----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Pollak" <mpollak at panix.com>
> > The conditions that have made for decades of peace in the West are
> > fast disappearing, as Europe prepares to return to the multi-polar
> > system that, between 1648 and 1945, bred one destructive conflict
> > after another
> >
> > by John J. Mearsheimer
>
> Mearsheimer is fundamentally wrong here. For all his merits, he's still
> deeply, deeply stuck in the past like almost all realists.
======================================
Michael, the planetary context may be unipolar [or rather a self-destabilizing hegemonic-dynamic] but he was talking about Europe immediately after the Berlin Wall. What makes him productively wrong is his Spenglerian pessimism and, given the recent discussion of wish fulfilment, it's self-fulfilling proclivities that flow from the Realist premises, from EH Carr, Morgenthau, Gilpin etc., To a certain extent Neoliberal IR -Ruggie, Keohane etc.- attempted to reverse such aristocratic pessimism.
>
> The post-cold war world is not multipolar. It's unipolar in an
> unprecendented way. And secondly, the 21st century does not have Great
> Powers in the same sense that 19th century had: countries that were
> continuously devoted to territorial expansion for its own sake, and
whose
> citizenry and soldiery accepted that being sacrificed to such aims was a
> glorious accomplishment.
=======================
Well for the US now -yes I'm reifying for convenience, territorial expansion -into various ecosystems, institutions etc.- is a collateral effect of perpetually restless capital accumulation; the money-space dyad and the economies of speed are what finance capital, with it's liquidity preference-pessimism mood swings [endogenously driven mind you] cannot avoid without some sort of debt deflation at this stage of the great game, no? Most soldiers and citizens are blithely distracted from this dynamic even as they participate in it; such are the narratives of prosperity and the benign, Smithian characteristics of the World Market[s].
> Remove those two elements from his parallel and it's kind of like the
old
> German saying, "Wenn meine Grossmuetter raeder haette, waere sie
Autobus"
> -- if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bus. Those elements gave
rise
> to a particular international logic. What we have today is an entirely
> different one. If if they both produce wars.
>
> The strategic environment changed enormously with the end of the cold
war.
> But boy have realists not grasped the essentials. And Mearsheimer is a
> genius compared to that raison brain Wolfowitz. (I hear he's good at
> math. But he wouldn't be the first one who erroneously thought that
gave
> him the keys to the social world.)
>
> Michael
===========================
Mearsheimer is smart, but his pessimism is a form of Right Wing revo. defeatism, bordering on fatalism; "the rest of the planet may become an ever cumulative dynamic of failed States, we have to step in and stop this new, potentially nefarious dominoes cascade................"
I doubt the Dems. can come up with a neo-neoWilsonian narrative to counter the WOT that has been diffused in the USA body politique any time soon, but there is stuff, from political ecology to some moderate constructivist takes on IR and peace research that mesh with the neo-Gramscian school of IPE that can be made use of to come up with a different story to motivate lefties etc. to deal with the limitations/pathologies of what's goin' down right now. An anti-poverty paradigm that deepens the critique of IMF/WB/WTO/Pentagon/Treasury/FedRes./Wall Street etc. seems to be a possibility for a strategic counterweight to the drivel presented to retinas-brains around the globe; activists have been working from just such a position since the early nineties, we need not give it up now just because of the Bushies and Enronization.............
Ian