16.12.2004

Globalisation or imperialism?

John Ball examines rival theories which seek to explain recent world history and how the idea of empire has once again become acceptable in ruling circles

Alan Freeman and Boris Kagarlitsky, the joint editors of The politics of empire: the crisis of globalisation, were amongst those who participated in an organisation called the Transnational Institute, which is an NGO based in Amsterdam. Originally it was formed to organise European trade union responses to the increasing presence of American transnational companies in Europe, and the phenomenon known as rip-sawing, where plant is moved from one country to another to try to force workers to accept cuts in conditions. It reinvented itself in the epoch of Seattle as a multinational anti-corporate globalisation organisation.

In 2001 15 anti-globalisation activists from around the world came together in a seminar to consider the theoretical issues arising from corporate globalisation. What was then a rather novel view - although now it is more widely accepted - was agreed: that the problem with globalisation is not whether you are in favour of it or against it, but what was going to happen to it. I can give you an analogy. Let us suppose you are on a train which is running down the tracks out of control, and there is a big debate among the passengers about whether it is a good train or a bad train, about the quality of the service. What you should actually do is not debate whether you should be on the train or not, but deal with the fact that in about five minutes the train will no longer exist.

Globalisation
Globalisation in itself is merely a short phase of history and in many senses a name which substituted for something else. It is structurally unstable. There are two questions: first, what is it going to give rise to? The second concerns the debate which rapidly surfaced between what you might call the Marxist and the less Marxist present at the seminar (everybody had an affiliation in some sense to the ideas of Marx): which is, do you actually believe in the analysis of globalisation?

Some said globalisation is a bad thing but a true analysis: the nation-state as we know it really is losing power, and there are now multinational forms of class organisation which transcend national boundaries. In particular there is something called a transnational bourgeoisie. When you look at countries like Argentina, where I have to say empirically the concept has some force, the super-rich class is not really located within the country any more. It holds property elsewhere and commutes all round the globe. It keeps its money in dollars, and its point of reference in relation to the policies it wants to implement is whatever is good for the United States. This is simply because it relies on US military power in order to get it out of a jam - it makes up only about five percent of the country’s population, so as soon as there is any kind of democratic movement it runs into problems. Financial fortunes are actually tied to the dollar.

This worldwide phenomenon of more and more non-residents who are visibly members of the capitalist class, either as intellectuals or as holders of money, was not present 30 years ago. There is a class of people, runs the argument, who essentially seem to be stateless. If then the nation-state has been superseded, what we require is a completely different way of thinking about the way that the working class should organise. The point of view which is probably closest to this is something like the following: the fundamental division of the world is between all the rich and all the poor, between all the capitalists and all the workers, and really state boundaries are just incidental.
At the opposite end of the spectrum we have people who say that essentially this is nothing more than old-style imperialism. Really it has been there all the time. Nothing has changed, and all we have to do is defend the traditional analysis of imperialism. There is also very strong empirical evidence for this point of view.

Two discourses
It is therefore essential to ascertain, first of all, which analysis corresponds more closely to what is going on in the world and, secondly, if there are any real changes which have taken place since the era of what I call classical imperialism. Let us then examine the facts - always the most useful place to start in analysing any theoretical problem. Figure 1 is based on International Monetary Fund figures on population and income, divided into two categories: what the IMF calls the advanced countries, and the rest of the world.

Fig 1: Income and population in advanced countries, compared to the rest of the world (IMF definitions)

As you might expect, the advanced countries have most of the world’s income but a small proportion of the population - about one billion. The figures for GDP per capita are averages.

When people talk about global-isation there are two discourses going on. One is the discourse of academic sociologists like Tony Giddens, who say it is a good theory, explaining what is really happening. What they mean by globalisation is a long process, whereby 4,000 years of world history have led up to nothing but the abolition of world boundaries, caused by the compression of space and time, and the fact that companies can transfer money at the click of a button from one end of the globe to another. They engage in diatribes against the ‘historicist’, teleological view of the Marxists and Hegelians who say history is nothing but a march towards a final end. In fact they actually have the most teleological view of all - but that is their contradiction.

I prefer to speak about the current phase of history not in terms of ideal, abstract understanding, but what is specific to this period: the appearance of multilateral organisations which play a real role in shaping world politics - the World Trade Organisation, the IMF, the World Bank and to some extent the United Nations. Is the role of these organisms mere appearance or is there some reality to it?

Let us begin with the empirical fact that since the debt crisis of the early 1980s a situation has existed where the IMF certainly did begin to intervene in the internal politics of many third world countries, and also many European countries, much more vigorously than before. These countries had to submit programmes of structural adjustment which had to be approved by the IMF and were not able to do anything different. There was, therefore, something like a uniform world financial regime for the first time in history. The question is, what sort of stability did this provide and what was really behind it? Who was controlling whom? My view is that the period of globalisation is best described as the period of multilateral political intervention alongside the free movement of capital. For me the decisive factor is not so much the globalisation of the market, but the free market in capital itself. Financial deregulation acted like a vacuum cleaner that sucked up the savings of the third world into the banks of the USA to fund its huge current deficit.

If the neoliberals claim things went wrong in the past and the reason is the absence of a free market, one is entitled to say, this was your free market and this is what happened. The income of the advanced countries multiplied by 250% per capita; the income of the rest of the world actually went down according to the IMF’s own definitions in real terms and the ratio of inequality between the advanced countries and the rest rose from 8.4 to 22.6. The rise in inequality in the period championed by everybody as the free market saw the greatest rise in inequality in world history. That is the first empirical observation we want to make. These are categories which Lenin himself would recognise - the group of robber-barons on the one hand and everybody else on the other. That is the real effect of globalisation.

The question then is, what is the stability of this system? Is it sustainable? I want to turn the usual theory completely upside down. The theory goes that the economy is what is driving globalisation - this teleological push towards the abolition of all boundaries is the underlying function of the market and is completely unstoppable. It may provoke a few a political problems - the odd 100,000 people protesting about it, a few trade rounds breaking down - but really it is wonderful. The protesters are just Luddites, standing in the way of inevitable progress.

Political triumph
I would say exactly the opposite. Globalisation is an economic catastrophe, but a political triumph. It is a real political triumph to establish a uniform world political economy for a period of 20 years, even though it is now crumbling away. Economically, when we let the bastards do what they want, the result is awful. It does not work. The prime thesis I want to put forward is that this failure of the global world economy, the failure of capital to attempt a world political order, is now revealed. What we are living through is a period of the break-up of globalisation, the break-up of multilateralism and of the world market in capital.

There are two things at work. One is a polarisation between the ‘south’ and the ‘north’ - I prefer these terms to ‘rich and poor’ or ‘advanced and the rest’. It is becoming increasingly impossible to impose governments that consent to this political economy which destroys people’s lives. People are getting poorer in the third world. They consume less. (Averages are distorting, because there are some exceptions, like India and especially China. China did not enter into globalisation. If China is left out, there are a few countries where there has been a small increase in average income.) As far as the incomes of ordinary people are concerned, there has been a massive increase in inequality. Argentina, for example, was in comparative terms a very egalitarian society. Thirty years ago the top 10% of the population was 12 times richer than the bottom 10%. It is now 64 times richer. There is a layer of people in many third world countries, the super-rich, who do live at a level quite comparable to that of the west. But the rest, the 90%, have been crushed. That gives rise to what happened in Venezuela and Argentina. Stable government becomes impossible when so many people are poor.

Translating the bald numbers into people makes you realise what is actually going on. What The politics of empire tries to do, having presented the political economy and political geography, is ask what these abstract numbers the economists come up with really mean in terms of real people. In Argentina now, seven million people are classified as indigent. The definition of this is that they cannot eat once a day. These people, because they have a proud and militant tradition, are not prepared to tolerate anybody who simply goes along with the IMF. That is why there were four presidents thrown out in the space of three weeks in 2002, and why the existing president is looking for a way to get something out of the IMF, because he is terrified of the vengeance of the electorate if he does not stand up it.

There are also whole areas which are socially destroyed, where all the instruments of civil society begin to collapse, which is essentially what happened in Afghanistan. Whole areas are torn by civil war, by conflicts where no stable government can exist, such as the Middle East and central Africa. The possibility of continuing to implement current policy is being removed. This is what really what drove the United States into the hands of the Bush faction, the imperialist faction of US capital - although the Democrats are now rapidly converting to exactly the same politics - because it corresponds to the logic of what America had to do. It could not run the world through the multinational institutions any more.

Which begins to answer the question: was it really the case that the national states were agents of the multilateral organisations? Because once the biggest national state cut loose, suddenly it gets to be America which decides what will happen, not the UN. This came out first in the military sphere - when they did not get the UN, the US looked for the ‘coalition of the willing’, and when they did not get that they said, ‘We are doing it whether you like it or not’. And the same thing is happening in the economic sphere. Increasingly America is entering bilateral relations, setting up a world network of military institutions. All the talk of US troops withdrawing does not correspond to reality. The US is establishing the identical policy to Britain in the 1850s, which is to have a sufficient presence, and sufficient mobile forces in every quarter of the globe, so it can get troops in numbers to any given locality within a day. It is a new strategic repositioning of American military power, with the objective of intervening in the third world. That is what Iraq and Afghanistan were all about. The biggest airfield in the world is being built in Uzbekistan.

Thieves fall out
The US is acting independently of the multilateral organisations, leading to the conclusion that probably they were always the agents of something, if not necessarily of the US. One question I will ask, when we come to look at where Europe sits in all this, is, agents of whom?

This brings me to the second phenomenon relevant to the current situation - that of thieves falling out. This is important because the analysis I want to counterpose to the theory of globalisation is what you might call the classical analysis of imperialism. There was an important debate in central Europe and Russia between about 1912 and 1924 about what imperialism really was. Luxemburg, Lenin, the Austrian Marxists and others all had different views. The three things that everyone could agree on where as follows. First, the world is divided into two great camps: the rich nations and the poor nations. Secondly, the rich nations use their power to maintain their wealth. So it is a political domination which maintains an economic domination. Thirdly, which is where it becomes controversial, there is competition between the imperialist powers - imperialism is a competitive system. This discards or sets on one side two views of imperialism which are more discordant: those of ultra-imperialism and super-imperialism.

Super-imperialism says the world is now organised by the US: a single power organises all imperialism around it. I think this roughly corresponds to much of the historical period through which we have lived, but with suppressed competition between the imperialist powers. The second view, ultra-imperialism, is close to the modern globalisation theories. It says all the imperialists will get together and settle their differences so there will be no conflict between them: they will organise the world between them. The third view, which is Lenin’s and Trotsky’s view of imperialism, is that the imperialists will fight.

Figure 2 shows the growth in real GDP per capita for different blocs - North America, south-east Asia, the EU and the rest of the world. South-east Asia includes Korea and the ‘four tigers’. It is the only serious addition to the imperialist bloc since 150 years ago. Their population is 80 million people. So if only 80 million join the imperialist bloc in 150 years, it is not a way out for the majority of the world. They started below the US and rose above it, but then dipped in two phases - in the 1980s and recently. So the growth rate of the major economic rival of the United States has crashed in two waves of globalisation, IMF and structural adjustment.

Figure 2

The second thing which is really pertinent to the present discussion is the European Union. That again took a great dip in the 1980s, crept up again, and is now on a systematic down, as we know. America may be doing badly, but Europe is doing much worse in terms of GDP growth. However, this is not the case in terms of economic competiveness. Europe’s superiority in productivity means it is running bigger and bigger surpluses. Paradoxically, it is not able to use those surpluses to raise substantially the living standards of their people, at least at the same rate as North America.

This is giving rise to inter-imperialist rivalry. To the use of the multilateral institutions by the USA, essentially to compensate for its structural weakness, its huge deficit, which requires the permanent import of funds from the rest of the world. And the US is not fussy where it comes from. It did not say, ‘We will only take it from the third world and the Russians and not from the Europeans and the Japanese.’ The Japanese were the major funders of the US deficit - that was the deal. They are beginning to say, ‘We don’t like this, it is beginning to make it hard for us to run our countries. Never mind the south - we are finding it difficult.’ The Asian crisis was a very serious blow for Japanese capital.

And the present situation in Europe is not good for European capital. That is what lay behind the failure to secure a ‘coalition of the willing’. Chirac and Schröder had completely opposite political complexions - which make the ‘coalition of the unwilling’ in Europe a very interesting thing, they have so little in common. What motivated them was the realisation that if they allowed America to have free control in the Middle East, and to use it essentially as its distant backyard, then European economic interests would be fundamentally compromised.

When I say ‘European economic interests’ I mean European imperialism’s interests, of course. So I do not, for example, accept the view that one finds in some quarters, that Chirac is the world’s greatest pacifist. These are the people who gave you Rwanda. These are not humanitarians. The French intervention in central Africa is nothing short of scandalous, but nobody talks about it. They are probably directly responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people.

Empire
Increasingly multilateralism is beginning to erode and something else is replacing it, which I think is much closer to classical imperialism.

Two quotes which support this idea of the decline of multilateralism and the rise of empire:
1) John Williamson, inventor of the term ‘Washington consensus’: “There is no longer any agreement on the main lines of economic policy between the current US administration and the international financial institutions ... there is now a critical difference in attitudes towards capital account liberalisation in the emerging market countries, with the IMF having beaten a well advised retreat since the Asian crisis (see, for example, Rogoff, 2002), while the Bush administration is still using bilateral free trade agreements to bully countries like Chile and Singapore into emasculating even the most enlightened capital controls. And even on trade the international financial institutions have expressed strong criticism of US policy on agriculture and steel. So, in this sense, any Washington consensus has simply ceased to exist - a reflection of the chasm that the Bush administration has opened up between the United States and the rest of the world”.

2) Wall Street Journal July 15 2003: “A decade ago, being against empire would have been like being against rape. To all but the perverse few who cheered for the wrong side in Star Wars movies, ‘empire’ was a dirty word. Today, it has re-emerged, newly laundered. The most aggressive advocates are ‘neo-conservatives’ such as William Kristol, publisher of The Weekly Standard, who said on Fox television recently that ‘if people want to say we’re an imperial power, fine’. Or Max Boot, a veteran of this paper’s editorial page, who wrote shortly after September 11 2001, that ‘Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets’.

“Left-leaning foreign-policy thinkers have taken up the battle cry as well, saying they disagree less with the ends of the neo-conservatives than with their means. They want empire, but administered through multilateral institutions. Robert Cooper, director-general for external affairs in the European Union and a senior adviser to British prime minister Tony Blair, calls for a ‘new kind of imperialism’ by which western states, perhaps acting under the guidance of the United Nations, take political responsibility for zones of disorder. Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay at the Brookings Institution, a more liberal leaning think tank here, write: ‘The real debate is not whether to have an empire, but what kind.’ We are all, it seems, imperialists now.”

So people are now talking quite openly about empire. If you look at the website of the Project for a New American Century, they say empire is a good thing. Long live pith helmets. Let’s all be Brits again - they brought enlightened civilisation to the world. The principal adviser to Tony Blair, Robert Cooper, has written openly in The Independent expressing exactly the same view.

And the dialogue goes like this. There are failed states and rogue states. The rogue states are the ones who are responsible for terrorism; failed states are the ones where things simply do not work. We have to go there and do it for them. So we now have a return to a completely open discourse about running other countries, and we have increasing competition between the advanced countries about who is going to do it. And I think that this is far closer to classical imperialism than it is to theories of globalisation.

All the classical instruments of imperialist domination are already in place in Europe. But now there is a new kind of military instrument. The European constitution includes the proviso that the council of ministers can declare war without consulting the European parliament. There is a duty to participate in war once it is declared. There is also a doctrine of pre-emptive war. It is being spun in terms of Europe being the human face of globalisation, including military intervention - we can sort things out better than the Americans. That is the classic way in which the old imperialists confronted each other: our imperialism is better than yours, just as in World War I everybody found an excuse to support their own bourgeoisie. European capital is trying to drum up support for what is a militarisation of Europe in which we will be constitutionally committed not just to participation but to a constant increase in our military capacity. So no chance of denuclearisation, as that would obviously represent a decrease in military capacity. It is illegal to disarm. To take the classical anti-imperialist, defeatist position has always been, as we all know, historically difficult. It still is, but it remains valid.

There is one other very important change in relation to the world in general. The last time around, the world was not completely capitalist, so there was a discourse in which people said that the real problem is that certain countries were not capitalist enough - feudal survivals, too many peasants, too many landowners and so forth. Much of the explanation of backwardness amounted to blaming the victims. It was often a racist discourse.

You cannot say that now. Look at Argentina - it may have peasants and large numbers of small businesses, and I am not saying they are unimportant, but it is essentially a country with a capitalist class system and a working class majority. This is actually what makes it difficult to invade countries like this, because capitalism actually does seek out a national form. Iraq is the weirdest national state that one could possibly hope to form. Nevertheless it is resisting the American invasion with a national consciousness, which gets formed by history and events.

That is why it is proving extremely difficult for the capitalists to go in and reorganise other people’s societies through military force.

Alan Freeman, Boris Kagarlitsky (eds)
The politics of empire: the crisis of globalisation
Pluto Press, 2004, £15.99, pp304