>Japan isn't acting like the hegemon in
>chrysalis right now, and the EU isn't either. Those things could change,
of
>course, but the parallels are strained.
parallels I'm interested in, but also maybe differences. for instance, Japan and Germany are caught in the bind of their post-ww2 limitations on global military intervention, not just constitutionally but also politically. I'm sure there's a debate going on in Germany right now over whether this situation 'proves' just how important it is to abandon those limits. here no doubt the hitlerisation of Milosevic is important. Hussein doesn't play well as Hitler - Hitler has to be a European.
>But, the bubble-ish aspects of the U.S. economy make me wonder if we've
>reached some bizarre extreme of the Pox Americana.
do bubbles always burst?
>I think he's very persuasive that these forms of anti-Americanism,
>"monsters" like Saddam & Milosevic, are simply the other side of the
>neoliberal coin.
I think it's persuasive as well. especially because it abandons all those nice versions of capitalism as progress and racism as a thing of the past. which kind of returns us to maureen's comments some time back:
>There's a vast scholarship that's studied how colonial states control the
>very context shaping group and individual interests. They control the
>criteria of access to resources, and even the context in which ethnicity
>either is or isn't salient. Formerly fluid group boundaries almost always
>become much more sharply delineated. Then it's the state again that
creates
>the context which sets newly "primordial" entities in competition with
each
>other.
>In eastern Europe, ethnic problems have arisen
>_with_ free market capitalism and the erosion of safety nets.
angela