[E-rundbrief] Info 667 - Susan George: Globalisation and war

[Matthias Reichl]

E-Rundbrief - Info 667 - Susan George (F): Globalisation and war. Speech 
at the International congress of IPPNW, New Delhi, 10 March 2008.

Bad Ischl, 22.3.2008

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Globalisation and war

Susan George

International congress of IPPNW, New Delhi, 10 March 2008

Corporate-led, finance-driven globalisation has successfully transferred 
wealth from labour to capital. This has resulted in inequality and 
exclusion on a massive scale which, combined with the pressure on water 
and other environmental resources, is likely to fuel new conflicts.

First let me thank IPPNW for this invitation to speak at your 18th World 
Congress. It's a great honour and I'm very grateful since I have admired 
your work for many years. I would especially like to thank Doctors Arun 
Mitra and Christoph Kraemer who went to a great deal of trouble on my 
behalf.

The subject you've asked me to discuss, "Globalisation and War", is vast 
and we may as well begin by defining terms so that we are all reading 
from the same page. "Globalisation" is a much abused word, rather like 
"development", and doesn't mean much unless accompanied by a couple of 
adjectives and an explanation. My adjectives would be "neo-liberal", 
"corporate-led", "finance-driven", or whatever else evokes for you the 
present phase of world capitalism---the kind of capitalism others have 
called, turbo- or super- or hyper-capitalism.

Globalisation is "corporate-driven"; it's the system which allows 
transnational business and finance to invest what they want where they 
want; to produce what they want; and to buy and sell what they want, 
everywhere, with the fewest restrictions possible coming from labour 
laws, social conventions or environmental regulations. That definition 
is not mine, it is that of a prominent European business man. 
Globalisation is also "finance-driven": we need only look at the vast 
mess in the financial markets today to see how free to operate they have 
been. Government officials who are supposed to be regulating these 
markets no longer have a clue what is going on. Let us recall too the 
slogan that Klaus Schwab gave to this year's festivities in Davos: "The 
power of collaborative innovation". Well, the finance people have 
certainly been innovating like mad and now, after having collected 
enormous bonuses, they want the taxpayers to bail them out, as usual. 
The United States Congress is working with their representatives on 
legislation to do that right now. The corporations and the banks demand 
deregulation until they get themselves into trouble, but in that case, 
of course, State intervention is justified.

Since this talk is about globalisation and war, here is an initial 
opportunity to make the link to war. In a book just launched, The Three 
Trillion Dollar War, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and 
his co-author Linda Bilmes, explains how American spending on the war in 
Iraq actually encouraged Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve to flood 
the American economy with cheap credit, leading to the housing bubble, 
the consumption boom, and the biggest budget deficit in history. We have 
an opportunity to learn how the Iraq war indirectly led to hundreds of 
thousands of US families losing their homes.

On its own terms and for those in the forefront driving the process, 
corporate-led, finance-driven globalisation has been extremely 
successful. They have accomplished exactly what they set out to do. The 
whole point of capitalism is to make as large a profit as possible and 
to increase so-called "shareholder value", so the result, when 
successful is systematically to transfer wealth from labour to capital. 
We now live in what John Maynard Keynes called a "rentier economy"; the 
kind in which you make money while you sleep because you own capital. 
Measured by its own yardsticks, the system is booming. Profits of 
transnational corporations have been running at record levels and 
shareholders have been demanding, and receiving, returns of 10, 15, even 
20 percent a year, as, for example, British banks have supplied, at 
least until this year. Tax havens and offshore companies shelter the 
wealth of the companies and of rich individuals, as the ongoing scandal 
in Germany and other European countries is making clearer every day.

The number of millionaires and billionaires, including now four in 
India, has escalated steadily so that now there are about nine and a 
half million people, or about one for every 700 people on earth, that 
the brokerage house Merrill Lynch calls High Net Worth Individuals who 
together possess, in liquid funds, some 37 trillion dollars---that is 37 
followed by 12 zeros. This is about three times the GDP of either the 
United States or of Europe and more than a dozen times the GDP of India. 
So globalisation has been extremely good to those at the top of our 
various societies. We have statistical proof also that the share of 
added value accruing to capital is swelling as the share of labour 
declines---in Europe, capital's share has risen to about 40 percent, 
compared to 25 percent thirty years ago.

The benefits of globalisation for ordinary people have been far more 
problematic, particularly in the mature capitalist countries that I know 
best. Business quite correctly sees two great obstacles to higher 
profits which are labour costs and taxes, and it has consequently 
concentrated on reducing both. Mass layoffs have become common. Workers 
are placed in competition with each other throughout the world. Within 
Europe itself, wage differences are already on a scale of one to ten; 
worldwide, they are at least one to thirty. This means a race to the 
bottom for working people while wages, benefits and working conditions 
are pushed downwards. Such competition now affects not just industrial 
production but any kind of work that can be done on a computer. I would 
warn even Indians, some of whom have so far profited from these trends, 
that there is always someone prepared to work for less than you---as the 
Malaysians and even the Indonesians have discovered.

The numbers also show huge and growing inequalities between people, both 
inside individual countries and between countries. The more neo-liberal, 
anti-regulation, pro-free trade a country is, the greater the 
inequalities are. No one disputes these growing disparities: those who 
defend neo-liberal globalisation argue that it pushes the floor upwards 
for everyone---a highly disputable proposition in a world where a 
billion people live with the purchasing power of a dollar a day and half 
the world with that of less than two dollars.

Furthermore, we know that transnational businesses, finance corporations 
and wealthy individuals contribute less and less proportionally in taxes 
to national budgets. This means that ordinary people, consumers and 
local businesses pay more than their fair share. It means that 
governments are hard-pressed to provide services to their populations 
because their revenues are under steady pressure. Internationally 
speaking, treaties are also designed to be extremely business-friendly. 
For example in the case of the agreements under the auspices of the 
World Trade Organisation, the thousands of pages of rules are careful to 
protect the interests of finance and business but are totally silent on 
labour, the environment or human rights. The new Lisbon Treaty for 
Europe, in process of ratification by parliaments, has 410 articles in 
which the word "market" is used 63 times and "competition" 25 times, but 
"social progress" gets three mentions, "full employment" one and 
"unemployment" none.

Marxists put exploitation of labour at the centre of their discourse. 
This may have been the case in the nineteenth century, but I would 
suggest that they are now missing the point. Today it is almost a 
privilege to be exploited. The real problem is that globalisation takes 
the best and leaves the rest. Of course it exploits, but more than that, 
it excludes. We must face such facts however much we may deplore them. 
There are huge regions in which the drivers of globalisation take little 
or no interest. Present day globalisation is not interested either in 
the hundreds of millions of people who do not produce within the market 
system and consume so little that they scarcely register. We should 
above all stop asking the "market" to solve our social problems. Markets 
can and do perform extremely valuable services in some areas, but social 
services are not among them.

A quite famous person wrote the following: " 'All for ourselves and 
nothing for other people' seems, in every age to the world, to have been 
the vile maxim of the masters of mankind". This observation comes not 
from Machiavelli or Karl Marx but from Adam Smith. I think we can take 
this great theoretician of capitalism at his word when he explains to us 
how the capitalist masters of mankind---today the sort of people who 
meet in Davos, can be expected to behave. They may be individually kind 
and generous, but as a class, they will conform to Smith's law. The real 
globalisation debate is therefore not about whether the phenomenon is 
"good" or "bad"---because globalisation is a fact, not an option. The 
real debate in my view should concern what is in the market and what is 
not; what is a marketable commodity and what is not. Should water be 
subject to the laws of the market? Health? Education? Public services? 
Basic foodstuffs? Energy?

Before even attempting to attack such questions, please let me stress 
that the system I have been describing, despite the huge rewards it has 
provided for some, is in crisis. It got a huge push with the end of the 
Cold War, which opened up virtually every place on earth to the forces 
of international capital, but it is now in serious trouble. 
International financial institutions like the World Bank and the 
International Monetary Fund that used to smooth the way for mass 
privatisations and universal market-orientation are much less important 
than they were even a decade ago. The Fund is sacking staff. The World 
Trade Organisation has been deadlocked for nearly three years. I've 
already mentioned the woes of the financial system and the incipient 
recession, which will spread from its epicentre in the United States to 
the rest of the world. Oil, mineral and basic food prices have hit 
all-time highs so that inflation is also a risk.

What is the relationship of all these features of the present world 
economic system to war and violence? Again, please allow me first to 
define terms: my definition of serious conflict will be the one used by 
various peace research institutions: a thousand or more deaths due to 
armed conflict. So we are not just talking about State actors but also 
about civil wars, terrorist attacks and so on. I want also to argue, 
perhaps unconventionally, that other, new, determinants of violence are 
growing more and more common, like environmental stress, and already 
contribute to increased disruption and death.

IPPNW was founded a quarter century ago in the context of the Cold War 
and the super-powers' nuclear arms race. So it may seem to many of you a 
kind of heresy to say that those times, although surely terrifying in 
their own way, also provided a strange kind of stability. No place on 
earth could be considered unimportant by the super-powers because any 
place could become a base, a staging area, a strategic pawn for the 
other side. Today the situation is radically changed. There are a great 
many places that are not worth bothering about; they are full of losers, 
of the excluded, the hundreds of millions seens as rubbish people, both 
disposable and dispensable. There are quite a few loser States as well. 
We, on the other side of the fence, instead call them failed or rogue 
States.

Let me start with the individual losers and their relation to conflict. 
Such people and groups are much more conscious of their situation than 
they used to be. Many studies have shown that the sense of injustice 
relates less to the absolute level of one's purchasing power and status 
in life than it does to the comparison with others. Inequalities are 
increasingly visible everywhere. Lots of ordinary people in Europe are 
witnessing the tax haven scandal; lots of people in the United States 
are being thrown out of the houses they can no longer afford to pay 
for---and they can see that there are big winners and big losers. Even 
in poorer societies, nearly everyone has at least some access to 
television; half the human race now lives in cities, many of them made 
up largely of slums. Resentment is growing. People do not ask themselves 
what they may have done wrong; they ask, rather "Who has done this to 
us?". Because they cannot usually touch the kinds of people they may see 
on television, they may take out their grievances on their neighbours of 
a different ethnic group, as we have recently witnessed in Kenya. You 
don't need nukes---machetes and matches will do as well to murder 
thousands, if not hundreds of thousands. All such conflicts can be 
traced to their economic roots.

Free trade, the bedrock of neoliberal globalisation, also takes its 
toll. One of its consequences, clandestine immigration also results in 
untold numbers of deaths. The NAFTA, the free trade agreement between 
the US, Canada and Mexico has caused the ruin of hundreds of thousands 
of poor, small Mexican farmers, unable to compete with cheap corn now 
flooding the country from the US. Plenty are trying to get into the 
United States; just as Africans and North Africans take enormous risks 
to reach Europe or Bangladeshis to get into India; creating further 
instability and broader terrains for conflicts. It is often US and 
European policies that close off all other economic avenues to people, 
except for immigration. Yet the response is always to use the army, the 
police and various security measures, not negotiation and policy change.

As if all this were not enough, the planet, the environment is also in 
crisis. We already know that climate change is creating massive flows of 
refugees. As their numbers continue to swell, what will our governments 
do? Shoot them? Bomb them? Tell them to commit suicide? I'm not trying 
to be sarcastic, simply realistic, because I see little planning for the 
crises that we know loom ahead and mass attempts to emigrate are 
certainly among them.

The links between conflict and the water crisis are as clear as water 
itself. Water stress and scarcity is increasing, due to the deadly 
combination of population growth, increase in human-induced global 
warming, corporate control and use of water, pollution and so on. In 
this context, the struggle for control over environmental resources is 
deadly serious.

In 1991, the then Secretary General of the United Nations, Boutros 
Boutros Ghali, warned that the next wars would be not about oil but 
about water. In 2008, the present SG, Ban Ki-moon, told first the people 
in Davos, then the UN General Assembly that water wars already existed. 
He laid particular stress on the crises in Kenya, Chad and especially 
Darfur, which some have begun to call the "first climate change war". 
The Nobel Peace Prize Committee took a quantum leap in recognising the 
connections between ecological damage and warfare and the risk of 
environmental war by giving the 2007 prize to Al Gore and the 
Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change.

Marc Levy, a scholar at Columbia, is working to establish the water and 
conflict link scientifically. He works with the International Crisis 
Group and is combining databases on civil wars and water availability, 
showing that "when rainfall is significantly below normal, the risk of a 
low-level conflict escalating to a full-scale civil war approximately 
doubles the following year". Among other cases, he cites the areas of 
Nepal where there was heavy fighting during the Maoist insurgency after 
severe droughts; whereas there was no fighting in other parts of Nepal 
that had not suffered drought. Levy's case studies also point out that 
drought causes food shortages and promotes anger against the government. 
In such cases, "semi-retired" armed groups often re-emerge and start 
fighting again.

The International Crisis Group has placed 70 conflict hotspots on its 
"watch list" and Levy is in process of compiling rainfall data for all 
of them to see if this evidence can help predict increased conflict. His 
approach will undoubtedly help to flag places where wars are most likely 
and, although the work is far from finished, the data strongly support 
the finding that for civil wars, "severe, prolonged droughts are the 
strongest indicator of high-intensity conflict". "I was surprised", adds 
Levy, "at how strong the correlation is".

Military strategists are also acutely interested in the probability of 
water wars. A Professor of Political Military Strategy at the US Army 
War College has published a long scholarly article entitled "The 
Strategic Importance of Water" in which he points out that of the 
world's 200 largest river systems, 150 are shared between two nations 
and the remaining 50 are shared by three to ten nations1.

As we all know, the Middle East is especially fragile and three rivers, 
the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates and the Jordan are central to present and 
potential conflict. the former president of Turkey, Mr Demirel said "We 
do not ask Syria and Iraq to share their oil. Why should they ask us to 
share our water? We can do anything we like". The Jordan is at the heart 
of the Israel-Jordan-Syria-Lebanon-Palestine dilemma. Thanks to the 
territory it captured in the 1967 war, Israel is in control of water to 
which it simultaneously restricts Palestinian access. As one military 
observer has noted, "Israeli strategists always name control over water 
sources as one critical factor making necessary, in their view, 
retention of at least a part of the occupied Arab territories." As for 
the Nile, nine States share its waters and Egypt is the last one 
downstream. Egypt has made quite clear that it is willing to go to war 
against any of the eight upstream states in order to preserve its access 
to the Nile, on which it depends for 97 percent of its water.

As this audience will know better than anyone, the Indus is an element 
of the India-Pakistan conflict and the Ganges plays the same role in 
India-Bangladesh relations. The combination of water scarcity and 
nuclear weapons does nothing to ease the minds of military strategists 
in these regions or elsewhere. And may I add here that one of the best 
arguments against nuclear reactors, quite apart from their inherent 
dangers and the insoluble problem of radioactive wastes is the huge 
amount of water they require in order to remain functional. Nuclear 
reactors are the biggest industrial user of water and in a 
water-stressed country like India, it is quite possible that the 
authorities will be faced with the deadly choice of taking thousands of 
cubic meters of water from local communities or shutting down the 
reactors. After the cooling process, the water is re-injected into the 
environment but at a much higher temperature, so it can do great damage 
to local ecosystems.

Even if we recognise, as we should do, that complex events like 
conflicts can never be ascribed to a single cause, there seems no doubt 
that water will remain an exacerbating factor, particularly since it is 
intimately connected to other vital national needs, like food. Various 
factors ascribable to globalisation have caused grain prices to escalate 
dangerously, leaving poor countries especially open to shortages and 
introducing another common denominator of conflict.

One could elaborate on these crises, but it is important to note that 
worldwide, these various systemic crises---of the economy, of massive 
inequality, of the environment, of migration, of resource-shortage, of 
so-called "failed States" and so on---all these increase the dangers of 
military response. In the poor world, the poor will mostly fight against 
the poor as the system of exclusion and environmental disasters create 
more and more struggles for mere survival. Poor people already live in 
the most threatened areas; the elites are growing quite good at creating 
their local enclaves and fortresses, but these may not protect them 
forever. To prevent their collapse, they will increasingly employ the 
military to control populations perceived as troublesome, superfluous 
and irrelevant.

One cannot find great cause for optimism at the global level either. As 
the United States loses influence in other areas and its economy 
weakens, it will rely increasingly on its unquestioned military 
dominance, becoming thereby even more dangerous than it is today. The 
present extension of the network of US foreign military bases is one key 
to this strategy. Multilateralism will become even more frayed as even 
some NATO partners, for example, refuse to go along with so-called 
"coalitions of the willing". Already, these coalitions are being 
replaced by "coalitions of the coerced" or simply with mercenaries, as 
in Iraq. The next US elections are crucial: remember that John McCain is 
the grandson and the son of military commanders, and a Navy man himself. 
Faced with crisis, his first reflex is not likely to be confined to 
diplomacy and negotiations.

It is time, perhaps past time, for me to conclude and to ask if and how 
we can emerge from the present crisis. We face the oldest moral question 
in the world, whether for religions or for secular political bodies as 
well as for social movements and civil society organisations. What do 
the rich owe to the poor, the fortunate to the less fortunate, the 
educated to the uneducated; the healthy to the ill? Do these 
obligations, if there are any, apply only to the people in our own 
societies, to our own countries, or to everyone, everywhere? The kind of 
globalisation we choose---and I assure you that it is a choice, not a 
fate to which we must submit---will determine whether there is peace or 
war. In my mind, there can be no peace without justice.

The other big question concerns the laws and regulations we should 
demand, in our own interests, so as to keep the market under control and 
to protect the planet from further destruction. How can we make sure 
such laws are put in place, particularly in the international arena 
where there is no democratic machinery? If we do not have enforceable 
laws and binding rules, the vile maxim of "All for ourselves and nothing 
for other people" will continue to prevail, nationally and 
internationally. We especially need rules which oblige societies to 
share because, if we are to believe Adam Smith, this is not going to 
happen spontaneously. This means that we need taxes, including 
international taxes, in order to promote individual welfare, social 
cohesion and---the subject that has brought all of us here to the IPPNW 
Congress---peace.

Let me say once more now in closing how grateful I am to IPPNW for 
asking me to speak here---not just for the personal honour, but because 
I see this invitation as a sign of recognition on the part of your 
organisation that the peace movement and the movement that has come to 
be known as the "alter-globalisation" or the "global justice" movement 
have got to come together and join forces. I see your gesture in 
inviting someone who has participated in the global justice movement 
since it began, as visionary. So far, on both sides, we have failed to 
make the crucial links between peace and global justice movements, 
either theoretically or practically.

The 15th of February 2003 was a magnificent, history-making day, when 
all over the world millions came out to protest the invasion of Iraq, 
but we did not then know how to remain allies and struggle together in 
the longer term. The magnificent momentum of that day was somehow lost. 
As we approach the fifth anniversary of this terrible war, whose 
disastrous consequences will continue to reverberate throughout the 
world for years to come, let us recognise concretely that our movements 
will either succeed together, or fail separately. Failure is 
unthinkable, the stakes are too high. We must choose success, we must 
choose each other.

Thank you.

Note

1 Some particularly important river systems have a great many nations 
with an interest: the Nile [9]; the Congo [9]; the Zambese [8]; the 
Amazon [7]; the Mekong [6];.the Tigris-Euprates [3]



Presented at the international congress of the International Physicians 
for the Prevention of Nuclear War
(IPPNW), New Delhi

www.tni.org/detail_page.phtml?act_id=18042

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