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The
September/October 2002 issue of New Left Review carried
an editorial entitled 'Force and Consensus'. In it, Perry
Anderson analyzes the changes in American politics and the
present state of the relationships between the US and Europe.
Casting aside the rhetorical battles that accompanied the
clash between the transatlantic partners, he gets down to
appraising 'the underlying parameters in the current international
situation.' In order to do so, he poses three analytical
questions: 'To what extent does the line of the Republican
administration in Washington today represents a break with
previous US policies? Insofar as that is the case, what
explains this discontinuity? What are the likely consequences
of the change?' In his reply to these questions, Anderson
tries to go beyond the conjuncture, grappling with a long-term
perspective, and assessing the foundations of American hegemony
in the aftermath of World War Two.
Thus, he states that: 'From the start, Washington pursued
two integrally related strategic goals. On one hand, the
US set out to make the world safe for capitalism. That meant
that the containment of the USSR became a top priority along
with that of halting the spread of revolution beyond its
borders... On the other hand, Washington was determined
to consolidate an unrivalled American supremacy within world
capitalism... Once this framework was in place, the wartime
boom of American capitalism was successfully extended to
allied and defeated powers alike, for the common benefit
of all OECD states.'
Further below, he argues that: "During the years of
the Cold War, there was little or no tension between these
two fundamental objectives of the US policy. The danger
of Communism for the capitalist classes everywhere, increased
in Asia by the Chinese Revolution, meant that virtually
everybody was happy to be protected, assisted and surveyed
by Washington.'
'The disappearance of the USSR signaled the complete victory
of the US in the Cold War. But, by the same token, the knot
tying the basic objectives of America's global strategy
together was loosened. The same logic no longer encompassed
its two goals into a single hegemonic system. Once the Communist
danger was faded away, the American supremacy ceased to
be an automatic prerequisite for the security of the established
order tout court. Potentially, the field of inter-capitalist
rivalries, not only at the level of corporations but also
of states, was open once again, while -in theory at least-
the European and East Asian regimes could now contemplate
degrees of independence unthinkable during the epoch of
the threat of totalitarianism. Yet there was another reason
for this change. If the usual foundations of the consensual
structure of American domination had been eroded, its coercive
superiority was, at a stroke, abruptly and massively enhanced.
With the demise of the USSR, there was no longer any countervailing
force on earth capable of withstanding the US's military
might... These interrelated changes were eventually bound
to alter the role of the United States in the world.'
Certainly, as we argued in another article of this journal,
the demise of the former USSR has nourished the rivalry
among the imperialist powers. Meanwhile, the overwhelming
American military supremacy, without the counterbalance
of the Soviet nuclear might, has resulted in an enhanced
room for maneuver for the US in the international arena,
reinforcing its 'coercive superiority'. But, is the changed
role of the US in the world alone to account for this?
Is
American hegemony in decline or not?
Perry
Anderson points out correctly to the eroded foundations
of America's rule. But he overlooks the economic and home
constraints weighing down on its domination, pushing it
in the direction of a less 'consensual' form.
The period that followed the Second World War saw the heyday
of its hegemony, when both rival and allied imperialisms
alike were in ruins or else exhausted by the war, and the
economy of the US accounted for almost 50% of the world
GDP, being in turn overwhelmingly more advanced and efficient.
This endowed it with an irresistible appeal. Together with
the need for new valorization sources for the American capital,
these laid the basis for the spread of Americanism. But
from the 1970s until this day, the world has witnessed the
emergence of three imperialist blocs with a more or less
equal economic power, whatever the token shifts in the balance
of forces between those blocs through the last decades.
In turn, at home, the decline of the US economy has resulted
in an increase of social inequality compared with the boom
years. The US is the country with the widest gap in the
income distribution between the well-of strata of its population
and the most impoverished ones among the G7 members. Nowadays,
over forty million people are living below the poverty line
while the exploitation of the workforce has been increased
-the exhausting working days and the increase of the hours
worked per year by labor bear testimony to that.
These two elements, the relative retreat of the dominant
position of the US in the international economy and the
social backlash at home, are boosting the reactionary drift
of the US in the international arena. This is striving to
uphold its position in the world, in spite of the tendencies
to its historical decline -which are still at work in spite
of the of the relative invigoration of the 1990s. This historical
perspective that even non-Marxist schools such as the theoreticians
of the world-system, like Wallerstein and Arrighi, have
been postulating for so long, is surprisingly absent from
the analysis of a major historian such as Perry Anderson.
Has
the unstable equilibrium of the 1990s unraveled?
Anderson
brilliantly describes the conditions that allowed the token
reinvigoration of the US with regard to its competitors
during the 1990s (1), set against with the decades that
elapsed since the onset of the crisis of capitalist accumulation
in the early 1970s. 'Two years later, the scenario looks
very different. But in what respects?', he wonders. Anderson
is far from any kind of impressionistic analysis operating
a complete separation between the imperialist politics of
the current Bush administration and that of Clinton in the
1990s, -e.g. Toni Negri. Instead, Anderson points out that
'...such alterations in style did not mean a big change
in the fundamental aims of America's global strategy, which
have remained completely stable for half a century. Two
developments, however, have radically reversed the ways
in which these are currently being pursued.'
Anderson remarks that: '...two changed circumstances -the
inflamed popular nationalism in the wake of September 11
at home, and the new heights reached by the RMA [Revolution
in Military Affairs] abroad- have gone hand in hand with
an ideological shift. This is the main element of discontinuity
in the current US global strategy. Where the rhetoric of
the Clinton administration spoke of the cause of international
justice and the construction of a democratic peace, the
Bush administration has raised the banner of the war on
terrorism. These are not incompatible ideas, but the emphasis
put on each of them has changed. The result is a sharply
changed atmosphere. The war on terrorism orchestrated by
Cheney and Rumsfeld is a far more strident, and also feebler,
rallying-cry than the usual pieties invoked during the Clinton-Albright
years. The immediate political credit yielded by each is
also different. The new and sharper line put forward by
Washington has gone down badly in Europe, where the human-rights
profile was and remains a highly esteemed agenda. Here the
previous line appears clearly superior as a hegemonic modality.'
Apart from the breakthroughs in military technology, which
have undoubtedly enhanced the war capacity of the US, it
is very clear that September 11 was a sea change. Not only
in the sense pointed out by Anderson, i.e. a massive boost
to jingoism at home, but mainly as a catalyst of the contradictions
that were already accumulating in the international situation
and in the US itself. The attacks launched against the symbols
of American power, revealed in a rather barbaric fashion
the external vulnerability of the US and a shift in the
relationship between the center and the periphery of the
world, with the shock waves of instability coming from the
latter making a deeper impact on the former. In the last
few decades, the reinforced domination of the US over the
world has resulted in the former importing home all the
contradictions at work in the world area. Global-scale terrorism
in the realm of security along with the strong deflationary
pressures coming from the crisis-ridden world economy are
the two most acute symptoms of that process.
On the other hand, the corporate bankruptcies at home and
the drops in the stock market both express the emergence
of a social crisis in the US, which hits the lower-income
tiers of the population the hardest, thus alienating wide
layers of society. This has the potential to rock the feeble
American political system, a mere platform for the lobbying
activities of finance capital reliant on the manipulation
of public opinion by the mass media. The hegemony enjoyed
by financial capital during the last decades, which allowed
the US to download the burden of its own crisis on to the
shoulders of the rest of the imperialist powers and the
periphery, wreaking havoc to the international economy,
has now become a 'boomerang' that is hitting home hard.
All these elements point to a disruption of the unstable
equilibrium of the 1990s. In this sense, the rise of Bush
not only represents an ideological shift with regard to
the previous administration as Anderson asserts. It also
represents a backlash bearing wholesale Bonapartist features
in response to changed conditions both at home and abroad,
when those factors that contributed to the token rejuvenation
of the US in the 1990s have been massively eroded. The Bush
administration seeks to rally the people behind its policy
of growing militarism by cranking up on the need for defense
from an external enemy, in an attempt at channeling the
population's fears towards the economic instability and
the security uncertainty affecting it at home. Besides,
this aggressive drive in the realm of foreign policy goes
hand in hand with an armory of repressive legislation and
a restriction of democratic liberties at home, in an attempt
at recreating the conditions that underpinned the American
growth during the 1990s, this time through a tour de force
and a reactionary political engineering.
The
control of the oil routes, a strategic weapon in the inter-imperialist
rivalry
We agree
with the three factors that Anderson points out as the main
reasons for the forthcoming war in Iraq. The first one is
the necessity of a resounding victory against terrorism,
a much bolder one than the victory in Afghanistan. The second
one is related to a more strategic calculation: to send
a warning to the challenge posed by the other countries
members of the traditional nuclear oligopoly, setting a
precedent as to the necessity of pre-emptive wars and their
right to impose 'régime changes' whenever they see
fit. The third reason is more directly political and it
is bound to the situation in the Arab world, where a system
that has relied so far on leverage exerted from afar and
indirectly, has also nourished the emergence of aberrant
feelings and political forces there -the September 11 attackers
being its clearest manifestation. Anderson concludes that
'taking over Iraq, by contrast, would give Washington a
large oil-rich platform at the heart of the Arab world,
which will serve as a ground for building an enlarged version
of an Afghan-styled democracy, designed to change the whole
political landscape of the Middle East.'
In appraising the pros and cons of an eventual attack on
Iraq, he points out that, although it enshrines a risk,
'The operation is clearly in line with America's capacity,
and its immediate costs -there will undoubtedly be some-
do not at this stage look exorbitant.' We might put a different
stress on one or another aspect of the American campaign
in Iraq, but as a whole we believe that both the reasons
and short-term prospects outlined by Anderson are quite
sensible.
At this point, Anderson wonders: 'Why then has the prospect
of war aroused such unrest, not so much in the Middle East,
where the protests raised by the Arab League bluster are
largely pro forma, but in Europe?' He first says that the
strong presence of Muslims in Europe makes the European
states more fearful of the risks that any war move in the
Middle East might bring about. In turn, 'The EU countries,
far weaker as military or political actors on the international
arena, are inherently more cautious than the United States.'
And he adds that: 'By and large, whereas the European states
know they are subordinated to the US, and accept their status,
they hate being reminded about it publicly...' (2)
Once again, we agree with the reasons postulated by Anderson
and accounting for the standoff between the US and Europe
with regard to an eventual war against Iraq. However, in
our view, there is a key question that is surprisingly glossed
over in his article, which ponders the relationships among
the imperialist powers so accurately in other respects.
With this we mean the ominous consequences the direct control
by the US and its increased military and political influence
in this oil-rich area of the globe would have for Europe
-and also for Japan, as well as, according to the Department
of State, for other 'strategic competitor' such as China.
This strategic leverage would be used as a weapon by the
US for increasing its bargaining power in its commercial
disputes with the other centers of power, seeking to gain
an advantageous geopolitical position that would help it
consolidate its hegemonic position -thus reinforcing the
subordination of the rest of the imperialist nations. This
is a major oblivion on the part of Anderson, one that is
closely related to his own methodological approach.
Ultraimperialism,
Imperialism and Hegemony at the dawn of the 21st century
The
theoretical kernel of Anderson's article lies in the following
excerpt: 'Left to its own devices, the outcome of such anarchy
[of capitalist competition] can only be a mutually destructive
war, of the kind Lenin described in 1916. Kautsky, by contrast,
abstracted the clashing interests and the dynamics of the
concrete states of that time, coming to the conclusion that
the future of the system -for the sake of in its own interests-
lies in the emergence of mechanisms of international capitalist
coordination capable of transcending such conflicts, or
what he called 'ultra-imperialism'. This was a prospect
Lenin rejected as utopian. The second half of the century
produced a solution that both thinkers failed to envisage,
but one that Gramsci glimpsed intuitively. For in due course
it became clear that the question of coordination could
be satisfactorily worked out only by the existence of a
superordinate power, capable of imposing discipline on the
system as a whole, in the common interest of all parties.
Such 'imposition' cannot be a by-product of brute force.
It must also correspond to a genuine ability of persuasion
-ideally, in the shape of a leadership that can offer the
most advanced model of production and culture of the day,
as a target of imitation for everybody else. That is the
definition of hegemony, as a general unification of the
camp of capital.'
In another article of this journal, we resort to the Gramscian
concept of hegemony to grapple with the order of rule established
by the US in the postwar period. Back then, the disputes
for world hegemony were settled and the inter-imperialist
contests muffled, as the US was in a position to lead the
reproduction of the capitalist world not only for its own
benefit, but also guaranteeing the interest of its old rivals.
But Anderson presents this concept in isolation from any
historical context, expanding it to encompass the whole
second half of the 20th century without distinguishing the
different periods of the American hegemony, (3) and opposing
it to the theses on imperialism outlined by Lenin. In doing
so, he takes a step further than Gramsci himself, who never
opposed his concepts to the theory of imperialism.
Today, the opposition to this theory flows from two different
viewpoints. There are those who look at the enhanced geographical
spread of capitalist relationships and the increased internationalization
of the productive forces, and take up the views of 'ultra-imperialism'
first devised by Kautsky to mean a harmonious globalization,
or else trans-nationalism. On the other hand, there are
those who, basing themselves on the sharply uneven balance
of power in the international system of today, especially
that opposing the US and the rest of the powers, have resorted
to the theses of 'super-imperialism'. (4) Anderson does
not stand by this view, espoused by those that anticipate
an American hyper-power for the 21st century. However, as
long as he downplays the inter-imperialist divisions, Anderson
also moves in this direction.
The theoretical operation carried out by Anderson, far from
enhancing Gramsci's concepts, enriching them to better explain
reality, actually turns them even more abstract. Although
they might be useful for dealing with many of the external
features of the hegemon, they are rendered useless when
it comes to tracing its laws of motion, its dynamic and
therefore the chances of subverting it. Thus, Anderson fails
to see that the more frequent use of force is not just an
expression of an enhanced room for maneuver in the military
arena, or else of its increased self-confidence after its
victory against the USSR -as he points out. In our view,
this is also a symptom of a potential weakness in the long
term.
Thus Anderson transforms the categories of 'force' and 'consensus',
which are useful notions to explain how a hegemonic power
rules, into useless and sterile concepts, which do not enable
us to grapple with the cracks in the hegemonic system. This
is the case because they fail to take into account the tendencies
to the historical decline of the US and, in a shorter term,
the disruption of the unstable equilibrium of the 1990s.
Such one-sidedness is not a random mistake in such sharp
an observer like Anderson. Instead, it is an expression
of Anderson's deep skepticism after 1989, as he considered
the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR
as a 'historical defeat' that wiped out all revolutionary
perspectives from the political horizon of our time.
Has
the American economy just become jittery?
Anderson
maintains that the relevant political question in relation
to the divergences between Europe and the US is whether
they are anticipating a major rift or further reversals
in the inter-imperialist balance of power. Anderson also
claims that '...today the EU is in no position to deflect
or challenge any major American initiative', and opinion
we also share. He predicts that after the invasion in Iraq
and with the setting-up of a mild Arab-styled 'democracy'
in that country, along the lines of Yugoslavia's and Afghanistan's,
'the storm in the Atlantic tea-cup will not last very long.
The reconciliation [between the US and Europe] is all the
more predictable, since the current shift of emphasis from
what is 'cooperatively allied' to what is 'distinctively
American' within the imperial ideology is, by nature, likely
to be short-lived.'
We do not rule out such scenario ourselves, that the US
and Europe may attempt some kind of reconciliation, as implored
by commentators at both sides of the Atlantic, fearful for
the consequences that American 'unilateralism' could bring
about for the entire world system -especially the dangers
entailed by an open break between the two major allied blocs
of the Western world. But the key to a Marxist analysis
is to trace the growing rifts between the US and Europe,
as well as their possible dynamics within the framework
of the whole relationships of the world capitalist system.
In this regard, a notorious weakness of the article is the
lack of a deep analysis of the present state of the American
and also the world economy. This leads Anderson to an excessive
reliance on political and geopolitical factors, taking them
in complete isolation from the tendencies at work in the
capitalist economy. It will be those that will shape -together
with the military and diplomatic operations and the level
of the class struggle- both the extent and the likely evolution
of the standoff between the US and Europe, as well as among
the other powers.
Anderson points in passing to the 'jittery behavior' of
the American economy. If that was the case, a quick victory
in Iraq might reinstate or even extend the unstable equilibrium
of the past decade and heal the inter-imperialist rivalries.
We do not rule out such perspective. At any rate, we do
not deem it as the more likely scenario. We are not just
witnessing a 'jittery behavior' of the US economy. This
has experienced the biggest loss of assets in its whole
history -with big corporations such as Enron or World Com
going bust, in the context of a world economy subjected
to the strongest deflationary pressures since the 1930s.
So we think that is a totally inadequate notion, a too gullible
perspective about the ways that might lead the capitalist
economy onwards to reach a new equilibrium.
Far from an easy way out of the world crisis, the most likely
scenario for the world economy is one proceeding along 'catastrophic'
lines, as well as a tendency to the disruption of the capitalist
equilibrium. If that was the case, the increase of geopolitical
tensions in the rarefied atmosphere of the world economy
will most likely become intensified, radically altering
the relationship between the economy, the state-system and
the class struggle currently unfolding within the world
system today. Anderson's 'historical pessimism', as Gilbert
Achcar put it, prevents him from considering this perspective
at all. |
