[And a tip of the cap to RKMickey for point out this Egyptian paper]
Al-Ahram Weekly Al-Ahram Weekly
6 - 12 May 1999
Issue No. 428 [black.gif]
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 [empty.gif]
http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly
The worst catastrophes imaginable
By Samir Amin
In my previous article (Al-Ahram Weekly, 29 April-5 May), I
defined the goals and means of Washington's hegemonic ambitions.
While the simplistic economicist discourse of neo-liberalism holds
that the globalisation of a deregulated market (that is to say,
regulated unilaterally by capital) should spontaneously produce
peace and democracy, the facts prove that US military hegemony is
the necessary condition for the functioning of this system,
ensuring as it does both its domination by the Triad (US-Canada,
Western Europe and Japan), and the submission of Europe and Japan
to America's strategic objectives.
To this vision of a unipolar world, I had opposed that of
multipolar globalisation, the only strategy that would allow
acceptable social development for the different regions of the
world, and thereby the democratisation of societies and the
reduction of motives for conflict. The US's strategic hegemony, I
had concluded, is today the principal enemy of social progress,
democracy and peace.
The reply the dominant forces brought to the crises that have
occurred in rapid succession since 1990 and the chaos engendered by
the establishment of the neo-liberal utopia reveal both the US's
hegemonic goals and the dissolution of the European project.
The Gulf crisis had already revealed Washington's objectives.
Secretly encouraging Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait, the US turned
the situation to its own benefit in order to establish a military
protectorate over the petrol states of the region, with the
blessing of Europe and the UN, domesticated for the occasion. The
Iraqi regime's use of nerve gas against the Kurdish guerrilla
movement, which had never bothered Western diplomatic circles
before, was suddenly orchestrated by the media to justify the
systematic destruction of Iraq.
Encouraged by this first success, the United States then became
involved in European affairs, exploiting the Yugoslavian crises in
a bid to achieve a variety of objectives, not least the surrender
of the European Union. It is not my intention to disregard the
principal responsibilities of the fragmented local ruling classes,
all of which chose ethnic chauvinism as a means of reconstituting,
to their profit, a "legitimacy" to replace that of Tito-ism, which
had been based on social progress and the equality of nations.
Ethnic cleansing was therefore practiced by all these ruling
classes, in Croatia (through the expulsion of the Serbs, a majority
in Krajina) as in Bosnia (by each of the three components of this
absurd state -- for, if coexistence is possible in the "little
Yugoslavia", why would it not be so in the large one?) and in
Serbia (Kosovo). But we must admit that Europe threw oil on the
fire by its almost immediate acceptance of Slovenia and Croatia's
unilaterally proclaimed independence, without the imposition of any
conditions in terms of respect for the rights of the minorities
created by the explosion of Yugoslavia. This decision could only
serve to encourage the criminal regimes in question. The point was
made at the time, but the media abstained from any critical
analysis of the policy inaugurated, it must be said, by Germany,
but which an initially reticent France resisted no longer than two
weeks. Subsequently, the media systematically applied double
standards, mobilising all the means at its disposal to denounce
massacres in one place while ignoring them in another.
The massacres in Kosovo and the provocation practiced by its
"Liberation Army" (was it any better, at the outset, than the
Basque ETA?) provided the pretext for the US's systematic
intervention, already put to the test in Bosnia. This intervention
is based on three principles: 1) the brutal replacement of the UN
with NATO as the means of managing the international order; 2) the
alignment of Europe with Washington's strategic objectives; 3) the
adoption of military methods reinforcing American hegemony (no-risk
bombing campaigns and the use of European troops for an eventual
ground intervention).
The consequences of these choices are catastrophic at all levels.
They have deprived the dominant discourse on democracy and people's
rights of any scrap of credibility. They reveal that the real
strategic goal, beyond Serbia, is Russia and China -- a fact that
American strategists do not refrain from stating. NATO, now openly
the tool of American expansionism, and no longer that of European
defence, has thereby been able to put an end to illusions of
"European autonomy", forcing the EU into a new alignment, even more
severe than that imposed in the past under the pretext of the "Cold
War".
The only option which would have had some meaning for Europe would
have been to inscribe its construction within the perspective of a
multipolar world. The margin of autonomy that this option defines
would have allowed the invention of a socially valid project, in
keeping with the best humanitarian and socialist European
traditions. This option, of course, implied the recognition of the
same margin of autonomy for Russia, China, and each of the large
regions of the Third World. It also implied that the NATO page
would be turned, once and for all, and replaced by the concept of a
European defensive force, which could be integrated gradually at
the rhythm of European political construction itself. It implied,
furthermore, the conception of adequate modes of regulation at the
European level, and at that of the world system, to replace the
dominant forms: Bretton-Woods, the World Trade Organisation (WTO)
and the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI). By choosing
liberal globalisation, Europe has in fact renounced the use of its
potential economic competitiveness, and been satisfied to navigate
in the wake of Washington's ambitions, of which it has become the
zealous servant.
The fact that the European states have chosen this path reveals the
frailty of the European project itself, and even the fact that this
project is only a subaltern priority on the scale of dominant
political visions. Great Britain's fundamental option since 1945
has been to console itself for the loss of its imperial role by
reliving it vicariously through the US. Germany, having given up
the insane Nazi dream of world conquest, has chosen to limit its
ambitions to the means at its disposal by reconstituting its
traditional zone of influence in eastern and southeastern Europe,
tailgating Washington's global hegemonic strategy. For somewhat
similar reasons, Japan -- confronted with China, and even Korea --
has also inscribed its strictly regional expansionist ambitions
within the same global American perspective.
Today, Blair and Schrder are, clearly, not only the most dangerous
gravediggers of the traditions that were once the pride of the
European left, but also the servile executors of America's
anti-European project. Their association with Clinton in the
so-called "Third Way" discourse must be the object of no illusions,
for the new "Clinton doctrine" that has been announced aims --
after Yugoslavia -- "to turn on the East and the Middle East".
Robert I Hunter, senior adviser at the Rand Corporation and US
ambassador to NATO from 1993 to '98, recently wrote the following
in the Washington Post (21 April), with respect to the Clinton
doctrine and its application in Kosovo: "It is the gateway to areas
of intense Western concern -- the Arab-Israeli conflict, Iraq and
Iran, Afghanistan, the Caspian Sea and Transcaucasia. Stability in
southeastern Europe must be a precursor to protecting Western
interests and reducing threats from farther East." Again, the only
question is that of protecting Western interests (such as oil and
pipelines, or the flourishing of McDonald's -- see my previous
article), not democracy or the rights of Kurds and Palestinians.
We must therefore expect a policy of systematic provocation in
Russia and China. As for the Middle East, as it is clearly
impossible to imagine the US bombing Israel to make it accept the
Palestinian state and the return of refugees (the official motive
for the intervention in Kosovo!), the use of force in Lebanon
(where Hizbullah's "fanaticism" can serve as a pretext) and Syria
(an "undemocratic" regime) will be the means of imposing the Pax
Israeliana.
Can the European project be saved from this debacle? Things being
what they are, the only means of climbing back up the slope that
leads to the eradication of the European project implies that the
political forces attached to it -- in France, Germany or Italy --
should rethink this project in terms of what is immediately
possible -- in other words, in terms of a return to a more modest
concept of a "Europe of nations", while waiting for the progressive
ripening of cooperation. This in turn would imply a friendly -- and
non-aggressive -- approach to Russia, China and the Third World
and, in this framework, a revival of the UN's functions. Once
again, this is not the option taken by the European governments,
including the socialist majority. The priority given to the
ultra-conservative management of a fictive single currency, the
support for globalised liberalism and the US's hegemonic strategy
are arrayed against the project of a multipolar world, and will
lead to the worst catastrophes imaginable, for Europe and the rest
of the world.
______________________________________________________________
Translated from the French
by Pascale Ghazaleh
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