No. 588
By: Counterspin
Audio Clip: Counterspin interview: U.S. News & World Report article is part of an effort to present Venezuela as a "Rogue State" Theotonio Dos Santos
Alai-amlatina
*** FORCE AND CONSENT
Editorial.
*** Latin
America & Underdevelopment
Leo Huberman
Para todos ustedes que se consideran estudiosos y humanistas creyentes de los procesos de transformación social que sufre cada pueblo.
Se hace necesario Solicitar de su apoyo con la finalidad de evaluar milimetricamente todo tipo de denuncia que involucre al Gobierno Norteamericano por el Sanguinario Bush,
En efecto es sábido por ustedes que Chávez les tumbo el Negocio de la Privatización de la Empresa estatal Petrólera PDVSA-Capitulo Venezula.
Producto de esta situación este señor, torpemente mantiene estrategicamente un plan de agitación a las masas, y socavamiento de las Instituciones, de allí que se hace necesario que cada quien aporte de la Información u Operación Sagaz y Silenciosa que desarrolla en estos momentos la CIA, desde su Embajada a la cabeza de Mister Shapiro, cualquier documentación o actuaciones que vincule a estos nefastos personajes es necesario que se divulgue y se profundice con propiedad.
Atentamente René Colmenares.
http://www.wsws.org/de/2003/okt2003/vs-o18.shtml
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THE media have been a recourse against abuses of power within the democratic structures of our societies. It is not unusual for the three traditional areas of power - legislative, executive and judicial - to make mistakes and operate less perfectly than they might. This is more likely to happen under authoritarian and dictatorial regimes, where the political realm is mainly responsible for violations of human rights and attacks on liberties. But there are serious abuses of power in democratic countries too, even when laws are the result of democratic votes, governments are elected through universal suffrage and justice is (at least in theory) independent of the executive.
An innocent person can be wrongly accused (as in the infamous Dreyfus affair in France); parliaments can pass laws that discriminate against sections of the population (as with the treatment of Afro-Americans over more than a century in the United States, or the current treatment of people from Muslim countries under the USA Patriot Act); and governments can pursue policies that damage a sector of society (as with illegal immigrants in many European countries).
In a democratic framework the media have often seen it as a duty to denounce such violations of human rights. Sometimes journalists have paid the price - they have been physically attacked, murdered or have disappeared; this is still happening in Colombia, Guatemala, Turkey, Pakistan, the Philippines and elsewhere. This is why, in the phrase attributed to Edmund Burke, journalism is the "fourth estate". Thanks to the civic responsibility of the media and the courage of individual journalists, this fourth estate has provided a fundamental and democratic means for people to criticise, reject and reverse decisions (unfair, unjust, illegal and sometimes even criminal) against innocent people. It is the voice of those who have no voice.
Over the past 15 years, with the acceleration of globalisation, this fourth estate has been stripped of its potential, and has gradually ceased to function as a counterpower. This is shockingly apparent when you look closely at the realities of globalisation. A new type of capitalism is on the rise, not just industrial, but financial, based on speculation. We are witnessing a clash between the market and the state, the public services and the private sector, the individual and society, the personal and the collective, egoism and solidarity.
Real power is now in the hands of a few global economic groupings and conglomerates that appear to wield more power in world politics than most governments. These are the new masters of the world who gather annually at the World Economic Forum in Davos and lay the groundwork for policy decisions by the globalising trinity of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and World Trade Organisation.
Within this geo-economic framework there has been a decisive transformation in the mass media, striking at the heart of their structure as industries. The mass communications media (radio, newspapers, television, internet) are being realigned to create media groups with a world vocation. Giant enterprises such as NewsCorp, Viacom, AOL Time Warner, General Electric, Microsoft, Bertelsmann, UnitedGlobalCom, Disney, Telefónica, RTL Group and France Telecom have realised that the revolution in new technology has greatly increased the possibilities for expansion. The digital revolution shattered the divisions that previously separated the three traditional forms of communication (sound, text and images) and allowed the creation and growth of the internet. This has now become a fourth form of communication, a means of self-expression, information-access and entertainment.
Subsequently the media companies began a further stage of group restructuring by bringing into a single frame not only the classic media (press, radio and television) but also all activities in mass culture, communication and information. Previously these three spheres were independent: mass culture with its commercial logic, its emphasis on popular programming and its basically commercial objectives; communications, as advertising, marketing and propaganda; and news and information, represented by agencies, radio and television news, press, 24-hour news channels - the many-sided world of journalism.
These three spheres, previously separate, have gradually become integrated into a single sphere in which it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between the elements of mass culture, communication and news (1). And these giant enterprises, which are assembly-line producers of symbols, now distribute their messages through a wide variety of outlets, including television, animation, film, video games, CDs, DVDs, publishing, Disneyland-type theme parks and sporting events.
The 1940 film Citizen Kane was Orson Welles's approach to the superpower status of a US press baron, modeled on the early 20th- century newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. But by today's standards even Kane's power was relatively limited. As the owner of a limited number of papers in a single country he would have been small fry in comparison to the mega-power of today's corporate media giants (2), although this is not to deny that he could have made his mark both at national and local level. The modern hyper-enterprises have been concentrated, and have bought their way into a wide variety of media sectors in many different countries on every continent. They have acquired such economic weight and ideological importance that they are now major players in globalisation itself. Now that communications - as extended to include information technology, electronics and telephony - are the heavy industry of our time, these companies are constantly seeking to increase their scale by non-stop company acquisitions. They are also pressuring governments to break down the laws that were designed to limit concentration and prevent the creation of monopolies and duopolies (3).
Globalisation now also means the globalisation of the mass media and the communications-information companies. These big companies are preoccupied with growth, which means that they have to develop relations with the other estates in society, so they no longer claim to act as a fourth estate with a civic objective and a commitment to denouncing human rights abuses. They are not interested in correcting the malfunctions of democracy and creating a better political system. They have no interest in being a fourth estate and even less in acting as a countervailing power. And even when they do constitute a fourth estate, that estate is just an adjunct to the existing political and economic estates and operates as a supplementary, media power to crush people.
How do we react to all of this? How can we defend ourselves? How can we resist the offensive of this new power that has betrayed society and gone over to the enemy? The answer is simple. We have to create a new estate, a fifth estate, that will let us pit a civic force against this new coalition of rulers. A fifth estate to denounce the hyperpower of the media conglomerates which are complicit in, and diffusers of, neoliberal globalisation.
In some instances the media have not only ceased to defend their citizens but have even acted against them, as in Venezuela. There the opposition swept to power in 1998 in elections that were free and democratic, but the main press, radio and television groupings launched an all-out war against the legitimacy of President Hugo Chávez (4). While he and his government had respected the rules of democracy, the media, in the hands of a few magnates, used manipulation, lies and brainwashing to poison minds (5). In this ideological war they have abandoned any role as a fourth estate and instead have been determined to defend the privileges of a caste by opposing any attempt at social reform or at a slightly fairer distribution of Venezuela's wealth (see Venezuela: the promise of land for the people).
VENEZUELA is an exemplary case of the new international situation, in which media corporations are running rampant and openly operating as guard-dogs of the established economic order: a new force operating against the people and civil society. The operations of these big groups are no longer confined to the business of media; they are also, above all, the ideological arm of globalisation. Their function is to contain demands from the grass roots and, where possible, also to seize political power; Silvio Berlusconi, owner of Italy's biggest media conglomerate, has succeeded in achieving this by demo cratic means.
The media-based dirty war in Venezuela against Chávez is an exact copy of what was done in 1970-73 by the El Mercurio newspaper (6) in Chile, against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende - this was the campaign that led to the coup against him. And this kind of campaign, with the media setting out to destroy democracy, could happen tomorrow in Ecuador, Brazil or Argentina, against any legal reforms that attempted to modify the social hierarchy and inequalities of wealth. The powers of the traditional oligarchy and the classical reactionaries have now been joined by the power of the media. With a single voice, claiming to speak in the name of freedom of expression, the media attack anything that defends the interests of the majority of the people. That is the media face of globalisation, and it reveals in the clearest, caricatured way the ideology of globalisation.
Mass media and economic liberalisation are now intimately linked. This is why we think it urgent to analyse how the people of the world might demand a more ethical approach from major media, to require a commitment to truth and a respect for codes of conduct, so that journalists can operate in line with their consciences rather than the interests of the groups, companies and editors that employ them.
In the new war of ideology that globalisation has forced on us, the media are used as a weapon. Since we now face an explosive multiplication and over-abundance of information, our news is being contaminated - poisoned by lies, polluted by rumours, misrepresentations, distortions and manipulation.
What is happening here has already happened in the food industry. For a long time food was a scarce commodity and it still is in many parts of the world. But when the countryside began to produce in abundance, particularly in western Europe and North America, thanks to the revolution in agricultural technology, we found many of our foods were contaminated, poisoned by pesticides, which then caused illnesses, infections, cancers and other health problems. (Sometimes causing mass panics, as with mad cow disease.) People once died of hunger. Now they have a chance to die from eating contaminated food.
News was once a scarce commodity and there is still, in countries run by dictatorships, an absence of reliable, comprehensive and quality news. But in democratic countries news and information overflow on all sides. They are suffocating us. The Greek philosopher Empedocles said that the world was made up of four elements: air, water, earth and fire. Information has become so abundant in our globalised world that it is now almost a fifth element.
But at the same time, as people are now beginning to realise, news is contaminated. It poisons our minds, pollutes our brains, manipulates us, intoxicates us, and tries to instill into our subconscious ideas that are not our own. This is why we now need to establish an ecology of news, to sort real news from a flood of lies. The enormity of the situation was apparent in the invasion of Iraq (7). We need to decontaminate our news. Just as we can now buy less-contaminated organic foods, we need organic news. People should mobilise to demand that the media owned by the global groups show respect for the truth, because news is only legitimate when it is really engaged in a search for truth.
That is why we suggested setting up Media Watch Global (L'Observatoire international des médias) (8). It will at last give people a peaceful civic weapon against the emerging superpower of the big mass media. It is an outcome of meetings of the global social movement held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and expresses the concern of the people of the world in the face of the new arrogance of the giant communications industries at the height of their globalisation offensive.
Big media companies push their interests to the detriment of the general interest, and confuse their freedom with the freedom of enterprise, held to be the first of liberties. But that freedom of enterprise cannot be permitted to override people's right to rigorously researched and verified news, nor can it serve as an alibi for the deliberate diffusion of false news and defamation.
Press freedom is no more than the extension of collective freedom of expression, which is the foundation of democracy. We cannot allow it to be hijacked by the rich and powerful. It implies a social responsibility and its exercise must remain, in the final instance, under the control of society. That is why we propose the creation of Media Watch Global, because the media now constitute the only power without a counterweight, which creates an imbalance damaging for democracy. The strength of the organisation will be moral: it will judge media honesty on the basis of ethics, and will seek to remedy media shortcomings by reports and studies which it will prepare, publish and distribute.
Media Watch Global will act as an essential counterweight to the excessive power of the big media groups. It is needed because these groups, in providing news and information, impose the single logic of the market, and the single ideology of neoliberalism. Media Watch Global will be an international association, with the objective of exercising a collective responsibility, in the name of the higher interest of society and the right of citizens to be properly informed. We attach the greatest importance to the World Information Summit in Geneva in December. The association intends to act as a whistle-blower, warning society against the epidemic of media manipulations in recent years.
Media Watch Global will have three levels of membership, each with identical rights: professional and occasional journalists, both active and retired, from all the media, mainstream or alternative; academics and researchers from all disciplines, and particularly media specialists, because universities are now one of the few places partially protected from the totalitarian ambitions of the market; and media users, ordinary people and public figures known for their moral stance.
IN ALL countries the existing systems for regulating the media are unsatisfactory. Since news is a common good, its quality cannot be guaranteed by organisations made up only of journalists, since they often have their own interests. The codes of conduct of individual media enterprises, insofar as they exist, are often unsuitable for judging and correcting the doctoring, suppression and censorship of news. It is vital that the codes of conduct and ethics of news are defined and defended by an impartial body that is credible, independent and objective, within which academics have a vital role. Ombudsmen, or mediators, useful in the 1980s and 1990s, have now become commercialised and degraded. They are often exploited by companies as a part of image-management and as a way to help artificially reinforce the media's credibility.
One of humanity's most precious rights is the right to communicate freely our thoughts and opinions. No law should be allowed arbitrarily to restrict press freedom and the freedom of speech. But these freedoms can only be exercised by media enterprises if they do not infringe other rights that are equally sacred, such as the right of each citizen to have access to uncontaminated news. Under the pretext of freedom of expression media enterprises should not be allowed to disseminate false news, or conduct campaigns of ideological propaganda.
Media Watch Global believes that the absolute media freedom that the owners of the major communications groups pursue so insistently will necessarily be detrimental to the people of the world. These big corporations need to know that a counterpower is being created, one that will bring together all who are part of the global social movement, all who are fighting against the expropriation of our right of expression. Journalists, academics, newspaper readers, radio listeners, television viewers and internet users will come together to create together a weapon of debate and democratic action. The globalisers proclaim the 21st century "the century of global enterprise". Media Watch Global says it will be the century in which communication and information at last belong to the people of the world.
(1) See La Tyrannie de la communication and Propagandes silencieuses, Galilée, Paris, 1999 and 2002 (in paperback in the Folio series).
(2) See Silvio Berlusconi's massive Fininvest media corporation in Italy, and the Lagardère and Dassault conglomerates in France.
(3) In June, under pressure from the major US media groups, the US Federal Communications Commission authorised the relaxation of limits on concentration: a company is now allowed to control up to 45% of the national audience (35% previously). The decision was supposed to come into effect in September, but because some have seen it as a serious threat to democracy, it has been suspended by the Supreme Court.
(4) See "The perfect crime", Le Monde diplomatique, English language edition, June 2002.
(5) See Maurice Lemoine, "Venezuela's press power", Le Monde diplomatique, English language edition, August 2002.
(6) Also other media, such as La Tercera, Ultimas Noticias, La Segunda, Canal 13. See Patricio Tupper, Allende, la cible des médias chiliens et de la CIA (1970-1973), Editions de l'Amandier, Paris 2003.
(7) See "State-sponsored lies", Le Monde diplomatique, English language edition, July 2003.
(8) A French arm, l'Observatoire français des médias, was established on 24 September under the presidency of Armand Mattelart, professor of communications science at the University of Paris VIII. For futher information see www.monde-diplomatique.fr/ofm
Translated by Ed Emery
http://mondediplo.com/2003/10/01media
New Left Review 17, September-October 2002
As war looms again in the Middle East, what are the aims of the Republican Administration, and how far do they mark a break in the long-term objectives of US global strategy? The changing elements of American hegemony in the post-Cold War world.
FORCE AND CONSENT
Editorial
As a count-down to war begins once again in the Middle East, amid high levels of sanctimony and bluster in the Atlantic world, it is the underlying parameters of the current international situation that demand attention, not the spray of rhetoric—whether belligerently official or ostensibly oppositional—surrounding it. They pose three main analytic questions. How far does the line of the Republican administration in Washington today represent a break with previous US policies? To the extent that it does so, what explains the discontinuity? What are the likely consequences of the change? To answer these, it seems likely that a longer perspective than the immediate conjuncture is required. The role of the United States in the world has become the topic of an increasingly wide range of posturing across the established political spectrum, and only a few of the complex issues it poses can be addressed here. But some arrows from the quiver of classical socialist theory may be better than none.
1
American policy planners today are the heirs of unbroken traditions of global calculation by the US state that go back to the last years of the Second World War. Between 1943 and 1945, the Roosevelt administration worked on the shape of the American system of power which it could see that victory over Germany and Japan, amidst mounting Russian casualties and British debts, was bringing. From the start, Washington pursued two integrally connected strategic goals. On the one hand, the US set out to make the world safe for capitalism. That meant according top priority to containing the USSR and halting the spread of revolution beyond its borders, wherever it could not directly contest the spoils of war, as in Eastern Europe. With the onset of the Cold War, the long-term aim of the struggle against Communism became once more—as it had been at the outset of Wilson’s intervention in 1919—not simply to block, but to remove the Soviet antagonist from the map. On the other hand, Washington was determined to ensure uncontested American primacy within world capitalism. That meant in the first instance reducing Britain to economic dependency, a process that had begun with Lend Lease itself, and establishing a post-war military regency in West Germany and Japan. Once this framework was in place, the wartime boom of American capitalism was successfully extended to allied and defeated powers alike, to the common benefit of all OECD states.
During the years of the Cold War, there was little or no tension between these two fundamental objectives of US policy. The danger of Communism to capitalist classes everywhere, in Asia increased by the Chinese Revolution, meant that virtually all were happy to be protected, assisted and invigilated by Washington. France—culturally less close than Britain, and militarily more autonomous than Germany or Japan—was the only brief exception, under De Gaulle. This parenthesis aside, the entire advanced-capitalist zone was integrated without much strain into an informal American imperium, whose landmarks were Bretton Woods, the Marshall and Dodge Plans, NATO and the US–Japan Security Pact. In due course, Japanese and German capitalism recovered to a point where they became increasingly serious economic competitors of the United States, while the Bretton Woods system gave way under the pressures of the Vietnam War in the early seventies. But the political and ideological unity of the Free World was scarcely affected. The Soviet bloc, always weaker, smaller and poorer, held out for another twenty years of declining growth and escalating arms race, but eventually collapsed at the turn of the nineties.
The disappearance of the USSR marked complete US victory in the Cold War. But, by the same token, the knot tying the basic objectives of American global strategy together became looser. The same logic no longer integrated its two goals into a single hegemonic system. [1] For once the Communist danger was taken off the table, American primacy ceased to be an automatic requirement of the security of the established order tout court. Potentially, the field of inter-capitalist rivalries, no longer just at the level of firms but of states, sprang open once again, as—in theory—European and East Asian regimes could now contemplate degrees of independence unthinkable during the time of totalitarian peril. Yet there was another aspect to this change. If the consensual structure of American dominion now lacked the same external girders, its coercive superiority was, at a single stroke, abruptly and massively enhanced. For with the erasure of the USSR, there was no longer any countervailing force on earth capable of withstanding US military might. The days when it could be checkmated in Vietnam, or suffer proxy defeat in Southern Africa, were over. These interrelated changes were eventually bound to alter the role of the United States in the world. The chemical formula of power was in solution.
2
In practice, however, the effects of this structural shift in the balance between force and consent within the operation of American hegemony remained latent for a decade. The defining conflict of the nineties, indeed, all but completely masked it. The Iraqi seizure of Kuwait threatened the pricing of oil supplies to all the leading capitalist states, not to speak of the stability of neighbouring regimes, allowing a vast coalition of G-7 and Arab allies to be swiftly assembled by the United States for the restoration of the Sabah dynasty to its throne. Yet more significant than the range of foreign auxiliaries or subsidies garnered for Desert Storm was the ability of the US to secure the full cover of the United Nations for its campaign. With the USSR out for the count, the Security Council could henceforward be utilized with increasing confidence as a portable ideological screen for the initiatives of the single superpower. To all appearances, it looked as if the consensual reach of American diplomacy was greater than ever before.
However, the consent so enlarged was of a specialized kind. The elites of Russia and—this had started earlier—China were certainly susceptible to the magnetism of American material and cultural success, as norms for imitation. In this respect, the internalization by subaltern powers of selected values and attributes of the paramount state, which Gramsci would have thought an essential feature of any international hegemony, started to take hold. But the objective character of these regimes was still too far removed from US prototypes for such subjective predispositions to form a reliable guarantee for every act of complaisance in the Security Council. For that, the third lever Gramsci once picked out—intermediate between force and consent, but closer to the latter—was required: corruption. [2] Long used to control votes in the General Assembly, it was now extended upwards to these veto-holders. The economic inducements to comply with the will of the United States stretched, in post-communist Russia, from IMF loans to the backdoor funding and organization of Yeltsin’s electoral campaigns. In the case of China, they centred on the fine-tuning of MFN status and trade arrangements. [3] Assent that is bought is never quite the same as that which is given; but for practical purposes, it was enough to return the UN to something like the halcyon days at the outbreak of the Korean War, when it automatically did US bidding. The minor irritant of a Secretary-General who on occasion escaped the American thumb was removed, and a placeman of the White House, rewarded for covering the Rwandan genocide while the US pressed for intervention in the Balkans, installed. [4] By the late nineties, the UN had become virtually as much an arm of the State Department as the IMF is of the Treasury.
In these conditions, American policy planners could confront the post-Cold War world with an unprecedentedly free hand. Their first priority was to make sure that Russia was locked, economically and politically, into the global order of capital, with the installation of a privatized economy and a business oligarchy at the switches of a democratic electoral system. This was the major diplomatic focus of the Clinton administration. A second concern was to secure the two adjacent zones of Soviet influence—Eastern Europe and the Middle East. In the former, Washington extended NATO to the traditional borders of Russia, well before any EU expansion to the East, and took charge of liquidating the Yugoslav estate. In the latter, the war for Kuwait was a windfall that allowed it to install advanced military bases in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, establish a protectorate in Kurdistan, and tie the Palestinian national movement down in an Israeli-dictated waiting-zone. These were all, in some degree, emergency tasks arising from the aftermath of victory in the Cold War itself.
3
Ideologically, the outlines of a post-Cold War system emerged more gradually. But the Gulf and Balkan Wars helped to crystallize an ever more comprehensive doctrine, linking free markets (the ark of neoliberalism since the Reagan–Thatcher period) to free elections (the leitmotif of liberation in Central–Eastern Europe) to human rights (the battle-cry in Kurdistan and the Balkans). The first two had, in varying tonalities, always been part of the repertoire of the Cold War, although now they were much more confidently asserted: a change most marked in the full-throated recovery of the term ‘capitalism’, held indiscreet at the height of the Cold War, when euphemisms were preferred. It was the third, however, that was the principal innovation of the period, and did most to alter the strategic landscape. For this was the jemmy in the door of national sovereignty.
Traditional principles upholding the autonomy of nations in their domestic affairs were, of course, regularly flouted by both sides in the Cold War. But, as inscribed in diplomatic convention—not least the UN Charter itself—these issued from the balance of forces during a period of decolonization that had given birth to a multiplicity of often small, and nearly always weak, states in the Third World. [5] Juridically, the doctrine of national sovereignty presupposed notions of equality between peoples that afforded some protection against the bullying of the two superpowers, whose competition ensured that neither could seek openly to set it aside, for fear of yielding too much moral advantage to the other. But with the end of the Cold War, and the disappearance of any counterbalance to the camp of capital, there was little reason to pay too much attention to formulations that expressed another relationship of international forces, now defunct. The New World Order, at first proclaimed in triumphalist but still traditional terms by Bush Sr, became under Clinton the legitimate pursuit by the international community of universal justice and human rights, wherever they were in jeopardy, regardless of state borders, as a condition of a democratic peace.
From the mid-nineties onwards, the setting in which the Democratic administration operated was unusually propitious. At home it was cresting on a speculative boom; abroad it enjoyed a set of European regimes tailored to its domestic ideological agenda. The Third Way version of neoliberalism fitted well with the catechism of the ‘international community’ and its shared devotion to universal human values. In practice, of course, wherever the logic of American primacy clashed with allied considerations or objectives, the former prevailed. The political realities underlying multilateral rhetoric were time and again made clear in these years. The US scuppered the Lisbon accords in 1992, preferring to dictate its own settlement in Bosnia, if necessary at the price of further ethnic cleansing, rather than accept an EU initiative; imposed the ultimatum at Rambouillet that launched full-scale war over Kosovo; bundled NATO to the frontiers of Belarus and Ukraine; and gave its blessing to the Russian reconquest of Chechnya—Clinton hailing the ‘liberation of Grozny’ after an onslaught that made the fate of Sarajevo look like a picnic.
In one way or another, all these moves in its backyard overrode or scanted EU sensibilities. But in no case were these flouted too indelicately or ostentatiously. Indeed, as the second Clinton administration wore on, European officialdom actually became, if anything, more profuse and vehement in announcing the interconnexion of free markets and free elections, and the need to limit national sovereignty in the name of human rights, than Washington itself. Politicians and intellectuals could pick what they wanted from the mixture. In a speech in Chicago, Blair outdid Clinton in enthusiasm for a new military humanism, while in Germany a thinker like Habermas saw disinterested commitment to the ideal of human rights as a definition of European identity itself, setting the Continent apart from the merely instrumental aims of the Anglo-American powers in the bombing of Yugoslavia.
By the end of the decade, strategic planners in Washington had every reason to be satisfied with the overall balance sheet of the nineties. The USSR had been knocked out of the ring, Europe and Japan kept in check, China drawn into increasingly close trade relations, the UN reduced to little more than a permissions office; and all this accomplished to the tune of the most emollient of ideologies, whose every second word was international understanding and democratic goodwill. Peace, justice and freedom were spreading around the world.
4
Two years later, the scene looks very different. But in what respects? From the start, the incoming Bush administration showed a certain impatience with the fiction that the ‘international community’ was an alliance of democratic equals, and a disregard for the assorted hypocrisies associated with it, grating to a European opinion still in mourning for Clinton. But such shifts in style signified no change in the fundamental aims of American global strategy, which have remained completely stable for a half-century. Two developments, however, have radically modified the ways in which these are currently being pursued.
The first of these, of course, was the shock of September 11. In no sense a serious threat to American power, the attentats targeted symbolic buildings and innocent victims—killing virtually as many Americans in a day as they do each other in a season—in a spectacle calculated to sow terror and fury in a population with no experience of foreign attack. Dramatic retribution, on a scale more than proportionate to the massacre, would automatically have become the first duty of any government, whatever party was in power. In this case the new administration, elected by a small and contested margin, had already posted its intention of striking a more assertive national posture abroad, dispensing with a series of diplomatic façades or placebos—Rome, Kyoto etc—its predecessor had, rather nominally, approved. September 11 gave it an unexpected chance to recast the terms of American global strategy more decisively than would otherwise have been possible. Spontaneously, domestic opinion was now galvanized for a struggle figuratively comparable to the Cold War itself.
With this, a critical constraint was lifted. In postmodern conditions, the hegemony of capital American primacy does require an activation of popular sentiment beyond mere assent to the domestic status quo. This is far from readily or continuously available. The Gulf War was approved by only a handful of votes in Congress. Intervention in Bosnia was long delayed for fear of unenthusiastic reaction in the electorate. Even landings in Haiti had to be quite brief. Here there have always been quite tight constraints on the Pentagon and White House—popular fear of casualties, widespread ignorance of the outside world, traditional indifference to foreign conflicts. In effect, there is a permanent structural gap between the range of military-political operations the American empire needs in order to maintain its sway, and the span of attention or commitment of American voters. To close it, a threat of some kind is virtually indispensable. In that sense, much like Pearl Harbour, the attentats of September 11 gave a Presidency that was anyway seeking to change the modus operandi of America abroad the opportunity for a much swifter and more ambitious turn than it could easily have executed otherwise. The circle around Bush realized this immediately, National Security Adviser Rice comparing the moment to the inception of the Cold War—a political equivalent of the Creation. [6] does not require mass mobilization of any kind. Rather, it thrives on the opposite—political apathy and withdrawal of any cathexis from public life. Failure to vote, as Britain’s Chancellor remarked after the last UK election, is the mark of the satisfied citizen. Nowhere is this axiom more widely accepted than in the United States, where Presidents are regularly elected by about a quarter of the adult population. But—here is an essential distinction—the exercise of
The second development, of no less significance, had been germinating since the mid-nineties. The Balkan War, valuable as a demonstration of American command in Europe, and uplifting in its removal of Miloševic, had also yielded a premium of a more virtual yet consequential kind. Here for the first time, in well-nigh ideal conditions, could be tested out what specialists had for some time predicted as the impending ‘revolution in military affairs’. What the RMA meant was a fundamental change in the nature of warfare, by comprehensive application of electronic advances to weapons and communications systems. The NATO campaign against Yugoslavia was still an early experiment, with a good many technical flaws and targeting failures, in the possibilities for one-sided destruction that these innovations opened up. But the results were startling enough, suggesting the potential for a quantum jump in the accuracy and effect of American fire power. By the time that plans for retaliation against Al-Qaeda were in preparation, the RMA had proceeded much further. The blitz on Afghanistan, deploying a full panoply of satellites, smart missiles, drones, stealth bombers and special forces, showed just how wide the technological gap between the US armoury and that of all other states had become, and how low the human cost—to the US—of further military interventions round the world might be. The global imbalance in the means of violence once the USSR had vanished has, in effect, since been redoubled, tilting the underlying constituents of hegemony yet more sharply towards the pole of force. For the effect of the RMA is to create a low-risk power vacuum around American planning, in which the ordinary calculus of the risks or gains of war is diluted or suspended. The lightning success of the Afghan operation, over forbidding geographical and cultural terrain, could only embolden any Administration for wider imperial sweeps.
These two changes of circumstance—the inflaming of popular nationalism in the wake of September 11 at home, and the new latitude afforded by the RMA abroad—have been accompanied by an ideological shift. This is the main element of discontinuity in current US global strategy. Where the rhetoric of the Clinton regime spoke of the cause of international justice and the construction of a democratic peace, the Bush administration has hoist the banner of the war on terrorism. These are not incompatible motifs, but the order of emphasis assigned to each has altered. The result is a sharp contrast of atmospherics. The war on terrorism orchestrated by Cheney and Rumsfeld is a far more strident, if also brittle, rallying-cry than the cloying pieties of the Clinton–Albright years. The immediate political yield of each has also differed. The new and sharper line from Washington has gone down badly in Europe, where human-rights discourse was and is especially prized. Here the earlier line was clearly superior as a hegemonic idiom.
On the other hand, in Russia and China, the opposite holds good. There, the war on terrorism has—at any rate temporarily—offered a much better basis for integrating rival power centres under American leadership than human-rights rhetoric, which only irritated the principals. For the moment, the diplomatic gains scored by the co-option of Putin’s regime into the Afghan campaign, and installation of US bases throughout Central Asia, can well be regarded by Washington as more substantial than the costs of the listless grumbling at American unilateralism that is so marked a feature of the European scene. The ABM Treaty is dead, NATO is moving into the Baltic states without resistance from Moscow, and Russia is eager to join the Western concert. China too, put out at first by loose Republican talk on Taiwan, has been reassured by the war on terrorism, which gives it cover from the White House for ethnic repression in Xinjiang.
5
If such was the balance sheet as an American marionette was lowered smoothly into place in Kabul, to all but universal applause—from Iranian mullahs to French philosophes, Scandinavian social-democrats to Russian secret policemen, British NGOs to Chinese generals—what explains the projected follow-up in Iraq? A tougher policy towards the Ba’ath regime, already signalled during Bush’s electoral campaign, was predictable well before September 11, at a time when the long-standing Anglo-American bombardment of Iraq was anyway intensifying. [7] Three factors have since converted what was no doubt originally envisaged as stepped-up covert operations to overthrow Saddam into the current proposals for a straightforward invasion. The first is the need for some more conclusively spectacular outcome to the war on terrorism. Victory in Afghanistan, satisfactory enough in itself, was achieved over a largely invisible enemy, and to some extent psychologically offset by continuing warnings of the danger of further attacks by the hidden agents of Al-Qaeda. Functional for keeping up a high state of public alarm, this theme nevertheless lacks any liberating resolution. The conquest of Iraq offers drama of a grander and more familiar type, whose victorious ending could convey a sense that a hydra-like enemy has truly been put out of action. For an American public, traumatized by a new sense of insecurity, distinctions in the taxonomy of evil between Kandahar and Baghdad are not of great moment.
Beyond such atmospherics, however, the drive to attack Iraq answers to a rational calculation of a more strategic nature. It is clear that the traditional nuclear oligopoly, indefensible on any principled grounds, is bound to be more and more challenged in practice as the technology for making atomic weapons becomes cheaper and simpler. The club has already been defied by India and Pakistan. To deal with this looming danger, the US needs to be able to launch pre-emptive strikes at possible candidates, whenever it so wishes. The Balkan War provided a vital first precedent for overriding the legal doctrine of national sovereignty without any need to invoke self-defence—one retrospectively sanctioned by the UN. In Europe, this was still often presented as a regrettable exception, triggered by a humanitarian emergency, to the normal respect for international law characteristic of democracies. The notion of the axis of evil, by contrast, and the subsequent targeting of Iraq, lays down the need for pre-emptive war and enforcement of regime change as a norm, if the world is ever to be made safe.
For obvious reasons, this conception—unlike the battle against terrorism more narrowly construed—is capable of making all power-centres outside Washington nervous. Misgivings have already been expressed, if not too loudly, by France and Russia. But from the viewpoint of Washington, if the momentum of the war on terrorism can be used to push through a de facto—or better yet, de jure—UN acceptance of the need to crush Saddam Hussein without further ado, then pre-emptive strikes will have been established henceforward as part of the regular repertoire of democratic peace-keeping on a global scale. Such a window of ideological opportunity is unlikely to come again soon. It is the juridical possibilities it opens up for a new ‘international constitution’, in which such operations become part of a habitual and legal order, that excite such a leading theorist of earlier human-rights interventions as Philip Bobbitt, a passionate admirer and close counsellor of Clinton during the Balkan strikes—underlining the extent to which the logic of pre-emption is potentially bipartisan. [8] The fact that Iraq does not have nuclear weapons, of course, would make an attack on it all the more effective as a lesson deterring others from any bid to acquire them.
A third reason for seizing Baghdad is more directly political, rather than ideological or military. Here the risk is significantly greater. The Republican administration is as well aware as anyone on the Left that September 11 was not simply an act of unmotivated evil, but a response to the widely disliked role of the United States in the Middle East. This is a region in which—unlike Europe, Russia, China, Japan or Latin America—there are virtually no regimes with a credible base to offer effective transmission points for American cultural or economic hegemony. The assorted Arab states are docile enough, but they lack any kind of popular support, resting on family networks and secret police which typically compensate for their factual servility to the US with a good deal of media hostility, not to speak of closure, towards America. Uniquely, indeed, Washington’s oldest dependency and most valuable client in the region, Saudi Arabia, is more barricaded against US cultural penetration than any country in the world after North Korea.
In practice, while thoroughly subject to the grip of American ‘hard’ power (funds and arms), most of the Arab world thus forms a kind of exclusion zone for the normal operations of American ‘soft power’, allowing all kinds of aberrant forces and sentiments to brew under the apparently tight lid of the local security services, as the origins of the assailants of 9.11 demonstrated. Viewed in this light, Al-Qaeda could be seen as a warning of the dangers of relying on too external and indirect a system of control in the Middle East, an area which also contains the bulk of the world’s oil reserves and so cannot be left to its own devices as an irrelevant marchland in the way that most of Sub-Saharan Africa can. On the other hand, any attempt to alter the struts of US command over the region by tampering with the existing regimes could easily lead to regime backlashes of the Madame Nhu type, which did the US no good in South-East Asia. Taking over Iraq, by contrast, would give Washington a large oil-rich platform in the centre of the Arab world, on which to build an enlarged version of Afghan-style democracy, designed to change the whole political landscape of the Middle East.
Of course, as many otherwise well-disposed commentators have hastened to point out, rebuilding Iraq might prove a taxing and hazardous business. But American resources are large, and Washington can hope for a Nicaraguan effect after a decade of mortality and despair under UN siege—counting on the end of sanctions and full resumption of oil exports, under a US occupation, to improve the living conditions of the majority of the Iraqi population so dramatically as to create the potential for a stable American protectorate, of the kind that already more or less exists in the Kurdish sector of the country. Unlike the Sandinista government, the Ba’ath regime is a pitiless dictatorship with few or no popular roots. The Bush administration could reckon that the chances of a Nicaraguan outcome, in which an exhausted population trades independence for material relief, are likely to be higher in Baghdad than they were in Managua.
In turn, the demonstration effect of a role-model parliamentary regime, under benevolent international tutelage—perhaps another Loya Jirga of the ethnic mosaic in the country—would be counted on to convince Arab elites of the need to modernize their ways, and Arab masses of the invincibility of America. In the Muslim world at large, Washington has already pocketed the connivance of the Iranian clerics (conservative and reformist) for a repeat of Enduring Freedom in Mesopotamia. In these conditions, so the strategic calculus goes, bandwagoning of the kind that originally brought the PLO to heel at Oslo after the Gulf War would once again become irresistible, allowing a final settlement of the Palestinian question along lines acceptable to Sharon.
6
Such, roughly speaking, is the thinking behind the Republican plan to occupy Iraq. Like all such geopolitical enterprises, which can never factor in every relevant agent or circumstance, it involves a gamble. But a calculation that misfires is not thereby necessarily irrational—it becomes so only if the odds are plainly too high against it, or the potential costs far outweigh the benefits, even if the odds are low. Neither appears to apply in this case. The operation is clearly within American capabilities, and its immediate costs—there would undoubtedly be some—do not at this stage look prohibitive. What would upset the apple-cart, of course, would be any sudden overthrow of one or more of the US client regimes in the region by indignant crowds or enraged officers. In the nature of things, it is impossible to rule out such coups de théâtre, but as things stand at the moment, it looks as if Washington is not being unrealistic in discounting such an eventuality. The Iraqi regime attracts far less sympathy than the Palestinian cause, yet the Arab masses were unable to lift a finger to help the second intifada throughout the televised crushing by the IDF of the uprising in the occupied territories.
Why then has the prospect of war aroused such disquiet, not so much in the Middle East, where Arab League bluster is largely pro forma, but in Europe? At governmental level, part of the reason lies, as often noted, in the opposite distribution of Jewish and Arab populations on the two sides of the Atlantic. Europe has no strict equivalent to the power of AIPAC in the US, but does contain millions of Muslims: communities in which an occupation of Iraq could provoke unrest—possibly triggering, in freer conditions, unwelcome turbulence in the Arab street itself, where the reactions to an invasion after the event might prove stronger than inability to block it beforehand would suggest. The EU countries, far weaker as military or political actors on the international stage, are inherently more cautious than the United States. Britain, of course, is the exception, where an equerry mentality has led to the other extreme, falling in more or less automatically with initiatives from across the ocean.
In general, while European states know they are subaltern to the US, and accept their status, they dislike having it rubbed in publicly. The Bush administration’s dismissal of the Kyoto Protocols and International Criminal Court has also offended a sense of propriety earnestly attached to the outward forms of political rectitude. NATO was accorded scant attention in the Afghan campaign, and is being completely ignored in the drive to the Tigris. All this has ruffled European sensibilities. A further ingredient in the hostile reception the plan to attack Iraq has met in the European—to a lesser extent also liberal American—intelligentsia is the justified fear that it could strip away the humanitarian veil covering Balkan and Afghan operations, to reveal too nakedly the imperial realities behind the new militarism. This layer has invested a great deal in human-rights rhetoric, and feels uncomfortably exposed by the bluntness of the thrust now under way.
In practice, such misgivings amount to little more than a plea that whatever war is launched should have the nominal blessing of the United Nations. The Republican administration has been happy to oblige, explaining with perfect candour that America always benefits if it can act multilaterally, but if it cannot, will act unilaterally anyway. A Security Council Resolution framed vaguely enough to allow an American assault on Iraq soon after the elapse of some kind of ultimatum would suffice to appease European consciences, and let the Pentagon get on with the war. A month or two of sustained official massaging of opinion on both sides of the Atlantic is capable of working wonders. Despite the huge anti-war demonstration in London this autumn, three-quarters of the British public would support an attack on Iraq, provided the UN extends its fig-leaf. In that event, it seems quite possible the French jackal will be in at the kill as well. In Germany, Schroeder has tapped popular opposition to the war to escape electoral eviction, but since his country is not a member of the Security Council, his gestures are costless. In practice, the Federal Republic will furnish all the necessary staging-posts for an expedition to Iraq—a considerably more important strategic service to the Pentagon than the provision of British commandos or French paras. Overall, European acquiescence in the campaign can be taken for granted.
This does not mean that there will be any widespread enthusiasm for the war in the EU, aside from Downing Street itself. Factual assent to an armed assault is one matter; ideological commitment to it another. Participation in the expedition, or—more probably—occupation to follow it, is unlikely to cancel altogether resentment about the extent to which Europe was bounced into the enterprise. The demonstration of American prerogatives—‘the unilateralist iron fist inside the multilateralist velvet glove’, as Robert Kagan has crisply put it—may rankle for some time yet. [9]
7
Does this mean, as a chorus of establishment voices in both Europe and America protests, that the ‘unity of the West’ risks long-run damage from the high-handedness of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice? In considering this question, it is essential to bear in mind the formal figure of any hegemony, which necessarily always conjugates a particular power with a general task of coordination. Capitalism as an abstract economic order requires certain universal conditions for its operation: stable rights of private property, predictable legal rules, some procedures of arbitration, and (crucially) mechanisms to ensure the subordination of labour. But this is a competitive system, whose motor is rivalry between economic agents. Such competition has no ‘natural’ ceiling: once it becomes international, the Darwinian struggle between firms has an inherent tendency to escalate to the level of states. There, however, as the history of the first half of the twentieth century repeatedly showed, it can have disastrous consequences for the system itself. For on the plane of inter-state relations, there are only weak equivalents of domestic law, and no mechanisms for aggregating interests between different parties on an equal basis, as nominally within electoral democracies.
Left to itself, the logic of such anarchy can only be internecine war, of the kind Lenin described in 1916. Kautsky, by contrast, abstracting from the clashing interests and dynamics of the concrete states of that time, came to the conclusion that the future of the system must—in its own interests—lie in the emergence of mechanisms of international capitalist coordination capable of transcending such conflicts, or what he called ‘ultra-imperialism’. [10] This was a prospect Lenin rejected as utopian. The second half of the century produced a solution envisaged by neither thinker, but glimpsed intuitively by Gramsci. For in due course it became clear that the coordination problem can be satisfactorily resolved only by the existence of a superordinate power, capable of imposing discipline on the system as a whole, in the common interests of all parties. Such ‘imposition’ cannot be a product of brute force. It must also correspond to a genuine capacity of persuasion—ideally, a form of leadership that can offer the most advanced model of production and culture of its day, as target of imitation for all others. That is the definition of hegemony, as a general unification of the field of capital.
But at the same time, the hegemon must—can only—be a particular state: as such, inevitably possessed of a differential history and set of national peculiarities that distinguish it from all others. This contradiction is inscribed from the beginning, in Hegel’s philosophy, in which the necessity of the incarnation of reason in just one world-historical state, in any given period, can never entirely erase the contingent multiplicity of political forms around it. [11] Latently, the singular universal always remains at variance with the empirical manifold. This is the conceptual setting in which American ‘exceptionalism’ should be viewed. All states are more or less exceptional, in the sense that they possess unique characteristics. By definition, however, a hegemon will possess features that cannot be shared by others, since it is precisely those that lift it above the ruck of its rivals. But at the same time, its role requires it to be as close to a generalizable—that is, reproducible—model as practicable. Squaring this circle is, of course, in the end impossible, which is why there is an inherent coefficient of friction in any hegemonic order. Structurally, a discrepancy is built into the harmony whose function it is to install. In this sense, we live in a world which is inseparably—in a way that neither of them could foresee—both the past described by Lenin and the future anticipated by Kautsky. The particular and the general are condemned to each other. Union can only be realized by division.
In the notebooks he wrote in prison, Gramsci theorized hegemony as a distinctive synthesis of ‘domination’ and ‘direction’, or a dynamic equilibrium of force and consent. The principal focus of his attention was on the variable ways in which this balance was achieved, or broken, within national states. But the logic of his theory, of which he was aware, extended to the international system as well. On this plane too, the elements of hegemony are distributed asymmetrically. [12] Domination—the exercise of violence as the ultimate currency of power—tends necessarily towards the pole of particularity. The hegemon must possess superior force of arms, a national attribute that cannot be alienated or shared, as the first condition of its sway. Direction, on the other hand—the ideological capacity to win consent—is a form of leadership whose appeal is by definition general. This does not mean that a hegemonic synthesis therefore requires a persuasive structure that is as purely international as its coercive structure must be irreducibly national. The ideological system of a successful hegemon cannot derive solely from its function of general coordination. It will inevitably also reflect the particular matrix of its own social history. [13] The less marked the distance between these two, of course, the more effective it will be.
8
In the case of the United States, the degree of this gap—the closeness of the join—is a reflection of the principal features of the country’s past. A large literature has been spent on the American exception. But the only exceptionality that really matters—since all nations are in their way sui generis—is the configuration that has founded its global hegemony. How is this best expressed? It lies in the virtually perfect fit the country offers between optimal geographical and optimal social conditions for capitalist development. That is: a continental scale of territory, resources and market, protected by two oceans, that no other nation-state comes near to possessing; and a settler-immigrant population forming a society with virtually no pre-capitalist past, apart from its local inhabitants, slaves and religious creeds, and bound only by the abstractions of a democratic ideology. Here are to be found all the requirements for spectacular economic growth, military power and cultural penetration. Politically, since capital has always lorded it over labour to an extent unknown in other advanced-industrial societies, the result is a domestic landscape well to the right of them.
In Western Europe on the other hand, virtually all the terms of the American equation are reversed. Nation-states are small or medium in size, easily besieged or invaded; populations often go back to neolithic times; social and cultural structures are saturated with traces of pre-capitalist origin; the balance of forces is less disadvantageous for labour; by and large, religion is a played-out force. Consequently, the centre of gravity of European political systems is to the left of the American—more socially protective and welfarist, even under governments of the right. [14] In the relations between Europe and the US, there is thus abundant material for all kinds of friction, even combustion. It is no surprise that sparks have flown in the current tense situation. The relevant political question, however, is whether these portend some larger rift or modification in the balance of power between the two, as the European Union acquires a stronger sense of its own identity.
Viewing the two capitalist centres comparatively, the contrast between their international styles is clear enough. The characteristic European approach to the New World Order is drawn from the internal experience of gradual integration within the EU itself: treaty-based diplomacy, incremental pooling of sovereignty, legalistic attachment to formal rule-making, voluble concern for human rights. American strategic practices, based on a hub-and-spokes conception of inter-state relations, are blunter and more bilateral. But US diplomacy has always had two languages: one line descending from the macho axioms of Theodore Roosevelt, the other from the presbyterian cant of Woodrow Wilson. [15] These are respectively, the national and international idioms of American power. Whereas in the early twentieth century, the latter was more alien to European statecraft, today it has become the Atlantic raft to which EU susceptibilities desperately cling. But both are quintessentially American. A great deal of the recent commotion in the Democratic intellectual establishment within the US has consisted of a reminder to the White House of the need to offer the world a palatable blend of the two. [16] The National Security Strategy delivered on 21 September to Congress by Bush has met the demand with aplomb. Here, for listeners at home and abroad, is a perfectly interwoven duet of the two voices of ‘a distinctively American internationalism’. The phrase is well chosen. The exercise of hegemony requires just such duality.
American direction, as opposed to domination, of the globe does not, of course, rest simply on an ideological creed. Historically, it has been the attractive power of US models of production and culture that has extended the reach of this hegemony. The two have over time become increasingly unified in the sphere of consumption, to offer a single way of life as pattern to the world. But analytically they should be kept distinct. The power of what Gramsci theorized as Fordism—the development of scientific management and the world’s first assembly lines—lay in its technical and organizational innovations, which by his time had already made the United States the richest society in existence. So long as this economic lead was maintained—in recent decades it has had its ups and downs—America could figure in a world-wide imaginary as the vanishing point of modernity: in the eyes of millions of people overseas, the form of life that traced an ideal shape of their own future. This image was, and is, a function of technological advance.
The cultural mirror the US has offered the world, on the other hand, owes its success to something else. Here the secret of American hegemony has lain rather in formulaic abstraction, the basis for the fortune of Hollywood. In a vast continent of heterogeneous immigrants, coming from all corners of Europe, the products of industrial culture had from the start to be as generic as possible, to maximize their share of the market. In Europe, every film came out of, and had to play to, cultures with a dense sedimentation of particular traditions, customs, languages inherited from the national past—inevitably generating a cinema with a high local content, with small chance of travelling. In America on the other hand, immigrant