There can be twin collapses of Japan and USA, given their politico-economic interdependency, no? To what extent is the European economy dependent on the US being the consumer of last resort? Peter Gowan says that "The final implementation of the Euro in July 2002 will supply a very substantial shield for Western Europe, particularly when it is combined with an integrated deep and liquid EU financial system. The strength of this shield will be all the greater in that, despite all the talk of economic globalisation, the European economy is becoming an increasingly closed one, less and less reliant upon transatlantic trade" (@ <http://www.unl.ac.uk/ukrainecentre/WSS/ws-9.html>). Is the European economy really becoming "less and less reliant upon transatlantic trade"? If so, the euro can get stronger, but European economic growth is anemic, too.
Jim Devine wrote in 1999:
***** As seen sporadically above, a key issue came up in the process of my writing comments on this paper in 1999. Is the problem of international instability in the 1990s that of the hegemon being "too weak" as in the 1920s or that of it being "too strong"? Thinking in these terms can be misleading, since "power" is not a one-dimensional variable. The hegemon's power can be measured (1) relative to that of nonhegemonic capitalist powers or (2) relative to noncapitalist elements....The original paper emphasized the first, following the lead of the global Keynesians like Kindleberger. Though this emphasis on intraclass capitalist competition is not all wrong (and helps us understand the onset of the Great Collapse), it is the second that is crucial to the present question: the key difference between the hegemon's role in the 1960s and that of the 1990s should be seen more in terms of the relative strength of the hegemon vis-à-vis labor and other forces preventing unfettered capitalism and pushing to share in productivity gains. In the 1960s, unlike the 1990s, the power of the U.S., the I.M.F., and the World Bank (the unholy trinity now standing astride the world) was moderated by competition from the U.S.S.R., the power of social democracy in Western Europe, and the more anemic might of the U.S. labor movement, together with "labor scarce" conditions in the core countries (in part due to limits on capital mobility and the persistence of the nation-based model of economic growth). In the 1960s, these forces encouraged the general sharing of prosperity in the core countries. But the problem of the 1990s is that the hegemon (and its allies) does not face such political limits, while labor abundance prevails due to capital mobility (and labor's political losses). In this sense, we might conclude that the key issue is that of the relative power of labor versus capital on a world scale, with the 1990s being an era of global labor abundance and weakness encouraging the reassertion of underconsumption tendencies in this era of Neo-Liberalism.
<http://clawww.lmu.edu/~JDevine/depr/d4.html#hegemon> *****
Just as economic foundations of the US empire became fragile, its politico-military hegemony became supreme, preventing the rise of challengers (imperial and third-world), as well as creating the global deflationary waves and underconsumption tendencies that may catch up with it.
At 7:03 PM -0400 10/9/02, Christian Gregory wrote:
>I guess I'm not following what you mean by an unarticulated connection between
>economic and politico-military.
I was thinking of Hardt & Negri, Wallerstein & WST, what's said about "the war on Afghanistan, the war on Iraq, and other imperial military ventures" in left-liberal/left-wing articles circulating on the Net, listserv posts here and elsewhere, etc. -- Yoshie
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