[lbo-talk] Kees van der Pijl

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Fri Jun 27 12:54:54 PDT 2003



>
> Wojtek, I sympathize with your wish to banish 'noble
> savage' romanticisms to the scrap heap. In your zeal
> to do so however, I believe you're erring too far on
> the side of dismissing all claims of outside
> interference as nationalist, self-determination,
> absurdities.
>
>
> DRM

I do not think so. I think that negative foreign influence is often overplayed by domestic nationalistic leaders to cover up their own incompetence and corruption, and the naïve "noble savage" crowd swallows that crap raw - but that is not the same as denying the role of outside factors. I never denied the role of the external factors. On this list alone I said it time and again that historically the only force that is capable deposing an oppressive regime is not a revolution withing by an external force, usually in th eform of a military intervention of another state. The revolution within, if it happens, only mops up the debris left by the carnage inflicted by the external power - as for exampl eit was the case of Russian or Chinese revolutions, not to mention less noble events, Iraq including.

External force rarely acts alone - it usually acts through internal agents (cf. the "indirect rule" of British colonialism). As the current debacle in Iraq demonstrates, it is virtually impossible to rule a country without cooperation of some reasonably powerful faction inside that country. This is how external influlence is usually extercised - a foreign power destroys or undermines a political/economic order it deos not like, and that opens up the space for other factions to establish their order. Sometimes those other factions are the puppets of the external power in question, sometimes they are not.

Thus, the shape of the new order that develops in the aftermath of a foreign intervention depends, for the most part, on the local factions, their intersts, agendas, power nd other resources, and abilities to operate in the new geo-political environment. Those factions may or may not be aided by various foreign powers, and the foreign influence may influence the outcomes - but that influence is almost always mediated to a substantial degree by the local factions and power structures. Eastern Europe under the Soviet rule is a case in point - all EE countries faced similar external pressures backed by the Soviet tanks, but local power and class structures account for vast differences, say, between Poland and Czechoslovakia, Romania and Hungary, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria etc.

I think that the anti-colonialism, depenendency theory, first-world-bad, third-world-good, crowd misses that point altogether - because as I see it, they are more interested in attributing moral blame (a pretty futile exercise, IMHO) instead of providing a coherent historical-materialist explanation of international relations.

The position that I support is to analytically separate the effects of the external interventions from those of internal power and class structures. If those effects were linear and additive I would go as far as saying that the interanal factors account perhaps for three fourths of the explained cross-national variance in social-political-economic development, whereas external factors account perhaps for one fourth. That; however, would miss the non-linear and non-additive elements, such as strategic interventions, strategic choices, path dependencies etc. It needs to be emphasized, however, that such non-linear factors are present on both, internal and external, sides of the equation i.e. effects of a foreign intervention boosted by a strategic timing may be counteracted by a a local response at another strategically important junction.

Wojtek



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