[E-rundbrief] Info 78 - Walden Bello: Global Civil Society meets at WSF Mumbai

[Matthias Reichl]

E-Rundbrief - Info 78 - Walden Bello: Global Civil Society meets amidst 
Crisis of Empire - at WSF Mumbai

Bad Ischl, 20.1.2004

Begegnungszentrum für aktive Gewaltlosigkeit
www.begegnungszentrum.at

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THIS year's World Social Forum - the first to be held in Asia -- is 
important. Four year's after the first brilliant and inspiring gathering in 
Porto Alegre, Brazil, we are facing a world situation where the stakes are 
still frighteningly high, with new threats but also with new opportunities. 
The US' imperial ambitions are leading it into direct confrontation with 
adversaries and allies alike, paradoxically resulting in fractures to the 
post-Cold War consensus that gave us rampant "globalisation" and the 
disintegration of politics and society. These cracks let in the light.

Tens of thousands are coming to Mumbai with a sense of urgency and 
optimism: urgency because of the problems we face and optimism because the 
movement for change is growing. We all believe that while me must continue 
to talk, we must also act. The trajectory of militarisation foisted on the 
rest of the world by the US, the growing nuclear threat in Asia, 
corporations running amok with greed and corruption, ecological disasters 
consuming communities and livelihoods, cannot continue. Our collective 
future is at stake.

This year, also for the first time, there will be a significant 
representation from the Arab and Islamic worlds - a deliberate and 
essential effort by everyone to bring together justice, peace and 
anti-imperialist movements from all parts of the world, in spite of the 
attempts to divide us by religion.

On the eve of the 4th World Social Forum, we have in this issue of Focus on 
Trade an overview of the world situation from Walden Bello, a view from the 
heart of Mumbai on the politics of place, and a report from Iraq on why the 
"reconstruction" is at a standstill.

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GLOBAL CIVIL SOCIETY MEETS AMIDST CRISIS OF EMPIRE By Walden Bello*

For the thousands of representatives of global civil society who will be 
gathering in Mumbai for the World Social Forum on January 16- 22, 
Washington is the world's number one problem. Yet what a difference a year 
makes!  The US they confront today is not quite the same cocksure 
superpower of yesterday.

When George W. Bush landed on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off 
the California coast on May 1st last year to mark the end of the war in 
Iraq, Washington seemed to be at the zenith of its power, with many 
commentators calling it, with a mixture of awe and disgust, the "New 
Rome."  The carrier landing, as Canadian scholar Anthony Wallace points 
out, was a celebration of power-a spectacle that was masterfully 
choreographed along the lines of the American sci-fi thriller Independence 
Day and Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will.

In the opening scene of Triumph, Adolf Hitler is pictured approaching from 
the air the Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg in 1934. President Bush began his 
big spectacle on board the Abraham Lincoln by touching down on the vessel's 
deck in a S-3B Viking jet. Emblazoned on the windshield of the aircraft 
were the words "Commander in Chief."  The US president then emerged in full 
fighter garb, invoking the imagery of the dramatic concluding scenes in 
Independence Day.  In those scenes, an American president leads a global 
coalition from the cockpit of a small jet fighter. The aim of this US-led 
operation is to defend the planet from the attack of outer-space aliens.

But fortune is fickle, particularly in wartime.

Less than six months later, in mid-September, the US, along with the 
European Union, lost the "Battle of Cancun," as the fifth Ministerial 
Meeting of the World Trade Organization collapsed in that Mexican tourist 
town.  A key architect of the successful effort to thwart Washington and 
Brussels' plan to impose their agenda on the developing world was the newly 
formed Group of 20, led by Brazil, India, South Africa, and China.

That the G20 dared to challenge Washington was not unrelated to the fact 
that by September, the legitimacy of the invasion was in tatters owing to 
the collapse of the weapons-of- mass-destruction rationale for waging the 
war; Bush's loyal ally, Tony Blair, was fighting for his political life; 
and US forces in Iraq were being subjected to something akin to the ancient 
torture known as "Death by a Thousand Cuts."

Power is partly a function of perception, and the inflation of US power 
right after the Iraq invasion was followed by an even more rapid deflation 
in the next few months. With its image transformed into that of a flailing 
Gulliver lashing out ineffectively at unseen Lilliputians in Baghdad and 
other cities in central Iraq, other candidates for "regime change" such as 
Pyongyang, Damascus, and Teheran saw Washington's missives as increasingly 
hollow. Washington was not unaware of the rapid erosion, in the eyes of the 
world, of its capacity to coerce: by late October, in fact, George W. Bush 
was talking, Bill Clinton-like, about giving a "security pledge" to North 
Korea, the aggressive isolation of which had been one of the hallmarks of 
this first year in office.

Unable to call for a higher troop commitment without triggering the 
perception of being trapped in a war without a foreseeable ending, 
Washington was desperate.  By the time of the Cancun ministerial, the 
message coming out of Washington was:  "We want to get out of Iraq, but not 
with our tail between our legs.  We need UN cover, some semblance of a 
multinational security force to leave behind, and some semblance of a 
functioning governme nt."

US authorities hailed the passing on October 17 of a watered-down UN 
Security Council resolution authorizing a multinational force under US 
leadership, but most observers saw few non-US occupation troops and little 
non-US funding for reconstruction resulting from its vague provisions.  To 
many governments, it was reminiscent of "peace with honor," Richard Nixon's 
exit strategy from Vietnam, and few were willing to become ensnared in a 
los t cause.  When Washington announced an accelerated withdrawal plan a 
few weeks later in response to increasingly effective guerrilla attacks, 
the impression stuck that, indeed, the Bush administration was after a 
Vietnam- style exit.

By the third week of October, 104 US occupation soldiers had been killed 
since Bush's May 1st declaration ending the war-with the average death rate 
hitting one a day in the first three weeks of the month.  In November, a 
lso known as Washington's cruelest month, some 74 US combatants were killed 
in action, over 30 of them in three helicopters brought down by Iraqi 
fire.  By the end of 2003, some 325 US troops had been killed in combat sin 
ce the invasion of Iraq in March, 210 of them since Bush's Nuremberg-style 
descent from the skies.

The capture of Saddam Hussein in mid-December simply served to confirm that 
Saddam was not in control of what was clearly a people's resistance since 
guerrilla attacks continued unabated.  And as 2004 commences, the quest ion 
is no longer whether the Iraqi resistance would stage their equivalent of a 
Tet Offensive but when.

THE DYNAMICS OF OVEREXTENSION The Iraq quagmire and the collapse of the 
Cancun ministerial of the WTO were just two manifestations of that fatal 
disease of empires: over-extension.  There were other critical indicators, 
among them: - the failure to consolidate a dependent regime in Afghanistan 
where the writ of the Karzai government only extends to the outskirts of 
Kabul; - the utter failure to stabilize the Palestine situation, with 
Washington increasingly held hostage by the Sharon government's lack of any 
interest in serious negotiations to bring about a viable Palestinian state; 
- the paradoxical boost given to Islamic extremism not only in its Middle 
Eastern birthplace but in South Asia and Southeast Asia by US-led 
invasions-that of Iraq and Afghanistan-that had been justified to snuff out 
terro rism; - the unraveling of the Atlantic Alliance that won the Cold 
War; - the emergence in Washington's own backyard of anti-US, 
anti-free-market regimes exemplified by those led by Luis Inacio da Silva 
in Brazil and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela while the US was focused on the 
Middle East - the rise of a massive transborder civil society movement that 
has led the increasingly successful drive to delegitimize the US presence 
in Iraq and contributed decisively to the collapse of the WTO ministerials 
in Seatt le and Cancun.

IMPERIAL DILEMMA Against such challenges to its hegemony, the US's absolute 
superiority in nuclear and conventional warfare capability counts for 
little, in much the same way that a sledgehammer is useless in swatting 
flies.  To intervene , invade, and enforce an occupation, ground forces 
will continue to be the decisive element, but there is no way the US 
public, most of whom no longer see the Iraq invasion as worth its price in 
US casualties, will tolera te a significant expansion in ground troop 
commitments beyond the 168,000 serving in Iraq and the Gulf states and some 
47,000 deployed to Afghanistan, South Korea, the Philippines, and the Balkans.

One option is to return to the gunboat diplomacy of the Clinton era, to 
what Boston University's Andrew Bacevich describes as the calibrated 
application of airpower without ground force commitments "to punish, draw 
lines, signal, and negotiate." The Bush people, however, rail against such 
an option, and for good reason: whether it was Bill Clinton's fusillade of 
cruise missiles against Osama bin Laden's reported hideouts in Afghanistan 
an d Sudan or President Lyndon Baines Johnson's Operation Rolling Thunder 
against North Vietnam in 1964, air strikes are very limited in their impact 
against a determined foe.  But then neither does the ground troop option f 
are any better, leading to the question: is the US in a no-win situation?

The problem is that the Bush people have unlearned a vital lesson of 
imperial management: that, as Bacevich puts it, "Governing any empire is a 
political, economic, and military undertaking; but it is a moral one as 
well. "  If the Roman Empire lasted 700 years, says UCLA's Michael Mann, it 
is because the Romans figured out that the solution to the problem of 
overextension was not the deployment of more and more legions but the 
extension o f citizenship first to local elites, then to all freemen.

For much of the post-World War II period, in fact, the dominant bipartisan 
faction of the US political elite exhibited the Roman realization that a 
"moral vision" was central to imperial management.  That was a world forg 
ed mainly by alliance-building, undergirded by multilateral mechanisms such 
as the United Nations, World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, and 
resting on the belief that, as Frances Fitzgerald put it, "electoral 
democracy combined with private ownership and civil liberties, was what the 
United States had to offer the Third World."

National Security Memorandum 68, the defining document of the Cold War, was 
not simply a national security strategy; it was an ideological vision that 
spoke of a "long twilight struggle" against communism for the loyaltie s of 
the peoples and countries throughout the world.  This cannot be said of the 
current administration's National Security Strategy document which speaks 
in narrow terms of the American mission mainly as one of defending the 
American way of life from its enemies abroad and arrogates the right to 
strike against even potential threats in pursuit of American 
interests.  Even when the reigning neoconservatives speak about extending 
democracy to the Middle East, they cannot dispel the impression that they 
see democracy in the light of realpolitik--as a mechanism to destroy Arab 
unity in order to assure the existence of Israel and guarantee US access to 
oil.

A RETURN TO MULTILATERALISM Can a more sophisticated administration undo 
the damage to US imperial management wrought by the Bush presidency by 
bringing back mutilateralism and a "moral" dimension to empire? Perhaps, 
but even this approach may be anachronistic.  For history does not stand 
still.  It will be difficult for a reinvigorated US-led coalition politics 
to douse the wildfire of Islamic fundamentalist reaction that wi ll 
eventually bring down or seriously erode the staying power of US allies 
like the Saudi and Gulf elites.  Going back to the Cold War era promise of 
extending democracy is unlikely to work with disenchanted people who ha ve 
seen US-supported elite-controlled democracies in places like Pakistan and 
the Philippines become obstacles to economic and social equality.  To 
revert to the Clinton era of promising prosperity via accelerated globali 
zation won't work either since the overwhelming evidence is that, as even 
the World Bank admits, poverty and inequality increased globally in the 
1990s -- the decade of accelerated globalization.

As for economic multilateralism, financier George Soros' appeal for a 
reform of the IMF, World Bank, and WTO to promote a more equitable form of 
globalization may seem sound, but it is unlikely to draw the support of the 
dominant US business interests which, after all, torpedoed the WTO talks 
with their aggressive protectionist posture on agriculture, intellectual 
property rights, and steel tariffs, and their gangbuster attitudes towards 
other economies in the areas of investment rights, capital mobility, and 
the export of genetically  modified products.  Armed with the ideological 
smokescreen of free trade, the US corporate establishment is, in fact, lik 
ely to become even more protectionist and mercantilist in the era of global 
stagnation, deflation, and diminishing profits that the world has entered.

CHALLENGERS And the future? Militarily, there is no doubt that Washington 
will retain absolute superiority in gross indices of military might such as 
nuclear warheads, conventional weaponry, and aircraft carriers, but the 
ability to transform military power into effective intervention will 
decline as the "Iraq syndrome" takes hold.

The break-up of the Atlantic Alliance is irreversible, with the conflict 
over Iraq merely accelerating the disruptive dynamics of differences 
building since the 1990s in practically all dimensions of international 
relatio ns. Europe will most likely move towards creating a European 
Defense Force independent of NATO, though it will not challenge US 
strategic superiority.  Politically, however, Europe will increasingly slip 
out of the US orb it and present an alternative pole--pursuing regional 
self-interest via a liberal, diplomacy-oriented, and multilateral approach.

In terms of economic strength, the US will remain the dominant power over 
the next two decades, but it is likely to slip as the source of its 
hegemony--the global framework for transnational capitalist cooperation to 
whic h the WTO is central--is eroded.  Bilateral or regional trade 
arrangements are likely to proliferate, but the most dynamic ones may not 
be those integrating weak economies with one superpower like the US or EU 
but regiona l economic arrangements among developing countries-or, in the 
parlance of development economics, "South-South cooperation."  Formations, 
such as Mercosur in Latin America, the Association of Southeast Asian 
Nations (ASEAN ), and the G20, will increasingly reflect the key lessons 
that developing countries have learned over the last 25 years of 
destabilizing globalization: that trade policy must be subordinated to 
development, that technolog y must be liberated from stringent intellectual 
property rules, that capital controls are necessary, that development 
demands not less but more state intervention.  And, above all, that the 
weak must hang together, or the y will hang separately.

Among the developing countries, China is, of course, in a category by 
itself.  Indeed, China is one of the winners of the Bush era.  It has 
managed to be on the side of everybody on key economic and political 
conflicts an d thus on the side of nobody but China.  As the US has become 
ensnared in wars without end, China has deftly maneuvered to stay free of 
entangling commitments to pursue rapid economic growth, technological 
deepening, and political stability.  Democratization, of course, remains an 
urgent need, but the unraveling of China owing to its slow progress--which 
many China watchers love to predict to sell their books--is not likely to 
happen.

The other big winner of the last few years is what the New York Times 
called the world's "second superpower "after the US.  This is global civil 
society, a force whose most dynamic expression is the World Social Forum 
tha t is meeting in Mumbai. This rapidly expanding trans-border network 
that spans the South and the North is the main force for peace, democracy, 
fair trade, justice, human rights, and sustainable 
development.  Governments a s disparate as Beijing and Washington deride 
its claims.  Corporations hate it.  And multilateral agencies find 
themselves compelled to adopt its language of "rights."  But its increasing 
ability to delegitimize power and cut into corporate bottom lines is a fact 
of international relations that they will have to live with.

A decreased US capacity to control global events, the rise of regional 
economic blocks as the multilateral system declines, rising assertiveness 
among developing countries, and the emergence of global civil society as an 
increasingly powerful check on states and corporations-these trends are 
likely to accelerate in the next few years.

History is cunning and mischievous, often playing an outrageous game of 
bringing about precisely the opposite than what its actors intend.  "Full 
spectrum dominance" by the United States in the 21st century has been the a 
vowed objective of the neoconservatives that came to power with George 
Bush.   Paradoxically, pursuit of this objective by the current 
administration has accelerated the erosion of US hegemony-a process that 
might have be en slowed down by a more skilled imperial elite.

The crowds in Mumbai will undoubtedly continue to regard the US as a mortal 
threat to global peace and justice, but they will also be cheered by the 
increasing difficulties of an arrogant empire that fails to see that dec 
line is inevitable and that the challenge is not to resist the process but 
to manage it deftly.

*Walden Bello is professor of sociology and public administration at the 
University of the Philippines and executive director of the Bangkok-based 
research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South.  He is one of t 
he recipients of the Right Livelihood Award-better known as the Alternative 
Nobel Prize-for 2003.

Aus: FOCUS ON TRADE, NUMBER 96, JANUARY 2004

Focus on the Global South (FOCUS)
c/o CUSRI, Chulalongkorn University
Bangkok 10330 THAILAND
Tel: 662 218 7363/7364/7365/7383
Fax: 662 255 9976
E-mail: N.Bullard at focusweb.org
Web Page   http://www.focusweb.org

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Matthias Reichl
Begegnungszentrum für aktive Gewaltlosigkeit
Wolfgangerstr.26
A-4820 Bad Ischl
Tel. +43-6132-24590
e-mail: mareichl at ping.at
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