The WEEK ending 13 October 2002
THE NEW IMPERIALISM
George Bush's White House team came to power sceptical of the humanitarian interventions of their Clinton predecessors. In particular the goal of 'state building' in supposedly failed states like Bosnia and East Timor drew criticism from conservatives who saw it as an example of the temptations of legislating for human perfection. International diplomacy struck the conservative ideologues of the Republican Party as 'foreign entanglements', and they applauded Bush for withdrawing from the Kyoto agreement on climate control. European criticisms of the US in the first year of the Bush administration were that they had disengaged from the world in a new isolationism.
Pointedly, the attack on the Pentagon and Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 saw the Bush team rehabilitating authoritarian regimes in Indonesia, Pakistan, and Israel that had been actively destabilised by the previous US administration. Where the Clinton team came close to sponsoring oppositional movements in those countries, the Bush administration allowed them to crack down on their opponents in the name of the 'War against Terror'. It was the end of Humanitarian Intervention as formulated in the Clinton years.
But the impulse to remake the world in its image is more enduring than any single administration. Despite qualms about 'state building', the Bush team first adopted the goal of 'regime change' in Afghanistan, and most recently floated a plan for a military administration in post-Saddam Iraq modelled on the 1946 occupation of Japan, with General Tommy Franks cast as MacArthur. Those European commentators who gloated that September 11 had blown the US administration back into global engagement got their wish.
FOR ALL THAT, WESTERN BELLIGERENCE IS SKIN DEEP
Though Bush is now committed to an attack on Iraq - drawing the charge that he 'won't take "yes" for an answer - the campaign against Saddam is pointedly weak. Over the last week American and British secret services both undermined their respective leaders' case for war against Iraq. The CIA indicated that war would make terrorism more likely, while MI5 poured scorn on evidence of the Iraqi threat. Such noises might be taken as examples of a debate amongst the elite in the past, but today they are more an indication of the lack of decisiveness in the stated policy. At its margins, the establishment is showing qualms about the War Against Terror, whether in the European criticisms of the US, or the security services criticisms, or those of the older Bush administration veterans. All of those doubts are reflected in the poor polling figures, even in Britain and America supporting the war.
JUST FANCY THAT 1
Was the WEEK being to harsh when it reported that the 'The role of the protest [against the Iraq war on 28 September] is not to affect public policy, but to demonstrate the morally pure soul of the protestor.'? (29 September 2002)
Leading anti-globalisation protestor George Monbiot: 'There is little that those of us who oppose the coming war with Iraq can now do to prevent it ... Our role is now, perhaps, confined to the modest but necessary task of demonstrating the withdrawal of our consent' (8 October 2002).
JUST FANCY THAT 2
'My job,' says the High Representative of Bosnia Paddy Ashdown 'has a Gilbert and Sullivan title and powers that should make a liberal blush ... it's not surprising that the people regard me as just another Hapsburg governor'. For those who thought that the intervention in Bosnia was supposed to bring democracy, 'King Paddy' lamented 'it was a mistake to bring democracy here before the rule of law'. 'What we have now is near imperialism', he said. Following the strong showing for Bosnia's nationalist parties in elections, against his advice the High Representative commented: 'The weekend vote was a protest'. Against whom, one might ask?
REPORT FROM BRAZIL By John Conroy
Western economic analysts and commentators are warning financial markets to stop panicking over the possibility of a Workers Party election victory on 27 October 2002. The Economist, FT, Washington Post, Inter-American Development Bank and others are criticising what they see as 'irrational despair' that could elicit a 'self-fulfilling financial crisis' in the Americas and even further.
Analysts are now much more vocal in their undisguised defence of Lula (the PT's presidential candidate) potential to create a more stable basis for Capital in Brazil. Editorials clarify that a PT government will respect debt payments and fiscal austerity measures, not re-nationalise industries, create an independent central bank, and will negotiate trade deals with the USA and the Trade Association Association of the Americas (FTAA) and even transform its military into a police-keeping force for international duty, in short continue the course outlined by FHC
The smarter ones or those with access to specialist knowledge of the Brazil and the trajectory of the PT know that the PT has unique qualities to protect the interests of Capital. They know that Lula and the PT is a political product of Brazil's 1980s re-democratization process after Latin America's longest dictatorship (1964-85) and of the end of the cold war: its objective since inception in 1980 has been to contain radicalism and channel it into formal democratic ideals. The end of the Cold War was a benefit to the PT as it aided its crushing of radicalism within and outside of its own ranks. 'Moratorium on utopias' is one of its new mottos. They know that Lula and the PT are Brazil's best bet to generate a 'social pact' of Brazil's modernising business elite, middle-classes and urban working classes to see through even more painful reforms over a deeply atomised and demoralised nation.
Lula's message that he will attack the 'economic terrorism' of international speculators and introduce stability is attractive to analysts who are conscious of the hyper-sensitive and jittery state of international markets that are obsessed with risk aversion after 11/09, US corporate fraud cases and recent poor US economic performance. The NGO Transparency International argues that the PT is most likely to create a clean government free of corruption. Anti-globalization activists share such concerns and hype the PT as challenge to Western corporate power. The PT is fast becoming an international symbol of the war on corporate power and for clean and corrupt-free states and markets. The PT's moralization of the market and the State is highly attractive to Western thinkers.
But at the same time Lula's candidature has provoked panic precisely due to the current enfeebled state of Western Capitalism. Western politicians and economic leaders are projecting their own concerns about the general state of the international economy onto Brazil: a ready-fit target with an all-star cast of likely candidates headed by Lula the bearded ex-union man and friend of Chavez and Castro.
They are nostalgic for an old-style, easily recognisable stand-off involving an archaic notion of 'left versus right'. There is no threat where they see one. But their fears and consequent reactions from jittery markets are creating unnecessary damage to the Brazilian economy. The question is whose vision will win out: those who see in Lula a symbol of the remedy for international instability, who recognise that there is a subjective element in operation, or those who agree with the markets and see Lula as yet another threat to stability. -- James Heartfield The 'Death of the Subject' Explained is available at GBP11.00, plus GBP1.00 p&p from Publications, audacity.org, 8 College Close, Hackney, London, E9 6ER. Make cheques payable to 'Audacity Ltd'