority and are getting very angry. Soon, the country may be awash with nostalgia for the regime the U.S. ousted. Meanwhile, in Great Britain, the heroic ally of the U.S., Tony Blair, is in increasing deep trouble. The Conservatives have decided there is no profit in supporting him. The Liberals never did. And the number of Labor M.P.'s who are restive are growing. At just this moment, the U.S. has announced that it is going to try six persons at Guantanamo Bay, of whom two are British citizens. There is a storm brewing in Great Britain among very respectable jurists who object to what they see as dubious, even illegal, procedures. They are calling for Blair to get the U.S. to turn these men over to British justice. But Blair can't promise the U.S. that confessions extracted in the absence of legal counsel will stand up in British courts. There is no easy way that the U.S. could help Blair in this difficulty without jeopardizing the entire structure of the Guantanamo nightmare. At the same time, the U.S. government is having a very hard time convincing any U.S. attorneys to be defense attorneys because they assert that the rules are rigged aggainst them illegitimately. The U.S. victory in Iraq was supposed to have the effect of getting recalcitrant allies - France, Germany, Russia - to reverse their positions. There is no sign of this whatsoever. Why should they? When Time Magazine conducted a poll in Europe in March, asking which of three - North Korea, Iraq, or the United States - was the biggest threat to world peace, a whopping 86.9% answered the United States. And the U.S. and Europe are on a collision course about mundane trade matters. In this, the U.S. has clearly been in the weak position. The World Trade Organization is ruling against the U.S. on these matters. Lots of little countries are quietly, and some not so quietly, refusing to bend to the U.S. insistence on being the only country above international law. And last but not least, the U.S. economy is not doing well at all. In addition, there are conservatives yelling that the Bush regime is not really conservative, because it is increasing, not reducing, the role of the state. Howard Dean is taking off as a potential Democratic candidate. And even if he doesn't get the nomination, which he in fact may, he has already forced the other Democratic candidates to "move to the left" to try to capture a little of the support Dean seems to be getting. Can Bush turn all this around? In the short run, maybe. If he can capture Saddam Hussein, that would help Bush. Here again, I am amazed that the U.S. has not been able to do this. But perhaps I should not be so amazed. Osama bin Laden has not been captured, dead or alive, in the almost two years Bush has been chasing him. Mullah Omar is still at large, and it seems he has been reorganizing the Taliban. As for the hawks who surround Bush, the day after the fall of Baghdad, they started clamoring to invade Syria. But all that's quiet now. Neither Iran nor North Korea have slowed down their drive to acquire nuclear weapons. Quite the contrary. They are virtually flaunting it. And the U.S. is being very prudent. The U.S. does not seem to have even the troops available to do what is urgently needed, reinforcing their position in Iraq. They seem scarcely in a position to take on Iran or North Korea seriously. Nor are the diplomatic initiatives achieving much of anything - in Israel/Palestine, in Northeast Asia, or even in Latin America. If I were George W. Bush, I'd be very worried. Perhaps he's not. Pride goeth before the fall. But I bet some of his clever political advisors are chewing their nails. They were feeling very sure of themselves not so long ago. But the ship of state has hit rough water. It may not sink immediately. But will it reach shore safely? The odds are not high enough for them to be smiling complacently. 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.] Has Saddam Hussein Lost? (1 August 2003)
The answer, say the American authorities, is obvious. Paul Bremer, the U.S. proconsul in Iraq, said recently, "Dead or alive, this man is finished in Iraq." What is wrong with this analysis is that it is made from the narrow perspective of someone who plays the game of geopolitics from a position of habitual strength, and who therefore measures wins and losses in a very short-term perspective. But the game of geopolitics looks different if you play it from a position of relative weakness. In that case, you have to play for the middle run. Let us look at how the war in Iraq might look from the position of Saddam Hussein.
In 1958, radical nationalists overthrew the monarchy in Iraq and installed Abdul Karim Kassim in power. The government considered itself pan-Arabist and revolutionary. Kassim took Iraq out of the U.S.-backed Baghdad Pact. He nationalized part of the oil industry. He had the support of the Communist Party of Iraq. He seemed to the U.S. to be moving to align Iraq too closely with the Soviet Union. In 1963, there was a second coup, which installed the Baath party in power. The Baath party had been a secular, socialist, nationalist pan-Arab movement in several Arab countries, which however was hostile to the Communist parties. It is widely believed the CIA helped the Baath to come to power. The Baath party suppressed the Communist Party of Iraq. At the time, Saddam Hussein was a young, up-and-coming Baath leader, nephew of the new president, intelligent and ruthless. In 1979, he staged a bloody coup against his uncle and became the ruler of Iraq. He began his unceasing purge of opponents. What did Saddam want, besides merely being in power? He wanted to strengthen the Arab role in world politics. He was in favor of greater Arab unity, and probably saw himself as the natural leader of the Arab world, the new Saladin. No doubt there were other aspirants for this role, but with Nasser out of the picture none as strong. Besides, Baghdad had always been, along with Cairo, the claimant to central status in the Arab-Muslim world. Saddam saw his objectives as having many enemies. In the Arab world, the two main ones were the Communists and the Islamists, and both hated Saddam. In the rest of the world, the two main ones were Iran and Israel, who hated Saddam, and the United States and Russia, both of whom hoped Saddam hated the other more. Saddam couldn't fight all his enemies at once. Without cutting ties with the Soviet Union, he struck up a tacit accord with the United States in the days of Ronald Reagan. None other than Donald Rumsfeld came to Iraq to seal the deal. What was the deal? Iraq attacked Iran. This was partly to gain territory, partly to weaken the Shia opponents inside Iraq, partly to achieve pan-Arab prestige, partly to strengthen his own military. The United States, at the time regarding Iran as the chief danger to its interests in the Middle East, thought this was a wonderful idea and gave, directly (and via its allies such as Saudi Arabia), armaments, biological and chemical weapons, and intelligence support to Saddam Hussein. (To be fair, it had been the French at an earlier point in time who had given the Iraqis their first boost in the drive to obtain nuclear weapons, but then the Israelis bombed these facilities.) The Iraq-Iran war was a bust from Saddam's point of view. After eight years of struggle, everyone was back at the starting-point, having suffered massive loss of lives and resources. Still, the war kept the Iranians busy and this was a plus for the United States. Saddam demanded recompense. Both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia were slow in responding. At just this point in time, the Soviet Union collapsed. The cold war was over. Saddam Hussein saw this as a bonanza, not a negative. The Soviet Union had been a continuing arms supplier for Iraq. But the price for that was that Iraq could not do anything to strain U.S.-Soviet relations. Saddam was now free from this constraint, at last. In 1990, Iraq was in economic trouble, the price of oil being low on the world market, and the costs of the Iran war having been high. Kuwait was insisting on being repaid for its loans during the Iraq-Iran war. It may also have been stealing Iraqi oil via diagonal drilling. And Iraq had a historic claim to Kuwait, which they charged had been part of their zone in the Ottoman era, and arbitrarily separated from them by the British after the First World War. So, Saddam decided that the solution to his economic problems was to seize Kuwait. This also fulfilled an Iraqi nationalist claim, and if successful would make Iraq the number one Arab nation. Iraq could even be the savior of Palestine, the negotiations between the PLO and the Israelis having just broken down. Saddam's calculations were probably as follows. Invading Kuwait will no doubt be called aggression. But can I get away with it? Who will respond? Only the United States would be in a position to do anything serious, and the U.S. had been for a long time ambivalent in its relations with Iraq. As we now know, the U.S. Ambassador, April Glaspie, told Saddam just days before the invasion that the U.S. was neutral in the Iraq-Kuwait diplomatic argument. So, Saddam reasoned, either the U.S. will react or it will fudge. If it fudged, Saddam would have won. If it reacted, there would be a war. At most, Iraq would probably come out a non-loser, for the U.S. will not dare to invade Iraq. He was of course correct, for the reasons that Pres. George H.W. Bush and Gen. Schwarzkopf gave at the time. An invasion would have been too costly in U.S. lives, the occupation would have been too costly politically, and Saudi Arabia and Turkey feared a breakup of Iraq, and the consequent creation of a Shia state in the south and a Kurdish state in the north. So, when the first Gulf War ended, Saddam managed a truce at the line of departure. He did suffer some losses. Parts of his army and air force had been lost. A de facto Kurdish state was established in the north, but not a Shia state in the south. He was subjected to a U.N. regime to end his weapons of mass destruction. By the time he was able to evict the U.N. inspectors in 1998, most of his weapons of mass destruction were no more. When George W. Bush came to power, Saddam knew he was in trouble, as most of his chief advisors had publicly called for overthrowing Saddam just a few years before. Then came 9/11. And Saddam must have known that it would be he, not Osama bin Laden, who would pay the price. So he called back the U.N. inspectors, knowing they would find nothing, since by now it seems he had destroyed or not replaced the destroyed weapons of mass destruction. It soon became clear however that nothing that Saddam would do would stop the U.S. invasion, since the point of the invasion was to remove Saddam and establish U.S. might in the region. Why then, if he no longer had weapons of mass destruction, did he not say so? Well, as a matter of fact, he did, but no one believed him. So, what could he do? He knew the limited power of his own army, and he knew that he would lose the second Gulf War. If you were Saddam and knew you would lose the second Gulf War, what would you do? Obviously, prepare the third Gulf War. How could you do that? The first thing to do would be to make sure that as many of your relatively small contingent of fierce loyalist fighters would survive. Therefore, you would have the resistance collapse early and dramatically. The second thing you would do is to create massive disorder by systematic looting. The third thing you would do is start a guerilla war, aimed first of all at U.S. soldiers and second of all at collaborators. Then you'd sit back and wait for the erosion of the U.S. position. You would expect that two crucial public opinions would shift in time. In the United States, the creeping losses of lives, the inability to get things going in Iraq, and the patent deceptions of the Bush regime would erode U.S. support for the operation. And in Iraq, as time went on, the image of Saddam, the torturer, would give way to the image of Saddam, the nationalist resister. Even if the U.S. were to find and kill Saddam, his image might survive. And in any case, the image of the U.S., the liberator, would disintegrate. This is less good than being Saladin, but if you're weak, you have to settle for what you can get. Bush thinks that if he brings down Saddam, he will have won. But Saddam thinks that if he brings down Bush, he will have won. We shall see who is right. 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.] Anglicans, North and South (15 August 2003)
Debates about the ordination of Anglican bishops are seldom of great interest to those who are not Anglicans. Yet, the debate about the ordination of an openly gay priest, Canon V. Gene Robinson, to become the Bishop of New Hampshire of the Episcopalian Church in the United States, has been front page news in the United States this month and has had repercussions throughout the world. When the appointment was approved by a majority of the bishops as well as of lay delegates of the Episcopalian Church, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, was moved to convene a special meeting of the primates of all the Anglican churches throughout the world to discuss the consequences of this action.
For those who voted in favor of Robinson, the issue was simple. It was God's way to make the church inclusive. Today people understood, in ways that earlier generations did not, that inclusion meant the acceptance of gays and lesbians as practicing an alternative method of human love, and therefore the sexuality of a priest was irrelevant to his/her consecration as bishop. For those opposed to this idea, it seemed clear that the scriptures indicated that homosexuality was a sin, and that therefore it was inconceivable that someone who was in unapologetic commission of sin could be consecrated as a bishop of the church. I do not propose here to discuss the theological debate. I leave that to those who are members of the Anglican Communion. But we should notice that the two sides in the debate are not randomly distributed. In the Anglican churches in the North (that is, primarily the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), there is a division between those who are in favor of inclusiveness (who seem to be today a majority) and a smaller but very strong group of so-called "conservatives" who are loudly opposed to these developments. On the other hand, the Anglican communions in the South (Latin America, Africa, Asia) seem to be very strongly on the side of the "conservatives" on this issue, with the sole exception of South Africa. The Archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola, has openly threatened the ending of communion with any Anglican church that tolerates homosexuality. This, and similar threats, is why the Archbishop of Canterbury has convened his meeting, to see if he can head off a possible formal split within the Anglican Communion. We should ask ourselves why there is this geographical difference in attitude, what are its roots, and what it portends for the future. Among all world religions, it is only Christianity that has a rough balance today between adherents in the North and adherents in the South. This is no doubt the consequence of European colonization of the world-system in the last five centuries, but it constitutes nonetheless a social reality of the twenty-first century. In the case of the Anglican version of Christianity, adherents are almost all to be found in whatever was at one time part of the British Empire which, however, of all the European empires, was the most geographically widespread. In the North, the divisions among Anglicans on this issue are an old, old story. For several hundred years now, some Christians within all the various churches, have struggled for a more "modern" understanding of faith and morals. In the second half of the twentieth century, the main issues have revolved around gender and sexuality: celibacy, the role of women in the church, accession of women to clerical posts, and most recently homosexuality. In the last century, almost all Christian churches in the North have seen an erosion of their membership, largely the result of more secular individuals withdrawing from active membership. Despite this erosion, the majority of those who have remained active have steadily sought to intrude new interpretations of faith and morality into their practice. The nineteenth century saw the development of a vast movement known as "liberal Protestantism." And Pope John XXIII implemented an "aggiornamento" (a bringing up to the present) of the Roman Catholic Church through the Council known as Vatican II. (Similar tendencies have been seen in most other world religions, of course.) There has been a reaction to such revisions of theology and practice, which has taken the form of evangelical movements or of insistence on a return to "orthodoxy." In many cases, these reacting groups have set up their own religious institutions. But many have remained within the so-called "mainstream" Christian churches, and have continued to struggle from within. The Anglican "conservatives" are thus simply a variant on a theme which is a commonplace view, even if (in many churches and many countries) a minority view. But why has the "conservative" view been a minority movement within so many Christian churches in the North? The answer no doubt is the joint impact of secular modernity and affluence. The reformists within the churches see themselves as seeking to have Christianity adapt to and survive in the modern world. The conservatives see the reformists as diluting, if not fundamentally offending, Christianity. The issue looks somewhat different in the South. Who are active in the Christian churches in the South? In Asia and Africa, they are for the most part converts or descendants of converts who defined Christianity in ancient ways, as the rejection of "pagan" ways. The Christianity to which they were converted was the Christianity of the missionaries, and it was hardly presented in the garb of secularist modernism. For such Christians, their religious life is a constant struggle against pagan practices, and they see decisions such as those concerning Canon Robinson as a betrayal of their struggle. This is reinforced by a sense of latter-day nationalism, in which they feel that the churches of the North are condescending to them, saying to them that, one day (when they are more "developed"), they will "understand" the wisdom of the new inclusiveness. There is a third element. In the North, mainstream Christian churches (and this is particularly true of Anglicans) draw their membership for the most part from elite elements - economically, politically, and socially. These people are sure of themselves. They are "respectable" people who feel strongly the need to be gracious and accepting of fellow Christians. In Asia and Africa, quite often, Christians are a minority in countries with Moslem, Buddhist, or Hindu majorities. Or the majority of the population are de facto practicing local religions. Christian churches find themselves in a defensive position, and their members are perhaps less sure of themselves. While Christians in the North may fear the encroachment of secular withdrawal, Christians in the South may fear the encroachment of other religious movements more "traditional" in their social practices. The situation is a bit different in Latin America. There, the minority Protestant churches have made headway by pulling people away from the Catholic Church, using tonalities of the Reformation and the rejection of the powerful and wealthy whose multiple saints are "idols." Here too, however, the reforms advocated within Protestant churches in the North seem both irrelevant to their needs and a betrayal of their religious struggles. Finally, South Africa has been a very special case within the South, where a multiracial struggle against an apartheid regime founded on a very conservative version of Protestantism, encouraged an openness to religious reformism not operative in most other countries of the South. There may well be a split in the Anglican Communion. And even if there is not, there will be a continuing tension, and probably a continuing geographical lopsidedness. This may also be occurring within the Roman Catholic Church. What does this portend for the future? Will the churches of the South evolve in the same direction as the churches of the North, as the reformers in the North hope and expect? Quite possibly not at all. Actually, the same division can be seen within the North, where old-line dominant White ethnic groups are far more open to the "reformism" of mores than those active in the churches who belong to "minority" communities. What it does demonstrate is that "reformism" in matters of sexuality among the powerful and "identity politics" among those who are less powerful are not at all necessarily doctrines that bring the two groups together. And if one extrapolates this to other issues, one can see that those who in some broad sense are, or could be, part of the family of the spirit of Porto Alegre, have some way to go before they can understand and accommodate the needs of each other. Immanuel Wallerstein [Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315. These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.] Brazil and the World-System: The Era of Lula (1 September 2003)
Brazil is a major country in the world-system. Its large size, its large population, its role as a leader of Latin America, and its strength as a semiperipheral state all mean that what happens in Brazil is of great consequence in terms of both the geopolitical arena and the structure of the world-economy. In 2002, for the first time in Brazil's history, the candidate of a left party, Luiz Inácio da Silva ("Lula") of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), won the elections, and seemed to signal a resurgence of left forces in Latin America and the South in general. Yet, only ten months later, the reviews of commentators, both Brazilian and foreign, are very mixed. Once again, the question is being asked whether it is possible to sustain an elected left government, one that will pursue a policy in opposition to the forces of neo-liberalism, in a country of the South? Or are the counterpressures of the United States, the IMF, and major capitalist forces too strong?
First, we should look at the correlation of forces at the moment of Lula's election. Lula obtained an electoral majority by forging an alliance with other parties (mostly of the center). His party is a minority party in the Brazilian parliament. Brazil has nearly the world's record in terms of internal inequalities. A large part of the rural population is landless. The country was bound by agreements made by the previous regime with the IMF. Brazil had a large debt and a relatively small amount of cash reserves. In the six months prior to Lula's election, he was clearly being threatened by a massive withdrawal of investment and financial inflows, if he failed to "reassure" world capital that he would not engage in measures that they considered hostile. On the other hand, he was swept into office by popular enthusiasm, both for him personally and for the anti-neoliberal program he and his party represented. For Lula and for Brazilians, especially the poor, hope had conquered fear (see Commentary No. 100, Nov. 1, 2002). There are three arenas which dominate political concerns of Brazilians: economic policy, land reform, and foreign policy. Lula's government clearly decided to move first in the arena of economic policy. Lula gave certain guarantees to international capital, even before his inauguration. He insisted that Brazil would continue to emphasize the fight against inflation. He appointed Henrique Mireilles, who had been head of the Bank of Boston, as the head of the Central Bank. Mireilles had actually supported Lula's opponent during the elections. The rest of Lula's economic team are also persons who are anxious to pursue policies that will not antagonize international capital. In its defense, the government says that it is seeking to renegotiate its accord with the IMF in ways that will reduce constrictions on infrastructural and social investment, or even dispense with an agreement altogether. Two major economic decisions of the initial ten months stand out. The Brazilian government has maintained an extremely high interest rate on its bonds (although they have lowered it from 26% to 22%). And the Brazilian government has passed a reform of the social security system which reduces considerably government pensions. Both actions are financially conservative. Both actions have been severely criticized by left intellectuals, but also by some business sectors who feel that the high interest rates make it impossible for them to expand their economic role (as opposed to the economic role of foreign banks and large-scale Brazilian enterprises linked to them). These left intellectuals had promoted instead a "productive shock" through the radical lowering of interest rates. One of them, Emir Sader, talks of a "lost opportunity," whose very negative effects will be felt in the near future. In the arena of agrarian reform, the government has been far more cautious than in economic policy. Thus far, it has done very little. But Lula has made an effort to keep the support of the Movimento dos Sem-Terra (MST, or the Movement of the Landless), who were a major historic pillar of the PT, and who continue to have the support of a major segment of the Catholic Church as well as the Coordenação dos Movimentos Sociais (which groups a large number of powerful trade-union, student, and church organizations). The MST engages in occupations of unused land (which represents a significant part of Brazil's acreage). The government's official position is that the government should buy this land from its owners and turn it over to the landless. The problem is that it doesn't really have the money to do this, and its economic policy is not one that will augment the sums necessary in any short time. The MST is not waiting, and continues to occupy land. It is met by resistance, often armed resistance, from the large landowners, who regard the MST as a dangerous movement that should be crushed, or at least curbed. These landowners are not for the most part ready even to sell their land, much less give it up without compensation. The MST recently asked for an audience with Lula, which he granted on June 24, much to the public dismay of the landowners. In his talk with the leaders of the MST, Lula asked them for "patience" and reaffirmed his "moral and historic commitment" to agrarian reform. One of the leaders of the MST, João Paulo Rodrigues Chaves, said they still had faith in Lula, but he warned that he had to "implement real changes" no later than the end of 2003. We shall see if he is able to do that. Finally, in the arena of foreign relations, which even his left intellectual critics agree is his best showing, Lula has moved in various ways to show his colors. He has reached out strongly to other leaders of South America - not only Venezuela and Argentina - but also Peru which he visited this month, pushing the idea that Mercosur (Mercosul in Portuguese) must be strengthened, widened, and become a major force on the world geopolitical scene. Mercosur is today the embryo of an economic union, with only four full members who have reduced tariffs between each other. Its strength is about that of the early forms of the European Union some 30-40 years ago. Of course the major issue is how Mercosur relates to the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA, or ALCA in Spanish and Portuguese), being promoted by the United States. The U.S. basically regards Mercosur as at best a nuisance and at worst an enemy. The U.S. wants a free trade agreement that would open Latin American countries to its financial institutions and would guarantee intellectual property. The Latin Americans are interested in access for their manufactures to the U.S. market. Each side basically hopes to veto or put off the primary demands of the other side by insisting that the questions each doesn't like be treated within the framework of the World Trade Organization (rather than bilaterally) where each believes it can find support. In the end, U.S.-Brazilian divisions over FTAA/ALCA are the key apple of discord. If Lula holds strongly to his position, he will find that he has made a big difference in world geopolitics and that therefore the Bush government may give him no quarter. If he doesn't, however, he may have little to show for his term of office. Brazil is already in the midst of electoral maneuvers. There are legislative elections in 2004 and presidential elections in 2006. The PT has outlined the list of parties with which it wishes to make alliances and those that it wishes to oppose at all costs. Lula says he doesn't know if he will run again. But no one believes him. And his polls at the moment are good. He is a charismatic figure and there is no visible opponent of stature. What kind of government is the government of Lula? His supporters say that it is a government of the center-left (necessarily, because of the alliances). He himself said this August that he is not and has never been a "leftist," although his public declarations in the past seem to belie this, since he spoke of being part of the Latin American left with a socialist perspective. Some left intellectuals in Brazil now are saying that his government is a right-wing government, even though they also say there is no left party to contest him. In neighboring Argentina, President Kirchner is pursuing the policy many expected or hoped that Lula would pursue and which was not expected of Kirchner. But Lula and Kirchner have different social and cultural "constraints," as the left Uruguayan publicist, Raúl Zibechi, has recently reminded us, Argentina having a middle class that has lost considerable income recently whereas Brazil has a middle class that is still moving upwards. Can Lula move more in the direction which the PT represented historically in Brazil? That depends in part on how far he succeeds with Mercosur. It also depends, and few acknowledge this, on how much trouble George Bush finds himself in. To the degree that the U.S. in is political and economic difficulty, the room for manoeuver of a government like that of Lula, will increase considerably. The picture will become much clearer in 2003. 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.] Bush in Big Trouble at Home (15 September 2003)
President Bush has been in great trouble with most of the world for over a year now, if not longer. But he has retained solid strength in the United States, up to about three months ago. Now, it's slipping away, and very fast.
Let's start with the Establishment press. The Republicans like to refer to this press as the "liberal press," suggesting that they are leftist wolves in sheep's clothing. But the fact is that the Establishment press in the United States is and always has been solidly centrist. For a year after 9/11, indeed up until three months ago, this centrist press sounded like they simply took the press releases from the White House and endorsed them. Now suddenly, this is no longer true. Indeed far from true. One only needs to take a look at the four main TV channels (CBS, NBC, CBS, and CNN) or read the main news magazines (Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report) or the principal newspapers (N.Y. Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times, Boston Globe). What one sees is article after article - news stories, opinion pieces, editorials - quite critical of the Bush administration - of its policies in Iraq, or rather of its "failures" in Iraq, and of its inability to counter the persistent and growing recession and unemployment in the United States. Indeed these articles are now so critical that they comment openly and negatively on what the Bush people say. The Bush administration got the U.S. into the war with scare tactics about Iraq - weapons of mass destruction, rocket launchers, drone planes that could spread biological weapons; and of course, close ties to Al-Qaeda. One by one, each of these claims has come undone. No weapons have been found, nor rockets, nor drone planes, nor ties to Al-Qaeda. And more and more intelligence people are saying now that they told the Bush administration this long ago, long before the invasion. This is so true that the Bush people stopped defending the invasion on these grounds some two months ago. They found another argument. The U.S. got rid of Saddam Hussein, for which the Iraqi people are eternally grateful. And the Iraqis will now build an exemplary democratic state in the Middle East. But the Iraqis seem to be expressing their gratitude by shooting at American soldiers with some regularity. The country is a physical and political mess. And if Iraq has become a beacon to the democratic world, I must be living on another planet. The most unbelievable picture, in terms of where the U.S. was even three months ago, is what is happening in the Democratic Party - the meteoric rise of Howard Dean. Howard Dean was a rather obscure governor of a small state, centrist in his political options (at least in the past), who started with only one thing going for him. He was an open critic of the invasion of Iraq. Up to three months ago, there were only a handful of prominent Democratic opponents of the war - Senators Byrd, Kennedy, Graham, Rep. Kucinich, and most of all, Howard Dean. That was about it. Everyone else had jumped on Bush's patriotic bandwagon, including the four major opponents of Dean for the Democratic nomination - Lieberman, Kerry, Edwards, and Gephardt. Dean's outspoken, very down to earth, persistent opposition to the Iraq war (expressed not only before but also after it started) gained him a national audience. And his smart use of the internet gave him a political grassroots organization across the country and financial contributions that have outdone his Democratic opponents. The press originally treated him as inconsequential, then as interesting but marginal, then as interesting but sure to lose the election to Bush if he won the nomination, to its present belief that not only can he win the nomination but he has a good shot at beating Bush. His Democratic opponents have responded to the Dean phenomenon by coming as close to his position as they possibly can, given their past records and commitments. The four major opponents are now saying that the invasion may have been correct, but the aftermath was very badly planned. This doesn't really persuade anyone. Just as Democratic voters don't seem to want "Bush light" (which is what some commentators called Lieberman), so they don't seem to want "Dean light" (which is what they are calling Kerry, Edwards, and Gephardt now). Even more interesting has been the reaction of the Republican political insiders. Originally, they thought Dean would be the easiest Democrat to defeat. Now they quite openly admit he might be the hardest. After all, there is already a Republicans for Dean organization. Finally, there are the ordinary voters, the ones who get polled regularly. Bush's ratings have been steadily falling. Today, at best he has a bare majority who think he's doing well. But more interesting is the latest poll that shows that 64% of the American population believe that the Iraq invasion has increased the likelihood of terrorist attacks. 77% believe that negative attitudes toward the U.S. in the Islamic world have increased terrorist recruiting. And 81% think that the true lesson of 9/11 is that the U.S. needs to be more multilateral. The Bush administration is inching its way back to trying to seem multilateral. They are seeking a U.N. resolution, and are more or less pleading with other countries to send in troops and money (let bygones be bygone, suggests President Bush). But the U.S. still doesn't want to give up U.S. political and military primacy in Iraq, which is no doubt the real price they must pay to get support. The U.S. may get its U.N. resolution, or some diluted version of it. But even so, the U.S. probably will get neither troops nor money from other countries, anyway nothing significant. To be sure, after Bush's latest speech, Romania promised another 50 soldiers. But that's so ridiculous that even the Bush administration doesn't advertise it. The first American voices for a full U.S. withdrawal from Iraq have started to be heard. Their numbers will be growing and they may be shouting quite loudly in the next three months, as the casualties continue to mount, the situation in Israel/Palestine deteriorates still further, and unemployment continues to mount in the U.S. The neo-cons are aware of this. They have begun to say that the comparison is not with Vietnam, but with Somalia, where the U.S. withdrew in disgrace and defeat. They are warning that, if the U.S. does not stand firm, it will lose everything. In a sense they are right. This is George Bush's unsolvable dilemma. If he stands firm, but resolves nothing in Iraq, his likelihood of reelection will diminish radically and rapidly. If, however, he doesn't stand firm, he will be ridiculed as someone who talked big and couldn't stand the heat in the kitchen. His principal danger is not losing the center, but losing his own firm supporters on the right. Many of them are already unhappy that this administration has been one of the most spending administrations in the history of the U.S. despite its rhetoric. The U.S. deficit is approaching rapidly the half trillion dollar mark. Probably George Bush's only way out would be to say to the American people: The U.S. needs to stay in Iraq for five years at least. And for that, we need American sacrifices. I am going to reinstitute the draft, and I am going to ask for sharp tax increases to pay for this imperial policy. This is in fact what someone like Sen. McCain would do. It might even work, at least in terms of American backing for such a policy. But George Bush doesn't have the guts to do it, and the people around him have many other agendas. So, bye-bye George W. Bush. In ten years, we will look back and agree that no president in the history of the United States did more to weaken the world power and prestige of the United States. George W. Bush will have the record. 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.] Cancun: The Collapse of the Neo-Liberal Offensive (1 October 2003)
Cancun is more than just a passing geopolitical battle. It represents the interment of a neo-liberal offensive that started in the 1970s. To understand the importance of the event, we have to go back to the beginning.
The 1970s marks a turning-point in two cyclical rhythms of the capitalist world-economy. It was the beginning of a long stagnation of the world-economy, a Kondratieff-B phase, out of which we have not yet come. And it marks the moment when the hegemony of the United States in the world-system began to decline. Stagnations in the world-economy mean that the rate of profit has gone down to an important degree, as a result of increased competition in the leading industries and a consequent overproduction. This leads to two kinds of geoeconomic battles: a struggle among the centers of capital accumulation (the United States, western Europe, and Japan/East Asia) to shift the burden of lowered rates of profit to each other. I call this "exporting unemployment," and it has been going on for thirty years, with each of the three centers doing better at different times (Europe in the 1970s, Japan in the 1980s, and the U.S. in the late 1990s). The second geoeconomic battle however is that between the center and the periphery, the North and the South, in which the North seeks to take back from the South whatever small gains they made during the preceding Kondratieff A-period of expansion (ca. 1945-1970). As everyone knows, Latin America, Africa, eastern Europe, and South Asia all for the most part did poorly after 1970. The only area in the South that did relatively well was eastern and southeast Asia, at least until the financial crisis of the late 1990s. But one area of the periphery always does well in a downturn, since there has to be some region into which declining industries move. In this difficult period when capitalists were scrambling to maintain their income, partially through relocation of production but more often through financial speculation, they started what can only be called a counteroffensive against the gains of the South and of the working classes in the North in the previous A-period. This came to be called "neo-liberalism." The political face of this counteroffensive was to be found first of all in the transformation of the British Conservative Party and the U.S. Republican Party from a party of moderate Keynesians to a party of ferocious believers in the nostrums of Milton Friedman. Mrs. Thatcher's years as Prime Minister and Ronald Reagan's term as President of the United States represented a distinct turn to the right in both national and world policy, but even more importantly a transformation of their own party structures, as the basis of pushing the balance-point of internal politics from the center to considerably right of center. The new conservative policy constituted a pushback on all three sources of rising cost for producers: wages, the internalization of costs to reduce ecological damage, and state taxation to finance the welfare state. There was an attempt to coordinate this policy throughout the countries of the North by creating a series of new institutions, notably the Trilateral Commission, the G-7, and the World Economic Forum of Davos. The economic policy that was proposed came to called the Washington Consensus. First of all, we should note the Washington Consensus replaced something called developmentalism. Developmentalism had been the reigning world economic policy in the previous period (in the late 1960s the United Nations had even proclaimed that the 1970s would be the "Decade of Development"). The basic premise of developmentalism had been that every country could "develop," if only its state would implement appropriate policies, and the end point would be a world of states all looking more or less the same and all more or less equally wealthy. Of course, developmentalism did not work, could not work, which sad reality became clear to everyone in the 1970s. In its place, the Washington Consensus proclaimed that the world was in the era of "globalization." Globalization was said to be the triumph of the free market, the radical reduction of the economic role of the state, and above all, the elimination of all state-created barriers to trans-border movements of goods and capital. The Washington Consensus ordained that the prime role of governments, especially those in the South, was to end the illusions of developmentalism, and accept the unrestricted opening of their frontiers. Mrs. Thatcher trumpeted that they had no choice. She said: TINA, there is no alternative. TINA meant that any government that did not conform would be punished, first of all by the world market and second of all by interstate institutions. There has been insufficient attention to the fact that it was only beginning in the 1970s that interstate institutions began to play a significant role in these geoeconomic struggles. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank were turned into very active enforcers of the Washington Consensus. They could play this role because the states of the South, grievously hurt by the stagnation of the world-economy, were short on funds and had to turn constantly to outside lenders to compensate for a negative balance of payments. The IMF in particular imposed drastic conditions on such loans, conditions which generally required considerably reduced social services within the country and gave priority to the repayment of external debt over anything else. In the 1980s, it was decided to go further. The World Trade Organization (WTO) had been an idea first discussed in the 1940s. But it had foundered on considerable differences among the centers of capital accumulation. What enabled it to proceed in the 1980s was the common agreement of the countries of the North that it could be a very useful tool in furthering the Washington Consensus. In theory, the WTO stands for the opening of frontiers, the maximization of a free world market. The major problem is that the North has never quite meant this. They wanted the countries of the South to open their frontiers, but they didn't really want to reciprocate. After the United States succeeded in creating the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) and Europe had proceeded further in its economic union, the countries of the North decided it was time to implement their program in the WTO. The moment chosen was the Seattle meeting of 1999. The North had however waited too long. The ravages of the Washington Consensus - increasing unemployment, ecological degradation, destruction of food autonomy - led to an unexpectedly strong protest movement which managed to bring together many different kinds of groups from anarchists to environmentalists to trade-unionists. And their combined protests managed to render impotent the meeting. In addition to this, at Seattle, the U.S. and western Europe were at odds with each other because of their respective protectionist policies against each other. So Seattle closed without accomplishing anything. At this point, two major events occurred. The first was the founding of the World Social Forum (WSF), which held its first three meetings at Porto Alegre, and which constituted a "movement of movements" against neo-liberalism, the Washington Consensus, and the forum of Davos. It has been remarkably successful thus far. The second event was 9/11, which led to the proclamation of the Bush doctrine of unilateral preemptive action against anyone the U.S. government designated as "terrorists." Initially the effect of 9/11 was that of much worldwide support for the fight against "terrorism." And it was soon after this that the next WTO meeting was held in Doha. At that meeting, the North was able to impose on a momentarily intimidated South the acceptance of an agreement to discuss new treaties that would open world economic frontiers considerably further. These treaties were to be consecrated in 2003 at Cancun. Once again, Cancun came too late. Between Doha and Cancun came the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, which turned world sentiment strongly against the U.S. and exposed the serious limitations of U.S. military power. And in the meantime the world peace movement had considerably strengthened the forces of Porto Alegre, which in turn were able to place considerable pressure on the countries of the South to strengthen their backbone. At Cancun, the more or less united forces of the North pushed their program of opening the frontiers of the South to their goods and capital, while protecting the intellectual property of the North (patents) against dilution or non-respect. The South counterorganized. Brazil took the lead in creating a Group of 21 (including India, China, and South Africa) who said in essence that in return the South insisted on an opening of the frontiers of the North to the South's agriculture and manufactures. In this battle, the Group of 21, who were "middle powers," obtained the support of the poorer countries, notably in Africa. Since the North was not willing, for its internal political reasons, to make any serious concessions to the South, the South did not budge. The result was deadlock. This is seen by everyone as a political victory for the states of the South. It should be clear that this victory was made possible by the conjuncture of U.S. geopolitical weakness and the strength of the forces of Porto Alegre. The WTO is now effectively dead. It will survive on paper, as do many other interstate institutions, but it will no longer matter. The U.S. hopes to recoup the situation by going unilateral. It will find that it will not be easy to get significant countries in the South to sign one-sided free trade treaties. The South will now move on to challenge the IMF and the World Bank. Indeed, this offensive has already begun, and the strong defiance of Argentina's President Kirchner has shown that such defiance can work. It will not be long before the term "neo-liberalism" will represent the almost forgotten follies of yesteryear. 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.] Osama's Victory (15 October 2003)
The attacks of 9/11 on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon have been attributed to Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, and have been called acts of terrorism. What is the meaning of terrorism? What is its purpose? Terrorism is usually defined as acts perpetrated against a category of victims with the objective of sowing terror, that is, excessive fear on the part of others in the category of the victims. It is done in the attempt to make these others change their future behavior. In this case, the victims were generically American civilians. (I know there were others in the buildings, but that was in some sense, from the point of view of the terrorists, accidental.) The first question, therefore, is, did the attacks succeed in sowing terror among Americans, and therefore changing their future behavior?
If one read The New York Times of Sept. 12, 2003, which no doubt neither Osama bin Laden nor George W. Bush did, one might be tempted to say that yes, indeed, the attacks succeeded because they changed the behavior of the kinds of people who were attacked, in ways that, for Osama bin Laden, were a victory. The United States used to boast of being an open society, where people could come and go as they pleased, a country welcoming of visitors and immigrants, a country in which the police were not oppressive, a country in which ordinary people were not afraid. What do we find in the newspaper stories? There is one story entitled "Security around U.S. embassy strains relations with Berlin." The Reuters story begins: "The tight security that has sealed the American Embassy here from the rest of Berlin and brought a once bustling block in the heart of the German capital to a standstill has an eerie cold war feel to it. Fences 10 feet high, huge concrete barriers, guards with machine guns and armored vehicles have made the street in front of the five-story building look like a war zone, disrupting businesses and motorists." The story explains the great unhappiness of Berliners, the disputes with the city government about the extent of the cordon around the embassy, and the fact that neither the British nor the French embassies have felt the need to install similar security measures. The story ends by quoting a Dutch tourist: "I don't know if there needs to be so much security here. It seems like way too much. It makes you feel like you aren't free." The second story is entitled "In-transit foreign fliers deterred by new rules." This story details the consequences of the fact that the U.S. government now requires many persons from other countries who merely change planes in a U.S. airport to obtain visas in advance, even if these persons do not go beyond the transit lounge. Who are such people? Well, Brazilians flying to Japan passing through New York, or Costa Ricans flying to Spain passing through Miami. It also talks about Central Europeans coming on tourist visits to the United States - the excessive costs and time of acquiring the tourist visa in Slovakia, the fact that Czechs are in a dilemma in answering the queries about military service of the U.S. consuls because it seems Czech law makes it a crime to disclose military service. One result has been that a Czech tourist agency has decided to send people to Canada instead - not only no visa hassle, but the Canadian government actually offers to help with trip planning. The third story is entitled "Aid workers leaving Iraq, fearing they are targets." At the very moment that the U.S. government is asking the world to assist it in the reconstruction of Iraq, "the great majority of foreign aid workers in Iraq, fearing they have become targets of the new violence, have quietly pulled out of the country in the past month, leaving essential relief work to their Iraqi colleagues and slowing the reconstruction effort." This is because the aid workers either are Americans, are mistaken for Americans, or are associated in Iraqi minds with the U.S. occupying authority. So, even if they are French, they have to fear that they are mistaken for Americans. None of the three stories relates an issue of world-shaking importance. But the three together, two years after the attacks of September 11, indicate that the situation is far from being in hand from the point of view of the United States. The U.S. has had to retreat behind walls of safety - concrete barriers around its embassy in Berlin, creating obstacles to foreign tourism, and in Baghdad both losing civilian aid workers and putting its own people behind other concrete barriers. No doubt some, perhaps even all, of these security measures are justified by the dangers posed. But that's just the point. That was what Osama bin Laden hoped and expected would happen. It is a victory for him because living behind concrete barriers is first of all a severe limitation on the freedoms of those who have to do this. And secondly, living behind walls breeds an ambiance of fear and besiegement, which inevitably affects behavior at home and abroad. I suppose if one presents this analysis to officials of the Bush administration, they will answer that the "war on terror" is supposed to end this state of fear and besiegement, by eliminating the source of the fear. One has the right to wonder, after reading the newspaper accounts, whether this "war on terrorism" has been very effective, whether the Bush administration has in fact done what it would actually take to eliminate the source of the fear. The fact is that, at the present time, the fear is growing, not diminishing. It behooves us to ask why. 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.] Bolivia, Bush, and Latin America (1 November 2003)
The uprising in Bolivia which ousted a president attracted an unusually large amount of coverage in North American and European newspapers. In a way, this is surprising, since countries like Bolivia are normally ignored (or given minor coverage) even in the best newspapers. This may merely be the effect of the cumulation of events of the last two years reflecting a changing politics in Latin America. Latin America may be reentering the world's political focus.
In the 1960s, "revolution" had been a pervasive theme in Latin America. Cuba became a symbol of the march to socialism. Che Guevara symbolized and practiced what was called "focoismo" or a "revolution within a revolution" (and which led to Guevara's own death in - Bolivia). Dependency was the new slogan of Latin American intellectuals, a concept that had evolved out of the core-periphery concepts and "desarollismo" (developmentalism) first elaborated by Raúl Prebisch and the U.N.'s Economic Commission for Latin America. These intellectuals began to be openly opposed to the Latin American Communist parties, regarding them as reformist, anti-revolutionary de facto collaborators with the United States and world capitalism. Guerrilla movements were started in a large number of countries and seemed to be very powerful. In Chile, Salvador Allende was elected on a program of a transition to socialism. The United States began to favor military takeovers of a number of regimes (Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay) to stem the tide. The tide of revolution began to wane in the 1970s, although the Sandinistas in Nicaragua represented a last burst forward. In the 1980s, the stagnation in the world-economy began to take its toll on Latin America. Mexico led the Latin American band by inaugurating the "debt crisis" in 1982 (although Poland had actually beaten it to the world starting-line in 1980). The 1980s saw a retreat from developmentalism, a new drive to "democracy" (that is, electoral politics), and a general calming of the waters. The various guerrilla movements in Central America essentially gave up, obtaining a face-saving right to (re)enter electoral politics. The collapse of the Soviet Union and of the communisms in east-central Europe disoriented and disarmed much of the Latin American left. The 1990s were a period in which the United States felt it could breathe easily in Latin America. Mexico accepted to be part of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). And finally, after a half-century of the continuous single-party government of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), Mexico elected the leader of a conservative, free-trade-oriented, pro-North American party, Vincente Fox, as president. True, immediately upon the signing of the NAFTA accord, Mexico saw the emergence and survival of a startlingly new type of socio-political movement, the Zapatistas in Chiapas, defending the interests of the repressed Indian populations. And it was attracting a lot of attention and support across the entire world, but the U.S. basically paid no attention to them, possibly because they proclaimed that they were not interested in achieving state power. The U.S. began to promote the idea of a Free Trade Association of the Americas (FTAA, or ALCA) and persuaded Chile to be the first to sign a bilateral agreement of this sort. Then began a slow rumble of political discontent in Latin America. The forms this took in Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, Brazil, and Argentina were different in detail. But they all shared one feature. The discontent found its roots in the Indian (or mestizo) populations and in the organized trade-union and peasant sectors of the population. It was the middle classes who were relatively disoriented and unsure where their interests lay. In none of these cases, did a government come into power that was "revolutionary" by 1960s standards. But in each case, there was opposition, more or less overt, to the dictates of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and to the creation of FTAA. In each case, the United States was unhappy but didn't seem to be able to affect the situation as directly and as rapidly as in the 1970s. There were no right-wing coups à la Pinochet. This is the background to Bolivia, perhaps the poorest country in South America. Bolivia had actually been the pioneer of the earlier "revolutionary" wave in Latin America. A revolution in 1952 led to the nationalization of the tin mines. The revolution was led by the Central Obrero Boliviano (COB), which had organized the tin miners, most of whom were Indians. The revolution was a great shock to the United States, combining as it did trade-union militancy with claims of the Indian majority to a political role in the state. It took five years to contain it. As tin receded on the world market, many of the Indian producers turned to the production of coca, which brought them income but also the wrath of the U.S. pursuing its anti-drug campaign. In the last election, the leader of the cocaleros, Evo Morales, heading a movement called Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), with the support of the COB and of the Indian movements, lost by a very narrow margin to a standard conservative candidate, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. It is said that when Sánchez met Bush in Washington, he joked that he would do as asked but that, if he did, the next time Bush saw him he would probably be in political exile in the U.S. And thus it happened. When Sánchez offered to sell Bolivia's gas as a low price, and proposed on top of that to build the gas pipeline to a port that had once been part of Bolivia but had been won in a war by Chile in the nineteenth century, the country erupted, and first of all the enormous slum areas of the Altiplano, which hovered over the capital city. And suddenly, students and workers marching in the streets (and the COB in an official document) were shouting the praises of Che Guevara. The United States proclaimed its support for Sánchez, and it got the Secretary-General of the Organization of American States to do the same. But the uprising had been too strong. And the nondescript Vice-President withdrew his support from the government, paving the way for his takeover of the office. Then, a short time after, to everyone's surprise, the conservative government in Colombia, the strongest ally of the United States on the continent, lost the mayoralty elections in Bogotá (as well as in the second city, Medellin) to a trade-union leader and ex-communist, "Lucho" Garzón. The discontents were basically the same: the damage wrought by neo-liberalism and the demands to eradicate coca, as well as in this case discontent with the government's hard line on negotiations with the long-surviving rebel movement, the FARC. So, no "revolutions" but a series of systematic setbacks to conservative forces and to United States policy. Let us review all that has happened. In Brazil, "Lula" and the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) finally won a presidential election. In Argentina, showcase of the IMF, economic collapse and political turmoil in the end produced a president who defied the IMF, got away with it, and then was rewarded with strong political support for his candidates in the major mayoralty elections. In 2003, in a critical vote of the U.N. Security Council on Iraq, the United States failed to get the support of either Mexico or Chile. At Cancún, the opposition to the U.S. proposals was led, and led successfully, by Brazil. And everywhere, there has been the political awakening of the indigenous populations which, in the majority of countries in Latin America, are the majority of the population. This upsurge has been made possible by two phenomena that have come together. On the one hand, the United States no longer has the power to dictate outcomes in Latin America, especially now that it is tied down in Middle Eastern military commitments. And on the other hand, Latin American political leaders, especially of the center-left, have learned the lesson that they do not have the power to take large, quick steps, but they do have the power to take medium-sized ones, and these can cumulate. Latin America is in the process of taking advantage of U.S. weaknesses. The key battles are two: the degree to which Indian movements and other peasant-based and trade-union movements maintain their vigor and increase their political influence; and whether the negotiations over the FTAA will in fact collapse because of U.S. rigidity over any concessions that are meaningful. 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 is Realism in Iraq? (15 November 2003)
As the U.S. gets into more and more difficulty in Iraq, the U.S. hawks are getting more and more shrill in their attacks on the doubters. They are accusing the doubters of being out of touch with what is going on. And this, they say, is what is causing the U.S. difficulty. So in the end it is not the Iraqis but the messengers of skepticism who are said to be causing the harm to U.S. interests. I myself was attacked for being an example of "dizzying unreality" in an article by Victor Davis Hanson in the October 13, 2003 issue of the National Review, America's premier conservative journal of opinion. Here is the evidence Hanson offers:
Immanuel Wallerstein warned of the possibility of "a long and exhausting war," dismissing the scenario of a quick triumph - "Swift and easy victory, obviously the hope of the U.S. administration, is the least likely [outcome]. I give it one chance in twenty" - before concluding that "losing, incredible as it seems (but then it seemed so in Vietnam too), is a plausible outcome." Hanson's quotes, taken from an article I wrote in Foreign Policy in its July/August 2002 issue, don't seem to me, today, anything I should blush about. It is true that I, along with most people, expected Saddam Hussein to hunker down in the big cities and fight a house-by-house war. But, it seems, he was cleverer than we were. He decided instead on a guerrilla war. Scott Ritter, an American ex-marine who was part of the U.N. inspection teams of the mid-1990s, says he came across at that time an outline of an official program for a guerrilla war in case of invasion, a document that he turned over to U.S. authorities. And in the Nov. 13, 2003 issue of the Washington Post, the commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division, Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack, Jr., who is responsible for combat operations in the lower Sunni triangle, is quoted in essential agreement with this assessment: I believe Saddam Hussein always intended to fight an insurgency should Iraq fall. That's why you see so many of these arms caches out there in significant numbers all over the country. They were planning to go ahead and fight an insurgency. So, let us review where we are. The U.S. clearly has not won a swift and easy victory. The U.S. is into a long drawn-out war. In that article I wrote last year, I said I thought the U.S. had two chances out of three of winning a long-drawn out, bloody war and only one in three of a real defeat. But a widely-leaked recent supposedly top secret CIA report says that the U.S. might actually be losing the situation in Iraq. I may thus have overestimated the chances of the U.S. to win. In any case, the only dizzying unreality is to believe that the U.S. is doing well in the Iraq fiasco. We now know, because no one less than Richard Perle, the preeminent neo-con, tells us, that Saddam Hussein offered just before the U.S. invasion, via a backdoor messenger, to make a deal that would have left him in power but allowed direct U.S. inspection for weapons of mass destruction. The offer was not pursued by the U.S. The commentary by The New York Times in its editorial on Nov. 7, 2003 on this revelation was: Administration supporters were fond of saying at the time that there were things Bush officials knew but could not share with the public. Little did we imagine that among those things was an offer that might have provided a way to avoid the war. Meanwhile, within the United States, all the polls show that the U.S. public is slowly but surely coming to the conclusion that the whole Iraq adventure was a mistake. One of the most senior U.S. senators, Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, a Democrat from South Carolina, with 30 years of service, made a not widely reported speech on Nov. 3 on the floor of the Senate explaining his misgivings about Iraq. Hollings started by saying "I come to acknowledge my 'Cambodian moment' in the Iraq war." He is referring to an earlier war, when Senator Mansfield of Montana, the then Majority Leader in the U.S. Senate, said at the time of the invasion of Cambodia that he could not take the whole Vietnam war any longer. Hollings said he did not want to wait as long as Mansfield did on Vietnam. What is important about this speech is that Hollings is from the South and has been historically a quite conservative Democrat. And countering the Bush regime's hype, he says that to say this isn't Vietnam all over again is nonsense. The rumbling in middle America that Hollings represents is very real and is spreading very fast. So could the United States really lose the war in Iraq? Well, the U.S. really did lose the war in Vietnam. Of course, I suppose it depends on how you would define winning the war. Do we mean a situation in which U.S. troops remain in Iraq but no one shoots at them? The real prospect before us is instead the gathering of U.S. troops in Iraq behind concrete walls where it's more difficult to shoot at them. Does it mean the election of a "democratic" government? A free election today, or tomorrow, would most likely lead to a Shiite majority, and not a government in the hands of those favored exiles the U.S. has been sponsoring. In either case, it is doubtful that those elected would have John Locke or Thomas Jefferson as their heroes, or have a less hostile view towards Israel than Saddam Hussein, or be less likely to pursue nuclear proliferation as soon as they could. After all, Iraq has national interests too, and they don't accord very well with the national interests of the United States. The U.S. administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, seemed to think he could handle this by remaining proconsul in Iraq for a long time and slowly building an acceptable puppet regime. But the daily deaths make even the hawks in Washington doubt that they have the leisure to be so disingenuous. The horizon is grim for the United States in Iraq, in the Middle East, and indeed in the world. This puts the Bush administration in a bind. In Washington, they are now beginning to mumble about an exit strategy. Some think this may win more votes for Bush in 2004 than persisting in the current strategy. But it may also lose votes among disillusioned partisans. So it's a lose-lose situation for Bush. And the only dizzying unreality would be not to recognize this. Immanuel Wallerstein [Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315. These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.] The Future of Iraq (1 December 2003)
The sudden change in U.S. policy in Iraq concerning the holding of elections brings to the fore the question of what is the future of Iraq. The U.S. proconsul, Paul Bremer, had hoped to have his appointed interim governing council draw up a constitution that the U.S. would like and then, a year or two later, hold elections under this constitution. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the leading Shiite cleric in Iraq, had issued a fatwa already in June saying that this procedure was unacceptable, that only an elected Iraqi assembly could draw up a constitution. Al-Sistani had been the Shiite leader least hostile to the U.S., most seemingly ready to cooperate, and this was a blow to U.S. intentions.
It took Paul Bremer five months to realize that he could not simply ignore al-Sistani and proceed without his support. So, he flew to Washington and came up with a supposed compromise. The U.S. would allow elections first and a constitution later. But the elections he proposed would be that of multiple regional caucuses, composed of persons approved by the U.S. authorities, and they would elect the group that would draw up the constitution. The Grand Ayatollah then issued another fatwa saying this was equally unacceptable. Everyone is waiting to see what Bremer will do next. At the moment, he is trying to get al-Sistani to back down. Good luck. What is the problem? The problem is that the U.S. has a simple dilemma, clearly spelled out by Sen. Jack Reed, a leading moderate Democratic senator: "A quick, hasty election might bring to power a person who doesn't share the values we're trying to encourage. But the more we wait, the more it looks like an occupation." Translated, this means, the U.S. wants elections that will have the results it favors, and it is worried that this might be difficult. But since the U.S. says it invaded Iraq in order to bring democracy (read: elections) to Iraq, it's equally difficult not to hold them. What is it the U.S. wants at this point? Democracy, whatever that means? Not really. What the U.S. wants is a pliable regime that can successfully maintain internal order and that will be a de facto ally of the United States in the world arena. That is, it wants a regime that will not do very much about Israel/Palestine, not allow the French or the Russians to get economic advantages over the United States, not be a haven for Islamists or "terrorists," and not try to develop nuclear weapons. It wants a regime more or less like that of Egypt or Jordan. And oh yes, the U.S. wants a regime that might allow the U.S. to have bases there, should the U.S. want them. For the rest (rights for opposition movements, civil rights, women's rights), the U.S. is rather unconcerned, provided that the Iraqi regime they put in place doesn't do anything to embarrass them internationally. Can the U.S. achieve these objectives? It will not be that easy. For one thing, the U.S. is in great military difficulty. It's not I who says so but General Barry McCaffrey. The general is a professor of international security studies at West Point and the one who led the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division in the 1991 Gulf War. So, he's hardly a pacifist, a leftist, or someone ignorant of the military reality. Hear his voice in The Wall Street Journal of Nov. 28, 2003: "Iraq is a military and political mess, and it's not getting better....Donald Rumsfeld is in denial of reality....The U.S. Army is stretched to the breaking point....Many of us are concerned that we won't be able to carry out the strategy we've embarked on in Iraq because we won't be able to sustain it....[T]he heart of the problem [is] that U.S. forces in Iraq are being forced into a drawdown situation." By now, we've all learned about the basic realities of Iraqi politics. The country has three zones: Kurds in the north, Sunni Arabs in the center, Shiites in the south. The oil is located in the north and in the south, but not in the center. The Sunni Arabs have dominated every Iraqi government since the creation of the modern state, to the unhappiness of both the Kurds and the Shiites. Demographically, however, the Shiites are about 60% of the total population, and free, unfettered elections would undoubtedly give us a government heavily dominated by the Shiites, which the Sunni Arabs and even the Kurds would not appreciate. One "solution" being bruited about is dividing the country into three separate sovereign states. This might seem to serve U.S. interests, since it would take an important middle power in the world geopolitical arena and turn it into three small states, which as the U.S. well knows are more vulnerable to its pressures. But we have seen what happened in Yugoslavia when the federal state broke up. All but one of the resulting states were still not ethnically homogeneous. But the states were in the hands of the dominant ethnic group most of whom sought to create a homogeneous state, if necessary by ethnic cleansing. Or if, like Bosnia, there was no clear ethnic majority, the state split de facto into three substates. We can hardly call Yugoslavia a model Iraqis should want to follow. But do they want to follow it? Well, the Kurds would say yes. But the Sunni Arabs would be violently opposed, since they would lose everything thereby (a state that was powerful, power within that state, oil). And the Shiites would probably be opposed as well. Why settle for a Shiite state when they could have a whole Iraq dominated by them? Nor would dividing up Iraq be all that easy. In the Kurdish north, there are significant minorities of Sunni Arabs and Turcomans. The Sunni Arabs would fight to have Kirkuk, the oil center, and a city in which many of them are located, placed in the Sunni Arab state. And the Turcomans would welcome a Turkish invasion which the Turkish government would seriously consider. The center has a significant Shiite and Kurdish minority. The Shiite state in the south (the most homogeneous of the three) would find it harder to keep its distance from Iran, which it could more easily do if Iraq were a unified state. In short, were the U.S. to proceed with trying to chop up Iraq, there could be significant Iraqi-Iraqi violence to add to the guerrilla war against the U.S. that already exists. Not a pretty picture. So what will happen? No one can be sure at this point. It is unlikely the Iraqi exiles that the U.S. catapulted back into Iraq and who are its favorites will survive the electoral process. The elections (and there will be elections) will probably put into power a regime that will call for U.S. withdrawal without expressing total hostility. Will the guerrillas then cease to exist, or become ineffective? That depends on whether the new Iraqi regime could gain enough legitimacy and enough force to put them down. Both elements are in doubt at this point. And in the background, there is always the possibility of a resurgence of the Baathist forces. And U.S. forces? They will probably, as Gen. McCaffrey suggests, "draw down." For there are inconvenient elections in the U.S. as well. And there are very few real hawks among the U.S. population. In addition to those opposed to the war outright, there are very large groups who do "support" the troops as long as they are there, but who really wish they'd come home as soon as possible. The hawks and the militarists in the Bush administration want to hold fast to their initial objective of getting a pro-U.S. regime firmly in power in Iraq, but Bush's political advisors may start to press him to withdraw. As I've said before, Bush has no good option available to him. As for Iraq, it will take a long time for it to recreate a politically stable situation. 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 Ambiguities of Free Trade (15 December 2003)
The debate about free trade versus protectionism has been going on for 500 years, all through the history of our modern world-system. The argument is favor of free trade has always been that it results in maximum competition, therefore maximum efficiency of production, therefore reduction of prices, and ultimately benefits to the consumer. The argument in favor of protectionism has always been that free trade has very negative consequences for various national economic situations, both in the short run and the long run. In the short run, it increases unemployment and causes the failures of local enterprises. And in the long run, it locks weaker countries into lower-profit types of economic activities.
Of course, both sides are right up to a point. But the abstract virtues of free trade versus protectionism never determine what actually happens. Ultimately, the question is as much political as it is economic. Those countries who are at a given moment particularly efficient at productive activities are normally the ones who proclaim the virtues of free trade. Free trade obviously serves their national interests. It means they can sell their products in foreign markets without the penalty of tariffs or other barriers. It means they can invest surplus capital in other countries. Those countries who are moderately strong but still weaker than the strongest are normally the ones who try to be protectionist. They feel that, if they can protect their internal markets for a while from the competition of producers in the strongest countries, they can improve their own efficiencies and develop a sufficient internal market to withstand open competition. For them, it is a matter of time. The protection is temporary. Truly economically weak countries are usually too weak politically to get away with protectionism. The ambiguities arise when we look at the strong countries who proclaim the virtues of free trade. The strong countries are in favor of free trade only up to a point. For example, in the seventeenth century, the Dutch (then called the United Provinces), who were then the most efficient producers (and traders) in Europe, preached the virtues of free trade to a weaker England and France. But that didn't mean that the Dutch didn't protect certain markets. In 1663, Sir George Downing, a British statesman, bitterly noted about Dutch policy: "It is mare liberum [open seas] in the British seas but mare clausum [closed seas] on the coast of Africa and the East Indies." The British had to fight three maritime wars with the Dutch to even the playing field in world trade for them. This story is being repeated today. The United States after 1945 was the most efficient producer, and of course favored free trade. Still, in order to strengthen politically their alliances against the Soviet Union, the U.S. allowed western Europe, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea to engage in certain protectionist processes. This strengthened these countries economically up to a point. When, as of the 1970s they became highly competitive with the United States, the U.S. began to complain about their protectionist policies. But precisely because the U.S. had become relatively weaker economically, it also strengthened its own protectionist policies amidst a declining manufacturing sector. The U.S. government, like other governments, was faced with internal political pressure to preserve jobs and profits for local entrepreneurs. The United States turned its eyes towards what it called "emerging markets," which meant some of the larger countries in the world's South - countries like Malaysia and Indonesia, India and Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey, South Africa and Nigeria, Brazil and Argentina. It saw these countries as outlets for U.S. products - manufactures, information services and biotechnology - as well as for financial transactions. But these countries had all been devoted to a developmentalist ideology which led them to engage in certain protectionist policies. So the U.S. explained to them that in an age of "globalization" such practices were evil and counterproductive, The emerging markets had to open themselves to the free market, meaning to U.S. (and other) investments and activities. The major tools to obtain compliance with this new regime were the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. Treasury, and the World Trade Organization (WTO), which would lay down enforceable rules of free trade. These rules of course were meant to apply to others, not really to the United States. The problem with rules, however, is that others can also use them. When the U.S. (and western Europe) tried to extend these rules further to the so-called emerging markets, they found resistance at Cancun, where Brazil led a coalition of the middle powers insisting that rules worked both ways - that if the South were to lower barriers to free trade, the U.S. and the rest of the North must do so as well (see Commentary 122, Oct. 1, 2003). The U.S. refused to go along and hence Cancun was a failure. But an even greater problem was lurking for the U.S. Europe (and others in the North) were very unhappy about U.S. protectionism, which hurt their own interests directly. When George W. Bush placed tariffs on steel, to protect U.S. manufactures in states that were electorally crucial to him (such as West Virginia and Ohio), the Europeans brought a case in the WTO Tribunal, charging the U.S. with violating the treaty. They won the case, and obtained the right to pose countertariffs, which they threatened to do against U.S. products important in other states electorally important to George Bush (like Florida and Michigan). As a result, George Bush swallowed hard, and revoked the steel tariffs. But the Europeans weren't through. They plan to use the same countertariffs if the U.S. does not end the tax breaks it gives U.S. corporations for their offshore operations. It seems these too violate the WTO treaty. And, if this wasn't enough, when George Bush announced that he wasn't going to let the French, Germans, Russians, and Canadians bid on contracts to rebuild Iraq, it was immediately suggested that this violated the same WTO treaty. All of a sudden, the WTO - virtually a U.S. invention and cherished achievement - began to seem like an albatross around the neck of the United States. Free trade is marvelous of course, at least if one doesn't have to bear its negative costs oneself. 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.] |