At 5:45 PM -0400 1/8/09, Doug Henwood wrote:
>[from the WSJ's Real Time Economics - RAND study at:
><http://www.rand.org/pubs/occasional_papers/2009/RAND_OP275.pdf>.]
Study: The 1929-1930 Depression Not Game Changer for International Politics
1930 - RAND Corportation
Economists aren't the only ones scrambling to predict what the world will look like after the recession. Political pundits are also squinting too see into the future - their question: Will the global economic meltdown change the game in international politics?
"Not much," says a new RAND Corp. study. Great Britain will continue to be a world superpower and policeman, colonialism the most popular economic recipe, and, as the rhetorical squabbles born in the heat of the crisis quiet down, old friends will stay friends and foes remain foes, argued Winston Churchill.
Churchill, a former envoy to South Africa and first Lord of the Admiralty, dismissed what he called "a flood of recent articles" predicting the recession's "destructive consequences for the international system." If the economy recovers by the first half of 1931, as most analysts predict, wrote Churchill, the face of international politics isn't likely to change in any fundamental way in the next five years.
Sure, wrote Churchill, the plunging world economy has already created its fair share of political trouble, with native uprisings in North and South America, Australia and the other colonles, and street protests erupting in countries ranging from Spain to Germany. And more trouble may come in the near future, he noted, in the form of "more poverty, more disease, more crime, more migration, and more colonial military conflict."
But, maintained the author, the economic crisis doesn't seem to be moving the fundamental pieces of the international political puzzle. Popular discontent over the recession didn't send Germany teetering on the verge of communism and it didn't trip Great Britain into loosing (sic) control of its colonies or starting another war with Germany, as some feared. In America, the closest approximation to a revolution the country has seen since 1778 was a result of election fraud, not falling wages amidst a global slump in demand.
The downturn, argued Churchill, just isn't enough to destabilize a Rusian Communist Party that survived self-made economic disasters. And a staggering pile of public debt doesn't seem to be pushing Great Britain to cut its foreign policy agenda and commitments.
Churchill's paper is a sobering response to many of the doomsday scenarios circulating a few months ago, and we all feel much more optimistic as a result.