<URL: http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/psn/2002/msg00097.html >
Was there a thread when I posted the same?
Peter Gowan, Leo Panitch and Martin Shaw. The state, globalisation and the new imperialism: a roundtablediscussion. (From the UK journal, Historical Materialism, so Carrol who reads it (ouch, $14 an issue) has seen the pieces. HM, btw, reviewed, "Empire, " in the last issue I saw.) <URL: http://www.theglobalsite.ac.uk/press/201gowan.htm > Peter Gowan, Leo Panitch and Martin Shaw The state, globalisation and the new imperialism: a roundtable discussion First Published in: Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory, No.9, Autumn 2001 www.historicalmaterialism.net The following is a transcript of a roundtable held in London on 9 July 2001, jointly organised by Historical Materialism and the Politics Department at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). The aim of the session was to bring together three prominent authors who have recently shed light on the relationship between the state and globalisation from different disciplinary and political perspectives (see references for details of these publications). With much recent critical social theory dedicated to scrutinising the relationship between the state as a political form and the socio-economic processes associated to capitalist globalisation; and with the anti-globalisation protests of Seattle, Prague, Gothenburg and Genoa bringing an added political urgency to these debates, we hope the roundtable reflects, and further contributes to the critical engagement with these phenomena. The speakers were asked to elucidate analytically what is at play in the process of globalisation , and to consider the political consequences - particularly for the Left - of the interface between globalisation and the state. Some of the guiding questions posed to the speakers included: what is globalisation, and what is the place of the modern state in this process? How is globalisation transforming power relations in the contemporary world? Can the processes of globalisation be harnessed to projects of radical social transformation? What is the relationship between globalisation and ‘classical’ capitalist imperialism of the turn of the 20thcentury? What conceptual challenges do these processes pose for critical theory, and Marxism in particular? The latter section of the transcript includes questions raised by the audience and the replies offered by the panel members. I. Introductory Statements by the Panel PETER GOWAN I will try to directly engage with Martin Shaw’s school of political ideas, and therefore what I’m going to say is going to be less on globalisation as it’s usually understood and more on ‘liberal cosmopolitanism’. Because, to me, the issues that Martin raises in his book The Global State, are much more issues to do with cosmopolitanism, and I would argue liberal cosmopolitanism, in a political sense. Now, these two discourses, of globalisation and of liberal cosmopolitanism run in parallel; and they are both radicalisations of earlier forms of liberalism. Globalisation deals with what you might call the market side of liberalism, and liberal cosmopolitanism deals with the political side of liberalism – each radicalises their particular sphere. Just to explain what I mean by ‘liberal cosmopolitanism’, the general liberal view was that the western states during the Cold War were, in defending their liberal and democratic values, having to play pretty rough, because the communists played pretty rough, and so you did not have a strong attachment to spreading liberal values and democratic values around the world. It was much more head-to-head, gun-to-gun, and so on, against communism. But now that communism and the Soviet bloc have gone, this discourse says that the western liberal democratic states are able to, and indeed are and must be understood above all as, spreading across the whole globe liberal democratic values and regimes. We thus have the prospect of a globe which is entirely liberalised and democratised, and - crucially - this transformation of the globe will bring with it a new kind of world order – a cosmopolitan world order – going beyond the old Westphalian world order which was characterised by the absolute rights of states. So what you have is this group of western states pushing forward, across the globe, a new world order in which state sovereignty will be made conditional upon states respecting certain minimal rights of citizens – minimal human rights and democratic rights –and thus the old Westphalian concept of sovereignty becomes conditionalised rather like a dog licence in Britain. In other words, you can have a dog in Britain provided – on condition – that you treated it right. If you treated your dog badly, the British authorities would remove your dog licence and end your right to a dog. Similarly, states will face an international community, which above all means the coalition of western states centred on the USA, and this international community will grant them sovereignty on condition that they respect basic rights of their citizens; and if not, if they don’t, then the sovereignty licence will be taken away and these states of the 'international community' will intervene in to various extents and in various ways within the delinquent state. So, what you have with the liberal cosmopolitan idea is a notion that the western states, called by Michael Doyle the ‘Pacific Union’, this Kantian union of states – western Europe, the USA, Japan, and so on – called by Martin, I think, the ‘western state’, or perhaps even a global state, is at the moment transforming the world in this way. An inspiring vision, surely, for those of us who are universalist humanists who look forward to a world beyond war, beyond the rather poisonous squabbles of power-politics states, and beyond all these nasty things that they do to their own citizens, and so on. It’s an inspiring vision, and this school of thought, which doesn’t necessarily spell out all of its premises, is basically saying that this is the way we’re moving, this is the way it’s going, and we should join this and get involved. Now, let me just make clear why I call it ‘liberal’. These people are not talking about a global democratic state. They are not, therefore, talking about cosmopolitan democracy – they are not saying ‘One person, one vote, across the globe, for a world government’. What they are talking about is cosmopolitan governance– that is, cosmopolitan rules and norms, not about everything, but about certain fundamental things, namely human rights, and, of course, some global governance on the economic field. That’s why I say that these people are cosmopolitan liberals, not actually democrats, even though they may well say that they are democrats, and no doubt they are good democrats when it comes to domestic activities. But the world order they want is to be a liberal one, not a genuine democratic state. Now, the economic globalisation discourse runs parallel to this, but it’s not to do with political change against the sovereign state: it’s to do with the market – the world economy. And just as liberal cosmopolitanism radicalises the old liberal internationalism, from a harmonious order between states to a liberal cosmopolitan order above states, so liberal economic globalisation theory says: We are no longer in a liberal international economy, where the international economy is essentially the sum of its parts. Instead, we’re in a global market, a globalised market which dominates all the national economic parts. And so each national economy now is subordinated to the logic of the global market. This, I think runs in perfect parallel with the other discourse. Let me just very quickly note some common themes in the two discourses. Both have the strong liberal antinomies of something versus the state: market versus state, civil society versus state, individual versus state, market forces versus state, human rights versus state, and so on. Secondly, both discourses are counterposed to the idea of strong, autonomous states: globalisation discourse says that the day of strong autonomous states controlling national economies is over; cosmopolitan discourse says the day of the autonomous state should be over let’s transcend it to a new global order. Thirdly, both lay great stress on the importance of law and judicial systems. There are also complementary differences: the globalisation discourse is cognitive and fatalistic. It says: we may like or dislike economic globalisation, but it’s there to stay. If you want to be competitive you’d better adapt to it. Cosmopolitanism is normative and activist and exciting; it says: look, there is an inspiring dynamic opening up. If you join it you can bring it about. But these two things can run hand in hand – you can get depressed about the global economy, but let’s get into the global cosmopolitan liberal order, and so on. Let me, then, turn to a critique of this liberal cosmopolitanism. First, there is an evasion here. It says: you’ve got a cosmopolitan order on one side, and you’ve got states on the other side. But this isn’t quite true, actually. You’ve got a who and a whom: you’ve got some statespushing this order onto other states;it’s important to note that. Of course, some liberal cosmopolitans recognise this, they say: yes, there is the Pacific Union of states. But others, talk rather vaguely about an 'international community' and Martin has talked about a global state, as if one existed. But we must remember that it is some states pushing, often coercively, other states. Let us leave to one side for the moment, the liberal cosmopolitan explanation as to what is driving the rich liberal states to push others. And let us turn to the organisation of the liberal states themselves. If we are moving towards a new, norm-based liberal global order, this movement should surely be reflected in new forms of norm-based institutionalisation of the 'international community' or Pacific Union. Where is this newly institutionalised or institutionalising order? If we run through the trends of the nineties, I see no such normative institutionalisation under way. Let’s begin with the UN: it’s a shambles. It had a Secretary General, Boutros Boutros Ghali. He was supported for a second term by every single state, as far as I’m aware, in the UN, except one. And he was got rid of, because of that one – just, out! – the one being the USA. And we have seen the UN's norms being used instrumentally in some cases, and then being flagrantly flouted in others. So much for liberal institutionalisation there. Let us take even a rather strong institution like the International Monetary Fund (IMF): there has been a marked erosion of its norms in the 1990s. Take Mexico, 1995. A shocking example of one state, the USA, simply just running roughshod over the most elementary procedures of the Fund, and grabbing $25 billion off the Europeans without so much as asking. An extraordinary business. Or let’s take Korea, November 1997: an absolutely incrediblesubversion of the articles of agreement of the IMF, openly manipulated by the US Treasury; the most unprecedented taking of a can opener to the Korean economy, in a way that we’ve never seen before – by the way, action by the USA described in the Financial Timesby an unnamed German Central Bank official as ‘financial terrorism’. That is not a sign of institutionalisation. Or let’s take another example: the GATT and the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Well, whatever else you can say about that, it is striking that the state which was the main driving force behind the Uruguay Round – the USA – has refused to subordinate itself, in law, to membership of the WTO. It has said, in law – in American law – that it will only abide by the decisions of the WTO if they are fair to the USA. Let us take another example: the International Criminal Court. Now, I’m not here talking about the fact that the Americans are refusing to have anything to do with it. All I’m talking about is that you have – here, surely? – an example of a rule-of-law human rights regime being promoted by the Europeans, and so on. And yet, the International Criminal Court, openly and in principle in the most flagrant and gross way, violates the principle of the rule of law, by saying that this law binding states in their behaviour should apply to everybody except one group – namely, members of the UN Security Council. So from these examples, the institutionalising principle of the 1990s seems to be rather different from cosmopolitan liberal norms and much more like the institutionalisation of world government in the hands of one single state. This looks more imperial than cosmopolitan and more power political than liberal. Let us, then, look at the organisation of the Pacific Union itself – these states pushing forward liberalism, democracy and peace. How are they institutionalised? As hub-and-spokes military alliances: Nato, the US–Japanese Security Pact, other US security arrangements. This is a rather bizarre form of Pacific Union! One organised as a set of hegemonic military alliances. How does this make sense, in terms of liberal cosmopolitan values? We can not turn to the question as to what is driving this Pacific Union -- or more properly its leading state to intervene in and push about other states. Liberal Cosmopolitans would have us believe that the driving force is liberal and human rights values and norms. They cite above all NATO’s new interventionism in Bosnia and in the war against Serbia over Kosovo and seek to generalise from them to a break with power politics on the part of NATO and its leading state. Yet the problem is that when we actually read the texts of the policy guideline documents of the American government itself, and see what they say, we find a frank and absolutely explicit power-politics completely suffuses these documents: the American national interest first. Secondly, and rather intriguingly we find that in one in the crucial document as well as in other supporting literature for US national security experts, the target of this US power politics in the 1990s has not actually been states violating liberal norms at all: it has been the threat of regaional autonomy within the Pacific Union itself. Thus, the national security guidelines written by Paul Wolfowitz of the Pentagon and I Lewish Libby for the NSC in 1991, which was then leaked to the New York Times, defines the key national security threat to the USA in the ‘90s as regional hegemons in the advanced capitalist countries, not the threat from 'rogue states', China or Russia. That’s a very interesting concept. I Lewis Libby and Paul Wolfowitz worked for Bush Senior. But Wolfowitz has publicly insisted that the Clinton administration followed the essentials of his concept throughout the ‘90s. And both Wolfowitz and Lewis Libby are back in the saddle: Wolfowitz as undersecretary for political affairs in the Pentagon; Lewis Libby as national security adviser to Vice-President Dick Cheney, no less. I want to suggest an intellectual exercise: try applying the Wolfowitz- Libby Lewis concept to the actions of the United States on Bosnia and Serbia. It would mean that US tactics in both cases were directed as regionalist political challenges from Western Europe and bringing the European members of the Pacific Union to heal. In other words they were part of the intense struggle by the USA to stop Germany and France from projecting military/political power eastwards into eastern Europe and ensuring that the US dominated the thrust Eastwards of Western political influence at that time. This would explain why, in the spring of 1991,as Yugoslavia was entering crisis and the European Union wanted to put a couple of divisions into Yugoslavia, the USA vetoed the idea, and denounced it in a public, diplomatic note. Then we have the Wolfowitz concept apparently contradicted by Washington's eagerness in the summer of 1991 to let the EC take responsibility for Yugoslavia. But if we look more closely we can see Wolfowitz again: Germany was lining up behind Croatia, France was lining up behind Yugoslavia, so the European push East should have collapsed into a proxy war in Yugoslavia between Germany and France. But instead, in December the whole European Union including Britain lined up behind Germany. That was the point when the Americans moved on Yugoslavia. They launched a campaign for an independent, unitary Bosnia. This was opposed by the European Union and Russia, it has been resisted by President Izetbegovic of Bosnia. He had begged the German foreign minister in December not to have independence for Croatia because it would increase the pressures for independence in Bosnia. The American drive for an independent unitary Bosnia was a drive for a civil war there, because there was no Bosnian nation: there were three nations, none of which was majoritarian and two of which were bitterly hostile to a unitary Bosnian state. Of course, the US got its way and the war came. Izetbegovic, in March, attempted a deal brokered by the European Union; the USA government persuaded him to break it, and you then get the slide into the war. Eagleburger, who was in charge of European affairs at the state department, explained way they did it: he said the Germans were getting ahead of the US in Europe, and secondly that the US needed to regain political leverage on Yugoslav crisis. Bosnia certainly provided Washington with that leverage. Repeatedly sabotaging all Europeanist efforts at peace deals, the US polarised the whole of Europe around Bosnia until the French and the British finally agreed to put everything is US hands through NATO. Only then was the war sewn up at Dayton. The NATO war against Serbia on Kosovo was the consolidation of the US's political victory in Europe. Human rights and liberal cosmopolitan rhetoric and the Hague Court were policy instruments of power politics. That would be a Wolfowitzian reading of liberal cosmopolitanism: the ideological form of a peculiar kind of imperial expansion. Excavating the material forces underlying this would require the decoding of economic globalisation. LEO PANITCH <SNIP>
-- Michael Pugliese
I got an axe-handle pistol with a graveyard frame. It shoots tombstone bullets wearing balls and chains. I'm drinking TNT. I'm smokin' dynamite. I hope some screwball start's a fight, 'cause I'm ready, ready, ready
Muddy Waters, "I'm Ready."