{"id":872,"date":"2019-03-06T23:58:03","date_gmt":"2019-03-06T23:58:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wsm.prolerat.org\/?page_id=872"},"modified":"2019-10-20T16:03:32","modified_gmt":"2019-10-20T15:03:32","slug":"tomorrows-enemies","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/tomorrows-enemies\/","title":{"rendered":"Tomorrow’s enemies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Gwynn Thomas argues that since the end of the Cold War, conventional war has become more likely.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

\nSince the emergence of a recognisably modern Europe after the Treaty of \nWestphalia of 1648 international relations have been based on the \npolitical sovereignty of states in which war became the \npolitically-motivated use of force by generally recognised authorities. \nWars between dynastic states became wars between nation states. Wars of \nstate formation and consolidation were replaced by wars of unification \nand of imperial conquest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an era of European global expansion built on the technological and\n military superiority of industrial capitalism, clashes also occurred \nbetween Europeans and the indigenous populations they conquered. For \nmore than two hundred years wars between expanding European states were \nmotivated by economic necessity driven by the need for access to \nmarkets, exploitable populations, and sources of raw materials. The \ngrowth of European (or \u201cWestern\u201d) influence was carried out with a sense\n of civilising mission and justified with ideas of racial superiority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The carnage of the First World War called the whole project into \nquestion. For the next ninety years the existence of state systems and \ntheir international relations were debated largely in terms of ideology.\n They were interpreted as titanic struggles firstly \u201cagainst fascism\u201d \nwhile the Soviet Union built its own brand of state capitalism, and in \nthe post-World War II period \u201cagainst communism\u201d. The European \nwithdrawals from direct rule over former colonial territory in the face \nof indigenous nationalist movements after 1945 were interpreted \nideologically as wars of \u201cnational liberation\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The centrally planned economy version of capitalism eventually \nsuccumbed to its more efficient liberal free-market variety. The \nimplosion of the Soviet Union was greeted with joy among the NATO allies\n and we were promised a golden age in which to spend the \u201cpeace \ndividend.\u201d Spending on armaments by the major powers actually declined. \nHowever the euphoria was soon dissipated and the world was confronted \nwith wars of disintegrating states, and continuing wars in the not quite\n and the not yet states. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It has become increasingly difficult for politicians and others to \nexplain these conflicts as having anything to do with high ideals such \nas defending democracy. Increasingly the more perceptive observers and \ncommentators are labelling the \u201csmall wars\u201d of Africa and Asia as \u201cwars \nof oil and diamonds\u201d, and those of Latin America as \u201cdrug wars\u201d \ncharacterising them as piratical acts carried out in states incapable of\n enforcing the rule of a centralised authority. Even so-called \n\u201cpeaceful\u201d Europe had its own backyard war in the Balkans as tensions \npreviously held in check by Cold War priorities erupted into bloody \narmed conflict.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

End of History?<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Two influential interpretations of what is happening in the \npost-post-cold war world have appeared since 1989. They attempt to set \nthe boundaries within which political debate takes place and try to \navoid political questions some might find upsetting regarding the true \nnature of present-day society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Commenting in 1989 on the end of the Cold War Francis Fukuyama, a \npolicy planner in the US State Department, identified a feeling abroad \n\u201cthat something very fundamental has happened in world history.\u201d He \ncharacterised this as \u201cthe Triumph of the West\u201d, a situation in which \neconomic and political liberalism having first seen off Absolutism and \nFascism had finally seen the end of Marxism-Leninism. The Soviet Union \nwas disintegrating and this demonstrated \u201cThe total exhaustion of viable\n systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.\u201d It was, he said, \u201cthe \nend of history as such\u201d (Francis Fukuyama: ‘The End of History?’ The \nNational Interest. Summer 1989 pages 3 – 18).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh sure, stuff would still actually happen but what had been reached \nwas the endpoint in mankind’s ideological evolution. The ideals of the \nFrench and American Revolutions had triumphed, their theoretical truth \n\u201cis absolute and cannot be improved on.\u201d The failure of \u201cMarxism\u201d he \nsaid was in large part a \u201cfailure to understand that the roots of \neconomic behaviour lie in the realm of consciousness and culture.\u201d \nConsciousness he said \u201cis cause and not effect\u201d and went on to argue for\n the \u201cautonomous power\u201d of ideas. For Fukuyama it is ideas and not \ninterests which drive historic change, which seems to imply that we have\n had capitalism simply because some thought it a good idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Further he argued that \u201cthe class issue has actually been \nsuccessfully resolved in the West\u201d and that the roots of present \ninequalities are not to be found in the legal and social structures of \nsociety which are fundamentally egalitarian and moderately \nredistributive. The problem is not the form of society as \u201cwith the \ncultural and social characteristics of the groups that make it up.\u201d \nThese groups are themselves a legacy from the pre-modern period. This, \nit will be noted, is a classic piece of blame the victim excuse-making \nwhich makes the poor responsible for their poverty. It is a popular view\n in some circles as it fits in well with the prevailing capitalist \napologetics. It represents the triumph of individualism over collective \naction. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And where the West had led the world would follow. Fukuyama pointed \nto post-1945 Japan’s transition from fascism and government intervention\n to being a political and economic beacon of light fostering free \nenterprise economic liberalism in Asia, and in particular to China. He \ncould identify no serious challenges from e.g. nationalism or religious \nfundamentalism, Western consumerism and the human need to be valued as \nan individual were too powerful to be resisted anywhere for long. True, \nthe Third World was still mired in history and will in his view be \u201ca \nterrain of conflict for many years to come.\u201d In addition the Soviet \nUnion was not likely to join the developed nations of the West as open \nsocieties \u201cat any time in the foreseeable future.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was of course written prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall but \nreading it now one is reminded of the Astronomer Royal who said in 1957 \nthat manned space flight was \u201cimpossible\u201d, and we wonder if the State \nDepartment now thinks they were getting their money’s worth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem with this approach is that it is mistaken as to what \nconstitutes history and historical agency, as to what that brings about \nmajor historical change. For Fukuyama it is economic and scientific \ndevelopments and their culmination in the fulfilling of an abstract idea\n of \u201chuman freedom\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Absent from his account is the collective political action by human \nbeings in pursuit of their interests. By his account human actors on the\n stage of history are expected to accept their allotted roles. The \ncontradiction between production which is collective and ownership which\n is private is ignored. The consequent class domination and exploitation\n seem not to enter the picture. And what happens when capitalism \ncontinues to fail to meet real human needs? For all its prodigious \nproductive capacity capitalism only produces what can be sold at a \nprofit leaving the many hundreds, if not thousands of millions in \nvarying degrees of poverty and insecurity. Surrounded by a plethora of \nconsumer goods many in \u201cthe West\u201d appear to suffer what the American \npoet Randal Jarell called \u201cA sad heart in the Supermarket.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Clash of civilisations?<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

With the supposed \u201cdeath of ideology\u201d and the emergence of a \npost-modern world a new rationale for arms spending and a new bogeyman \nhad to be found. One was not long in coming. A heavyweight journal, read\n mainly by academics and policy makers, published an article outlining \nthe thoughts Harvard Professor Samuel P. Huntington on the matter. (‘The\n Clash of Civilisations?’ Foreign Affairs Summer 1993). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The collapse of the former Soviet Union and the emergence of a \nmulti-polar world dominated by the USA as the only superpower was not in\n his view the end of history but rather it heralded a return to \ntraditional rivalries. The divisions of the post-cold war world will, he\n said, be cultural ones between civilisations. He identified eight or so\n based mainly on religious systems of thought. Clashes between nations \nwill be replaced by clashes between nations and groups of different \ncivilisations. Civilisations have as their most important determining \ncharacteristic not history, language, tradition or culture but religion.\n Except for micro-level clashes over the control of adjacent territory \nthe clashes of civilisations will not be concerned with the protection \nand promotion of vital interests so much as with the advancement of \nparticular political and religious values.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But even here he is inconsistent. Among \u201ccivilisations\u201d are four \nnon-religious classifications: \u201cWestern\u201d (by which he seems to mean \nNorthwest European Protestant, and possibly Catholic, and their North \nAmerican and Old Commonwealth descendants) \u201cLatin American\u201d (also mainly\n Christian but with an admixture of African and indigenous peoples), \n\u201cJapanese\u201d and \u201cpossibly African\u201d. Another oddity is his hiving off of \none group of Christians, the \u201cSlavic-Orthodox\u201d (possibly because they \nare for him not \u201creal\u201d Christians, and possibly because of their \n\u201cethnic\u201d roots they are not \u201creally\u201d Europeans either?). On the other \nhand he seems willing to lump together all of those of the Islamic faith\n Arabs, Africans, and Indonesians alike while ignoring the important \ndivide between Sunnis and Shiites. And he ignores the major clashes both\n between and within Islamic states (Iraq against Iran as an example of \nthe first and the breakaway of East Pakistan to form Bangladesh an \nexample of the second).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Civilisations have, he says, existed for far longer than nation \nstates as organising principles. As economic modernisation and social \nchange erode long-standing local identities, civilisations are left as \nthe largest possible identifying principle. They will replace ideologies\n such as liberalism, free enterprise, fascism, communism etc. as belief \nsystems around which alliances can be formed and enemies identified and \ndemonised. Conflicts will in future occur \u201calong the cultural fault \nlines\u201d separating the world’s eight or so civilisations from one another\n and will become the dominant form of conflicts in the world with the \never present danger of escalation to a global level. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Huntington’s analysis does not of course explain the many wars \nstarted within his proposed \u201ccivilisations\u201d \u2013 those of Christian Europe \nor Confucian China for example \u2013 nor those regions where different \ncivilisations co-exist relatively amicably for long periods. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For those of us too dim to see exactly where he is going, he \nidentifies Islam as the new (old) enemy as a continuation of the \n\u201ccenturies-old military interaction between the West and Islam [which] \nis unlikely to decline. It could become more virulent.\u201d Ignoring the \nBritish conquest of part of South Asia (partly Muslim and partly Hindu),\n its occupation with France of areas of the Middle East and North Africa\n (almost entirely Muslim in faith), and the Dutch empire in Indonesia \n(also largely Muslim), Huntington has the gall to warn his readers that \n\u201cIslam has bloody borders.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He gives as an example the war in the Balkans which followed the \nbreak-up of the former Yugoslavia. This area occupied the supposed \n\u201cfault line\u201d between the (Christian) Habsburg Empire and the (Muslim and\n Orthodox) Ottoman Empire. (Remember that for Huntington the Greek \nOrthodox is not \u201creally\u201d Christian.) But while the wars of Yugoslav \nsuccession were fought between and by people who happened to identify \nthemselves as Orthodox or Catholic or Muslim or \u201cCommunist\u201d, that is not\n why Yugoslavia broke up. This conflict had powerful economic motives \nand arose over the division of incomes and revenues between provinces \nhaving differing degrees of economic development. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Historically the proclaimed identities of the Balkan contestants were\n worked out by academics and intellectuals and in the main imposed on \nthe populations by nationalists. These identities were subsequently \nmanipulated by political elites when it suited their agendas. Bosnia \nfell victim to a land grab by two other Yugoslav provinces which \nprompted the intervention by NATO forces to \u201crestore peace\u201d. Turkey, a \nmember of NATO, and the only one with a common border with the former \nSoviet Union against whom NATO was formed, while nominally a secular \nstate, has a population the majority of whom identify themselves as \nMuslim.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What then is Huntington’s agenda?<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Huntington puts forward what he calls his \u201cplausible hypothesis\u201d \nwarning that the economic and military strength of the \u201cnon-western\u201d \ncivilisations will increase relative to that of \u201cthe West\u201d. This new \nsituation \u201cwill require the West to maintain the economic and military \npower necessary to protect its interests in relation to these \ncivilisations\u201d [emphasis added]. It will not go unnoticed that this \nthesis fits perfectly with the need to re-demonise the populations of \nthe Middle East for example as Arab, Iranian, Islamic and \u201cother\u201d. What \nit does is provide a \u201crespectable\u201d theoretical justification for the \ncontinuation of the warfare state that can be repeated ad nauseum in the\n popular media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Huntingdon’s thesis can be shown to be flawed on a number of other \ngrounds, the chief of which is that for at least the past two centuries \nthe modern world has been organised around the exploitation of wage \nlabour. No matter what the political, religious, or ideological label \nreads the principal economic drive has been the production of wealth for\n sale on the market in the hope of profit. Capitalism is now by far the \ndominant mode of wealth production throughout the globe. It is the needs\n of capitalist economies that drive a state’s foreign policy as its \nrelations with other capitalist states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conflict over access to and control of vital resources by competing \nnations have for the past one hundred years been rendered respectable by\n the cloak of capitalist ideology. They are no longer capable of being \nso masked. And as Margaret Thatcher observed, the end of the Cold War \nand the subsequent reduction of the threat of nuclear conflagration \nbetween the two super-powers has made the world much safer for \nconventional warfare as a tool of international relations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Back to the Politics Index<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Back to the World Socialist Movement home page<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gwynn Thomas argues that since the end of the Cold War, conventional war has become more likely. Since the emergence of a recognisably modern Europe after the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 international relations have been based on the political sovereignty of states in which war became the politically-motivated use of force by generally recognised…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"magazine_newspaper_sidebar_layout":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-872","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=872"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/872\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2590,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/872\/revisions\/2590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}