Seth Ackerman wrote:
> The US is the biggest investor in China, but that
> does't seem to require a that their foreign policies
> be aligned.
I'm not talking about a perfect alignment of foreign policy. The conflicts in the immediate pre-Iraq war period showed that it certainly isn't the case.
But between capitalist nation-states there exists a common interest in a minimum of international economic and political stability . Such a minimum of stability ensures smooth functioning for the accumulation of capital. Hammering out the concrete details, which inevitably result in advantages or disadvantages for individual nation-state actors, might lead to particular short-term alliances.
The high level of direct investment between advanced capitalist nations is just one more nail in the coffin of the Leninist theory of imperialism, if that theory ever had any use to begin with. It was also rooted in a completely false understanding of the state-form. As long as traditional Marxists conceive of the state as an instrument of the "capitalist class," they will continue to make theoretical errors like this that clash with empirical reality.
In his book-length treatment of the "Anti-German" phenomenon, Robert Kurz makes the interesting point that classical Anti-Imperialists, and the Anti-Germans (thankfully a phenomenon restricted to the German-speaking countries, though they have major political commonalities with Neo-Conservatives and the Euston crowd), though at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, both come at reality with antiquated analytical tools.
For the capital-letter Anti-Imperialists, the world is still essentially what it was at the time that Lenin wrote his Imperialism pamphlet, and can be broadly understood within that analytical framework. For the Anti-Germans, the constellation of world politics is the same as it was in the years 1933-1945. But the "Inter-Imperialist" rivalry framework, and the spectre of the "Imperium Teutonicum" are both equally distanced from what's really happening.
The economic inter-penetration between capitalist nations ensures a certain level of common interest, even if there is some conflict over the details. Even a long-term decline in U.S. hegemony won't change that. It will just mean that the U.S. will have to relinquish a little bit of its power to other state actors.
There is a heavy element of ideological Anti-Americanism to help cement the European project (Andrei Markovits has written an interesting book in German on this), but in generally, people like Derrida and Habermas and Rorty were just being useful idiots with their misplaced hopes in a European counter-hegemon. "Europe" will continue to remain an ideological figment, useful whenever the humanitarian bombers decide to bring the rogue-of-the-month to heel, and in a manner far more "civilized" and laden with "western values" than those barbaric, interest-driven Yankee imperialists.
Yoshie's thinking is not along those lines, her hopes for a bloc re-alignment seem more pragmatically grounded, but I think the power shift she hopes for would merely serve to discipline the U.S. into coming back into the fold of the capitalist mainstream, and not really serving the aim of a long-term anti-capitalist (anti-)politics.
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