|
|
May 16, 2004
The next phase
Aijaz Ahmad lists the preconditions that were met to pave the way for globalization as it has emerged today
THIS [globalization] is not simply a new phase of imperialism but also radically a new phase, which could not have come about until after a number of preconditions had been met. What were the most important of those preconditions? I shall answer that question in the form of 13 inter-linked theses, and what I want to argue is that it is the sum total of all these elements — not some, not this or that — which came to define the radical novelty of this phase.
The first of those preconditions, I believe, was the dissolution of the colonial empires themselves, and the beginning of globalization can thus be dated back to the years following the Second World War. Now, Marx was the first to point out that the drive toward an integrated world market has been inherent in the logic of capitalism from the beginning and that colonialism played the main role in creating such a market. However, between the end of the 15th century, when it all began, until the end of the 18th, the process of real colonization was mostly centred on the Americas and it was only in the 19th century that the interiors of Asia and Africa were intensively colonized, eventually dividing the world into a set of core industrialized countries of the advanced West and a vast hinterland of non-industrialized colonies and dependencies, many of them formally independent. In the days of its final glory, colonialism had created something resembling a world economy but it was a system, really, of interlocking economies, in which different colonial powers controlled different segments. Decolonization was now necessary for the further development of capitalism as a wholly integrated global economy in this new phase, and the US could not have emerged as an unchallengeable hegemonic power until after its rivals had lost their respective colonial empires.
This then leads to the second precondition, namely that there had to be a pre-eminent power to supervise this transition from a number of large and small empires to a united global empire. The quarter century after the Second World War, which has gone down in history as the golden era of US hegemony corresponds to the organization of that transition. Much has been said more recently about the decline of that hegemony, and it is certainly true that other centres, notably western Europe and Japan, have also emerged to challenge some aspects of that unique power. It is worth saying, however, that the United States continues to be the most powerful capitalist economy.
Third, as I just said, the era of classical colonialism had also divided the world into a core of industrialized countries and a vast hinterland of non-industrialized zones. For capitalism to really take off as a universal system, an altogether new kind of division of the world was necessary, between the advanced and the backward capitalist zones. The dissolution of the colonial empires made possible the national bourgeois project of some degree of industrialization in the Third World and thus vastly altered the very scope of capitalism as such.
Fourth, the existence of the Soviet bloc and the East Asian socialist and quasi-socialist states had obstructed ‘globalization’ in three ways. They constituted roughly a third of the world in demographic terms, and that one-third was simply not available for capitalist globalization in the real sense, whatever other relations with the world capitalist market those states might have maintained (witness, for example, the history and mechanics of debt formation among the weaker of the Comecon countries well before the dissolution of the system).
Second, they held out the possibility of a challenge to the system of capitalist imperialism as such, on the global scale, as the history of numerous wars of liberation during that period, from Vietnam to Angola and Guinea-Bissau, would testify.
And, third, they served as alternate sources of technology, training, finance and military supplies not only for wars of liberation but also for many of the non-aligned countries, such as Egypt or Syria or India
The fifth precondition for the full emergence of globalization in its present hegemonic form — namely, the demise of the nationalism of the national bourgeoisie — was also tied up with the demise of that alternate pole, as India’s own experience would show; 1989 made no difference to the leading communist force in the country, namely the CPI (M), but did transform the policy positions of the ruling class itself. For roughly a quarter century after the Second World War, economic nationalism in substantial parts of the Third World had presented something of a barrier to truly global triumph of neo-liberalism through a variety of strategies — for example, protectionism, use of the state sector for growth of domestic industry, relations with the Comecon countries as alternate source for economic aid and technologies — thus somewhat limiting the power of imperialism over their societies.
Sixth, new technologies were required to integrate the world financial markets and make productive capital itself relatively more mobile. This has involved, among other things, the creation of an Information Superhighway, beyond the territorial boundaries of nations and consisting of millions of pathways, whose notable feature is that financial information, commercial messages, entertainment goods and personal correspondence are intermeshed into a single, chaotic flow. The ‘virtual’ character of much of this flow has been much exaggerated; what one might say, more accurately, is that the kind of global production and exchange which these flows facilitate greatly intensify and extend processes of commodification as well as globalized labour regimes of a historically new kind.
Seventh, this whole edifice is upheld in a complex system of law and regulation which has two overlapping aspects. There are first of all the regulatory regimes of IMF, the World Bank, the IFIs, GATT, WTO and so on which are, together, fast emerging as a new world government for imposing uniform policies, obligations, and conditionalities around the world, especially the imperialized world.
These institutions have been central in perfecting this system, and they of course have their own very complex legal frameworks and regulatory regimes that individual nation-states are to abide by. But an equally crucial aspect of this globalization of law and sovereignty is that national governments are being constantly pressed to alter their own laws so as to make them more compatible with — often mere facsimiles of — American law.
Eighth, this new globalized imperialism also required new types of military technologies, the famous ‘automated battlefields’ for example, which could deliver imperial power effectively and swiftly against various little enemies that were perceived to be proliferating all over the world, as we have seen in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia, both of which have served as test cases both for military technologies and for moral claims of empire. The deployment of these technologies is then supervised and even executed primarily by the United States, though often in the name of a wider agency: if Iraq was invaded in the name of the UN, war over Kosovo was conducted under the aegis of Nato.
Ninth, just as the supra-national institutions such as the World Bank and WTO are used to impose new imperial regimes of law and regulation, various institutions associated with the UN, most notably the Security Council itself, are increasingly in use for the moral legitimation of imperial aggression. The use of the United Nations to legitimize American military designs is as old as the Korean War of the 1950s.
Tenth, in addition to the moral legitimization of American aggression by the Security Council, a complex network was required for moral pressure, ideological legitimization and cultural acceptance among the intelligentsias of the world. This was obtained in great many forms, ranging from all kinds of NGOs to high-minded postmodernism to the ‘End of History’ ideology.
It is in this newly emerging moral economy of empire that, as Antonio Negri points out so eloquently, we hear the suave moral philosophers from elite US universities expounding on merits of “just war” — a concept, interestingly enough, first developed in imperial Rome — and the “right of intervention” on the side of human rights, etc. That has had a remarkable effect globally, starting with the imperial centres but spreading among the empire’s clients in the Third World...
Eleventh, we are witnessing an evolving new system of sovereignty and citizenship. I have referred already, as have numerous other scholars, to the emergence of new legal regimes. The twin cities of Washington DC and New York serve as the combined capital city of this empire because they are the headquarters not only of the US government, which is the decisive fact, but also of most key institutions of this new imperial sovereignty: Wall Street, IMF, the World Bank, WTO, the United Nations and so on...
Twelfth, the ideology of globalization has produced much nonsense on the question of the nation-state and its supposed demise in the face of capitalist universalization. In reality, the nation-state form seems to be alive and proliferating. The United States has a military establishment that is national — and most jingoistically nationalist — to the core.
Germany, the most powerful member of the European Union, has just achieved its expanded national consolidation, by virtually colonizing the eastern zones. The spectacular growth of the so-called ‘East Asian tigers’ was unthinkable without the strong interventionist state. Policies of neo-liberal privatizations are carried out across the world by individual nation-states.
Capital wants no barriers but labour regimes are always national, even for immigrants as they move from one national regime to another: you only have to ask the Mexicans in Mexico City or, alternatively, in California — not to speak of Indian workers in the Gulf kingdoms. What globalization does want is a nation state that is weak in relation to labour but strong on behalf of capital.
Finally, the massive re-organization of culture. The central fact here is that we are witnessing the emergence of a worldwide capitalist civilization, in which national, regional and local cultures are being re-organized as so many variants of that singular civilization. Civilizational homogeneity exists at the deepest level, the level of commodification. But, at the level of second-order reality — that is to say, in the phenomenal form of the commodity — all kinds of differences are maintained, encouraged, even manufactured — because without that diversification, the illusion of freedom and choice cannot be maintained, which is the very essence of the market.
Excerpted with permission from
On Communalism and Globalization: Offensives of the Far Right
By Aijaz Ahmad
Three Essays Collective, 57-C, LIG, Motia Khan, New Delhi 110055, India
Tel: 09868126587, 09810991412
Email: info@threeessays.com Website: www.threeessays.com
ISBN 81-88789-14-3
117pp. Indian Rs150 $18.00
|
|
