Download the global power of uniteds states: formation, expansion and limits

THE GLOBAL POWER OF UNITEDS STATES: FORMATION,
EXPANSION AND LIMITS
JOSÉ LUÍS FIORI
The desire of every state and its rulers is to reach, through the conquest of the
entire world, a condition of perpetual peace.
Immanuel Kant, Philosophical Essay on the Perpetual Peace, 1795.
The Formation of the American Minotaur
The history of the United States does not constitute an exception in relation to the
European “model” of states and national economies. On the contrary, unlike many
social scientists and historians, including the Marxist, think, it is a product, and an
essential part of the process of expansion of the model itself. The birth of the
United States, as its capitalist development, was not an exclusive accomplishment
of its great private corporations, it is inseparable from the competition and the wars
between the Great European Powers. And it would be unthinkable without the
decisive intervention of the State and the American wars, and without the initial and
permanent support of the English financial capital. The rise of the United States
was doubtlessly a revolutionary fact in the history of the worldwide system, since it
was the first national state formed outside the European continent.
But this
revolution did not fall from the sky; it was provoked by the contradictions of the
political system created by the Europeans and the expansion of its Great Powers.
Therefore, although the United States has been a novelty, they have not been an
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exception, however, and they would soon be transformed into a new part of the
system itself.
To begin with, the American independence was a “European war”, besides, as it
happened with all the “European state-empires” that changed into Great Powers,
the United States has expanded its power and its “economic territory” in a
continuous form since the beginning of its independent history. The United States
has assumed in the 20th century the leadership of the system that formerly
belonged to the Europeans and has taken to the utmost limits its contradictory
trend towards the formation of a worldwide empire and, at the same time, the
strengthened of its power as a nation.
Those are the two sides of the
contemporary impasse that faces the worldwide system and the unknown that lies
in the future of the global power of the United States on the threshold of the 21st
century.
The “War of Independence” and the Formation of the First “Extra-European” State
The United States has been the first national state born outside Europe, and at the
same time was a “late” national state, since it was born amidst a system of states
that already were formed into a hierarchy and were, from the 17th century on, in
permanent expansion.
Actually, its own birth constitutes an episode of this
expansionist and competitive trend of the European states and their capitals.
Moreover, the United States has been a colony that separated from a “victorious
imperial state”, unlike all the others non-European states that form today’s
worldwide political system, which were born as a rule always from decaying
empires or in an open process of dissolution. As it was the case with the 19th
century Latin American states, and with all the African and Asian states that were
formed in 20th century, particularly after World War II.
The United States is the only case of a national state that leaves inside an empire
in expansion, during the wars that had defined the English hegemony in Europe
and its colonial world, and during the period when England made its industrial
revolution and created the material and financial basis of the first international
division of work. At the same time when mercantilist and colonialist citadel was
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attacked by Adam Smith’s economic liberalism, which suggested the exchange of
the colonies for an “imperialism of the free commerce”.
Therefore, when breaching its political ties with England, the United States were
immediately transformed into a “primary-exporter” periphery of the English
economy and industrialization. In this new historical context, absolutely original,
one could not expect that the same process of accumulation of power and wealth
that had occurred in Europe after the 15th century would repeat itself in North
America. Nor it would be possible that a state abruptly born out of a war between
the Great European Powers could perform, at once, “the accomplishment achieved
precociously by England, the revolution that created the English national market: a
political space transformed by the State, into an unified and coherent economic
space, whose activities started to develop together in a same direction.” (Braudel,
1987: 82). But, in spite of these differences and North American peculiarities, the
United States has offered from the start an expansive trend, like the first European
states that had been born in the form of “minotaurs”, half state and half empire; an
expansive trend that is not found in the “late” states, which was created in Latin
America at the beginning of
the 19th century.
From our point of view, this
characteristic of the United States is explained from two basic circumstances: one
being its initial geopolitical insertion; and the other, its economic relation with the
English metropolis, which was not severed by the independence.
From a geopolitical point of view, the most determinant factor in the independence
and formation of the American state was that it took place while the Great Powers
disputed the European hegemony, between the end in 1763 of the Seven Years
War, and the end of the Napoleonic wars, in 1815. And still more precisely during
a period when the Ancien Régime was in a defensive position in almost the entire
Europe , fearing in 1789 the French Revolution, and later the advance of
Bonaparte’s armies; at least until the consecration of the conservative victory in
1815 at the Congress of Vienna. It is precisely during this period of European war
that the United States conquers its independence, consolidates its territory, frames
its Constitution at Philadelphia, and chose its first republican government, its
territorial “insularity” in relation to the European continent using to its own profit,
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and adopting a position of neutrality in relation to the conflict between the Great
Powers. Actually, the American war of independence was a chapter of the great
European war during which finally was decided the secular dispute between
France and England for the European continent’s hegemony. After the English
victory in the Seven Years War, France lost its position in India, Canada and
Louisiana, but nevertheless would lead her alliance with Spain, supported by the
Netherlands, and encouraged by the anti-British positions of Russia, Denmark,
Sweden, and Prussia in favour of American independence, playing a decisive role
in the naval battle that decided the fate of England in Yorktown, on October 1781.
However, in spite of this victory, France end up definitively defeated in Waterloo,
being submitted from 1815 on to the policing of the Holy Alliance under the distant
control of England. At this time, while Europe managed to arise after twenty years
of continuous war, when its conservative forces and governments had managed to
regain the control of its peripheries, defining the basis for a new worldwide political
order, the United States was already on its own feet and, from viewpoint of its
territory and state, definitively established after its last war with England in 1812.
During this period of formation, the United States has had to negotiate with all the
Great Powers present in North America, at a moment when they have been
weakened by their fights and without the capacity to support their interests in
territories regarded at that moment as distant, onerous and badly defended, except
precisely for England. Therefore, the United States has negotiated its borders and
commercial treaties since the first hour of its independence with the “hard core” of
the Great European Powers, with which it had always kept privileged relations, in
particular with England; it end up securing outstanding diplomatic victories, for it
knew how to use on its favour the divisions of the Great Powers and their
temporary frailty, starting with the peace treaty with England, the preliminary
version of which was signed, in Paris, on
November the 30th 1782, and the
definitive version, signed on September the 3rd 1783, when the English would
recognize the independence of each one its former colonies, and demarcated the
borders of the new state: to the north, in the region of the Lakes; to the west, in
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the Mississippi river; and to the south, in the region of Florida1. It was in this same
context of European fragility that the United States has managed to impose to the
British, almost all of its conditions, in 1795 in Fort Greenville Treaty, regarding the
aboriginal lands on the bordering region with Canada, where the state of Ohio was
to be created; and the same happened in this very year with the treaties signed
with Spain, defining the common borders in the southwest of the new American
state. A little later, in 1803, the United States had still managed a new victory,
when securing to buy from the French the territory of Louisiana, which was
recovered in 1800 from Spain, by the Treaty of Santo Ildefonso.
The same
procedure was used in relation to Spain, in the case of the annexation of Florida in
1819. But amidst this history of small American battles and great negotiations
done on shadow of the European war that last between the years of 1793 and
1815, the moment of paramount importance took place after the war between
United States and Great Britain, which started in 1812 and ended in 1814, when
the Treaty of Ghent was signed consecrating the “principle of the arbitration” for the
new conflicts that could eventually arise between the two Anglo-Saxon countries.
A principle that was activated with the disarmament agreement of the Great Lakes’
region, on the limits of Canada, signed in 1818 - The Rush-Bagot Agreement -, a
real point of inflection in the geopolitical history of the United States, although the
Anglo-American disputes would not cease definitively until 1871 with the signature
the Treaty of Washington.
Nevertheless, the 1818 treaty signed with England
weighed decisively in favour of the American government during the negotiations
with Spain that would culminate on the 22nd of February 1819, when the Spanish
king Fernando VII yielded to the United States all the territories situated between
the east of Mississippi and the region of Florida.
From an economic, or geo-economic point of view, the decisive point that set apart
the formation of the American economy during the first decades of its independent
life is its complementary, functional and privileged relation with the English
1
The information given in this paper about American diplomatic history – especially those related to the 19th
century up to the I World War – were taken mainly from J.W. Pratt’s book, A History of United States
Foreign Policy, Prentice Hall.
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economy, at that moment world’s main capitalist economy in full process of
industrial revolution. From the English point of view, the United States became a
pioneering experience of its new system of international division of the work that
would be extended during 19th century to Latin America, North of Africa and some
Asian countries. In this sense, there is no doubt that in the first half of 19th century
the United States had been, as many other countries worldwide, a “primaryexporter” economy, specialized in the production of tobacco and cotton for the
English market. With the basic difference that England and its financial capital had
privileged some of these countries much more than others, assuring them the
essential capitals of investment for their great plantations, and the construction of
the infrastructure to deliver the production. Angus Madison’s study (2001) on 19th
century comparative development allows us to identify and rate the countries that
had occupied privileged positions as English granaries, and were select as
preferential receivers for investment of capitals; some Scandinavian countries and
Argentina, and the British dominions or white colonies, as it was the case of
Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa. The United States, however, as
has been indicated by the figures, was the country that has occupied during all the
19th century the main position inside of this group, which had the advantage of
belonging to a kind of British “zone of co-prosperity”. In some occasions, and
cases, the direct English investment in these territories went up to 60% of the total
investment of the period, which could be understandable in colonies that have
been great plantations or minerals suppliers of England. However, this was not the
case of the United States that, although was no longer a colony, kept inside the
“Anglo-Saxon economic territory” a privileged position, and, in this sense, has been
much more than a simple agrarian-exporter periphery of England, as a mater of
fact the United States has been a pioneering case of “development by invitation”.
The ties that had been severed during the Civil War period, due to English
sympathy for the Confederation’s cause, were immediately resumed after the
victory of the Union, and from 1870 on were kept and deepened. But, from now
on, it would be another story, since this was the moment when the United States
performed the also delayed “ revolution that created American national market”,
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and, therefore, the American State had also created by then “a coherent economic
space, unified, the activities of which started to develop together in one very same
direction”. (Braudel, 1987: 85).
From the American point of view, the choice for this economic alliance with
England was not only an imposition of its colonial productive structure, but also a
strategic and political choice taken already by first constitutional government of the
United States, under the presidency of George Washington.
In April 1794,
Washington sent to London John Jay, the first Chief Justice, to negotiate an
agreement with England on several controversies between the two countries. Jay
represented the Federalist position, in particular the pro-British position of
Alexander Hamilton, appointed Secretary of the Treasure by George Washington,
who at that moment was especially worried with the success of his politics
monetary-financial, which depended on the financial support of England. The Jay's
Treaty between England and United States, negotiated by John Jay, was signed in
1794, and it became the starting point for the economic partnership between
United States and England. A partnership that worked in spite of some periodic
disputes, giving to the United States all the advantages of the future British
Dominions, but without the United States having to give away its autonomy and its
neo-mercantilist protection policy. In 1815, Congress authorized the president to
remove, from all American harbours, every kind of discrimination in relation to
ships of countries that had abandoned the same practice in relation to the United
States. The answer of the United Kingdom to this was a decision of Parliament
opening for the Americans in 1822 several ports of her colonies, closing, therefore,
a kind of progressive agreement of preferential commerce between the United
States and herself. This did not prevent the Americans to sign, at this very time,
many other bilateral commercial agreements: with Denmark, Sweden, Holland,
France, and even with Spain, but they did not have the economic importance of the
agreements with England.
It was soon after the Boundary Treaty, signed on October 20, 1818, with England,
and of the Transcontinental Treaty, signed on February 22, 1819, with the Spain,
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that Secretary of State John Quincy Adams spoke for the first time in United
States’ history of the existence of a “manifest destiny”, and immediately propose to
Jefferson the annexation of Cuba and Florida. (Pratt, 1955: 165). The moment for
the Monroe Doctrine was arriving, but this is a history that needs to be reread with
greater care, so that the American expansionism from 1820s can be better
understood. After 1815, the conservative forces were ruling Europe again under
English hegemony, and the military control of the Holy Alliance, composed of the
armies of Russia, Austria and Prussia, was mobilized to definitively restrain
France. At the same time, they set among them the basic rules of how the new
worldwide order, created by the imperialistic expansion of the Great European
Powers, should function. It was at that moment that a long cycle of wars has come
to an end, and revolutions within the European territory, at the same time the wars
of independence multiplied inside the colonial possessions of the Iberian empires.
Therefore, the question of the “decolonisation” occupied a larger place at the
meetings of the Quadruple Alliance, and the Concert of the Europe, in Aix-laChapelle, (1818), Troppau, (1820), Laibach, (1821) and Verona (1822). In
particular, after the restoration of Fernando VII in Spain, and Luis XVIII in France,
events that restored the conservative dispositions and the intention to fight against
the liberals in the Europe and Latin America. The first repressive troops were sent
to contain the rebels in the two kingdoms of Naples and Piedmont, but this
repression caused England to distance herself from the exceedingly conservative
governments and to approach her former colony, the United States, aiming to
prevent the intervention of the Holy Alliance in the American continent, supporting
the Spanish Crown. The United States had already recognized the independences
that preceded the Congress of Vienna, but after consulting the governments of
England, France and Russia, stalled the recognition of other movements towards
independence. It was in this context that the British Foreign Secretary, George
Canning, proposed on August 1823 to Richard Rush, American ambassador in
London, that the United Kingdom and the United States should take a common
position disapproving any attempt from the European powers to restore the role of
Spain in her former colonies (Pratt, 1955: 175).
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The former presidents Jefferson and Madison gave their utmost support to the
English project and a strategic longer-term alliance with Great Britain.
But
president Monroe, backed the position of Adams, and choose to decline the
English invitation and to announce his own initiative before the American
Congress: his new doctrine for American continent in almost identical terms to
those of the British proposal. The Monroe Doctrine, announced on December
1823, was a political statement intended to the Great Powers, and without any
consideration regarding the political will of the newly created states in Spanish and
Portuguese America.
However, if the Europeans decided simply to ignore
Monroe’s speech, the British tried to mock it, publicizing the terms of their
agreement with the French minister Polignac, which was signed on October 1823,
therefore before Monroe’s address to the Congress, and favour a noninterventionist policy in America. “The United States was still a very minor power,
and its position in the international context was of lesser significance. Therefore,
the continental reaction to Monroe’s statement can be summarized as being an
irrelevant and impertinent declaration” (Pratt, 1955: 179). Soon after Monroe’s
speech, the governments of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico had
requested the American intervention in favour of their positions and had received
all the same negative reply, which immediately made them understand that the true
“anchor” for their independences would be the protectorate of the British Navy, and
the English markets and capitals. In that sense, one can say that the Monroe
Doctrine was only to be wielded by American hands at the moment when the
United States had accumulated the indispensable power to support its international
position, and this only took place at the end of 19th century. Until then, Latin
America remained an “economic territory” of British financial capital, and the United
States had aimed at restricting its direct and military action to the North American
territory, only acting outside its immediate zone of influence when assured of
British approval or neutrality. This was the case with the annexation of Texas in
1845, and the war with Mexico, in 1848, when the United States increased in 60%
the size of its territory due to the conquest and annexation of New Mexico and
California. A colossal territory, to which was added the Oregon, recently negotiated
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with England, to open for the United States the gates of the Pacific. The 19th
Century was still in its first half and United States long distance commerce already
had given at every possible opportunity, with the support of the American
diplomacy, its first steps towards Asia.
The treaty signed with Great Britain by the United States in 1794 gave already
permission to the American ships to trade with the British colonies in the East, and
soon after they would be arriving in Oman, Batavia, Manila and Canton. It was in
Asia that the United States started to define its anti-colonialist policy of extra
continental expansion. An option for the “economic territory” without administrative
responsibility, but also a strategy to compete with the French and English
influence, which was based on the use of force and colonial conquest. Therefore
the American permanent apology of the “open doors” policy and preservation of the
territorial integrity, especially in the case of China and Japan. But also in the case
of Canada that would sign in 1854 the Marcy Elgin Treaty with the United States,
which gave up definitively an annexation that had always tempted part of its
government, and choose instead an option for the economic integration of the
Canadian territory. As stated by J.W. Pratt, in his History of United States Foreign
Policy, the American president John Tyler ordered in 1844 its envoy Caleb Cushing
to China with the mission to obtain the same treatment given to England at the
Treaty of Nanking, which was imposed upon China after her 1842 defeat in the
Opium War. Cushing’s mission was successful and the Treaty of Wanghia opened
the ports of Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo, and Shangai to United States’ ships.
The “open doors” principle was kept, later, by the Treaty of Tientsin signed
simultaneously by England, France, Russia and the United States, after a war won
by the two main European colonial powers. In the case of Japan, however, the
American president Millard Fillmore had the initiative in 1853 to send Commodore
Mathew G. Perry over there with the mission to obtain the opening of the Japanese
ports.
This objective was achieved through the signature in 1854 of a treaty
between the two governments, the first treaty ever signed by Japan with a Western
state, the United States, that was followed only afterwards by the governments of
England, Russia and Holland. When American Civil War was due to take place,
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the United States had already completed the conquest of its continental territory
and had taken extremely important diplomatic movements in the commercial and
geo-economic Asian chessboard.
But the U.S. basically remained a primary-
exporter economy depending upon British financial capital, and remained bound to
the British imperial strategy in all territories outside its immediate zone of influence
in the North America, respecting the British dominion of Canada.
The “Civil War”, the Economic Revolution and the Continental Hegemony
The American Civil War changed the course of United States’ history in the second
half of 19th century. A period that covers the beginning of the military conflict in
1861 until the signature of the Commitment between democrats and republicans in
1877, which determined the end of the military occupation of the Confederates
States, and considered closed the Reconstruction policy by the Union of the
economy and society of the Southern states.
This long period of war and
economic disorder ended by having a paradoxical effect, which provoked an
enormous redistribution and centralization of power that left the United States
“head and shoulders above”, and up-to-date with the history and model of
formation and development of the European states and national economies. In this
sense, the Civil War, at the same time that it caused enormous material and
human losses, also played a revolutionary role from the viewpoint of reorganizing
the American national state and capitalism. As if in this case a “second round”
would take place intensively, only focussing this time, on the “centralization of
power”, so that just then, under pressure of wars, or revolutions, the state was
compelled to create - for military or strategic reasons - a national economy from a
monetary, financial, and creditworthy viewpoint developing as a whole one set
direction. It was at this very moment that the “memorable alliance”, to employ Max
Weber’s expression, in the United States speaks, between the state and the
national financial capital, in a similar way that has occurred in England during the
17th century. This is a different viewpoint, for instance, of the one sustained by
Alfred Chandler, which was used until nowadays as the foundation for almost all
the Marxist studies in relation to the exceptional enterprising qualities of American
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capitalism.
For Chandler, “the growth of the modern American industrial
enterprises, between 1880 and World War I was little affected by public policies,
and the capital market because it was part of a more basic economic
development.” (Chandler, 1977: 376).
From our point of view, the American Civil War had, on the contrary, qualities and
consequences typical of the classic European wars between two bordering national
states, in this case, the Union and the Confederation. And it was this Civil War that
was the great responsible for the building of the American modern state and
national economy, since it forced the nationalization of the army and the
consolidation of the Union’s public debt, which became the pillar of the banking
and financial system that expanded and was nationalized during this period, at the
same time that a new tax system was capable of guaranteeing the war debt,
precisely as had happen with the European wars during the 17th and 18th
centuries. And, after the war, during the Reconstruction period, the public bonds of
the debt incurred by the Union would play a basic role in financing the railroads
that would cross the American territory, opening the ways for the expansion of
businesses and great corporations that would integrated the American national
market. It was at that moment that the American financial capital, which only had
managed to gain autonomy from the British capital during the Civil War, once it had
established solid and permanent ties with the victorious power, was really formed.
The alliance between the power of the Union and the new financial capital, as
portrayed by John Hobson in his classic work on American modern capitalism, was
crucial for the success of the economic revolution that shook the United States in
the last decades of 19th century.
During the Civil War, as stated by an American historian, “the Union developed an
income policy that would transform most of the financial community into clients of
the state. The financiers had been attracted and coerced in becoming agents of
the Union’s tax policy and cooperated with the Treasure in selling the public debt
bonds, and making circulation of the currency of the Union. This happened in such
way that when the Civil War ended, the financial capital and American state
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interests had never been so close in any other moment of the 19th century as then
(...) the drop of British investment during the war encouraged the accumulation of
internal capital and the appearance of an American class of financiers. Between
1864 and 1879, for example, the number of bankers in New York increased from
167 to 1800.” (Bensel, 1990: 238-249). It was precisely the time in which the
American production of coal increased 800%, the production of steel rails, 523%,
the mileage of railroads grew 567%, and the wheat production, 256%, while
immigration doubled the size of the American population.
In many aspects, it was a similar and parallel economic revolution to the one that
occurred from 1870s on after the German unification. Also in this case the wars of
Prussia against Denmark, Austria and France had helped to build or to deepen the
ties between the political power and the financial capital that would act as a
propeller force in the German economical leap in the last decades of the 19th
century, which was described in Rudolph Hilferding’s classic work about the
“financial capital”. Putting aside some important differences, a strong parallelism
also exists between the trajectories of the United States and Germany with what
occurred in Japan, after the 1860s Civil War, the Meiji Restoration, which knocked
down the feudal regimen of the shogunate and initiated a much accelerated
process of modernization of the society and industrialization of the Japanese
economy. It is interesting to note that these three “late” national states would end
up by taking, almost at the same time, their first imperialistic steps outside their
territories, or continents, in the end of the 19th century. After a fast process of
modernization and industrialization, Japan invaded and defeated China in 18941895, and Russia, in 1904-1905, increasing its territory, and imposing its power in
Korea and the Manchuria. It was the very time that Germany abandoned Bismarck
diplomacy and started her imperial expansion in Africa, considering at the same
time to equal her naval power to Britain’s. An expansionist movement that would
approach France and Russia, and cause a radical change of British foreign policy
between the years of 1890 and 1914. Finally in 1898, the United States had also
left the “den” by declaring and wining the Spanish-American War, and conquering
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– through the 1898 Treaty of Paris - Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines,
starting a colonial escalade that would continue with the 1902 interventions in Haiti,
Panama in 1903, the Dominican Republic in 1905, and again in 1906 and 1912 in
Cuba and Haiti respectively.
The very time that the United States would fully
assume the military responsibility for the Monroe Doctrine when succeed in prevent
an 1895 invasion of Venezuela, planned by England and Germany, and aimed to
collect the Venezuelan government’s debts with European banks.
Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan would published his classic work, The Influence of
Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783, a book that exerted enormous influence on
his friend Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, two central figures
in American foreign policy decisive process, precisely in the year of 1890, at the
moment when the United States had started effectively its imperial expansion
outside of North America. His central thesis backed the perception of some Civil
War militaries on the necessity of the United States to have naval bases in the
Caribbean, and the Pacific, capable to support its advance towards Asia, where
part of the colonial competition was concentrated after 1870. Those ideas would
provoke an immediate expansion of the United States’ navy to the point of
becoming one of world’s three largest navies on the brink of World War I in 1914.
But above all, those were the same ideas that guided the decision to annex in 1897
Hawaii to the United States, and to initiate the 1989 Spanish-American War, and
consequently the conquest of Cuba and the Philippines.
Between 1900 and 1914, the American government had to define its politics in
relation to these new conquered overseas territories and would opt for a new kind
of political control: they became United States’ military and financial protectorates,
as it was the case in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Nicaragua, Panama and Cuba.
These countries kept their internal sovereignty, but they did not have any right to a
foreign policy, nor to implement an economic policy that was not in accordance
with the payment requirements by their debts in American banks. Moreover, the
United States kept a right to intervene at any time internal disturbances or threats
to jeopardise its protectorate occurred.
It was at that moment that the United
States assumed, for the first time, the role of international police, transforming the
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Caribbean into a kind of colonial zone, without the responsibility for the direct
administration, as in the case of the Philippines who had been, in fact, the first
United States’ colony, and its first step in the struggle for hegemony in the Asian
chessboard. After the Philippines, the United States would intervene more and
more in Asian affairs, as it was the case with the 1900 Boxer Uprising in China,
where the United States had mobilized the other Great Powers in favour of keeping
Chinese territorial integrity. And also during the Russo-Japanese War, when the
United States had adopted a neutral position, but would be openly in favour of
Japan, accepting as well the Japanese request to become the host nation for the
1905 Peace Conference in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Finally, on December 6th, 1904, in his annual message to the American Congress,
President Theodore Roosevelt reformulated the Monroe Doctrine, and adjusted it
to the new times. The new strategic doctrine that was behind his offensive in the
Caribbean, and Asia, was to be known as the “Roosevelt Corollary of the Monroe
Doctrine”. This was the first time that an American administration defended the
right of the United States to a “preventive attack” against states in case they
showed “inefficiency” regarding their internal order, or if they were “defaulters”
regarding their external debts. The new formula was foresee on May 1904 in a
letter from Roosevelt to Elihu Root, his Secretary of State, and later it was
repeated in the speech of December 6th in the same year: “Any well behaved
country or people can count upon our cordial friendship. If the nation demonstrates
that she knows how to act within reasonable efficiency and decency in social and
political matters, if she knows how to keep order and paid her debts, she doesn’t
need to fear the intervention of the United States. An inveterate disapproving
behaviour, or an impotence that results to set loose the ties of social civility, can
require, in America, or in any another place of the world, the intervention of a
civilized nation, and in the case of the Western Hemisphere, the adhesion of the
United States to the Monroe Doctrine, can force the United States to exert an
international police power, even though reluctantly” (Pratt, 1955:
417). When
entering World War I, in 1917, the United States was the only hegemonic power in
its own continent, and already had a prominent position in the Asian chessboard. It
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was the time when American fight for hegemony in Europe would start, the true
secret for conquering global power.
The Conquest Global Power by the United States
Between 1914 and 1945, the worldwide political system faced a new “Thirty Years’
War”, such as the one that took place mainly in Germany, between 1618 and 1648,
before the Peace of Westphalia, with the difference that in the 20th century it was a
worldwide war, involving countries of all the continents and reaching the territories
of Europe, North Africa and Asia. It was during this period that the worldwide
system “digested” the revolutionary entrance of three new political powers and
three new expansive national economies - two of them situated outside Europe - in
its central core of command, in addition to two worldwide wars, and a worldwide
economical crisis that had its epicentre in the United States. However, besides
war and the great economic crisis, it was in this precise period that a successful
Communist revolution took place in Russia, together with several others that, if not
succeeding in the same way, nevertheless agitated the European social and
political scenery, in particular regarding the territories of Central Europe,
contributing for the large fascist reaction which installed, in the 1930s, authoritarian
and conservative governments in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Germany. After World
War II, during the Cold War with Soviet Union, and under United States’ hegemony
amongst the other Great Powers, the capitalist economy lived its “golden age” and
the world experienced a global management based on supranational institutions
and regimes, even if tutored by the United States. But this period of “worldwide
hegemony” lasted only until the 1970s, when the United States changed its
international strategy. It was the moment when America lost the Vietnam War and
would approach China, also abandoned the international monetary regimen
created in Bretton Woods and gradually adopted a dollar-flexible system, and
finally had dismantled the controls on the international circulation of private
capitals, opting for the complete deregulation of the financial markets, which the
16
United States had already supported, and promoted, since the 1960s everywhere
possible. This was a new international strategy to escalate towards single imperial
global power, achieved after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Persian
Gulf War in 1991.
There is a widespread theory, in the field of international political economy, about
the origins of the “age of disaster” and the 1970s changes. After Charles
Kindelberger and Robert Gilpin, several authors had spoken of a “crisis of the
American hegemony” in the 1970s, and had attributed it to the same basic cause of
the 1930s crisis: the absence of a clearly hegemonic power, capable of imposing
order and to lead the international economy. This would have occurred after 1918,
when the United States did not want to assume the worldwide leadership in the
place of England, and the same would had happen again in the 1970s, when the
American hegemony would have been challenged by the economic rise of
Germany and Japan, the technological-military advance of the Soviet Union, and
the American defeat in the Vietnam War. From our point of view, however, the
United States did not abdicate voluntarily its worldwide leadership after World War
I. What was at issue in 1918 was a fight for hegemony within Europe, where
objective contradictions, and resistances, still existed that had blocked the
American upgrade and had hindered the United States to assume the economical
and political leadership of the region. Germany had been defeated, and Japan
already had been “realigned” with England since the beginning of the 20th century,
but there was no agreement between England and France about the pillars of the
new worldwide order, and much less upon the place and the role that were to be
grant to the United States inside the Great Powers’ club. This may be the reason
why 1918 Paris’ Agreements, considered by many as being a big strategic and
geopolitical calculation mistake, was as a matter of fact the only possible result of a
negotiation marked by divisions and conflicts amongst the victorious powers, and
by the existence of a French and English final veto to any kind of American
hegemony in Europe.
On the other hand, the “ the 1970s crisis” was not from our point of view only the
result of a loss of strength of United States’ worldwide hegemony caused by its
17
military and diplomatic defeats, and by the economic challenge of the other
capitalist economic powers. From the viewpoint of the worldwide system long-term
dynamics, the “ the 1970s crisis” was the product of the “expansive compulsion”
and the destructive trend of the hegemonic powers in their quest for global power.
World War I and the American Struggle for European Hegemony
World War I is one of the most enigmatic episodes in modern history. There is an
accumulation of theories, but none succeed to explain the sudden and sequential
way in which 32 nations - including the British Dominions and India - had become
involved in a war against Germany due to an absolutely prosaic episode that took
place in Sarajevo, on June 28, 1914. This included Japan that declared war to
Germany in August of the same year with her eyes set on the German controlled
territory in the Chinese peninsula of Shantung, and the German islands of the
North Pacific. The Americans had just finished to confirm its hegemonic power in
the American continent, and had already substantial positions in Asian, when
World War I begun, and the United States had proclaimed, once more, its position
of neutrality regarding the struggle for European hegemony. A position that was
sustained during two and half years by president Woodrow Wilson, despite French
and British pressure. The United States will declare the “state of war” with the
government of the German Empire, on April 6, 1917, but until then its position was
favourable to negotiation and the establishment of a “peace without victory”, as it
was the purposed suggested many times by president Woodrow Wilson who
looked forward to establish a new balance of power in Europe, capable to assure a
lasting peace and an American position similar to the one that belong to England
during the 19th century. Even when entering war against Germany, the United
States did not declare war to German allies, neither established any kind of treaty
or alliance with France and England, adopting a position of “associated power” in
the same war.
Moreover, the Americans had entered the war shielded by
president Wilson’s “Fourteen Points”, and immediately considered a fair peace for
all those involved in the conflict, including Germany.
18
The 1919’s negotiations of peace in Paris, however, had excluded German
presence and had given little space to the Italian and Japanese delegations,
becoming, in fact, a triumvirate formed by Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau,
and their respective delegations and teams of advisers.
The peace program
thought by Wilson had four very clear objectives: to re-establish the European
balance of power, to dismantle the colonial empires of France and England, to
reactivate the commerce, and the international economy, and to a covenant of a
League of Nations. Under no circumstance this project can be considered as a
deed of United States’ disinterested idealism, nevertheless its main proposals had
been blocked, or distorted, by previous agreements between the victorious, and by
the joint or divided veto of the other allies, in particular France and England.
Wilson’s great victory in the negotiations in Paris was the covenant of League of
Nations it became, however, a “Pyrrhic victory” the moment the American Senate
vetoed the participation of the United States in the League. On the one hand,
Wilson granted the point of the “economic reparation” imposed by France on
Germany, and he did not succeed in open the commercial doors of European
colonial empires. On the other hand, England and United States united to veto the
French proposal of dividing German territory, since both worried about the French
expansionism. Still, France and England joined to compel Wilson to restrict his
apology of the “self-determination of the peoples” to Central European nations, and
to accept that the old Ottoman Empire’s territories were to be transformed into
British and French “mandates” or “protectorates”. Even in Central Europe, the
creation of the new states was only accepted by all in the measure that it
weakened Germany, and created buffer states to contain Soviet Union. Finally,
United States, France and England came together when denying some claims of
Italy and Japan, deepening the division between victorious countries at end of
World War I. At last, on June 23, 1919, Germany would accept the extremely
unfair treaty that was imposed upon her by the allies. Before that, however, the
German and Russian destruction unbalanced the core of the Great Powers. The
balance of power would no longer be possible, and a kind of draw was established
amongst the victorious, where the power of mutual veto predominated above the
19
capacity of any of the victorious nations to impose its hegemony to the others, in
particular within the European geopolitical chessboard. It was this draw that led
the American Senate’s rejection of the covenant of League of Nations to prevail.
This was not though the forces that opposed the United States’ worldwide
presence were victorious; it was simply a rejection of the covenant’s terms
proposed by the Europeans, who had not accepted the changes suggested by the
American Senate: i) the recognition of the right of the countries to abandon the
League;
ii) the elimination of domestic issues, concerning the jurisdiction of
League; and iii) the acceptance, by all the members of League of the Monroe
Doctrine. Finally, It was this draw in the fight for European hegemony that
paralysed, in the 1930s, World War I “allies” and the League of Nations, when the
defeated or penalized states by the Peace Treaty of Versailles had retaken their
expansive impetus, and started to reconquest its war lost territories. This is what
happened before the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria; the 1935 Italian
invasion of Ethiopia; the Italo-German fascist intervention in the Spanish Civil War;
the 1936 German retaken of the Ruhr; the 1938 German annexation of Austria,
and the 1939 invasion of Czechoslovakia. After the Munich Pact, and the nonaggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, in 1939, they remained
paralysed before the Russian invasion of Poland, Finland, Romania, and the Baltic
states.
But, even then, only England and France would react to the German
invasion of Poland, starting World War II, while the United States would keep at
distance up to 1941.
In the economic field, the conflict and division between the three main victorious
powers in the 1914 War reappeared in all the post-war arguments: on the issue of
the new international monetary system and the problem of the “reparations”, in
Germany’s case in particular. During the war, the United States had stop being a
country in debt, becoming instead the main creditor of all European countries
involved in the conflict, including its own allies which had radicalised their demands
in relation to Germany in order to quit their debts with American banks. In relation
to the new monetary-financial order, they all have been in agreement, at first, with
the return to the gold standard and the rules in effect before the 1914 war.
20
However, the national interests were not convergent, nor was there any possibility
that one of the victorious countries would impose itself to the others. Therefore,
the Brussels Conference, convoked by the League of Nations and taking place on
September 1920 - assembling representatives of 34 countries, and only one
American observer - was a complete failure, and none of its recommendations to
League of Nations was enforced.
The same would happen again at the
Conference of Genoa in 1922, convoked by France and England, but also without
the adhesion of the United States. An impasse that would repeat once more at
World Economic Conference that took place on June 1933 in London.
Its
proposals had been rejected by Roosevelt, and each one of the main actors, who
end up withdrawing back his own resolution: the British Empire created the sterling
pound zone, while the French formed the “ gold group” with Belgium, Holland,
Switzerland and Italy.
The same conflict of interest between France, Great Britain and America was
present in the negotiations concerning the payment of German “reparations”.
Fifteen months after the peace settlement, Germany became already default with
her creditors, and despite the objection of England, the “Reparations Commission “
authorized in 1923 the occupation by French and Belgian troops of the German
industrial area of the Ruhr. As a result of this, German economy entered into a
deep inflationary crisis, interrupting completely the payment of her debt. Therefore
France agreed to the creation of a special commission, under the leadership of
American banker Charles G. Dawes, to study a plan to reschedule German debt.
Despite profound disagreement between the British and the French, it was possible
to reach in 1924 a final proposal and an agreement, called Dawes Plan, which
worked satisfactorily during the years of prosperity, between 1924 and 1928. After
the 1929 crisis, however, a new reschedule of the payments was necessary, the
Young Plan, sanctioned in April 1930, six months after the New York Stock market
crash. Soon after, the worldwide economic crisis hastened the liquidation of the
German debt; settle in Lausanne, July 1932, the precise moment when the nazi
ascension started and Germany was back on the struggle for European hegemony.
But in all these negotiations and agreements, what stands out was the profound
21
disagreement between the allies - they came close to break off diplomatic relations
- and the impossibility of establishing any kind of clear hegemony amongst them.
In this fight with its European allies, the United States, due to its geopolitical and
military nature, faced another extremely difficult problem: its territorial “insularity”,
which had been, until then, a safeguard against external attacks. They would learn
soon that “the terrestrial power is the decisive form of the military power, and that
the great water masses deeply limit the capacity of projecting of the power ashore.
Therefore, when the opposing armies have to cross great extensions of water, as
in the case of the Atlantic Ocean, for example, to attack one another, both will lose
offensive capacities, independently of the size and the quality of the opposing
forces.” (Mearsheimer, 2001: 83). This limitation of the United States explains, in
part, the Woodrow Wilson’s “idealism” and his apology of a system of “collective
security”, in which the Americans could exert their power inside Europe, as an
offshore balance, as it had been the case of the British, during the 19th century. It
was not the case of abandoning Theodore Roosevelt’s project of international
power, nor to abdicate of its expansionist program, the matter was to adjust it the
United States’ reality and possibilities at the stage of the development of military
technology of that time. Moreover, after World War I, already there was nothing
left to conquer in the world besides the two great European powers, the allies of
the United States, own colonies, the colonial empires of Great Britain and France.
The United States would be inclined, and would it have the conditions, at that
moment, to initiate a military competition with France and England? Everything
suggests that they did not have the national resolution, nor the military resources to
start this “race to the extremes”, which would have meant the definitive implosion
of the ally block and its enfeeblement before Germany and the Soviet Union. From
this point of view, the apology of the “self-determination of the peoples” coincided
with the national interest of the United States in disassembling the colonial empires
of its allies. A position that was announced in 1917, but that only became effective
after the end of World War II, when England and France already had no longer the
conditions to compete with the United States, nor to keep the control of their old
22
colonies. At this moment, however, the United States had already enforced its
hegemony in Europe and definitively surpassed its territorial, technological and
military limitations, to face the struggle for the conquest of global power.
World War II and the Worldwide Hegemony of the United States
Between 1939 and 1945, World War II generated a true revolution within the Great
Powers’ hierarchic core. It was a war in two movements, and as a matter of fact,
one can also speak of the existence of two wars in one: the first, between 1939
and 1941, only involved the Europeans and was won by Germany; and the second,
between 1941 and 1945, involved Germany, Japan and the United States, and was
won by the Americans. The Atlantic Charter, the declaration signed by Churchill
and Roosevelt, issued on August 1941, was a kind of point of passage between
the two conflicts. From the viewpoint of its content, the declaration signed aboard
a warship, in the North Atlantic off the coast of Newfoundland, held an updated
version of Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points”. As a matter of fact, it meant,
however, the transference of the Anglo-Saxon power to the United States that
would undertake the fight with Germany almost at the same time when it goes to
war with Japan, on December 1941. A kind of “settlement” between the three
“great late powers” that were born to the world power game almost a century ago
in the 1860s.
From United States’ viewpoint, it means the decision to fight
simultaneously for the hegemony in Europe and Southeast Asian, where it chose
at once the side of China, resigning to all its extraterritorial claims, and sponsoring
the Chinese entrance in the group of the “big four” that would sign in Moscow the
convene of the United Nations Conference, which took place in San Francisco, in
1945.
This second period of the war, between 1941 and 1945, was also the time when
the hierarchic, functional and competitive basis for the new worldwide political
order was negotiated, which was born under the simultaneous and complementary
form of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and of the economic and military
hegemony of the United States inside of the capitalist world.
The defeats of
France, Germany and Japan, and the transformation of the Soviet Union in the
23
new enemy and main competitor of the United States, had left in American and
British hands the design of this new order that was to be effective from 1947 on.
This was a joint work, developed basically by Great Britain and the United States,
but its construction was neither simple, nor linear. From the geopolitical point of
view, Roosevelt also supported, as Wilson did, a system of “collective security”, but
at the same time he believed in the necessity of “four international policemen” that
would act together, and guarantee the worldwide peace: United States, England,
Soviet Union and China. Roosevelt resisted the old European formula of the
“balance of power” supported by Churchill, and had towards the Soviet Union a
much more benevolent position than British Prime Minister’s one, favouring
substantive economic aid to the reconstruction of the Soviet economy. Roosevelt
also did not oppose to the Soviet claims in the region of the Central Europe, in
contrast to the British, but all these divergences had been outclassed with
Roosevelt’s death on April 1945, five months before president Truman authorized
the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and inaugurated a new relation of
power with America’s World War II allies and enemies. The arguments between
United States, England and Soviet Union, first at the Yalta meeting, on February
1945, and later, in Potsdam, in September of the same year, had been rigorously
inconclusive, and from then on, the hierarchic design and the territorial positions of
each one of the winners had to be established, in practical, case by case in relation
to the interests of each one, and in correlation to their local power. By and Large,
the Soviet Union extended its presence to its immediate “ security zone” in Central
Europe, and was contained in Greece, Turkey and the Iran, achieving the division
of German territory. The new United States’ strategic doctrine took two years to be
finally defined by defining the enemy and setting the Cold War borders and rules.
The result was a policy draw exclusively by British and Americans from the
proposal made by Churchill’s famous speech at Fulton, Missouri, on March 1946,
where the idea of an “iron curtain” was bespoken for the first time, collected and
transformed into the Truman Doctrine’s ethical bedrock, which was announced by
the American president on March 1947. The central idea of Winston Churchill’s
speech was only one: the worldwide system will not work unless a new map of the
24
world and a new border, or cleavage, capable to define the strategic calculation of
the Great Powers, would be organized; the “iron curtain “, which replaced Russia –
an old British imperial competitor – as the new Anglo-Saxon countries’ opponent,
and the allies, now under United States’ leadership, close to their former
adversaries, Germany, Japan and Italy, would fit to it.
“Churchill, who was
Germany’s first and harder adversary in the 1930s, became, nevertheless, the first
and most enthusiastic defender of the reconciliation with Germany after the end of
the war.” (Kissinger, 1994: 442). These thesis have been quickly incorporated and
accepted by the American establishment, and consecrated in 1947 by the Truman
Doctrine, as the new global strategy of the United States: “(...) the United States’
policy will be of a permanent support to the free peoples who want to resist the
domination of armed minorities or external forces.” (Truman, quote in Kissinger,
1994:
453). And of permanent and global containment of the Soviet Union,
according to conception of George Kennan, its first architect: “the policy of firm
containment was design to counterforce the Russians, with all the necessary
strength, in each and every point of the world where they show signs of wanting to
attack the interests of a pacific and steady world.” (Kennan, 1947: 581).
In 1949, after the partition of Germany, the Soviet occupation of Central Europe
and the formation of NATO, and the Warsaw Pact, the strategy of bipolarisation of
Europe defended for Churchill was definitively consolidated. The new rift would
cross, initially, only the old continent, but after the 1949 communist revolution in
China, the 1950-1953 Korean War, and the beginning of the Vietnam War, the
Cold War was “de-Europeanised”.
A decisive moment in this process of
displacement of the conflict epicentre was the 1956 Suez Canal crisis, moment
when the United States had extended its hegemony, also to the Middle East
geopolitical chessboard, after denying its support to the invasion of the Sinai by the
forces of Israel, France and Great Britain. The unconditional relation between the
“allies” of 1918 and 1945 ended there, the United States would launch at the same
time its final attack on the French and British colonial empires. “For the first time in
history the Americans had shown independence in relation to the Anglo-French
25
policy in Asia and Africa that reflected their colonial tradition.” (Kissinger, 1994:
545).
After the end of the Vietnam War, and the Revolution in the Iran, the Cold War axis
was once again moved toward the Middle East and Central Asia, and in the 1980s
it reached the Caribbean, without never getting close again to the European
territory, until the hour of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of the new
German reunification. In this United States global confrontation, the Soviet Union
only played the role of a military competitor, indispensable to the accumulation and
expansion of its territorial and political power, but never fulfilled the role of
complementary competitor to American economy. With the exception of some
moments, in the second half of 20th century, the Soviet Union ventured very little
during the Cold War outside its “ immediate security” zone. This only happened in
Cuba, in 1961, and in some points of Africa, before the 1979 invasion of
Afghanistan.
On the other hand, the United States’ strategy of “universal
containment” allowed a gradual and global deployment of American military forces,
although a new World War didn’t take place. At the time of the Soviet Union’s
dissolution and end of the Cold War, the Americans had military bases or
agreements in about 130 of the 194 existing countries in the world, and kept about
300.000 soldiers outside the United States, keeping the military control of all the
oceans and space itself. An almost global military “deployment” of imperial type
that didn’t include directly only the territories of China, India and Russia. “A vast
net of American military bases in all the continents, except Antarctica, that
constitutes a new form of empire” (Johnson, 2004: 1).
In the same period, between 1941 and 1945, the allies had negotiated the pillars of
the new monetary-financial architecture that would regulate the relations inside of
the worldwide capitalist economy after the end of the war. Also in this field, the
new order that was finally born after the Bretton Woods’ Agreements was an
exclusive work of the United States and Great Britain.
Harry White and Lord
Keynes had capitalized the theoretical argument, but none of the two was in
Bretton Woods to participate of an academic debate, on the contrary, they were
there to represent the very concrete American and British interests, and their
26
financial capitals. Therefore, independently of the theoretical affinities shared by
the two Anglo-Saxon representatives, the United States started to exert at that very
moment its condition of hegemon within the capitalist world, and its positions had
been imposed in almost all points. In relation to the basic topic of the administration
of capital accounts, for instance, the bankers from both sides of the Atlantic only
agreed to the creation of control systems that were temporary, and without
obligatory cooperation between the countries. As a matter fact, the financiers’
ultraliberal position was only temporally bent by the 1947 crisis of dollar shortage
Europe; through the threat of a Communists political-electoral victory in France and
Italy, at 1948 the elections; and through 1949 the collapse of the Japanese
economy. The bankers’ ideas had predominated between 1945 and 1947, but they
end up by being reverted due to the new international picture, and the imposition
upon them of the new Cold War Doctrine’s strategic priorities. It is this context that
explains the Marshall Plan, as well as all the other concessions made by the
United States with relation to European protectionism, especially in relation to the
retaken by German and Japanese economies of their old heterodox ways. And,
despite the British pressure, only in 1958 the European currencies’ convertibility
was restored and, still, only for current account transactions.
This change of the American position concerning the development strategy of the
defeated countries, especially Japan, Germany and Italy, became the cornerstone
of economic-financial engineering of the post-World War II period, particularly after
1950s, when these countries would be transformed into capitalist economy great
“economic miracles”. In the medium term, the United States’ economic relation
with these countries became a long-term strategic partnership, above all in the
cases of Germany and Japan, creating amongst themselves an American “zone of
co-prosperity”, where they had been enclosed, later, Taiwan, the South Korea, and
other Southeast Asia “tigers”.
In all this cases, they have been countries
transformed into a hybrid kind of national state that, although they did not become
an American colony, they had been “disarmed” in a permanent way, being
transformed into links of a “security belt” created around the Soviet Union, and
where the main American military bases have been installed, outside the United
27
States’ territory.
In other words, they became the United States’ “military
protectorates” and “economic guests”, and in the case of Germany and Japan, they
had been transformed into regional “pivots” of a global machine of capital
accumulation and wealth, which functioned in an absolutely virtuous way amidst
the Great Powers and in some peripheral economies until the 1970s crisis. It was
this combination of military protectorate of the defeated countries, with the
integration and global coordination of their economies, that was transformed into
the material and dynamic base of the “worldwide hegemony” exerted by the United
States, until the 1970s.
Therefore, one can say that during this period the United States had expanded its
political power through military competition with the Soviet Union, a power with
which the Americans did not keep complementary economic relations, and so it
could be destroyed in an unavoidable circumstance, without grievance to the
American economy. And, at the same time, the United States had expanded its
wealth through complementary and dynamic economic relations with unarmed and
incapable to face the United States militarily competitors. An absolutely original
formula, with relation to the worldwide system passed historical experience, that
end up by becoming the key to the success of the American worldwide hegemony,
which lasted for two decades.
The Vietnam War and the Escalation towards the Worldwide Empire
The “order” created by the American hegemony, and the global competition of the
Cold War end up having contradictory effect. The “initial” framework started to
crumble due to its own success, and the strength of the mechanism of power and
wealth accumulation created by it. After a certain moment, the Soviet Union gave
some signs that it already had the conditions to leave its zone of influence,
escaping the American containment and system of control, particularly in the case
of the 1979 invasion of the Afghanistan.
Meanwhile the “economic partners”
started to compete for markets and territories that threatened the hegemon’s
interests. The time and space for virtuous partnership was over, multiplying the
signs that the military sparring, and the “economic protectorates” wish to retake
28
their national projects of territorial and economic expansion. It was when took
place the rupture and the end of the capitalist “golden age” of growth, coming to an
end the “worldwide hegemony” exerted by the United States between 1945 and
19732.
There is a prevailing view about the “1970s crisis” that enhances the American
defeat in Vietnam, and its “domino effect” in Laos and Cambodia, and also in
Africa, Central America, and finally, in 1979, in the Middle East, with the Shiite
revolution in Iran, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. From the economic
viewpoint, this same view underlines in 1970s the end of the international monetary
system set up after World War II, the rupture of the energy policy based on cheap
oil and the beginning of the first big worldwide economic recession after World War
II.
This description of the shift that started in the 1970s is correct, however
insufficient, since the crisis doesn’t explain itself and it is not easy to understand
how it generated a change of such big proportions in a geopolitical conjuncture
characterized by the “pacific coexistence” between the United States and the
Soviet Union, and in a economic conjuncture characterized by the continuous
worldwide growth of the capitalist economy. It doesn’t make sense to place the “
dollar crisis”, or the simple defeat in Vietnam, as the starting point of such a deep
rupture, if one doesn’t explain the origin of the monetary crisis itself, and the
American escalade in Southeast Asia. The involvement of the United States in the
Vietnam War started in 1950s by financing and offering logistic support to the
French soon after the Korean War. It was part of the struggle for hegemony in
Southeast Asia, where the Americans had won a decisive round with the Japanese
defeat and the “cooptation” of China on the first half of 1940s. But it’s also where
as many rounds would be lost, either with the 1949 victory of the Communist
Revolution in China, or the Soviet offensive in Korea and Vietnam starting in the
1950s.
2
The worldwide changes of this period have been deeply described, discussed and charted in TAVARES, M. C.
& FIORI, J. L. (org), Poder e Dinheiro. Uma Economia Política da Globalização, Petrópolis, Editora Vozes,
1997.
29
The American military presence in the region during the 1950s grew slowly but in a
constant way, and escalated in geometric progression in 1960s, until the 1968
attack to North Vietnam. It was a continuous involvement, and each time more
extensive, explained by the necessity of hegemonic power’s worldwide permanent
expansion, and for its intolerance to any kind regional threat.
The worldwide
hegemony does not interrupt the expansionism, nor calms the hegemon, on the
contrary, it is a transitory position that must be conquered and kept by the constant
fight for more power, and in this sense is self-destructive, because the hegemon
itself wants to get rid of its own limitations to achieve the total conquest of global
power. Therefore, the hegemon becomes a de-stabiliser of its own hegemony and,
in this sense, it was not properly the defeat in Vietnam that cause the 1970s
change of route, but the hegemon’s own “expansive compulsion” that lead it to a
transitory defeat, without, however, affecting its strategic initiative capacity. While
being defeated in Vietnam, the United States was already approaching the
Chinese government, in one of the boldest diplomatic initiatives of the Nixon
administration. First it was Henry Kissinger’s 1971 secret visit to Beijing, which
opened the doors for the negotiations that culminated with the signature of the
Shanghai Communiqué on February 1972, and, finally, with the February 1973
treaty, where the Chinese and the Americans “agreed to jointly resist the attempt of
any other country that colluded to dominate the world, in such way that in the
space of one and half year the Sino-American relations changed from hostility and
isolation to a matter of fact alliance.” (Kissinger, 1994: 729). One can see today
that the Americans had answered immediately, with clarity, and in aggressive way,
to the loss of position in the Indochinese Peninsula, blocking the possibility of a
Russian hegemony in Southeast Asia and, at the same time, offering the Chinese
a return to their old economic partnership, which had begun with the 1844 treaty, in
defence of the “open doors” policy that had been revitalised with the 1943 SinoAmerican approach. Even though, there is no doubt that defeat in Vietnam ended
by becoming a decisive moment in the trajectory of American struggle for global
power, because it was precisely there that victory was made possible, inside
American foreign policy establishment, for those who defended, since a while, the
30
necessity of the United States to get rid of its “hegemonic behaviour”, to be able to
fight “for the conquest of the whole world”, and the formation of a “worldwide
empire”.
The same must be said with relation to the “dollar-gold standard” crisis, at the
beginning of the 1970s. It had profound and lasting economic consequences, but it
is important to go more in the past to understand its older causes, the long duration
process that culminated with the 1973 rupture. The “dollar and oil crisis” did not
happen “out of the blue”, and their roots can be traced to the period of the two
previous decades of economic success. The first step to the globalisation of the
financial markets was taken much before the 1971/73 crisis, with the creation of
the Euromarket, in the end of the 1950s, which had the decisive support of the
American and British governments.
The market operated in the London
marketplace, but the leading presence belonged to the American banks and great
corporations.
“In fact, in the mid 60s, the American authorities were actively
encouraging the banks and corporations to make their operations in the London
offshore marketplace.” (Helleiner, 1994: 82). The same happened with British
authorities, to whom the Euromarket represented a way out to the question of
conciliation between the Keynesian policies of welfare state and the preservation of
the international financial position of England itself. On the other hand, it was at
the beginning of 1960s that the first European attack against the dollar took place,
and the solutions first adopted had been insufficient, and did not succeed in
withholding the exit of capitals, what made the United States to pressure the
European governments for the liberation of their stock markets, allowing the
interests rates to reflect the national differences on capital productivity. In 1961,
the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) took a
position in this same direction, supporting the immediate liberalization of the
capitals accounts, and the American government started to support a liberalization
of the international financial market as the only way to keep the autonomy of its
economic policy and strategic decisions, in front of the increasing external
pressures.
“It is important to stress that the United States and England had
promoted a larger opening of the worldwide financial order through a strictly
31
unilateral action and that the unilateral liberalization has shown itself efficient for
the rapid increase of international financial activity.”(Helleiner, 1994: 99). At the
beginning of the 1970s, the Europeans and the Japanese had advocated a
cooperative action to achieve a larger control of the floating capitals movement, of
the same kind discussed at Bretton Woods, but the radical opposition of the United
States to any kind of cooperative action had defeated them.
In his 1973
Presidential Economic Report to the American Congress, president Richard Nixon
explicitly defended that the “control of capitals aiming the balance of payments
should not be encouraged” and that, on the contrary, the free circulation of capital
is the best way to promote proper economic policies. Soon after, the American
government devaluated the dollar and abolished, in 1974, its system of control of
capitals, in perfect continuity with all the strategic decisions that already have being
made since the 1960s to make the expansion of American capital possible, and to
keep the American autonomy in the handling of its internal policy. Therefore, the
so called “dollar crisis” was not an accident, neither a surprise, much less defeat; it
was an objective sought in conscious and strategic way by the international
economic policy of the American government.
From this perspective, one can understand better the affinity that exists, after all,
between the three strategies set in the 1970s by the Americans to face the
consequences of their own expansive policy. The first one, belonging to the Nixon
administration, considered the return to the multi-polar world, following an
international economic policy of the liberal and deregulating kind. Nixon’s team of
economic advisers was already radically neo-liberal and counted important names,
such as Gottfried Haberler, George Schultz, William Simon and Paul Volcker,
adamant adversaries of the post-War II embedded liberalism. It was most evident
for all of them that the financial markets deregulation was the only possible way to
increase American power.
In that sense, they have been simultaneously
champions of economic neo-liberalism and American nationalism, and concerned
with the preservation of the United States independent capacity to continue to
extend its power and wealth inside and outside its territory.
Moreover, the
business establishment, representing the new coalition of forces that appeared in
32
the second half of the 1960s, approaching the New Deal old industrialists to the
financial interests favourable to neo-liberal ideas, had already supported Nixon’s
election in 1968, in exchange for the promise to remove the capital control. Nixon,
however, was overthrown by the Watergate scandal.
The second strategy,
proposed Jimmy Carter’s democrats, considered to re-establish United States’
moral and messianic leadership in the world, and combined a Keynes inspired
international economic policy that, led by a United States, Germany and Japan’s
joint action, would become the locomotive for worldwide growth. Carter was run
over by the Shiite revolution in Iran, the Soviet invasion of the Afghanistan, and by
the acceleration of inflation and oil prices. While the third strategy, the victorious
one -- in Reagan’s administration -- combined Carter’s messianic anti-communist
with Nixon’s economic liberalism, and had the purpose of eliminating the Soviet
Union, and to build a new worldwide economic and political order, under the United
State’s undisputed leadership.
It is clear nowadays that this third strategy, adopted in the 1980s, and under the
leadership of the United States and Great Britain, accelerated the overturn of the
worldwide system’s organization and functioning, which have being elaborated, at
least, since the two preceding decades. Little by little, the worldwide system was
leaving behind a “regulated” model of “global rule” led by the United States
“benevolent hegemony”, and was moving towards a new worldwide order with
more imperial than hegemonic characteristics. “What at the beginning seemed a
conspiratorial vision, now looked already as a normal and consolidated fact: a new
project of imperial organization of the worldwide power gathered strength in the
end of the 20th century, (...) the possibility to make wars at distance and without
human losses, and the control of international currency without any reference
standard besides the issuing organ itself, had radically changed the way American
power was exerted over the world. With the elimination of the Soviet power of
contest, and the enlargement of the deregulated zones in the worldwide freemarket economy, a new kind of territory, submitted to the dollar lord-vassal
relationship, and the swiftness of American military intervention forces, was
created.” (Fiori, 2001: 62-63).
33
When V-Day took place, after Soviet Union’s dissolution, and the end of the Cold
War, the United States was placed, together with the rest of the world, for the first
time in history, before the possibility of a “global power”, without military limits and
colonies, which is based only “in the control of transnational, military, financial,
productive and ideological structures of global reach, without, nevertheless,
suppressing the national states.” (Fiori, 2001: 63). A new worldwide situation,
which, however, is neither exceptional, nor unexpected, fact in the long-term
perspective of the worldwide system, created by the expansion of the European
states and their national economies. On the contrary, it approached the system
towards its bias and contradictory limit: the constitution of a “global empire”. And
from the point of view of the United States, it represented another stage of a
continuous process of concentration and centralization of economic and political
power, which started in the American continent during the 19th century, and was
globalised after the end of World War II.
The “Gulf War” and the “Worldwide Empire” Project
According to Henry Kissinger, the United States faced in 1991, for the third time in
its history, the challenge to redesign the world to its image and similarity, divided,
once more, between Theodore Roosevelt’s “geopolitical realism” and Woodrow
Wilson’s “messianic idealism”. From our point of view, however, this division that
took place in the beginning of the 20th century does not exist anymore in the
beginning of 21st century. Neither the years of 1918, 1945 and 1991 should be
seen as United States’ failed attempts to shape the world. As a matter of fact,
those years have been three landmarks, or fundamental moments, in the United
States of America’s struggle for the conquest of global power.
The Cold War
ended without a new worldwide war, and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union,
the Great Powers neither convened, nor defined the new “constitution of the world”,
as they did in Westphalia, in 1648, in Vienna, in 1815, in Versailles, in 1918, or
even in Yalta, Potsdam and San Francisco in 1945.
Although they recognise
United States’ military and economic power uncontested superiority, the Great
34
Powers neither established among them any normative principle, nor an
operational agreement about peace and war, or the creation, and legitimacy, of the
new international laws, they not even decided how the new international monetary
and financial system should function.
As a matter of fact, before the Gulf War, which started on February 1991, the Great
Powers already had realized two meetings - in Huston and Dublin -, called explicitly
to discuss the end of the Cold War, and the new worldwide order that was born out
the Berlin Wall rubbles, under the liberal sign of democracy and free-markets. But
before any kind of agreement was established, the thundering demonstration of
American military strength in the Gulf War end up by imposing itself to all other
negotiations, and announced to the world its new organizing principle, since, as
rightfully stated by Henry Kissinger, the empires have no interest in operating
within an international system, their aim is to be the international system itself.
(Kissinger, 2001). The bombing of Iraq played, in 1991, a similar role to the 1945
Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombes:
it established, through the power of the
weapons, who would be the new “ruling power” in the international field; this time,
however, unlike in 1945, there was no other power with the means to challenge, or
to restrain, the exercise of its absolute and arbitrary will.
At first, due to the
combination in the 1990s of self-satisfaction and economic prosperity, pervaded by
the globalisation ideology, and the end of history, states, national economies and
war, this new imperial situation was not visible. “But at the beginning of the 21st
century, this project lost strength before the evidences of power and wealth
polarization that occurred under the shadow of the globalisation utopia. Soon after,
took place the deceleration of the “American economic miracle” and the
inauguration of George W. Bush Administration, which resumed the team and
strategic ideas formulated a decade before, during his father’s government, soon
after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And what could seem in 1990s the beginning of a
new phase of “benevolent” global hegemony, became clearly in the next decade
that it was the case, in fact, of an explicit imperial project.”(Fiori, 2001: 5).
Therefore, from one’s point of view, it was not the disappearance of communism, in
1991, that left the world disoriented, but the disappearance of a bipolar power
35
situation, involving the two “state-empires” capable of global military intervention.
The worldwide system had always some kind of regional bipolarisation of power,
particularly in Europe.
However, between 1945 and 1991, this bipolarisation
reaches a worldwide range, and its disappearance did not only leave a void in the
field of international power and values, but left an absolutely new and radical
unknown situation, since until then the worldwide system had not lived yet a real
possibility of the formation of a “worldwide empire” capable to impose its politic and
economic will without facing any sort of political and military resistance, as always
happened in the “balance of power” case, or even in the “hegemonic situations”
inside of the system’s core.
From the United States’ foreign policy viewpoint, however, no void ever existed
since the Gulf War, and, due to a first moment consensus established between
republicans and democrats concerning the new United States’ strategic doctrine,
no internal division ever occurred as well. Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in
his speech at the 1990 United Nations General Assembly, president Bush made a
proposal to the worldwide community that reminded president Woodrow Wilson’s
1918: “ We have a vision of a new partnership of nations that transcends the cold
war: a partnership based on consultation, cooperation and collective action,
especially through international and regional organizations; a partnership united by
principle and the rule of law and supported by an equitable sharing of both cost
and commitment; a partnership whose goals are to increase democracy, increase
prosperity, increase the peace and reduce arms.” (quoted by Kissinger, 1994:
805). However, in 1989 president Bush created himself a task force in charge of
outlining the pillars of what would be the United States’ new worldwide strategy
after the Cold War, the chairman was his secretary of defence, Dick Cheney,
besides the participation of Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, Eric Edelman, Donald
Rumsfeld, and, last but not least, Colin Powell. It was based on this task force’s
report that president Bush (senior) made another speech before the American
Congress - in August of 1990 - absolutely different from the one at the United
Nations, in which he apologised for the first time a foreign policy of active
containment to hinder the appearance of any sort of regional power that could
36
compete, in its own region, with the United States, or that could aim one day to
global power, as it had been the case of the Soviet Union.
A little later, on September 1993, in his speech at the United Nations General
Assembly opening session, Bill Clinton, the new democrat president, almost fully
repeated George Bush’s proposal made three years before: “in a new age of
dangers and opportunities, our aim is to expand, and to strength, the worldwide
community and the democracies based on the free-market. We want now to widen
the circle of nations that live under free institutions, because our dream is the day
when the opinions, and energies, of each person in the world, would have full
expression inside prosperous democracies that cooperate among themselves and
live in peace.” (quoted by Kissinger, 1994: 805). And this was the image that was
grasped almost everywhere of “ Clinton’s age “, as a period when the American
government believed in the pacific power of the markets, and in the convergent
economic force of the globalisation, considering at the same time an almost
universal “partnership for peace”.
As if the 1990s rhetoric could repeat what
happened in the 1920s, another historical period when there was a generalized
impression that the policies of power and force had yielded to the Great Powers’
international economic policy and the free-markets. However, the history of the
1920s is well known: soon after came the 1929’s crisis, and roaring twenties had
given place to a new escalation that culminated in World War II.
In the 1990s, the same belief in the markets’ pacific power and the convergent
economic force of globalisation also broadcasted, as if the cosmopolitan time,
under the United States’ benevolent leadership for a pacific and democratic
worldwide empire, had finally arrived.
But in the practice, the Clinton
administration followed the same basic ideas of George Bush (senior) government,
equally convinced that the 21st century would be an “American century”, and that
the “world needed the United States”, as Clinton’s Secretary of State, Magdeleine
Albright, used to repeat.
During his two mandates’ eight years, the Clinton
administration kept a military activism without precedents, in spite of its “globalist”
rhetoric, which was considered a “pacific common ground through free-market”, as
long as the new empire’s rules were respected. In his government, “the United
37
States was involved in 48 military interventions, many more than in the whole Cold
War, a period when 16 military interventions took place.” (Bacevich, 2002: 143) -including the 1992-1993 attacks against Somalia; the 1995 bombing of Bosnia in
the Balkans; the 1998 bombing of Sudan; the 1999 Kosovo war, in Yugoslavia;
and, between 1993 and 2003, the almost constant bombing of Iraq. Moreover, it
was president Bill Clinton who announced, on February 1998, together with British
Prime Minister Tony Blair, the new Iraq, or Gulf War, that was delayed until 2003.
This shows the United States’ outstanding strategic and political continuity since
1991, and contradicts those who imagine that the world is in a void, or that the
United States has still not defined or fully assumed its worldwide empire project.
On the contrary, during the 1990s, together with its global economy rhetoric, the
United States has consolidated and expanded its bases military and agreements,
extending its military presence to Central Europe, and more than 130 countries
scattered over every continent.
“Between 1989 and 2002, a revolution in
America’s relations with the rest of the world took place. At the beginning of this
period, the fulfilment of American foreign policy was basically a civil operation.
Around 2002, everything changed. The United States had no longer a foreign
policy, but a military empire instead.
During this period of little more than a
decade, a vast complexity of interests and projects, that I call empire, was built,
consisting of permanent naval bases, garrisons, air bases, espionage networks,
and strategic enclaves, in all the continents of the globe.” (Johnson, 2004: 22-23).
After 2001, the new Bush (junior) administration changed American foreign policy
dominant rhetoric during Clinton’s period, it started to employ again the warlike
language, and also to speak about external and internal enemies, and started to
defend openly the United States’ unilateral right to military and preventive
interventions in any place of the world. Nevertheless, despite its militarism, Bush
(junior) administration’s speech did not abandon the economic liberalism, and the
intransigent defence of the opening and deregulation of every world market.
In that sense, it seems more and more clearly that since the end of the Gulf War -despite rhetorical and stylistic differences -- a great consensus was formed,
between republicans and democrats, regarding the United States long-term
38
objectives. As in the beginning of the 19th century, it is also possible to distinguish
and identify nowadays two large groups within American foreign policy: “those who
advocate the unrestricted and unilateral American domination of the world, and
those who defend an imperialism with ‘humanitarian’ goals” (Johnson, 2004: 67).
But, from the strategic and long-term viewpoint, there is only one objective, and it
points towards a worldwide empire.
When seen from this perspective, one understands better the geopolitical logic of
the American occupation, after 1991, of the territories that had been under Soviet
influence. It started in the Baltic, crossed Central Europe, Ukraine and Belarus,
became a war in the Balkans; and after the alliance with Turkey was confirmed, it
arrived until Central Asia and Pakistan, with the Afghanistan war; and so far as
Baghdad and Palestine, with the last war with Iraq. This same logic explains the
haste with which the United States carried forward its project for the enlargement
NATO, even against the European vote. At the decade’s end, American military
bases geopolitical map in the world leaves no doubt that a global military power
exists today, but also that a “sanitary belt” do exist separating Germany from
Russia, and Russia from China.
On the geo-economic field, the American strategy of an active promotion of the
opening and deregulation of all national economies multiplied, in its turn, the speed
of the globalisation process, particularly of the financial markets.
And, at the
decade’s end, the economic balance was also very clear: the United States had
won in every way. Its currency was the base of the international monetary system,
and the American public debt became the world’s governments main financial
asset. In short, at the end of 1990s, the American military power became the
coercive infrastructure of a new kind of “worldwide military empire”. Besides, the
financial globalisation process had universalised the currency and the American
financial capital, getting it closer than ever of a “global financial empire”. In one
decade, the American strategy after the Cold War multiplied the United States’
military power, and transformed the “opening” project into the greatest instrument
of globalisation of America’s “economic territory”, currency, credit, finances and
taxation.
39
From this perspective, the meaning of the last Iraq War, which became a kind of
synthesis of all the unknowns and impasses of worldwide conjuncture, can also be
better understood. At the first sight, it was not more than another colonial war of
the classic kind, as many others from the 19th century, involving two great powers
and a state situated outside the system’s core. But, as a matter of fact, the Iraq
War was much more than that; it involved all the other Great Powers, because,
through the war, the United States and Great Britain had put on the table their
proposal for the worldwide system political reorganization, which had not been
discussed after the end of the Cold War and Gulf War. There wasn’t a basic
disagreement between the Great Powers in relation to Saddam Hussein’s regime;
what happened was a disagreement concerning the new, and seconded by Great
Britain, United States’ imperial project.
Firstly, the Iraq War enunciated a proposal that was a direct threat to the other
Great Powers, which are the larger producers of weapons of mass destruction. It
stated, in a clear and unequivocal way, that the new preventive attack doctrine’s
ultimate objective is to hinder, anywhere, and for an indefinite time, the emergence
of any other nation, or alliance of nations, that could vie with the United States. It
is a strategy of “containment”, as the one suggested by George Kennan, and
adopted after 1947 by the United States with relation to the Soviet Union, only that
now it aims for the exercise of global power, which requires the permanent and
universal containment of all the other Great Powers.
Secondly, the war in Iraq sent a message to the peripheral states in the worldwide
system.
From now on, according to Richard Cooper’s definition, Tony Blair’s
government international adviser, there will be two different ways to deal with
peripheral countries: for those countries “incapable to control their national
territories”, the “law of jungle”; and, for the other peripheral countries that would
accept peacefully the “the global economy’s voluntary imperialism, managed by an
international trust of financial institutions, such as the IMF and the World Bank”, the
“law of market” (Cooper, 1996).
If one looks carefully over both sides, however, one will notice that the Iraq War’s
only aim was to send a unique and fundamental message to all the states of the
40
worldwide political system. And this message tells of the United States’ disposal
towards keeping an undisputable technological and military advantage in relation to
all the other states of the system; since the United States is willing to decide on its
own -- sometimes for humanitarian reasons, sometimes for economic objectives,
and sometimes with the pure and simple intent to reproduce and expand the
American power -- when and where its real, potential or imaginary adversaries
must “be contained”, through the overthrown of regimes and governments, or
through the “markets invisible hands”, or even direct military intervention.
The “Iraq War” and the Limit Experience
In 1991, a military coalition led by the United States and Great Britain, together
with other 28 countries, after one month of continuous aerial bombing in the enemy
territory, won the Gulf War and defeated Iraq. It ousted Iraqi troops from Kuwait,
but it did not conquer Baghdad, and it did not overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Between 1991 and 2003, the United States and Great Britain bombed Iraqi territory
in an almost continuously way, but they had not succeeded neither in hitting and
changing the political regimen, nor to eliminate Saddam Hussein’s military
apparatus. In 1999, NATO’s troops, under the United States’ military leadership,
made a “humanitarian intervention” in Kosovo, having bombed and destroyed
Yugoslavian economy and assumed the province’s direct administration, without
succeeding either to remodel the country, or even less to eliminate the ethnic
conflicts, which were the explicit reason for the military occupation, that continue to
divide the local population. In 2002, the military coalition led by the United States
defeated and overthrew the government of Afghanistan, but “the warlords” and
Talibans had gradually retaken control of almost the whole country, and the allied
soldiers are having great difficulty to keep under control the region around the city
of Kabul.
In 2003, the United States and Great Britain won the Iraq War,
conquered Baghdad, destroyed Iraqi military forces, and overthrew Saddam
Hussein. But they didn’t succeed afterwards neither to reconstruct the country, nor
to define with precision the long-term objectives of the occupation troops that
41
remain in Iraqi territory, after the establishment of a local government under
American tutelage. Therefore, thirteen years after the end of the Cold War and the
Gulf War, the account that one can make of this new kind of empire, from the point
of view of American objectives, is quite negative.
The American military
interventions succeeded neither in spreading the democracy, nor the free markets;
the air warfare was insufficient, without the territorial conquest; and the military
territorial conquest did not succeed to carry on the national reconstruction of the
defeated countries.
The failure in Iraq, after the 2003 military victory, surfaces the question about the
future of United States’ global power, in a debate where one can distinguish three
basic positions. On one hand, there are authors, such as Philip Bobbit (2002) and
Niall Ferguson (2001 and 2004)3, that consider it necessary, and apologise that the
United States should fully assume the condition of a benevolent worldwide empire,
a “liberal empire”, different from the old empires, but equally incompatible with any
type of multilateralism. “What lacks to the United States is the will to exert the role
fulfilled in the 19th century by England, although it has the economic resources to
do it...”(Ferguson, 2001: 421). On the other hand, there are authors, such as John
Mearsheimer (2001) and Chalmers Johnson (2004), among others4, that placed
themselves on a contrary position, criticizing the American imperial role, and
considering, or foreseeing, a return to multilateralism. “All the great empires in
history had been weakened by a combination of extreme expansion, with rigid
institutions, and the inability to reform itself, being vulnerable before disastrous
situations in war. There is no reason to think that it will not happen the same with
an American empire... “ (Johnson, 2004: 310).
Finally, there is a third group of authors whose intellectual trend is shared in part by
me, it constitutes what was called by Robert Cox the critical theory. Those writers
are Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Immanuell Wallerstein, and Giovanni Arrighi,
among others. According to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000), the political
3
With small variations, this is in last resort the same position defended by Charles Krauthammer (2001),
Robert Kaplan (2001), Paul Kennedy (2002) and Joseph Nye (2002), among other writers, particularly the
American.
4
At least, Charles Kupchan (2002), Andrew Bacevich (2003), and Michael Mann (2003).
42
and economic transformations, which started in the 1970s, were the origin of a new
“post-modern” form of worldwide political organization. The national states had
yielded their place then to a new kind of Empire, which was no longer the
imperialistic projection of the power of a national state, becoming a new kind of
supranational sovereignty that would correspond to the superstructure of the
globalised capitalist economy. Hardt and Negri see, in this new kind of Empire, the
post-national political form of a global market and, at this point, incur the same
mistake of several other Marxists who did not manage to understand that the
globalisation of capitalism, from the 17th century onwards, was not a work of the
“capital in general”; but a work of national states, and economies, that had tried to
impose, to the remaining states and national economies, their currency, their
“public debt”, and their system of “taxation”, as the reserve of an international
monetary system transformed into the privileged space of expansion of their
national financial capital. In a similar line, Immanuell Wallerstein (2003 and 2004)
also diagnoses the “American hegemony’s terminal crisis”, which would have
started in the 1970s, and would have been transformed into the final crisis of the
“modern worldwide system” itself. This process started in 16th century and should
end around the year 2050, giving place to something new, but that is still unknown
and unexpected. In that sense, for Wallerstein, the world would be living at this
moment a change of galaxy, or Universe. Giovanni Arrighi (2001 and 2004) also
supports the American terminal crisis’ thesis, but he foresees only a “crisis of
hegemony”. According to Arrighi, after the end of the Cold War, the United States
has increased its military advantage on its competitors, but it became at the same
time frail as hegemonic power, due to the growth of its foreign indebtedness and its
unfavourable balance of trade, particularly in relation to the main Asian economies.
From our point of view, however, in this beginning of the 21st century, there is no
sign in the worldwide system’s horizon neither of the apotheosis of a successful
worldwide empire, nor an apocalyptical final crisis. There is no doubt that the
United States will face, in the next decades, increasing difficulties to keep its global
control in the economic and political fields. There isn’t, however, any economic or
military signs that those difficulties are part of a terminal crisis, or much less that
43
the United States, with its global power project, is ceasing to be a National State.
Neither it seems probable that it will succeed to impose on the world its worldwide
empire project.
From our viewpoint, this dispute over the future of the American power and the
worldwide system must come out of some theoretical and historical premises, that
have been already displayed in another article5 on the “Formation, expansion and
limits of the global power”: i) in the expanding universe of the “state-empires” and
their capitalist national economies, there is neither a logical possibility for a
“perpetual peace”, nor balanced and stable markets; ii) there is no possibility that
for Great Powers to practise, in a permanent way, a policy exclusively directed
toward the preservation of the status quo; iii) neither exist any possibility that the
command of capitalism’s economical expansion would leave the hands of the
“great predators”, allied with the “great powers”, to the hands of the typical-ideal
entrepreneur from the models of the “market economy”, found in economy
textbooks. This is the reason why the “imperial states”, or “great powers”, always
historically re-create their competitors and adversaries, soon after submitting or
destroying the previous competitor.
Precisely as is the case with capitalist
competition, where the capital itself re-creates continuously its new forms of
competition; since when a complete monopolization of the markets occurred, its
accumulation capacity would be lost.
And this was what happened between 2001 and 2003, after a decade when the
world experienced the possibility, and the limit, of a possible worldwide empire. It
was then that the United States defined its new bipolar enemy, and presented a
global strategic partnership, with all the great powers, to fight "international
terrorism". The problem is that terrorism is an enemy that does not identify itself
with any state, does not have any territory, and does not establish any kind of
economic complementarity with its adversary. It is universal and ubiquitous, a
typical imperial, and mankind, enemy, and not of any state in particular. To accept
it as an enemy means to enter in a war that the United States would define at any
5
Published in this same book (Fiori et al. 1997) on the part of “ Hegemony and Empire”.
44
moment and anywhere its adversary, an endless war that will become every time
more extensive, a permanent and "infinitely elastic" war.
It suffice to see that the initial issue was to destroy the Al-Qaeda network and
Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, but the American troops nowadays are already
present – for the sake of the same war - in Algeria, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan,
Philippines, Indonesia and Colombia.
The definition of the enemy itself has
already been modified some times in the last years: first, it was the "terrorist
networks"; later, the "axis of evil", constituted of Iraq, Iran and North Korea; and,
finally, the "states producing weapons of mass destruction", a category that
includes - at this moment - almost all the American allies in the wars of Afghanistan
and Iraq. The characteristics of this new bipolar enemy chosen by the United
States do not fulfil the basic requirements indispensable for the functioning of
worldwide system, besides they place immediate difficulties and limits for the
execution of the United States new strategy of global containment.
Firstly – from the United States’ internal security viewpoint -- it is part of the new
enemy’s nature, according to Donald Rumsfeld, to move in the field "of the
unknown, the uncertain, the unexpected", taking advantage of each and every
"American vulnerability".
Therefore a threat that can be nuclear, but also
cybernetic, biological and chemical, and that could be in the air, land, water, or
food, in short, in hundreds of vehicles, and different places.
In that sense,
everything can be turned into a weapon in this war chosen by the United States, in
particular American own technological innovations. And everything can become a
target, in particular the dearest and most unprotected American possessions.
Therefore the need, defended by Bush (junior) administration, for a "citizen
network" of espionage, consisting of millions of ordinary men and women, who
would spend part of their days controlling and watching their own neighbours. And
this is what also explains the creation by the American government of new "red
teams", which are in charge of planning attacks against the United States, thinking
as terrorists, to be able to identify the country’s "vulnerabilities". From this point of
view, the United States’ imperial vision and the ubiquity of its "internal" adversary,
will demand a permanent and every time more rigorous control of the American
45
society itself, considered by the U. S. government as an immense universe of
hostile possibilities.
Secondly, from the United State’s external security viewpoint, the new strategy
creates a situation of collective, and permanent, untrustworthiness within the
worldwide system. The new adversary, not being, in principle, neither a religion,
an ideology, a nationality, and a civilization, nor a state, can every time be redefined by the United States, being therefore arbitrary and unpredictable. And, in
that sense, the right reserved by the United States to make preventive attacks -against any and all state, considered as hosting bases or supporting terrorist
actions -- meaning a self-attributed imperial sovereignty. Still in the international
field, the new American strategic doctrine creates a situation of permanent war,
which can be declared by the United States at any time it would feel threatened. A
problem that will aggravate, even more, as all the other countries, and the other
Great Powers, in particular, would feel themselves threatened by forces considered
terrorist, regardless its nature, including foreign nations, or internal and external
minorities, in relation to their territories. In that sense, all the other nations that
could fulfil the necessary military capacity will follow the course of action started by
Israel, and already followed by the United States, with preventive attacks to places
where they consider to hide terrorists, including, at some moment, the territory of
the other powers that could be accused of protecting their enemies. The logic of
American new strategic doctrine is very simple, but perverse, because, once
established and accepted as a general principle, there won’t be any possible
agreement on what is terror, and who are the terrorists, for every one of the powers
that currently withhold weapons of mass destruction.
Therefore, everything indicates that, in the medium term, the global fight strategy
against terrorism does not have sustainability, and it will not succeed, in the long
term, to balance the worldwide system into a bipolar world. On the contrary, it
should increase the resistances inside the United States itself, and accelerate, in
the medium term, the return of the conflict between the great powers. At this point,
there is no mistake, from a historical viewpoint: the resistances to the American
power will come, in the end, from where they had always come, from inside the
46
central core of power in the worldwide system, from the Great Powers.
The
American necessity itself for alliances, and supports, in the wars of Afghanistan
and Iraq ended by giving back to Japan and Germany the freedom of military
initiative, allowing at the same time Russia to assert the return of her right of
"protection" in her "area of influence", or the classic "zone security", where several
territories have already been occupied militarily by the United States, after 1991.
Meanwhile, Western Europe starts to rebel against its military situation as a
hostage of NATO and the United States, foretelling the return of the struggle for
hegemony inside the European continent, even if it takes the form of a struggle for
the control of the European Union. In this region, if England leaves the European
Union, it is not improbable that German capitals would end by following history’s
way and establish a new, and surprising, "memorable alliance" (Weber, 1961) with
Russia’s "idle" military power. In the mean time, on the other side of the world, the
Asian state’s system resembles, more and more, the old model of competition for
power and wealth that was, since the 16th century, the original pattern of the
"European miracle", but it is unlikely that something similar to the European Union
should happen in Asia.
On the contrary, what one should expect is an
intensification of the economic and political competition for regional hegemony,
between China, Japan, and Korea.
There is no doubt, however, that the great geopolitical and geo-economic newness
in the worldwide system is the new relation, since the 1990s, between the United
States and China. It reproduces and extends the Europe-Asia axis, which has
activated, since its origin, the state and capitalist system, and, since 1949, the
United States privileged relation with Japan. But at the same time, it possesses
some remarkable new features. In the first place, the new geo-economic engine of
the worldwide capitalism dislocated and emptied the tripod of the worldwide
economy "golden age" -- United States, Germany and Japan -- that functioned
extremely well between 1945 and 1980. In the second place, this new worldwide
economic engineering, and the lasting stagnation of German and Japanese
economies, keeps on replacing the problem of their defeated or blocked national
projects, and the necessity, as way out of the crisis, to retake them without
47
expecting the American aid.
In the third place, this new alliance accelerated
Russia’s return to her classic positions of nationalistic and militarist pattern, forced
into it due to her perpetually divided position, lying between Asia and Europe.
Nevertheless, the most important aspect of this new relation between the United
States and China is unquestionably that it is at once complementary and
competitive, and at the same time economic and military.
We have seen elsewhere6 that this was the great secret, created in the Europe,
during the 16th century, of the worldwide system. This rule, however, was not
followed during the Cold War, when the United States maintains its military
competition with a country of no economic importance for the dynamism of
American economy. And kept dynamic economic relations with countries with any
military autonomy, or possibility to expand their national political power. The SinoAmerican relation puts the worldwide system back on its traditional track, and there
isn’t any other way for China but to compete for the Asian regional hegemony with
Japan, Russia and the United States. At this moment, the United States is no
longer in position economically to get rid of China. But the time will come when the
United States will have to block China’s expansive motion, this will take place when
this movement is no longer only economic, and assume the form of a imperial
political will.
In short, the United States’ worldwide empire project is experiencing its
contradictory limits after the Iraq War, and it is not probable that it could be
completely fulfilled because, at this moment, each one of old the Great Powers
devotes itself to reaffirm its traditional spaces of influence and to build alliances
that will end by blocking, or limiting, the American expansion. Everything suggests
that these divergences will tend to increase more than diminish, and in the medium
term, Germany and Japan will gain their autonomy from the United States. Russia
will come back to her traditional role, and China will try to impose her hegemony in
Asia, a very difficult situation to be controlled or managed by the United States.
When this time comes, and this may take years or decades, it is most likely that the
world would carefully read again the controversy at the beginning of 20th century 6
Fiori et al: 1997.
48
between Karl Kautsky and Vladimir Lenin - on the limits, and the future of the
worldwide economic and political order. The first believing in the possibility of "a
ultra-imperialistic" coordination between the Great Powers’ states and capitals; and
the former convinced of the inevitability of war, due to the uneven development of
the power of the states and the wealth of the nations. Those that will reread this
controversy, however, will realize that its nature is rigorously circular, because in
last instance, as Adam Smith taught, when discussing the role of "courage and
strength" on the uneven distribution of the wealth of nations: "the mutual fear
constitutes the only factor susceptible of intimidating the injustice of independent
nations, and of transforming it into a certain kind of respect for reciprocal rights."
(Smith [ 1776 ], 1983: 101).
49
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