Doug wrote:
> What'd he say?
Jeet Heer writes:
> Here is my attempt at a summary, based only on a quick read, of his
> latest mini-tome of a an essay: Anderson wants to use the idea of
> hegemony to examine the US's relationship with the European powers.
> During the Cold War, US hegemony was based more on force than
> consent, since capitalists of all nations feared communism and
> generally rallied behind US leadership. In the last decade, a number of
> factors have made force increasingly important as a tool of US
> hegemony. However, despite the fact that their is increasingly
> vocal unhappiness with the US's global rule, Anderson doesn't think
> that the centre left (either in the US or in Europe) offers any real
> alternative to current US policies. The centre left's opposition to the
> war on Iraq is merely prudential, rather than principled. Further, and
> perhaps more damning, the centre left's support of humanitarian
> intervention in the 1990s paved the way for the supposedly new
> doctrine of pre-emptive war to prevent small nations from acquiring
> weapons of mass destuction.
Yep. Still, being anal and rather fond of pouring over Anderson, and since I had this written before receiving the above, here's an abridged version (under 1500 words!):
Since WWII two primary objectives of US foreign policy have been to 1) make the world safe for capitalism & 2) ensure the primacy of American capitalism. During the Cold War there wasn't major conflict between these two, whereas today there is. Then, the threat of communism gave the other capitalist powers cause to cast their lot with the US. But with the fall of the USSR went a rationale for other quarters of the world to ally with the empire. At the same time, a major restraint to the US use of military force was removed.
During the past decade the US could use the UN Security Council a "portable ideological screen". IMF loans to Yeltsin's Russia and the carrot of MFN status for China were valuable in gaining the two nation's assent. With that assent plus a choice Secretary General "the UN had become virtually as much an arm of the State Department as the IMF is of the Treasury." This gave the US a "free hand," though much of the decade focused on "emergency tasks [turning Russia capitalist, the collapse of the FRY, etc.] arising from the aftermath of victory."
In Gulf War and NATO's Balkan intervention an ideological framework emerged linking free markets to free elections *and* to human rights. The last could now be used as a rationale to override national sovereignty without fear of a countervailing super power doing the same. High-minded multilateralism was the preferred tune of Washington in the '90s, and it played well in Europe.
The Bush administration dispensed with this packaging, but not the underlying policy. Two major developments altered how this it is pursued. First, Sept. 11, on which he says:
"In no sense a serious threat to American power, the attentats targeted symbolic buildings and innocent victims -- killing virtually as many Americans in a day as they do each other in a season -- in a spectacle calculated to sow terror and fury in a population with no experience of foreign attack. Dramatic retribution, on a scale more than proportionate to the massacre, would automatically have become the first duty of any government, whatever party was in power."
>From this the current administration could garner popular support for a
pursuit of _American primacy_ (his emphasis) that, unlike the hegemony of
_capital_ (his emphasis), requires active popular backing. He says
"there is a permanent structural gap between the range of
military-political operations the American empire needs in order to
maintain its sway, and the span of attention or commitment of American
voters." Second, there has genuinely been a "revolution in military
affairs", which got a trial run in the Balkan War and may "create a
low-risk power vacuum around American planning, in which the ordinary
calculus of the risks or gains of war is diluted or suspended." Also,
while the human rights angle got more applause in Europe, the war on
terrorism plays better in China and Russia. However, complaints of
unilateralism are a small price to pay for US bases throughout Central
Asia, the death of the ABM Treaty, NATO expansion, and closer ties with
Putin's regime.
There are three causes for the current push to invade: the need for a conclusive and glorious victory in the war on terrorism, to establish pre-emptive strikes as the _norm_ in securing a nuclear oligopoly as nukes become cheaper and easier to acquire, and to secure a center in an Arab world where American "soft power" currently holds no effective sway.
The price will be steep, but a dramatic revival in Iraq won't be too hard pull off in the wake of a decade of economic siege, with the population trading "independence for material relief." Iraq could be the US's imported model for the rest of the Arab world.
This is, of course, a gamble, but a rational one. Despite potential hostility in the region, the Iraqi regime is less popular than the Palestinian cause, and little has been done in the region against the IDF's crushing of the intifada. Part of the European and American liberal hostility to the war in Iraq is that "it could strip away the humanitarian veil covering Balkan and Afghan operations, to reveal too nakedly the imperial realities behind the new militarism." Practically, this amounts to scarcely more than a plea for UN blessing. Despite massive protests, with several weeks PR and a UN fig-leaf, "European acquiescence in the campaign can be taken for granted." They'll do their part, but don't expect them to like it.
Then, there is the specter of inter-capitalist competition. In order to overcome this with international coordination a "superordinate power" must discipline the entire system "in the common interests of all parties." This "_general_ unification" requires a "_particular_ state". On Gramsci:
"In the notebooks he wrote in prison, Gramsci theorized hegemony as a distinctive synthesis of 'domination' and 'direction', or a dynamic equilibrium of force and consent. The principal focus of his attention was on the variable ways in which this balance was achieved, or broken, within national states. But the logic of his theory, of which he was aware, extended to the international system as well. On this plane too, the elements of hegemony are distributed asymmetrically. Domination-the exercise of violence as the ultimate currency of power-tends necessarily towards the pole of particularity. The hegemon must possess superior force of arms, a national attribute that cannot be alienated or shared, as the first condition of its sway. Direction, on the other hand-the ideological capacity to win consent-is a form of leadership whose appeal is by definition general. This does not mean that a hegemonic synthesis therefore requires a persuasive structure that is as purely international as its coercive structure must be irreducibly national. The ideological system of a successful hegemon cannot derive solely from its function of general coordination. It will inevitably also reflect the particular matrix of its own social history. The less marked the distance between these two, of course, the more effective it will be."
The substance of American Exceptionalism as a basis for global hegemony is: "a continental scale of territory, resources and market, protected by two oceans, that no other nation-state comes near to possessing; and a settler-immigrant population forming a society with virtually no pre-capitalist past, apart from its local inhabitants, slaves and religious creeds, and bound only by the abstractions of a democratic ideology." In Western Europe, virtually all these terms are reversed, hence the friction between the US and Europe. In contrast to Europe's more measured and diplomatic approach to the global order, the US has both Teddy Roosevelt's "macho axioms" and Woodrow Wilson's "presbyterian cant." US direction rests not on these alone, but on the perception of the US as "the vanishing point of modernity." The exportability of the US market system owes a good deal to its disembeddedness from custom, tradition and solidarity.
Europe is clearly more embedded with custom, tradition and solidarity, but though the American standard is advancing in Europe. The EU is not a state, nor is it set to become one. In the gridlock between so many nations, the EU's external policies amount to "little more than a quest for the highest common factor of ideological vapour." The EU can not stop major US actions. Also, the march of the Third Way is, on the whole, stagnating, with "no clear pattern of domestic political alignments in the OECD." This is a potential future headache for US hegemony.
Despite the laments of a good chunk of the EU and a portion of the US intelligenstia, a pre-emptive strike here is no different than in Kosovo: "the right -- indeed the duty -- of civilized states to stamp out the worst forms of barbarism, within whatever national boundaries they occur, to make the world a safer and more peaceful place." After the war and upon occupation, the same intelligenstia can be counted on to somberly greet the dawn of Arab democracy... The goals of the war on terrorism are too negative to sustain hegemony, and will have to be supplanted by those of 'human rights and liberty.'
"Invasion and occupation are a logical upshot of the strangulation of the country since Desert Storm." .... "The doctrine of pre-emption is a menace to every state that might in future cross the will of the hegemon or its allies. But it is no better when proclaimed in the name of human rights than of non-proliferation. What is sauce for the Balkan goose is sauce for the Mesopotamian gander." The needs to be fought.
-- Shane summarizing Anderson
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