> <URL: http://www.theglobalsite.ac.uk/press/212vanderpijl.htm
> The unification of global space under Western hegemony and under
> capitalist discipline has reached a stage where no separate trajectories
> of social development can be allowed to persist. As Mark Duffield argues
> in a seminal study, the Western approach towards the outside world is no
> longer inspired by a concern to aid indigenous processes of development,
> but to impose, if need be by force, the Western social model altogether
> (Duffield, 2001).
What unified global space? The EU sure doesn't take orders from the US these days, and the countries of East Asia are beginning to run their own show. The totality is false (cue to Adorno) through and through, which means there are all sorts of structural contradictions (for one thing, every local mediation starts to transmit global contradictions). Example: the EU is shelling out huge chunks of money to its semi-periphery. That's a productive contradiction which needs to be pushed in the direction of multinational socialism -- not condemned in advance for being part of the totality (as if any of us or our institutions could possibly be entirely free of such).
-- DRR