Page 2 of
5 Excerpt
from Pepe Escobar's Globalistan The following is an excerpt from
Globalistan: How the Globalized World Is
Dissolving into Liquid War by Asia Times
Online's Pepe Escobar. For a review of the book,
click here.
GLOBALISTAN
the bodies that ingest them, thus
indistinguishable." This strategy has included
"cannibalism and forced assimilation" - cultural
crusades, declared wars against local practices,
against calendars, cults, dialects and other
prejudice and superstitions." That's how the
Sinopticon society also deals with its
own
Islamophobia.
In between,
the faceless multitudes are left with the
proliferation of what Bauman refers to as "no
places" or "cities of nowhere," places that are
ostensibly public but definitely
non-communitarian, places of passage like
airports, hotel lobbies, highway convenience
stores. Already in the mid-1980s French
multidisciplinarian Paul Virilio was saying that
in the future all prisons, hotels, airports and
shopping malls would look exactly the same. Liquid
modernity. Sinopticon society. So many other ways
to define the realm of globalization.
Ulrich Beck refers to "the nebulous word
'globalization' as code for 'the struggle of
national against international elites', these ones
struggling to gain position inside national power
spaces." As an alternative he proposes other
theories of the State, which would "break the
false alternative between deregulation neo-liberal
strategies and the interventionist and
protectionist neo-nationalist strategies" and also
address "what the politics of self-adaptation to
neo-liberalism has unforgivingly omitted, that is,
those disparities and conflicts (which
nevertheless public opinion have sufficiently
noticed) that sprang up either from the endemic
destruction of Nature and the environment as well
as the question ... of full employment which, if
it exists at all, is precarious."
Beck
believes in the possibility of a new pact between
economic power and political power and democracy.
This could only happen via "a reform of the
transnational institutions which coordinate the
world economy." That's quite unlikely, to say the
least. Beck's proposition of an "active
cosmopolitan project" would mean not only
grassroots mobilization but major players - from
NGOs to top managing officials - trying to change
the system from the inside.
Beck compares
the irruption of global terrorism to
"globalization's Chernobyl: then the benefits of
nuclear energy were buried; now neo-liberalism's
promises of salvation. The suicide attempts and
massive assassinations not only showed the
vulnerability of Western civilization but also
allowed us to savor in advance to what class of
conflicts globalization can lead. In a world of
global risk, neo-liberalism's dictum, that is, to
substitute the economy for politics and the State,
rapidly loses its force of conviction." Beck could
be placed in the same company of an array of
Islamic scholars who worry about the
"globalization of the culture of fear." (As do
many commentators in the United States, both
liberal and conservative, who worry about the
abridgement of fundamental rights or believe that
"if we change our behavior, the terrorists win.")
Now compare Beck to Anthony Giddens,
former director of the London School of Economics
and guru of Tony Blair's Third Way. Giddens could
be seen as a globalization insider with a
transforming agenda. He never bought the idea that
deregulated markets were the most efficient mode
of economic production. His emphasis is on civil
society. Giddens, in The Third Way and its
Critics, admits that globalization is not
exclusively economic but also social, political
and cultural. "In all these levels," it implies a
"highly unequal group" of processes which follow
up in "a fragmentary and contradictory" manner. He
contends that globalization is not Westernization.
Giddens' Third Way, in its ambitious
struggle to become a global political phi-
losophy, was supposed to be about integration. He
could not but know that "it's a mistake to simply
oppose the State and the markets… Without a stable
civil society, with norms of trust and social
decency, it's not possible neither for markets to
flourish nor for democracy to be maintained."
Giddens was convinced that "nation-states
remain the most important actors in the
international scene" because "they control
territory," are able to "legitimaly exercise
military force" and are responsible for
"sustaining a legal apparatus." He hailed the
confluence of global markets and new communication
techniques as "a globalizing process that comes
'from underneath' ... and is building an
infrastructure of global civil society ." But in
2000 Giddens could hardly have imagined that one
of the key expressions of this "global civil
society" would be on February 15, 2003 when more
than 10 million people all over the world marched
against an illegal war that had not even started
and in which Tony Blair's Third Way government was
totally implicated.
French sociologist
Alain Touraine has been keen to point out that
Globalization does not define a
stage in modernity, a new Industrial Revolution.
It intervenes at the level of modes of
management of historical change, and corresponds
to an extreme capitalist mode of modernization,
a category that should not be confused with a
type of society, like feudal society or
industrial society. And war, hot or cold,
belongs to this universe of competition,
confrontation, empires and not to the universe
of societies and its internal problems,
including class struggle.
What does
occupy central stage, according to Touraine, is
"the triumph of capitalism." But this does not
mean we are facing the end of History, just a
"certain mode of administration of historical
change, of modernization." In a similar vein
Brazilian economist José Fiori describes
globalization as little else than a technique for
profit optimization in a historically specific
world environment - the current situation of a
relative abundance of literate workforces outside
the Triad.
Unlike Bauman's liquid, fluid,
amoral modernity Touraine's concept of modernity
is linked to human rights, and modernity is seen
as an appeal to the universalism of rights. But he
is forced to admit this concept is facing two very
powerful enemies. Touraine identifies the first
enemy as "Islamic or Asiatic, which refuse any
universality to the Western model and affirm that
their model, determined by a communitarian
conception of social life and the maintenance of
traditional family, has revealed to be more
efficient than ours, affected by all forms of
personal and collective decomposition."
Touraine could be referring to Singapore's
resident Confucius and founding father Lee Kuan
Yew and the famous 1990s Asian values debate. The
two volumes of Lee's political autobiography are
nothing but a glossy, extended paean to Asian
values. Moreover Lee's masterpiece, Singapore,
works wonders, even tough civil society is largely
defined by a shop-till-you-drop mentality. Lee's
Confucianism is the opposite of the Enlightenment.
It's another - extremely effective - model of
modernization as the Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping
himself noted on the spot before copying it and
launching his own modernization drive in China.
The second enemy of Touraine's concept of human
rights-based modernity spans a tradition that
stretches from Rousseau to Hobbes, "which defines
democracy as the kingdom of the General Will or,
in other words, the utmost respect to popular
sovereignty." Touraine admits that this idea was
attacked "from the right by economic liberalism
and from the left by the idea of class struggle"
but "it's still predominant, especially in the
U.S."
It's inevitable that all those who
put globalization at the center of the
representation of our world show how it is
conformed by American hegemony - since most nodes
of the global network are U.S.-owned. It's not
that simple. The world economy's geography is not
spatial, but a demented speedball of flux – with
globalization as a mechanism configured by trade
flux, financial flux, information flux, human flux
and the uncontrollable explosion of the key nodes
in the grid, the world's megacities. But as much
as a "global economy" - Bauman's liquid modernity
- a map of those fluxes would also stress a
significant black void, a collection of stagnant
puddles accounting for the intersection of war and
poverty, war and globalization and the "war on
terror."
Imbalance and inequality are the
names of the game. Trade in goods and services are
a virtual monopoly of the Triad - North America,
the E.U. and North Asia. This has increased the
tension - bordering on open war - between the U.S.
and the E.U. on, for instance, civil aerospace,
agriculture subsidies or genetically modified
organisms. So the Triad does not operate like a
unified cartel: there is fierce internal
competition. The Triad concentrates no less than
70% of the wealth of the planet.
Africa is
on the other end of the spectrum. Africa's exports
were 4% of the global total in the early 1980s;
they had fallen to 1.5% by 2003. And then there's
trade as a weapon; if a country falls foul of the
great powers, a commercial embargo - shut up and
don't trade! - is the weapon of choice (even
though other countries always manage to sneak
around them).
The East to West financial
market flux - Tokyo, Frankfurt, Paris, London,
Wall Street - is a given. As for the human flux as
well as the info flux of ideas, they should be
increasing in all directions - but the flow still
privileges the Triad. "The end of geography" and,
in theory, political borders should have led -
according to globalization cheerleaders - to a new
configuration of the world population and a better
division of wealth. Reality proves otherwise.
Flux is not a congregation of random
electrons. Flux needs controlling engines - thus
the criss-crossing networks and companies
articulated with the finance, insurance,
innovation, counselling, publicity and security
industries. Only megalopolises can function as the
ideal providers for all these industries. And this
of course increases their seduction appeal. Since
2005 more than 3 billion people - half of the
global population - are urban.
So the
globalization flow is leading to increased
concentration, not dispersion. The real world
centers of economic and political power are
networked cities monopolizing economic, financial
and political flux.
We can identify 3 main
nodes - all of them interlinked, of course.
Node 1 - New
York/Boston/Philadelphia/Washington, linked to
"secondary" L.A., Mexico City and Sao Paulo.
Node 2 - London/Paris/Frankfurt/Milan,
linked to "secondary" Moscow, Dubai, Lagos and
Johannesburg.
Node 3 - Tokyo/Osaka -
linked to "secondary" Shanghai, Hong Kong,
Singapore and Sydney.
R&D remains
strictly a Triad affair. Less than 1% of patents
come from outside the Triad. There is of course
the odd foreign hub of technology and research
like Bangalore. But as multinational corporations
increase the amount of patents they register in
the U.S. from overseas branches that gives a false
impression of globalization of innovation.
Technological innovation in a tectronic-mad world
originates from less than 20 countries -
accounting for 15% of the global population.
Although China and India are mounting challenges
to the Triad's R&D supremacy, for now the
Triad (including Australia, South Korea, Taiwan,
and Israel) still "reigns," in Ezra Pound's words.
The 3 controlling nodes listed above are
inserted into the Big Picture of the Great
North/South divide - which in itself is also
totally fragmented. Take the North. The former
Soviet republics in Central Asia and the Caucasus
are not exactly part of the North en bloc, some
with annual GNPs per capita lower than US$ 2000.
Nor are other lower mid-level income countries
(GNP per capita less than US$ 10,000 annual) - and
these include E.U. member Poland and key global
player Russia. Even inside the E.U. Portugal's GNP
per capita, for instance, is still two-thirds of
Germany's.
Take the South. Australia, New
Zealand and South Africa are in fact part of the
North. So are the four original Asian tigers -
South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong -
plus the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Israel.
The South is heavily populated by a higher
mid-level - Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the
Philippines, most of Latin America, central Europe
and some scattered players like Botswana and
Mauritius. There's China, India and the Andean
countries at a lower mid-level. And then we find
what we could call the Deep South, the 48 LDCs
(least developed countries) which the OECD
euphemistically describes as "next emerging
countries." Under the current rules, where future
wealth is inevitably tied to the influx of more
foreign direct investment (FDI), once again it
works in tiers. When sub- Saharan Africa captures
only 1.2% of global FDI, Venezuela, Chile,
Malaysia, Thailand and Poland capture almost 1%
each, Mexico and Brazil
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