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A new world order
Part 1: The South strikes
back
By Pepe Escobar
SAO
PAULO - Last week, India, Brazil and South Africa - key
regional leaders in South Asia, South America and Africa
respectively- created a sort of poor-man's G8, a G3
charged to increase the bargaining power of developing
countries vis-a-vis the United States and the European
Union. The foreign ministers of India (Yashwant Sinha),
Brazil (Celso Amorim) and South Africa (Nkosazana
Dlamini-Zuma) for the moment make references to a G3
only as a joke: the official name of the group is IBSA
(the initials in English of the three members).
Sinha has pointed out that "in a more incisive
way than before, we must speak as much as we can with
only one voice". IBSA's agenda is ambitious, with the
heads of state of the three countries scheduled to meet
later this year to discuss it in detail. But it is
already known that at the United Nations level they are
bound to exert pressure for an urgent reform of the
Security Council - which should also include developing
countries. India and Brazil are already supporting each
other's membership bids. This is a G3 that aims to
represent the whole developing South. It may soon become
a G5 as diplomats confirm that China and Russia are
definitely interested.
The evolvement of this
tri-nation grouping reflects other realignments on the
world stage. At the recent G8 summit in Evian, French
President Jacques Chirac invited heads of state of
selected developing countries to hear their opinions.
The European Union wants to forge itself as an
alternative political and social model for the rest of
the world. Russia, and especially China, are keen on
forming special relationships with regional powers in
the South. What are the chances of these overlapping
developments finally converging and of the South making
itself heard? Jose Luis Fiori is arguably one of Latin
America's foremost political scientists. At the center
of what is now becoming a global debate, Fiori says,
lies the question of national development projects and
in how to offer "hope to the damned of the Earth after
the failure of the globalitarian Utopia".
There
are 193 nation-states in the world today: 125 of them
are former colonies that became independent in roughly
two waves of modern history: the first around the
beginning of the 19th century (most American states),
and the second after World War II (most African and
Asian states).
Fiori emphasizes how Adam Smith,
already in the 18th century, was in favor of colonialism
being discarded in favor of the free market. Smith and
Lord Shelbourne (who negotiated independence with the
Americans) were betting on English economic superiority
caused by the industrial revolution: by exporting their
commodities, the decolonized economies would inevitably
become a politico-economic "periphery" of the richer and
more powerful states. "And this would be beneficial to
the economic development of all, including the former
colonies."
Against this view there were almost
all conservative politicians and intellectuals who, in
the second half of the 19th century, defended the
territorial expansion and the civilizing mission of
Europeans across the world. Examples are Benjamin
Disraeli and Lord Palmerston as politicians in Britain
and Oswald Spengler and Wilhelm Dilthey as
intellectuals, as well as Cecil Rhodes, "a real
prototype of the English colonialist, and the first to
sustain the thesis that the way to universal peace
necessarily meant the submission of the rest of the
world to Anglo-Saxon laws", says Fiori.
Adam
Smith's recipes were eventually applied. There was a
flurry of trade deals - often imposed by force on
countries all over the world and which meant free access
for Europe's capital and goods. The former colonies
became exporters of commodities essential for European
industrialization. Fiori says, "With this new situation,
the governments of these countries had to go into debt
with English and French banks to cover for the lost
revenues in customs fees. That's why, in moments of
cyclical retraction of European economies, these
peripheral countries invariably faced problems in their
balance of payments and were forced to renegotiate their
external debt or face default." Fiori stresses that in
the case of Latin America, the debt was constantly
renegotiated with the creditors, and the burden of the
costs was transferred to their national populations. But
in the rest of the world, collecting the debt "justified
the invasion and political domination of almost all new
colonies that sprang up in the 19th century".
Fiori recognizes that during the 20th century
the US and the Soviet Union played a crucial role in the
decolonization of Africa and Asia. Socialism and
"developmentalism" became "the Utopia or the reason for
hope for many peoples, and alternative paths towards the
same objective: economic development, social mobility
and the easing of asymmetries of wealth and power in the
global system". But at the end of the 1970s, "American
foreign policy seriously started reviewing its financial
support for national development projects". It was, says
Fiori, "a response to the crisis of American hegemony
and to the world economic crisis in the 1970s". But also
a reaction to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries' oil shock of 1973 and to the emergence of the
Group of 77, "with its proposal of radical reform and
the creation of a new international economic order",
approved by a UN special session in 1974 (but never
implemented).
The 1980s are widely considered in
Latin America as "the lost decade". No wonder, says
Fiori, because for all indebted Latin American countries
there was only one way out: "Better conditions for debt
repayment were offered in exchange for deregulated
markets, open economies, non-interventionist states and
radical shelving of each and every kind of national
development project."
Finally, in the 1990s the
whole South was faced with a new configuration. Fiori
mentions Robert Cooper's "The Postmodern State and the
World Order " as the key paper to put it into context.
Cooper - a key adviser to British premier Tony Blair -
made the connection between the process of financial
globalization, neoliberal economic policies and, in his
words, "a new type of imperialism acceptable to the
world of human rights and cosmopolitan values". So,
according to Cooper's conceptualization, we now live
under three forms of imperialism:
1) A "cooperative
imperialism" - regulating relations between the
Anglo-Saxon world and other developed countries.
2)
An "imperialism based on the law of the jungle" -
regulating relations between the group of major powers
that "became honest" (Cooper's expression) and
"pre-modern" or "failed" states. (Afghanistan and Iraq
were dealt with militarily, other official and
unofficial "axis of evil" members will be dealt with one
way or another).
3) The "voluntary imperialism" of
the global economy - essentially managed by the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and (in
Cooper's words) "supporting states that open themselves
and peacefully accept interference of international
organizations and foreign states".
Fiori sums
up, "A sort of 'ultra-imperialism' inside the group of
major powers; the 'law of the jungle' for 'pre-modern'
states, and 'free market' imperialism for the countries
which Adam Smith in 1776, in the chapter on colonies
included in The Wealth of Nations, called 'our
most faithful and thankful allies'." Fiori identifies
the same common denominator in all cases, "The veto to
each and every autonomous national project capable of
threatening the status quo of the imperial system
articulated on the basis of post-modern states."
But a key problem is now in the forefront of any
debate: since the Seattle protests in 1999 against the
World Trade Organization, it's clear that the neoliberal
globalization project has failed, as well as the
neoliberal reforms in scores of countries in the
"periphery". There was negligible economic growth in
these countries, coupled with an explosion of social
inequality, and this all increased the frightening
asymmetry in the distribution of wealth and power in the
global system. And "in the void created by this immense
frustration", as Fiori puts it, comes the June 2002
George W Bush doctrine of preemptive strikes against
states and peoples judged to be threatening America's
national interest.
Fiori contends that the Bush
doctrine is nothing but an add-on to the "humanitarian
imperialism" of former president Bill Clinton and Blair.
"For a long time the Anglo-American international
economic policy has been subjected to the same strategic
objective of its military policy: the containment of
each and every state bent on altering the status quo and
ascending in the international hierarchy."
This
looks like a direct message to, first and foremost,
China - and it certainly is. Fiori quotes John
Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics
(Norton, New York, 2001) when the author stresses
that a rich and powerful China simply won't accept the
current international status quo. Mearsheimer worries
that the American establishment is not worried enough by
the fact that China will become the hegemon in northeast
Asia (it already is, anyway).
Fiori reminds us
that China's national project of becoming an economic
and military big power is no mystery to anyone. It's
also instructive to remember that before its derailment
into a succession of regional wars, Iraq in the 1970s
was carrying a clearly defined national development
project. But Fiori touches the real nerve when he
identifies "the badly-disguised nervousness of the
American establishment facing ever-more-evident signs
that Germany, Russia and Japan start to return to their
national development projects as a way of getting out of
the swamp they fell into during the 1990s".
Fiori argues that "some still believe that the
US may try to repeat the experience of so-called
'development by invitation' in which a country abdicates
from its national project and also any hegemonic
pretense in exchange for privileged access to the
American market". It's unlikely that the newly-formed
grouping of India, Brazil and South Africa will fall for
this carrot - not to mention Russia and China. It's fair
to argue that much more than any hegemonic pretense,
each of these actors would rather pursue its own
national development project its own way. Their closer
integration is not a "no" to the US, like an instrument
to force the US to listen. As to privileged access to
the American market, Fiori correctly laments this may be
the "only Utopia offered to the poor of the world in the
beginning of the 21st century". The candidates are many,
the slots a few.
Jose Saramago, the Portuguese
writer and winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for
literature, adds to this perspective when he talks about
the pain of living in these times where, from a humanist
point of view, nothing is changing for the better,
"Hopes vanish, Utopias vanish and humanism, as we know,
is a quality of hope." Apart from the merely material
Holy Grail of privileged access to the American market,
for "the damned of the Earth" there seems to be no other
reality left than to try to survive under the shadow of
Cooper's "voluntary imperialism".
Part 2:
Europe's 3D vision
(Copyright 2003 Asia
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