> [Bounced bec it came from non-sub'd address. In pre-emptive response,
> I'd say that openness and liberalization are very different from
> independence; the U.S. wants an economically open & liberalized, but
> one still politically subordinate to the U.S. Armed forces and
> independent foreign policies are very different from creating
> U.S.-style financial and labor markets.]
>
Yes, but the way you posed it was (paraphrasing), the US wants Euroland to
be more like itself, and if Euroland WAS more like us [you speculated] why
could there not therefore by a huge new Euro upwave, albeit warty round the
edges? [ie, you argued in favour of blairite 'structural reforms', ie,
closing down more of the welfare state, worker rights etc]. That was what
you said, yes? That Euroland could be have market-driven 'wealth-effects'
just like us? I lost the email so can't quote. But now you are talking the
OPPOSITE talk of modern colonialism aka globalised markets, neoliberalism
etc. Which is the exact opposite in INTENTION and is calculated to bind
Euroland (like every other 'failed' state/metropole etc] into even worse
duress than before. Under the guise of talking 'big upwave' we are actually
talking about a new maquiladora-style Euroland. This is IMF-speak.
My historical point (unarguable, surely) was that, yes, German postwar recovery was US-sponsored (to build a glacis against the east, and nb the form sponsorship took was not the creation of a neoliberal but of a social-market economy: thus we had in 1945 the grand spectacle of the likes of Eisenhower passionately arguing for trade union rights to be restored and extended in Germany etc). BUT the form the postwar recovery actually took was that of intense inter-imperialist competition in which US policy was always dedicated to ensuring continued hegemony in the face of the often-unexpected strength of German/Japanese revival. And they succeeded. Now, the recovery-phase is over. You are arguing we are in the midst of a new upwave. I say that we have the position that both Japan and Euroland are indeed faced with the creeping consequences of a long-range defeat of (pace Dennis) great magnitude, but during conditions of profound world crisis and not of upwave and that this epoch more closely resembles the last quarter of the 19th century, when Brit imperialism tried to consolidate itself by imposing long-run world deflation. And which really does offer Euroland not much room to manoeuvre between the failed polices of Festung Sotsial-markt on the one hand, and the ghastly fate allotted to subaltern zones forced thru failure to embrace to the full the new world order, on the other. And this cannot, I should have thought, be trumpeted as a great new phase of capitalist development, a new upwave, etc. That is just to repeat WSJ baloney under a thin veneer of leftist rhetoric. Euroland is in crisis, same as Japan.
Mark Jones http://www.egroups.com/group/CrashList
PS to say as you do that "Armed forces and
> independent foreign policies are very different from creating
> U.S.-style financial and labor markets." seems almost disingenuous. The US
state/economy is 'articulated' hence successful precisely BECAUSE its
markets, its secret police, its military-industrial complex, its media
& thought-police, its research programs and its armed forces
are seamlessly meshed together and function synergetically to
form the world hyperpower. Euroland per contra is radically
disarticulated, a prey to centrifugal forces, full of real and potential
satrapies and hogtied like Gulliver by a million threads of US technical,
military, financial etc domination & control.