Panic of the Plutocrats

Του Paul Krugman , Νομπελίστα οικονομολόγου και Καθηγητή Οικονομίας και Διεθνών Σχέσεων στο Πανεπιστήμιο Princeton .


Αναδημοσιεύεται από την ιστοσελίδα της αμερικανικής εφημερίδας New York Times , http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/opinion/panic-of-the-plutocrats.html?src=ISMR_AP_LO_MST_FB .



It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change America’s direction. Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent.

And this reaction tells you something important — namely, that the extremists threatening American values are what F.D.R. called “economic royalists,” not the people camping in Zuccotti Park.

Consider first how Republican politicians have portrayed the modest-sized if growing demonstrations, which have involved some confrontations with the police — confrontations that seem to have involved a lot of police overreaction — but nothing one could call a riot. And there has in fact been nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in the summer of 2009.

Nonetheless, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has denounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.” The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging “class warfare,” while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.” My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don’t deserve to have them.

Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor and a financial-industry titan in his own right, was a bit more moderate, but still accused the protesters of trying to “take the jobs away from people working in this city,” a statement that bears no resemblance to the movement’s actual goals.

And if you were listening to talking heads on CNBC, you learned that the protesters “let their freak flags fly,” and are “aligned with Lenin.”

The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.

Last year, you may recall, a number of financial-industry barons went wild over very mild criticism from President Obama. They denounced Mr. Obama as being almost a socialist for endorsing the so-called Volcker rule, which would simply prohibit banks backed by federal guarantees from engaging in risky speculation. And as for their reaction to proposals to close a loophole that lets some of them pay remarkably low taxes — well, Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of the Blackstone Group, compared it to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

And then there’s the campaign of character assassination against Elizabeth Warren, the financial reformer now running for the Senate in Massachusetts. Not long ago a YouTube video of Ms. Warren making an eloquent, down-to-earth case for taxes on the rich went viral. Nothing about what she said was radical — it was no more than a modern riff on Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous dictum that “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”

But listening to the reliable defenders of the wealthy, you’d think that Ms. Warren was the second coming of Leon Trotsky. George Will declared that she has a “collectivist agenda,” that she believes that “individualism is a chimera.” And Rush Limbaugh called her “a parasite who hates her host. Willing to destroy the host while she sucks the life out of it.”

What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.

This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage. In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she must be demonized, hence the frantic sliming of Elizabeth Warren.

So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.

IS THE WORLD TOO BIG TO FAIL ?

Του Noam Chomsky , Institute Professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy .


Αναδημοσιεύεται από την ιστοσελίδα του αραβικού ειδησεογραφικού δικτύου Al Jazeera , http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/09/201192514364490977.html .

The democracy uprising in the Arab world has been a spectacular display of courage, dedication, and commitment by popular forces - coinciding, fortuitously, with a remarkable uprising of tens of thousands in support of working people and democracy in Madison, Wisconsin, and other US cities. If the trajectories of revolt in Cairo and Madison intersected, however, they were headed in opposite directions: in Cairo toward gaining elementary rights denied by the dictatorship, in Madison towards defending rights that had been won in long and hard struggles and are now under severe attack.

Each is a microcosm of tendencies in global society, following varied courses. There are sure to be far-reaching consequences of what is taking place both in the decaying industrial heartland of the richest and most powerful country in human history, and in what President Dwight Eisenhower called "the most strategically important area in the world" - "a stupendous source of strategic power" and "probably the richest economic prize in the world in the field of foreign investment," in the words of the State Department in the 1940s, a prize that the US intended to keep for itself and its allies in the unfolding New World Order of that day.

Despite all the changes since, there is every reason to suppose that today's policy-makers basically adhere to the judgment of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's influential advisor A.A. Berle that control of the incomparable energy reserves of the Middle East would yield "substantial control of the world." And correspondingly, that loss of control would threaten the project of global dominance that was clearly articulated during World War II, and that has been sustained in the face of major changes in world order since that day.

'Grand Area'

From the outset of the war in 1939, Washington anticipated that it would end with the US in a position of overwhelming power. High-level State Department officials and foreign policy specialists met through the wartime years to lay out plans for the postwar world. They delineated a "Grand Area" that the US was to dominate, including the Western hemisphere, the Far East, and the former British empire, with its Middle East energy resources. As Russia began to grind down Nazi armies after Stalingrad, Grand Area goals extended to as much of Eurasia as possible, at least its economic core in Western Europe. Within the Grand Area, the US would maintain "unquestioned power," with "military and economic supremacy," while ensuring the "limitation of any exercise of sovereignty" by states that might interfere with its global designs. The careful wartime plans were soon implemented.

It was always recognised that Europe might choose to follow an independent course. NATO was partially intended to counter this threat. As soon as the official pretext for NATO dissolved in 1989, NATO was expanded to the East in violation of verbal pledges to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. It has since become a US-run intervention force, with far-ranging scope, spelled out by NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who informed a NATO conference that "NATO troops have to guard pipelines that transport oil and gas that is directed for the West," and more generally to protect sea routes used by tankers and other "crucial infrastructure" of the energy system.

Grand Area doctrines clearly license military intervention at will. That conclusion was articulated clearly by the Clinton administration, which declared that the US has the right to use military force to ensure "uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources," and must maintain huge military forces "forward deployed" in Europe and Asia "in order to shape people's opinions about us" and "to shape events that will affect our livelihood and our security."

The same principles governed the invasion of Iraq. As the US failure to impose its will in Iraq was becoming unmistakable, the actual goals of the invasion could no longer be concealed behind pretty rhetoric. In November 2007, the White House issued a Declaration of Principles demanding that US forces must remain indefinitely in Iraq and committing Iraq to privilege American investors. Two months later, President Bush informed Congress that he would reject legislation that might limit the permanent stationing of US Armed Forces in Iraq or "United States control of the oil resources of Iraq" - demands that the US had to abandon shortly after in the face of Iraqi resistance.

In Tunisia and Egypt, the recent popular uprisings have won impressive victories, but as the Carnegie Endowment reported, while names have changed, the regimes remain: "A change in ruling elites and system of governance is still a distant goal." The report discusses internal barriers to democracy, but ignores the external ones, which as always are significant.

The US and its Western allies are sure to do whatever they can to prevent authentic democracy in the Arab world. To understand why, it is only necessary to look at the studies of Arab opinion conducted by US polling agencies. Though barely reported, they are certainly known to planners. They reveal that by overwhelming majorities, Arabs regard the US and Israel as the major threats they face: the US is so regarded by 90 per cent of Egyptians, in the region generally by over 75 per cent. Some Arabs regard Iran as a threat: 10 per cent. Opposition to US policy is so strong that a majority believes that security would be improved if Iran had nuclear weapons - in Egypt, 80 per cent. Other figures are similar. If public opinion were to influence policy, the US not only would not control the region, but would be expelled from it, along with its allies, undermining fundamental principles of global dominance.

The invisible hand of power

Support for democracy is the province of ideologists and propagandists. In the real world, elite dislike of democracy is the norm. The evidence is overwhelming that democracy is supported insofar as it contributes to social and economic objectives, a conclusion reluctantly conceded by the more serious scholarship.

Elite contempt for democracy was revealed dramatically in the reaction to the WikiLeaks exposures. Those that received most attention, with euphoric commentary, were cables reporting that Arabs support the US stand on Iran. The reference was to the ruling dictators. The attitudes of the public were unmentioned. The guiding principle was articulated clearly by Carnegie Endowment Middle East specialist Marwan Muasher, formerly a high official of the Jordanian government: "There is nothing wrong, everything is under control." In short, if the dictators support us, what else could matter?

The Muasher doctrine is rational and venerable. To mention just one case that is highly relevant today, in internal discussion in 1958, president Eisenhower expressed concern about "the campaign of hatred" against us in the Arab world, not by governments, but by the people. The National Security Council (NSC) explained that there is a perception in the Arab world that the US supports dictatorships and blocks democracy and development so as to ensure control over the resources of the region. Furthermore, the perception is basically accurate, the NSC concluded, and that is what we should be doing, relying on the Muasher doctrine. Pentagon studies conducted after 9/11 confirmed that the same holds today.

It is normal for the victors to consign history to the trash can, and for victims to take it seriously. Perhaps a few brief observations on this important matter may be useful. Today is not the first occasion when Egypt and the US are facing similar problems, and moving in opposite directions. That was also true in the early nineteenth century.

Economic historians have argued that Egypt was well-placed to undertake rapid economic development at the same time that the US was. Both had rich agriculture, including cotton, the fuel of the early industrial revolution - though unlike Egypt, the US had to develop cotton production and a work force by conquest, extermination, and slavery, with consequences that are evident right now in the reservations for the survivors and the prisons that have rapidly expanded since the Reagan years to house the superfluous population left by deindustrialisation.

One fundamental difference was that the US had gained independence and was therefore free to ignore the prescriptions of economic theory, delivered at the time by Adam Smith in terms rather like those preached to developing societies today. Smith urged the liberated colonies to produce primary products for export and to import superior British manufactures, and certainly not to attempt to monopolise crucial goods, particularly cotton. Any other path, Smith warned, "would retard instead of accelerating the further increase in the value of their annual produce, and would obstruct instead of promoting the progress of their country towards real wealth and greatness."

Having gained their independence, the colonies were free to ignore his advice and to follow England's course of independent state-guided development, with high tariffs to protect industry from British exports, first textiles, later steel and others, and to adopt numerous other devices to accelerate industrial development. The independent Republic also sought to gain a monopoly of cotton so as to "place all other nations at our feet," particularly the British enemy, as the Jacksonian presidents announced when conquering Texas and half of Mexico.

For Egypt, a comparable course was barred by British power. Lord Palmerston declared that "no ideas of fairness [toward Egypt] ought to stand in the way of such great and paramount interests" of Britain as preserving its economic and political hegemony, expressing his "hate" for the "ignorant barbarian" Muhammed Ali who dared to seek an independent course, and deploying Britain's fleet and financial power to terminate Egypt's quest for independence and economic development.

After World War II, when the US displaced Britain as global hegemon, Washington adopted the same stand, making it clear that the US would provide no aid to Egypt unless it adhered to the standard rules for the weak - which the US continued to violate, imposing high tariffs to bar Egyptian cotton and causing a debilitating dollar shortage. The usual interpretation of market principles.

It is small wonder that the "campaign of hatred" against the US that concerned Eisenhower was based on the recognition that the US supports dictators and blocks democracy and development, as do its allies.

In Adam Smith's defence, it should be added that he recognised what would happen if Britain followed the rules of sound economics, now called "neoliberalism." He warned that if British manufacturers, merchants, and investors turned abroad, they might profit but England would suffer. But he felt that they would be guided by a home bias, so as if by an invisible hand England would be spared the ravages of economic rationality.

The passage is hard to miss. It is the one occurrence of the famous phrase "invisible hand" in The Wealth of Nations. The other leading founder of classical economics, David Ricardo, drew similar conclusions, hoping that home bias would lead men of property to "be satisfied with the low rate of profits in their own country, rather than seek a more advantageous employment for their wealth in foreign nations," feelings that, he added, "I should be sorry to see weakened." Their predictions aside, the instincts of the classical economists were sound.

The Iranian and Chinese 'threats'

The democracy uprising in the Arab world is sometimes compared to Eastern Europe in 1989, but on dubious grounds. In 1989, the democracy uprising was tolerated by the Russians, and supported by western power in accord with standard doctrine: it plainly conformed to economic and strategic objectives, and was therefore a noble achievement, greatly honoured, unlike the struggles at the same time "to defend the people's fundamental human rights" in Central America, in the words of the assassinated Archbishop of El Salvador, one of the hundreds of thousands of victims of the military forces armed and trained by Washington. There was no Gorbachev in the West throughout these horrendous years, and there is none today. And Western power remains hostile to democracy in the Arab world for good reasons.

Grand Area doctrines continue to apply to contemporary crises and confrontations. In Western policy-making circles and political commentary the Iranian threat is considered to pose the greatest danger to world order and hence must be the primary focus of US foreign policy, with Europe trailing along politely.

What exactly is the Iranian threat? An authoritative answer is provided by the Pentagon and US intelligence. Reporting on global security last year, they make it clear that the threat is not military. Iran's military spending is "relatively low compared to the rest of the region," they conclude. Its military doctrine is strictly "defensive, designed to slow an invasion and force a diplomatic solution to hostilities." Iran has only "a limited capability to project force beyond its borders." With regard to the nuclear option, "Iran's nuclear programme and its willingness to keep open the possibility of developing nuclear weapons is a central part of its deterrent strategy." All quotes.

The brutal clerical regime is doubtless a threat to its own people, though it hardly outranks US allies in that regard. But the threat lies elsewhere, and is ominous indeed. One element is Iran's potential deterrent capacity, an illegitimate exercise of sovereignty that might interfere with US freedom of action in the region. It is glaringly obvious why Iran would seek a deterrent capacity; a look at the military bases and nuclear forces in the region suffices to explain.

Seven years ago, Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld wrote that "The world has witnessed how the United States attacked Iraq for, as it turned out, no reason at all. Had the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be crazy," particularly when they are under constant threat of attack in violation of the UN Charter. Whether they are doing so remains an open question, but perhaps so.

But Iran's threat goes beyond deterrence. It is also seeking to expand its influence in neighbouring countries, the Pentagon and US intelligence emphasise, and in this way to "destabilise" the region (in the technical terms of foreign policy discourse). The US invasion and military occupation of Iran's neighbours is "stabilisation." Iran's efforts to extend its influence to them are "destabilisation," hence plainly illegitimate.

Such usage is routine. Thus the prominent foreign policy analyst James Chace was properly using the term "stability" in its technical sense when he explained that in order to achieve "stability" in Chile it was necessary to "destabilise" the country (by overthrowing the elected government of Salvador Allende and installing the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet). Other concerns about Iran are equally interesting to explore, but perhaps this is enough to reveal the guiding principles and their status in imperial culture. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt's planners emphasised at the dawn of the contemporary world system, the US cannot tolerate "any exercise of sovereignty" that interferes with its global designs.

The US and Europe are united in punishing Iran for its threat to stability, but it is useful to recall how isolated they are. The nonaligned countries have vigorously supported Iran's right to enrich uranium. In the region, Arab public opinion even strongly favours Iranian nuclear weapons. The major regional power, Turkey, voted against the latest US-initiated sanctions motion in the Security Council, along with Brazil, the most admired country of the South. Their disobedience led to sharp censure, not for the first time: Turkey had been bitterly condemned in 2003 when the government followed the will of 95 per cent of the population and refused to participate in the invasion of Iraq, thus demonstrating its weak grasp of democracy, western-style.

After its Security Council misdeed last year, Turkey was warned by Obama's top diplomat on European affairs, Philip Gordon, that it must "demonstrate its commitment to partnership with the West." A scholar with the Council on Foreign Relations asked, "How do we keep the Turks in their lane?" - following orders like good democrats. Brazil's Lula was admonished in a New York Times headline that his effort with Turkey to provide a solution to the uranium enrichment issue outside of the framework of US power was a "Spot on Brazilian Leader's Legacy." In brief, do what we say, or else.

An interesting sidelight, effectively suppressed, is that the Iran-Turkey-Brazil deal was approved in advance by Obama, presumably on the assumption that it would fail, providing an ideological weapon against Iran. When it succeeded, the approval turned to censure, and Washington rammed through a Security Council resolution so weak that China readily signed - and is now chastised for living up to the letter of the resolution but not Washington's unilateral directives - in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, for example.

While the US can tolerate Turkish disobedience, though with dismay, China is harder to ignore. The press warns that "China's investors and traders are now filling a vacuum in Iran as businesses from many other nations, especially in Europe, pull out," and in particular, is expanding its dominant role in Iran's energy industries. Washington is reacting with a touch of desperation. The State Department warned China that if it wants to be accepted in the international community - a technical term referring to the US and whoever happens to agree with it - then it must not "skirt and evade international responsibilities, [which] are clear": namely, follow US orders. China is unlikely to be impressed.

There is also much concern about the growing Chinese military threat. A recent Pentagon study warned that China's military budget is approaching "one-fifth of what the Pentagon spent to operate and carry out the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," a fraction of the US military budget, of course. China's expansion of military forces might "deny the ability of American warships to operate in international waters off its coast," the New York Times added.

Off the coast of China, that is; it has yet to be proposed that the US should eliminate military forces that deny the Caribbean to Chinese warships. China's lack of understanding of rules of international civility is illustrated further by its objections to plans for the advanced nuclear-powered aircraft carrier George Washington to join naval exercises a few miles off China's coast, with alleged capacity to strike Beijing.

In contrast, the West understands that such US operations are all undertaken to defend stability and its own security. The liberal New Republic expresses its concern that "China sent ten warships through international waters just off the Japanese island of Okinawa." That is indeed a provocation - unlike the fact, unmentioned, that Washington has converted the island into a major military base in defiance of vehement protests by the people of Okinawa. That is not a provocation, on the standard principle that we own the world.

Deep-seated imperial doctrine aside, there is good reason for China's neighbours to be concerned about its growing military and commercial power. And though Arab opinion supports an Iranian nuclear weapons programme, we certainly should not do so. The foreign policy literature is full of proposals as to how to counter the threat. One obvious way is rarely discussed: work to establish a nuclear-weapons-free zone (NWFZ) in the region. The issue arose (again) at the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) conference at United Nations headquarters last May. Egypt, as chair of the 118 nations of the Non-Aligned Movement, called for negotiations on a Middle East NWFZ, as had been agreed by the West, including the US, at the 1995 review conference on the NPT.

International support is so overwhelming that Obama formally agreed. It is a fine idea, Washington informed the conference, but not now. Furthermore, the US made clear that Israel must be exempted: no proposal can call for Israel's nuclear programme to be placed under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency or for the release of information about "Israeli nuclear facilities and activities." So much for this method of dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat.

Privatising the planet

While Grand Area doctrine still prevails, the capacity to implement it has declined. The peak of US power was after World War II, when it had literally half the world's wealth. But that naturally declined, as other industrial economies recovered from the devastation of the war and decolonisation took its agonising course. By the early 1970s, the US share of global wealth had declined to about 25 per cent, and the industrial world had become tripolar: North America, Europe, and East Asia (then Japan-based).

There was also a sharp change in the US economy in the 1970s, towards financialisation and export of production. A variety of factors converged to create a vicious cycle of radical concentration of wealth, primarily in the top fraction of 1 per cent of the population - mostly CEOs, hedge-fund managers, and the like. That leads to the concentration of political power, hence state policies to increase economic concentration: fiscal policies, rules of corporate governance, deregulation, and much more. Meanwhile the costs of electoral campaigns skyrocketed, driving the parties into the pockets of concentrated capital, increasingly financial: the Republicans reflexively, the Democrats - by now what used to be moderate Republicans - not far behind.

Elections have become a charade, run by the public relations industry. After his 2008 victory, Obama won an award from the industry for the best marketing campaign of the year. Executives were euphoric. In the business press they explained that they had been marketing candidates like other commodities since Ronald Reagan, but 2008 was their greatest achievement and would change the style in corporate boardrooms. The 2012 election is expected to cost $2bn, mostly in corporate funding. Small wonder that Obama is selecting business leaders for top positions. The public is angry and frustrated, but as long as the Muasher principle prevails, that doesn't matter.

While wealth and power have narrowly concentrated, for most of the population real incomes have stagnated and people have been getting by with increased work hours, debt, and asset inflation, regularly destroyed by the financial crises that began as the regulatory apparatus was dismantled starting in the 1980s.

None of this is problematic for the very wealthy, who benefit from a government insurance policy called "too big to fail." The banks and investment firms can make risky transactions, with rich rewards, and when the system inevitably crashes, they can run to the nanny state for a taxpayer bailout, clutching their copies of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.

That has been the regular process since the Reagan years, each crisis more extreme than the last - for the public population, that is. Right now, real unemployment is at Depression levels for much of the population, while Goldman Sachs, one of the main architects of the current crisis, is richer than ever. It has just quietly announced $17.5bn in compensation for last year, with CEO Lloyd Blankfein receiving a $12.6m bonus while his base salary more than triples.

It wouldn't do to focus attention on such facts as these. Accordingly, propaganda must seek to blame others, in the past few months, public sector workers, their fat salaries, exorbitant pensions, and so on: all fantasy, on the model of Reaganite imagery of black mothers being driven in their limousines to pick up welfare checks - and other models that need not be mentioned. We all must tighten our belts; almost all, that is.

Teachers are a particularly good target, as part of the deliberate effort to destroy the public education system from kindergarten through the universities by privatisation - again, good for the wealthy, but a disaster for the population, as well as the long-term health of the economy, but that is one of the externalities that is put to the side insofar as market principles prevail.

Another fine target, always, is immigrants. That has been true throughout US history, even more so at times of economic crisis, exacerbated now by a sense that our country is being taken away from us: the white population will soon become a minority. One can understand the anger of aggrieved individuals, but the cruelty of the policy is shocking.

Targeting immigrants

Who are the immigrants targeted? In Eastern Massachusetts, where I live, many are Mayans fleeing genocide in the Guatemalan highlands carried out by Reagan's favourite killers. Others are Mexican victims of Clinton's NAFTA, one of those rare government agreements that managed to harm working people in all three of the participating countries. As NAFTA was rammed through Congress over popular objection in 1994, Clinton also initiated the militarisation of the US-Mexican border, previously fairly open. It was understood that Mexican campesinos cannot compete with highly subsidised US agribusiness, and that Mexican businesses would not survive competition with US multinationals, which must be granted "national treatment" under the mislabeled free trade agreements, a privilege granted only to corporate persons, not those of flesh and blood. Not surprisingly, these measures led to a flood of desperate refugees, and to rising anti-immigrant hysteria by the victims of state-corporate policies at home.

Much the same appears to be happening in Europe, where racism is probably more rampant than in the US One can only watch with wonder as Italy complains about the flow of refugees from Libya, the scene of the first post-World War I genocide, in the now-liberated East, at the hands of Italy's Fascist government. Or when France, still today the main protector of the brutal dictatorships in its former colonies, manages to overlook its hideous atrocities in Africa, while French President Nicolas Sarkozy warns grimly of the "flood of immigrants" and Marine Le Pen objects that he is doing nothing to prevent it. I need not mention Belgium, which may win the prize for what Adam Smith called "the savage injustice of the Europeans."

The rise of neo-fascist parties in much of Europe would be a frightening phenomenon even if we were not to recall what happened on the continent in the recent past. Just imagine the reaction if Jews were being expelled from France to misery and oppression, and then witness the non-reaction when that is happening to Roma, also victims of the Holocaust and Europe's most brutalised population.

In Hungary, the neo-fascist party Jobbik gained 17 per cent of the vote in national elections, perhaps unsurprising when three-quarters of the population feels that they are worse off than under Communist rule. We might be relieved that in Austria the ultra-right Jörg Haider won only 10 per cent of the vote in 2008 - were it not for the fact that the new Freedom Party, outflanking him from the far right, won more than 17 per cent. It is chilling to recall that, in 1928, the Nazis won less than 3 per cent of the vote in Germany.

In England the British National Party and the English Defence League, on the ultra-racist right, are major forces. (What is happening in Holland you know all too well.) In Germany, Thilo Sarrazin's lament that immigrants are destroying the country was a runaway best-seller, while Chancellor Angela Merkel, though condemning the book, declared that multiculturalism had "utterly failed": the Turks imported to do the dirty work in Germany are failing to become blond and blue-eyed, true Aryans.

Those with a sense of irony may recall that Benjamin Franklin, one of the leading figures of the Enlightenment, warned that the newly liberated colonies should be wary of allowing Germans to immigrate, because they were too swarthy; Swedes as well. Into the twentieth century, ludicrous myths of Anglo-Saxon purity were common in the US, including among presidents and other leading figures. Racism in the literary culture has been a rank obscenity; far worse in practice, needless to say. It is much easier to eradicate polio than this horrifying plague, which regularly becomes more virulent in times of economic distress.

I do not want to end without mentioning another externality that is dismissed in market systems: the fate of the species. Systemic risk in the financial system can be remedied by the taxpayer, but no one will come to the rescue if the environment is destroyed. That it must be destroyed is close to an institutional imperative. Business leaders who are conducting propaganda campaigns to convince the population that anthropogenic global warming is a liberal hoax understand full well how grave is the threat, but they must maximize short-term profit and market share. If they don't, someone else will.

This vicious cycle could well turn out to be lethal. To see how grave the danger is, simply have a look at the new Congress in the US, propelled into power by business funding and propaganda. Almost all are climate deniers. They have already begun to cut funding for measures that might mitigate environmental catastrophe. Worse, some are true believers; for example, the new head of a subcommittee on the environment who explained that global warming cannot be a problem because God promised Noah that there will not be another flood.

If such things were happening in some small and remote country, we might laugh. Not when they are happening in the richest and most powerful country in the world. And before we laugh, we might also bear in mind that the current economic crisis is traceable in no small measure to the fanatic faith in such dogmas as the efficient market hypothesis, and in general to what Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, 15 years ago, called the "religion" that markets know best - which prevented the central bank and the economics profession from taking notice of an $8tn housing bubble that had no basis at all in economic fundamentals, and that devastated the economy when it burst.

All of this, and much more, can proceed as long as the Muashar doctrine prevails. As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

Του Alfred W. McCoy , Καθηγητή Ιστορίας στο Πανεπιστήμιο Wisconsin-Madison .

Αναδημοσιεύεται από τον ιστότοπο του αμερικανικού περιοδικού 'The Nation' , http://www.thenation.com/article/156851/decline-and-fall-american-empire .




A soft landing for America 40 years from now? Don’t bet on it. The demise of the United States as the global superpower could come far more quickly than anyone imagines. If Washington is dreaming of 2040 or 2050 as the end of the American Century, a more realistic assessment of domestic and global trends suggests that in 2025, just 15 years from now, it could all be over except for the shouting.

Despite the aura of omnipotence most empires project, a look at their history should remind us that they are fragile organisms. So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly bad, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, 11 years for the Ottomans, 17 years for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, 22 years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003. Future historians are likely to identify the Bush administration’s rash invasion of Iraq in that year as the start of America's downfall. However, instead of the bloodshed that marked the end of so many past empires, with cities burning and civilians slaughtered, this twenty-first century imperial collapse could come relatively quietly through the invisible tendrils of economic collapse or cyberwarfare. But have no doubt: when Washington's global dominion finally ends, there will be painful daily reminders of what such a loss of power means for Americans in every walk of life. As a half-dozen European nations have discovered, imperial decline tends to have a remarkably demoralizing impact on a society, regularly bringing at least a generation of economic privation. As the economy cools, political temperatures rise, often sparking serious domestic unrest. Available economic, educational, and military data indicate that, when it comes to US global power, negative trends will aggregate rapidly by 2020 and are likely to reach a critical mass no later than 2030. The American Century, proclaimed so triumphantly at the start of World War II, will be tattered and fading by 2025, its eighth decade, and could be history by 2030. Significantly, in 2008, the US National Intelligence Council admitted for the first time that America's global power was indeed on a declining trajectory. In one of its periodic futuristic reports, Global Trends 2025, the Council cited “the transfer of global wealth and economic power now under way, roughly from West to East" and "without precedent in modern history,” as the primary factor in the decline of the “United States' relative strength—even in the military realm.” Like many in Washington, however, the Council’s analysts anticipated a very long, very soft landing for American global preeminence, and harbored the hope that somehow the US would long “retain unique military capabilities… to project military power globally” for decades to come. No such luck. Under current projections, the United States will find itself in second place behind China (already the world's second largest economy) in economic output around 2026, and behind India by 2050. Similarly, Chinese innovation is on a trajectory toward world leadership in applied science and military technology sometime between 2020 and 2030, just as America's current supply of brilliant scientists and engineers retires, without adequate replacement by an ill-educated younger generation. By 2020, according to current plans, the Pentagon will throw a military Hail Mary pass for a dying empire. It will launch a lethal triple canopy of advanced aerospace robotics that represents Washington's last best hope of retaining global power despite its waning economic influence. By that year, however, China's global network of communications satellites, backed by the world's most powerful supercomputers, will also be fully operational, providing Beijing with an independent platform for the weaponization of space and a powerful communications system for missile- or cyber-strikes into every quadrant of the globe. Wrapped in imperial hubris, like Whitehall or Quai d'Orsay before it, the White House still seems to imagine that American decline will be gradual, gentle, and partial. In his State of the Union address last January, President Obama offered the reassurance that “I do not accept second place for the United States of America.” A few days later, Vice President Biden ridiculed the very idea that “we are destined to fulfill [historian Paul] Kennedy's prophecy that we are going to be a great nation that has failed because we lost control of our economy and overextended.” Similarly, writing in the November issue of the establishment journal Foreign Affairs, neo-liberal foreign policy guru Joseph Nye waved away talk of China's economic and military rise, dismissing “misleading metaphors of organic decline” and denying that any deterioration in US global power was underway. Ordinary Americans, watching their jobs head overseas, have a more realistic view than their cosseted leaders. An opinion poll in August 2010 found that 65% of Americans believed the country was now “in a state of decline.” Already, Australia and Turkey, traditional US military allies, are using their American-manufactured weapons for joint air and naval maneuvers with China. Already, America's closest economic partners are backing away from Washington's opposition to China's rigged currency rates. As the president flew back from his Asian tour last month, a gloomy New York Times headline summed the moment up this way: “Obama's Economic View Is Rejected on World Stage, China, Britain and Germany Challenge US, Trade Talks With Seoul Fail, Too.” Viewed historically, the question is not whether the United States will lose its unchallenged global power, but just how precipitous and wrenching the decline will be. In place of Washington's wishful thinking, let’s use the National Intelligence Council's own futuristic methodology to suggest four realistic scenarios for how, whether with a bang or a whimper, US global power could reach its end in the 2020s (along with four accompanying assessments of just where we are today). The future scenarios include: economic decline, oil shock, military misadventure, and World War III. While these are hardly the only possibilities when it comes to American decline or even collapse, they offer a window into an onrushing future.


Economic Decline: Present Situation

Today, three main threats exist to America’s dominant position in the global economy: loss of economic clout thanks to a shrinking share of world trade, the decline of American technological innovation, and the end of the dollar's privileged status as the global reserve currency.

By 2008, the United States had already fallen to number three in global merchandise exports, with just 11% of them compared to 12% for China and 16% for the European Union. There is no reason to believe that this trend will reverse itself.

Similarly, American leadership in technological innovation is on the wane. In 2008, the US was still number two behind Japan in worldwide patent applications with 232,000, but China was closing fast at 195,000, thanks to a blistering 400% increase since 2000. A harbinger of further decline: in 2009 the US hit rock bottom in ranking among the 40 nations surveyed by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation when it came to “change” in “global innovation-based competitiveness” during the previous decade. Adding substance to these statistics, in October China's Defense Ministry unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, so powerful, said one US expert, that it “blows away the existing No. 1 machine” in America.

Add to this clear evidence that the US education system, that source of future scientists and innovators, has been falling behind its competitors. After leading the world for decades in 25- to 34-year-olds with university degrees, the country sank to 12th place in 2010. The World Economic Forum ranked the United States at a mediocre 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly half of all graduate students in the sciences in the US are now foreigners, most of whom will be heading home, not staying here as once would have happened. By 2025, in other words, the United States is likely to face a critical shortage of talented scientists.

Such negative trends are encouraging increasingly sharp criticism of the dollar's role as the world’s reserve currency. “Other countries are no longer willing to buy into the idea that the US knows best on economic policy,” observed Kenneth S. Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. In mid-2009, with the world's central banks holding an astronomical $4 trillion in US Treasury notes, Russian president Dimitri Medvedev insisted that it was time to end “the artificially maintained unipolar system” based on “one formerly strong reserve currency.”

Simultaneously, China's central bank governor suggested that the future might lie with a global reserve currency “disconnected from individual nations” (that is, the US dollar). Take these as signposts of a world to come, and of a possible attempt, as economist Michael Hudson has argued , “to hasten the bankruptcy of the US financial-military world order.”

Economic Decline: Scenario 2020

After years of swelling deficits fed by incessant warfare in distant lands, in 2020, as long expected, the US dollar finally loses its special status as the world's reserve currency. Suddenly, the cost of imports soars. Unable to pay for swelling deficits by selling now-devalued Treasury notes abroad, Washington is finally forced to slash its bloated military budget. Under pressure at home and abroad, Washington slowly pulls US forces back from hundreds of overseas bases to a continental perimeter. By now, however, it is far too late.

Faced with a fading superpower incapable of paying the bills, China, India, Iran, Russia, and other powers, great and regional, provocatively challenge US dominion over the oceans, space, and cyberspace. Meanwhile, amid soaring prices, ever-rising unemployment, and a continuing decline in real wages, domestic divisions widen into violent clashes and divisive debates, often over remarkably irrelevant issues. Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair, a far-right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal. The world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.

Oil Shock: Present Situation

One casualty of America's waning economic power has been its lock on global oil supplies. Speeding by America's gas-guzzling economy in the passing lane, China became the world's number one energy consumer this summer, a position the US had held for over a century. Energy specialist Michael Klare has argued that this change means China will “set the pace in shaping our global future.”

By 2025, Iran and Russia will control almost half of the world's natural gas supply, which will potentially give them enormous leverage over energy-starved Europe. Add petroleum reserves to the mix and, as the National Intelligence Council has warned , in just 15 years two countries, Russia and Iran, could “emerge as energy kingpins.”

Despite remarkable ingenuity, the major oil powers are now draining the big basins of petroleum reserves that are amenable to easy, cheap extraction. The real lesson of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was not BP's sloppy safety standards, but the simple fact everyone saw on “spillcam”: one of the corporate energy giants had little choice but to search for what Klare calls “tough oil” miles beneath the surface of the ocean to keep its profits up.

Compounding the problem, the Chinese and Indians have suddenly become far heavier energy consumers. Even if fossil fuel supplies were to remain constant (which they won’t), demand, and so costs, are almost certain to rise—and sharply at that. Other developed nations are meeting this threat aggressively by plunging into experimental programs to develop alternative energy sources. The United States has taken a different path, doing far too little to develop alternative sources while, in the last three decades, doubling its dependence on foreign oil imports. Between 1973 and 2007, oil imports have risen from 36% of energy consumed in the US to 66% .

Oil Shock: Scenario 2025

The United States remains so dependent upon foreign oil that a few adverse developments in the global energy market in 2025 spark an oil shock. By comparison, it makes the 1973 oil shock (when prices quadrupled in just months) look like the proverbial molehill. Angered at the dollar's plummeting value, OPEC oil ministers, meeting in Riyadh, demand future energy payments in a “basket” of Yen, Yuan, and Euros. That only hikes the cost of US oil imports further. At the same moment, while signing a new series of long-term delivery contracts with China, the Saudis stabilize their own foreign exchange reserves by switching to the Yuan. Meanwhile, China pours countless billions into building a massive trans-Asia pipeline and funding Iran's exploitation of the world largest natural gas field at South Pars in the Persian Gulf.

Concerned that the US Navy might no longer be able to protect the oil tankers traveling from the Persian Gulf to fuel East Asia, a coalition of Tehran, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi form an unexpected new Gulf alliance and affirm that China's new fleet of swift aircraft carriers will henceforth patrol the Persian Gulf from a base on the Gulf of Oman. Under heavy economic pressure, London agrees to cancel the US lease on its Indian Ocean island base of Diego Garcia, while Canberra, pressured by the Chinese, informs Washington that the Seventh Fleet is no longer welcome to use Fremantle as a homeport, effectively evicting the US Navy from the Indian Ocean.

With just a few strokes of the pen and some terse announcements, the 'Carter Doctrine' by which US military power was to eternally protect the Persian Gulf, is laid to rest in 2025. All the elements that long assured the United States limitless supplies of low-cost oil from that region—logistics, exchange rates, and naval power—evaporate. At this point, the US can still cover only an insignificant 12% of its energy needs from its nascent alternative energy industry, and remains dependent on imported oil for half of its energy consumption.

The oil shock that follows hits the country like a hurricane, sending prices to startling heights, making travel a staggeringly expensive proposition, putting real wages (which had long been declining) into freefall, and rendering non-competitive whatever American exports remained. With thermostats dropping, gas prices climbing through the roof, and dollars flowing overseas in return for costly oil, the American economy is paralyzed. With long-fraying alliances at an end and fiscal pressures mounting, US military forces finally begin a staged withdrawal from their overseas bases.

Within a few years, the US is functionally bankrupt and the clock is ticking toward midnight on the American Century.

Military Misadventure: Present Situation

Counterintuitively, as their power wanes, empires often plunge into ill-advised military misadventures. This phenomenon is known among historians of empire as “micro-militarism” and seems to involve psychologically compensatory efforts to salve the sting of retreat or defeat by occupying new territories, however briefly and catastrophically. These operations, irrational even from an imperial point of view, often yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the loss of power.

Embattled empires through the ages suffer an arrogance that drives them to plunge ever deeper into military misadventures until defeat becomes debacle. In 413 BCE, a weakened Athens sent 200 ships to be slaughtered in Sicily. In 1921, a dying imperial Spain dispatched 20,000 soldiers to be massacred by Berber guerrillas in Morocco. In 1956, a fading British Empire destroyed its prestige by attacking Suez. And in 2001 and 2003, the US occupied Afghanistan and invaded Iraq. With the hubris that marks empires over the millennia, Washington has increased its troops in Afghanistan to 100,000, expanded the war into Pakistan, and extended its commitment to 2014 and beyond, courting disasters large and small in this guerilla-infested, nuclear-armed graveyard of empires.

Military Misadventure: Scenario 2014

So irrational, so unpredictable is “micro-militarism” that seemingly fanciful scenarios are soon outdone by actual events. With the US military stretched thin from Somalia to the Philippines and tensions rising in Israel, Iran, and Korea, possible combinations for a disastrous military crisis abroad are multifold.

It’s mid-summer 2014 and a drawn-down US garrison in embattled Kandahar in southern Afghanistan is suddenly, unexpectedly overrun by Taliban guerrillas, while US aircraft are grounded by a blinding sandstorm. Heavy loses are taken and in retaliation, an embarrassed American war commander looses B-1 bombers and F-16 fighters to demolish whole neighborhoods of the city that are believed to be under Taliban control, while AC-130U “Spooky” gunships rake the rubble with devastating cannon fire.

Soon, mullahs are preaching jihad from mosques throughout the region, and Afghan Army units, long trained by American forces to turn the tide of the war, begin to desert en masse. Taliban fighters then launch a series of remarkably sophisticated strikes aimed at US garrisons across the country, sending American casualties soaring. In scenes reminiscent of Saigon in 1975, US helicopters rescue American soldiers and civilians from rooftops in Kabul and Kandahar.

Meanwhile, angry at the endless, decades-long stalemate over Palestine, OPEC’s leaders impose a new oil embargo on the US to protest its backing of Israel as well as the killing of untold numbers of Muslim civilians in its ongoing wars across the Greater Middle East. With gas prices soaring and refineries running dry, Washington makes its move, sending in Special Operations forces to seize oil ports in the Persian Gulf. This, in turn, sparks a rash of suicide attacks and the sabotage of pipelines and oil wells. As black clouds billow skyward and diplomats rise at the UN to bitterly denounce American actions, commentators worldwide reach back into history to brand this “America's Suez,” a telling reference to the 1956 debacle that marked the end of the British Empire.

World War III: Present Situation

In the summer of 2010, military tensions between the US and China began to rise in the western Pacific, once considered an American “lake.” Even a year earlier no one would have predicted such a development. As Washington played upon its alliance with London to appropriate much of Britain's global power after World War II, so China is now using the profits from its export trade with the US to fund what is likely to become a military challenge to American dominion over the waterways of Asia and the Pacific.

With its growing resources, Beijing is claiming a vast maritime arc from Korea to Indonesia long dominated by the US Navy. In August, after Washington expressed a “national interest” in the South China Sea and conducted naval exercises there to reinforce that claim, Beijing's official Global Times responded angrily , saying, “The US-China wrestling match over the South China Sea issue has raised the stakes in deciding who the real future ruler of the planet will be.”

Amid growing tensions, the Pentagon reported that Beijing now holds “the capability to attack… [US] aircraft carriers in the western Pacific Ocean” and target “nuclear forces throughout… the continental United States.” By developing “offensive nuclear, space, and cyberwarfare capabilities,” China seems determined to vie for dominance of what the Pentagon calls “the information spectrum in all dimensions of the modern battlespace.” With ongoing development of the powerful Long March V booster rocket, as well as the launch of two satellites in January 2010 and another in July, for a total of five, Beijing signaled that the country was making rapid strides toward an “independent” network of 35 satellites for global positioning, communications, and reconnaissance capabilities by 2020.

To check China and extend its military position globally, Washington is intent on building a new digital network of air and space robotics, advanced cyberwarfare capabilities, and electronic surveillance. Military planners expect this integrated system to envelop the Earth in a cyber-grid capable of blinding entire armies on the battlefield or taking out a single terrorist in field or favela. By 2020, if all goes according to plan, the Pentagon will launch a three-tiered shield of space drones—reaching from stratosphere to exosphere, armed with agile missiles, linked by a resilient modular satellite system, and operated through total telescopic surveillance.

Last April, the Pentagon made history. It extended drone operations into the exosphere by quietly launching the X-37B unmanned space shuttle into a low orbit 255 miles above the planet. The X-37B is the first in a new generation of unmanned vehicles that will mark the full weaponization of space, creating an arena for future warfare unlike anything that has gone before.

World War III: Scenario 2025

The technology of space and cyberwarfare is so new and untested that even the most outlandish scenarios may soon be superseded by a reality still hard to conceive. If we simply employ the sort of scenarios that the Air Force itself used in its 2009 Future Capabilities Game, however, we can gain “a better understanding of how air, space and cyberspace overlap in warfare,” and so begin to imagine how the next world war might actually be fought.

It’s 11:59 p.m. on Thanksgiving Thursday in 2025. While cyber-shoppers pound the portals of Best Buy for deep discounts on the latest home electronics from China, US Air Force technicians at the Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) on Maui choke on their coffee as their panoramic screens suddenly blip to black. Thousands of miles away at the US CyberCommand's operations center in Texas, cyberwarriors soon detect malicious binaries that, though fired anonymously, show the distinctive digital fingertips of China's People's Liberation Army.

The first overt strike is one nobody predicted. Chinese “malware” seizes control of the robotics aboard an unmanned solar-powered US 'Vulture' drone as it flies at 70,000 feet over the Tsushima Strait between Korea and Japan. It suddenly fires all the rocket pods beneath its enormous 400-foot wingspan, sending dozens of lethal missiles plunging harmlessly into the Yellow Sea, effectively disarming this formidable weapon.

Determined to fight fire with fire, the White House authorizes a retaliatory strike. Confident that its F-6 “Fractionated, Free-Flying” satellite system is impenetrable, Air Force commanders in California transmit robotic codes to the flotilla of X-37B space drones orbiting 250 miles above the Earth, ordering them to launch their 'Triple Terminator' missiles at China's 35 satellites. Zero response. In near panic, the Air Force launches its Falkon Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle into an arc 100 miles above the Pacific Ocean and then, just 20 minutes later, sends the computer codes to fire missiles at seven Chinese satellites in nearby orbits. The launch codes are suddenly inoperative.

As the Chinese virus spreads uncontrollably through the F-6 satellite architecture, while those second-rate US supercomputers fail to crack the malware's devilishly complex code, GPS signals crucial to the navigation of US ships and aircraft worldwide are compromised. Carrier fleets begin steaming in circles in the mid-Pacific. Fighter squadrons are grounded. Reaper drones fly aimlessly toward the horizon, crashing when their fuel is exhausted. Suddenly, the United States loses what the US Air Force has long called “the ultimate high ground”: space. Within hours, the military power that had dominated the globe for nearly a century has been defeated in World War III without a single human casualty.

A New World Order?

Even if future events prove duller than these four scenarios suggest, every significant trend points toward a far more striking decline in American global power by 2025 than anything Washington now seems to be envisioning.

As allies worldwide begin to realign their policies to take cognizance of rising Asian powers, the cost of maintaining 800 or more overseas military bases will simply become unsustainable, finally forcing a staged withdrawal on a still-unwilling Washington. With both the US and China in a race to weaponize space and cyberspace, tensions between the two powers are bound to rise, making military conflict by 2025 at least feasible, if hardly guaranteed.

Complicating matters even more, the economic, military, and technological trends outlined above will not operate in tidy isolation. As happened to European empires after World War II, such negative forces will undoubtedly prove synergistic. They will combine in thoroughly unexpected ways, create crises for which Americans are remarkably unprepared, and threaten to spin the economy into a sudden downward spiral, consigning this country to a generation or more of economic misery.

As US power recedes, the past offers a spectrum of possibilities for a future world order. At one end of this spectrum, the rise of a new global superpower, however unlikely, cannot be ruled out. Yet both China and Russia evince self-referential cultures, recondite non-roman scripts, regional defense strategies, and underdeveloped legal systems, denying them key instruments for global dominion. At the moment then, no single superpower seems to be on the horizon likely to succeed the US.

In a dark, dystopian version of our global future, a coalition of transnational corporations, multilateral forces like NATO, and an international financial elite could conceivably forge a single, possibly unstable, supra-national nexus that would make it no longer meaningful to speak of national empires at all. While denationalized corporations and multinational elites would assumedly rule such a world from secure urban enclaves, the multitudes would be relegated to urban and rural wastelands.

In Planet of Slums , Mike Davis offers at least a partial vision of such a world from the bottom up. He argues that the billion people already packed into fetid favela-style slums worldwide (rising to two billion by 2030) will make “the 'feral, failed cities' of the Third World… the distinctive battlespace of the twenty-first century.” As darkness settles over some future super-favela, “the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression” as “hornet-like helicopter gun-ships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts… Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions.”

At a midpoint on the spectrum of possible futures, a new global oligopoly might emerge between 2020 and 2040, with rising powers China, Russia, India, and Brazil collaborating with receding powers like Britain, Germany, Japan, and the United States to enforce an ad hoc global dominion, akin to the loose alliance of European empires that ruled half of humanity circa 1900.

Another possibility: the rise of regional hegemons in a return to something reminiscent of the international system that operated before modern empires took shape. In this neo-Westphalian world order, with its endless vistas of micro-violence and unchecked exploitation, each hegemon would dominate its immediate region—Brasilia in South America, Washington in North America, Pretoria in southern Africa, and so on. Space, cyberspace, and the maritime deeps, removed from the control of the former planetary “policeman,” the United States, might even become a new global commons, controlled through an expanded UN Security Council or some ad hoc body.

All of these scenarios extrapolate existing trends into the future on the assumption that Americans, blinded by the arrogance of decades of historically unparalleled power, cannot or will not take steps to manage the unchecked erosion of their global position.

If America's decline is in fact on a 22-year trajectory from 2003 to 2025, then we have already frittered away most of the first decade of that decline with wars that distracted us from long-term problems and, like water tossed onto desert sands, wasted trillions of desperately needed dollars.

If only 15 years remain, the odds of frittering them all away still remain high. Congress and the president are now in gridlock; the American system is flooded with corporate money meant to jam up the works; and there is little suggestion that any issues of significance, including our wars, our bloated national security state, our starved education system, and our antiquated energy supplies, will be addressed with sufficient seriousness to assure the sort of soft landing that might maximize our country's role and prosperity in a changing world.

Europe's empires are gone and America's imperium is going. It seems increasingly doubtful that the United States will have anything like Britain's success in shaping a succeeding world order that protects its interests, preserves its prosperity, and bears the imprint of its best values.

Analyzing Political Islam : A Critique of Traditional Historical Materialist Analytic

Του Tariq Amin-Khan , Επίκουρου Καθηγητή στο Τμήμα Πολιτικής Επιστήμης και Δημόσιας Διοίκησης του Ryerson University στην πόλη Τορόντο του Καναδά .

Αναδημοσιεύεται από την ιστοσελίδα του επιστημονικού περιοδικού σοσιαλιστικής κατεύθυνσης Monthly Review , http://monthlyreview.org/commentary/analyzing-political-islam

Political, (1) more so, militant Islam has become an influential religious and social force in many post-colonial states. (2) The militants face very little by way of real political opposition within Muslim-majority societies, but they are now targeted and attacked militarily by the United States, other Western imperial interests, and client post-colonial states. In the context of the war in Iraq, the occupation of Afghanistan, and the “war on terror,” much has been written by people on the left. But, there is little by way of understanding political Islam from a historical materialist perspective. Some months back, however, Samir Amin offered his traditional historical materialist analysis of political Islam (Monthly Review, December 2007) and very briefly touched on a range of issues, such as modernity, secularism and imperialism. Amin has been generally dismissive of political Islam and unambiguous in saying that Islamists have been in the “service of imperialism.”

The concern with such a dismissal is its inability to provide a critical grasp of political Islam as an ideological phenomenon, and the current role of U.S. imperialism in targeting militant Islam and in controlling political outcomes in Muslim-majority states. (3) Such a view is also unhelpful for small left-wing and secular forces in these states to develop even a modest strategic initiative to contest political and militant Islam’s claims—an initiative that moves away from Western and Orientalist characterization of political and militant Islam, and begins to challenge the latter’s social base of support in Muslim-majority states. This social base, it must be clarified, underscores popular anger against U.S. military occupations of Muslim lands and the perception that the imperial onslaught as such is against Muslims. The popular anger against the United States can be gleaned from the expression of unfavorable sentiment by 78 percent of the population in Egypt, Jordan, and Pakistan which, paradoxically, are all U.S. client states. (4) However, there is also easy slippage in interpreting this anger against the United States as an endorsement for militant Islam’s obscurantist vision of society, on which more is said below.

Amin’s piece does not deal with the role of larger social and economic issues (including the impact of capitalist globalism) in Muslim-majority states—issues that may partly explain why the abysmally poor join the ranks of militant Islam. More significant, Amin suggests that political Islam is “lined up behind the dominant powers on the world scale” (p. 3), but does little to explain how this has come about given that militant Islam is now also confronting the United States and its imperialist occupation of and forays into Muslim-majority states. This new reality of military confrontation between former collaborators is not to suggest that political Islam’s actions are anti-imperialist. Rather, my concern here is to advance a critical historical materialist understanding of political Islam that is partly in agreement but also in collegial disagreement with some of Amin’s analysis. An understanding that problematizes Eurocentrism embedded in the treatment of militant Islam and the notion of modernity, while distinguishing my work from an orthodox materialist outlook. The critical materialist analysis employed here is also mindful of the oppressive practices of political Islam’s followers, especially concerning the treatment of women. The obscurantist mullahs have denied even the simplest pleasures of song and celebration, while the self-righteous patriarchal stranglehold of this tendency within Islam has been extremely debilitating for women and for much of society. However, militant Islam today is also a powerful social reality that is influencing and altering culture, language, and social and political policy in Muslim-majority states and in the Muslim diaspora of Europe and North America. Regretfully, this reality is not given much attention by many on the left in Western and even some in Muslim-majority states.

A related tendency on the left is to dismiss political Islam as reactionary. This tendency undergirds an uncritical embrace of Enlightenment modernity, and appears to conflate political Islamists with the followers of Islam (Muslims in general)—a conflation that is indeed integral to the dominant narrative in Western societies of “the Muslim” as violent, as oppressor of women, and as a medieval aberration against modernity. I will address below this issue of modernity and the characterization of Muslims in general. However, I will begin by touching on areas where there is agreement with Amin’s analysis.

As a starting point, there cannot be any quarrel with the view that political Islam has historically collaborated with U.S. imperialism throughout the period of the Cold War. This began very early in the 1950s with support for Ikhwanul-Muslimeen (Muslim Brotherhood) and ended when the Afghan mujahideen felt they were left in the lurch with the closing of the tap of U.S. arms flow, Saudi financial support, and Pakistan’s military training and assistance following the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. However, just as this collaboration ended, around the early 1990s, the demonization of Islam and the civilizational clash thesis was quickly developed by the likes of Bernard Lewis (later picked up by Samuel Huntington in his infamous The Clash of Civilizations), which reflected the post-Cold War shift of U.S. foreign policy, whose framework no longer needed political Islam’s support.

The one significant continuity between the Cold War era’s targeting of Marxist and leftists and the current attacks on political/militant Islam is United States’ continued reliance on culturalism to promote its imperial dominance. Western political leaders and the media, and liberal capitalist state’s organic intellectuals have been steeped in culturalism since the heydays of post-1945 era and the launching of Modernization theory—creating binaries between “traditional” and “modern” cultures, and “freedom” and “totalitarianism” to contrast the “free enterprise” Western capitalist culture broadly as a superior culturalist paradigm than other preceding or prevailing non-Euro/American cultures. However, this imperial strategy, more recently, has run into bad weather because the Islamists have been even more effective in using the culturalist terrain to mobilize their base of support against what they claim is U.S. “evil design” on Muslims and “Muslim values.” This culturalism of political Islam conceals the social and economic disfigurement caused by capitalist globalism and redirects political questions on to the terrain of culture. Thus, I am in agreement with Amin that culturalism has to be opposed, but the bigger question is: Who will mobilize people against culturalism of militant Islam in Muslim-majority states?

Also, I am in agreement with Amin that if the left is to be viable again in post-colonial societies, it just cannot gain credibility by making alliances with political or militant Islam. Such alliances are counterproductive and will hurt progressive forces in the long run. In this context, Amin claims that political Islam defends property relations and “aligns itself with the camp of dependent capitalism and dominant imperialism” (p. 1). However, I disagree with the sweep of his claim. Undoubtedly, political Islam is neither anticapitalist nor against property relations, but in the current conjuncture it is also not “an invaluable ally” of imperialism—although the two feed off each other. In other words, imperialist occupation is the oxygen for militant Islam’s survival, and more coherence is needed to understand how U.S. imperialism and client Muslim-majority states perpetuate the rise of political/militant Islam. Given that I am getting into my disagreements with Amin, I will expound on areas of concern in Amin’s historical materialist analysis.

I will first deal with Amin’s interpretation of modernity and secularism, and his claim that “perhaps even democracy” may need to “adapt to the strong presence of Islam” (p. 4). Such a view is fairly prevalent in Western mainstream thought and even in many left circles. This view belies that political Islam is a modern manifestation, albeit as modernity not grounded on the Enlightenment principles. As a corollary, such a perspective also then slips into an Orientalist understanding of political and militant Islam, viewing these phenomena as medieval aberrations—as appears to be the tendency of Western mainstream media, politicians, and others.

Now there is no denying, as Amin rightly points out, that modernity represents “a rupture in world history” following two significant developments—the emergence of the Enlightenment ideas and the rise of industrial capitalism—whose unfolding in close proximity of each other shaped the course of Western economic and societal transformation. But even within this understanding, there were two parallel trajectories: one based on the notion of progress as the progress of technology and economic development, and the other, based on the French Revolution slogan of liberté, egalité, fraternité. However, given the domination of capitalism, “development” as progress has become the dominant motif of modernity, while the latter ideas have taken a backseat to the drift of “instrumental reason” and a formal notion of democracy. Even the “rupture” that Amin speaks of was violent and effacing of preceding social traditions and outlook. In this sense, the notion of modernity has become closely associated with the ideas of Euro/American liberalism and congealed as a “mode of consciousness,” whereby modernity’s historical significance, as Philip Lawrence argues, lies in the manner in which “it self-consciously cut its links with all that had gone before.” (5) As a result, rationalism and modernity “unleashed forces which were able to vanquish the past and… [the] less technologically powerful cultures”—which meant that the Enlightenment project cut its links with its own historical past and with the “non-European world,” and this was done with “extreme violence.” (6) This violence of modernity and the erasure of the high points of other cultures, which European colonial powers were able to dominate and treat as “backward” or “barbaric,” also meant that the Eurocentric worldview would be privileged and universalized over the supposedly historyless and cultureless non-European world. It is this erasure of the non-European that gives the project of Enlightenment modernity its strong Eurocentric impulse: shaping empire-building projects on the one hand, while on the other, inferiorizing the colonized elite to a point wherein they have internalized the ideas of modernity, especially the notion of the “normal” nation-state (7)—the edifice that enabled colonial empires and current dominant Western states to tame colonial and post-colonial societies. This imperialist thrust of the past and the present has severely undermined and restructured the economic and political dimension, compartmentalizing thought and action, and displacing social upliftment ideas of Third Worldism and autarky with neoliberal restructuring and the re-imposition of the social and cultural legacies of the colonial state.

In being inattentive to this analytical complexity, and not recognizing the double-edged blade of modernity—issues not unknown to Amin—the irony is that he takes a similarly narrow view in discussing secularism. He dismisses as reactionary the claim of political Islamists that there is no separation between politics and religion—assuming that all forms of separation or the privileging of science is ipso facto progressive. How is this view in Islam any more reactionary from the contrived separation of religion in the secular fundamentalist thought of Dawkins and Hitchens? It would be more helpful to discuss how harm may result if the two remain unseparated, and whether not separating politics and religion in Islam is more harmful in comparison to other non-Muslim religions that also advocate for their unity? In tackling this question, it can be said that Islamic religious parties and political Islam generally have historically used the notion of Islamic revivalism to return the era of the caliphate, when the political and the scared were first merged. Islamic revivalism attempts to reclaim the medieval era’s “golden period” of Islam’s formation, and political Islamists harken back to the period of the caliphate in order to reintroduce sharia in the contemporary period. However, this harkening back is a political tool of mobilization—albeit along very narrow patriarchal and conservative lines—and also a way to posit a distinct identity for political Islam, one that is separate from the project of Western secular separation between church and state. In this context, Islamic revivalism is at best a late nineteenth century development, and the actions of political Islamists have formed in the period when Western modernity had its greatest influence in the colonies—that is, both are articulated in the spread of Western education, the propagation of the ideology of nationalism, and the emergence of anticolonial movements. As such, political Islam and its militant tendency should be seen as a contemporary political response to a “moral decline” that is perceived to have accompanied Western modernity. This is a powerful argument for the recruitment of potential foot soldiers of militant Islam. This argument is also a challenge to the European paradigm of modernity and cannot be dismissed as just a medieval aberration. The political Islamist position is as much a “modern” manifestation—albeit not within a Eurocentric notion of capitalist modernity.

On this issue of “moral decline,” there is no question that militant Islam’s position is deeply troubling, effacing and violent. This response is historically part of just one among a range of manifestations—reactionary at one end and mildly progressive at the other—which has unfolded since the late colonial era of the 1920s as Muslim religious groups and parties began to insert themselves in the more powerful secular-oriented anticolonial movements, such as in colonial Algeria, Indonesia, India and other states. By examining this history, one becomes aware that the larger aim of such Islamist anti-colonial movements historically had little to do with the right to self-determination of nations and more with enlarging an impositional pan-Muslim nationalism for which the separation of politics and religion made little sense. But this pan-Islamist drift continues to have a strong potential to harm weaker and smaller subnational groups by denying them the right of self-determination, examples of which abound in multiethnic/multinational Muslim-majority states. However, the harmful effects of pan-Islamic nationalism have been rarely taken up by the Western left or even by secular and national or subnational groups in Muslim-majority states.

On this issue of harm, it needs to be said that one often overlooks how the Enlightenment notion of modernity has also had debilitating and harmful consequences for the former colonized. Social and economic harm was done in universalizing the narrow conception of Western capitalist modernity as a ‘superior’ culturalist paradigm in relation to traditional societies, which have been treated as ‘backward’ and needed to be ‘civilized’. This rationale was implemented in the colonies once the charter companies (the British and Dutch East India companies) were dissolved and the colonial state was formally established—for instance, in parts of Asia since the mid 1800s. This issue of modernity’s universalization also concerned Fanon, and he was keenly aware of the impact of this cultural imposition on the former colonized and now the imperialized. He recognized much earlier from a more materialist understanding (than the current postcolonial theorists) that the colonized began to internalize the colonizer’s culture and the racism embedded in it as power and colonial domination was asserted to take hold of the cultural terrain in the colony. In speaking about the adoption-abandonment binary—the adoption of the colonizer’s culture and the abandonment of the culture of the colonized (8)—Fanon is also conscious, unlike the current postcolonial theorists, that the lost culture cannot be retrieved and that culturalism can also be a trap. However, the psycho-social and economic harm to the colonized is something that has endured well into the post-colonial era.

Moving from issues of modernity and secularism, a critical historical materialist understanding also needs to assess the nature of political Islam’s social base of support in Muslim-majority societies. On this issue, Amin claims that in countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the upper classes are the main supporters of political Islam. Now, this assumption may be valid for Saudi Arabia, (9) but it is definitely not true for Pakistan. There are other inaccuracies about Pakistan in Amin’s piece, but I will not get into them here. The support for political and militant Islam in Pakistan comes from the middle class and religious political parties, with the upper classes taking strategic decisions in defense of or opposition to political Islam depending on policy or ideological shifts within the post-colonial state. However, the foot soldiers of militant Islam are the dreadfully poor who have relied on the madrassahs for their very survival, and have been politicized and radicalized to pick up the gun in defense of what their indoctrination tells them: Islam is under threat from a non-Muslim, Judeo-Christian axis. Before this, it was “godless” Communism that was painted as a threat to these true believers, and as is now the case, eager recruits who have nothing save the shirts on their backs been willing to wage jihad in order to “save Islam.” The purveyors of this logic are not confined to Afghanistan or Pakistan, but are busy in the poor forgotten settlements and the terrible squalor that is the reality of urban and rural life of most Muslim-majority states, as also of largely the Third World. So the Islamist sales pitch provides a very small dose of material and a large vial of moral support that rekindles hope in these new recruits. However, the power brokers of client post-colonial states—in furthering their feudal and capitalist class interests as well as the civilian and military bureaucratic elite’s auxiliary class interests—have never given a damn about the poor despite the populist parties’ promises of roti, kapra aur makan (food, clothing and shelter). As a result, these classes remain callous and inept to match the zeal and commitment or the organizational abilities of militant Islam’s recruiters. Consequently, the chasm between the middle class (the rich become a whole other comparator) and the desperately poor continues to widen, and more people have fallen through this gap and into the madrassahs of militant Islam. In this context, political/militant Islam is also a big beneficiary of neoliberal capitalist globalism. Alongside, the United States uses the social and economic dislocations caused by neoliberalism to supplant its imperial militarist moves in Muslim-majority countries by enlisting the support of its client governments in these states. Such a deliberate move to enlist support further fan the flames of hatred against the United States and these client governments, and strengthens the social base of militant Islam’s support. I say deliberate because as many informed writers have pointed out, the “war on terror” is really the “Long War” for access to Central Asian and Middle Eastern energy resources and the consolidation of the military-industrial complex, and now the security-industrial complex (10)—and political and militant Islam have become the perfect foil for the maintenance of this heightened state of U.S. militarism and the national security state to safeguard its long term objective.

This larger objective is driving U.S. military planners to maintain a long term military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan—although it is becoming abundantly clear that militant Islam cannot be defeated militarily. Thus, the burden shifts on the people in client Muslim-majority states to force their governments to change course so that the twin scourge of U.S. imperialism and militant Islam can be removed.

For a country like Pakistan where there is a phenomenal disconnect between the aspirations of its people and the clientalism of the ruling classes, a lazy reading of the country’s social and political dynamics can lead to very misleading results. This, given that the downtrodden people in Pakistan have struggled hard for the maintenance of national sovereignty, almost never giving the religious parties more than 8 percent of the popular vote, (11) while also fighting to introduce the rule of law, and trying to keep Islam within the private and personal realm. But all this effort goes unacknowledged if the analysis is mainly focused on the upper classes, which then makes it convenient to lump Pakistan with Saudi Arabia. Pakistan is now fast becoming central to a revised U.S. strategy for the “defeat” of the Taliban and generally militant Islam. The current civilian government is not very different from the previous military dictators in prostrating before the United States and its demands. This, in the face of imperial arrogance that involves almost daily violations of Pakistan’s territorial sovereignty by U.S. drones that rain Hellfire missiles on largely women and children.

Therefore, in summarily dismissing political Islam, its larger project is obscured. This project has been spelled out very clearly by both political and militant Islamists, which is to capture state power. As a way to advance this objective, the mullahs and the Amirs lull their followers into believing that once state power is captured, the enforcement of shariawill end exploitation and bring a “just Islamic welfare society” in operation. Such fairy tales can be effectively countered if there is an organized left in Muslim-majority states. But the left in these states has been so hounded and beaten in the past 50 years of repression that reorganizing and regrouping them from the ground up seems to be a Herculean task. More important, if the Western left’s dismissive attitude toward political and militant Islam is also adopted by secular and miniscule left-wing forces, such as in Pakistan, they will not have even an outside possibility of organizing an alternative to these regressive religious forces. Militant Islam’s violent and often brutal actions are the material reality of existence in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. So, if the progressive and secular groups are to have even an outside chance of confronting political Islam, there will be no substitute for a critical understanding of this social phenomenon.

On Islamophobia, Amin says that it needs to be opposed, but then also blames the followers of political Islam for their “reactionary anti-Western discourse” which, in his view, gives rise to Islamophobic racism in the first place. In effect, he sees Islamophobia and anti-Western “discourse” as two reactionary campaigns that feed off each other.

Islamophobia is a critical issue on which Amin seems to have missed the boat. He appears to be blaming the victim, which is unfortunate given how events have unfolded in the United States and Europe as well as in Canada, where virulent racist attacks (verbal, physical, and in print) against Muslims have become a common occurrence. The moves at the level of the European states toward an underlying racist assimilation—for instance, in the development of the concepts of “community cohesion” and “civic integration” in Britain and the Netherlands, respectively—have meant the specific targeting of Muslim communities. At the institution in Toronto where I teach, which has probably one of the most diverse student body in the world, white supremacist groups have emerged, calling themselves a “white minority.” This and other groups are not just targeting Muslims, but also Black and Indigenous people. As Indigenous people have started to assert their treaty rights to land, a torrent of racist attacks have been unleashed on them. What this means is that Muslim-bashing may have been the trigger for the assertion of white supremacy, but it is now on the rise and affecting other communities. Therefore, one needs to be extremely careful in dismissing Islamophobia in a cavalier manner.

Finally, an important aspect of historical materialism is a keen attentiveness to history, a characteristic that has eluded Amin’s gaze. As an example, Amin has viewed political Islam mainly as a post-colonial development. Such a view disregards the colonial era origins of political Islam, an era that was very different from the current dominant tendency of Wahabi/Salafi/Deobandi political Islam. For instance, there has been an anticolonial component of political Islam reflected in the movements in colonial India and colonial Algeria. Also, while there is much that is obscurantist, antiwomen, and demeaning in the current tendencies of political/militant Islam, there have been and continue to be more “modernist” impulses among upper-class Muslims in Egypt, India, Indonesia, Lebanon, Pakistan, and other states with a significant Muslim population. Alongside, there have been other Muslim political thinkers and philosophers who have not accepted the Enlightenment notions of modernity, and have engaged with modernism (Mohammed Iqbal), (12) while Islamic currents and inclusivist tendencies, such as syncretism among South Asian Muslims and Hindus for instance have been prevalent since the precolonial period of Mughal rule in India. This has extended in the colonial era, and towards a Muslim orientation of anticolonial movements (Abul Kalam Azad). Mentioning these tendencies of political Islam is not to disregard the large body of literature from Iranian Muslim philosophers, such as Ali Shariati and others, and their engagement (problematic as it may be) with Marxism and modernism.

However, if this history informs a critical historical materialist analytic, then the Saudi Wahabi-imperialist nexus of the current project of political Islam can be clearly separated from other currents of political Islam. These other currents have weakened in the face of the enormous imperialist and client Muslim-majority states’ earlier support—enabling the rise of the dominant Wahabi political/militant Islam and the spread of jihad and the proliferation of the madrassahs.

Conclusion

The point is that if the left is ever to become serious in challenging militant/political Islam, it has to move past and dump its heavy baggage of Eurocentrism and the careless analysis of political Islam. The current wave of militant Islam is a force to reckon with, and dismissing it as reactionary—true as it may be—is unhelpful. Yes, militant Islam has an extremely narrow ideological view of Islam, and an exceedingly oppressive vision of societal change, especially concerning the treatment of women. This vision is not shared by the vast majority of Muslims in Afghanistan, Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan, and even India. That being said, this dominant obscurantist current of political Islam in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan is also locked in military/guerilla combat with U.S. imperial power and client states in the region. But here’s the rub, militant Islam is also supported by people in these respective regions not, as mentioned earlier, because they support its vision of a Muslim “welfare state” rather, the support is because the United States is seen as ruthless, anti-Islam imperial occupier. Alongside, people in these states are also very tired of the tactics of Islamists, especially as they terrorize and target unarmed and uninvolved people. Overwhelming numbers in Muslim-majority states would like the Islamists to disappear, just as they would also wish the same for U.S. imperial presence and the client regimes that rule over them. If this complexity could be grasped, it may enable people on the left as well Western political leaders and the media to desist from homogenizing the makeup of entire Muslim-majority societies as reactionary or obscurantist. Similarly, the popular anti-imperialist sentiment in Muslim majority states should not be confused with the actions of militant Islamists, which are not anti-imperialist. Militant Islam is conceived and imagined in the present, current context. It is, therefore, a “modern” manifestation that posits its own version of the Islamic “welfare state” for the current conjuncture to rival the Western capitalist state and Enlightenment notions of modernity. Understanding militant Islam in its current context will only enable the development of a coherent strategy of opposition and an alternative non-Eurocentric vision of society.

EndNotes:

(1) In distinguishing between political and militant Islam, the former can be seen as having a doctrinaire understanding of Muslim religious texts interpreted largely by an educated urban middle class group of ideologues whose ideological project is to capture state power and impose a narrow version of sharia.Political Islam’s rank and file is made up of students, and some members of the urban working class, rural workers and the peasantry. Political Islamists, ever since decolonization, have relied on the patronage of authoritarian rulers and petty bourgeois merchants, and on the limited use of violence for political mobilization and to influence state policy in Muslim-majority states. Militant Islamists, in contrast, recruit their foot soldiers from the urban and rural poor and its ideological diehards from the petty-bourgeoisie, working class and students. In some cases, rural/tribal heads may also lead a militant group. Militant Islamists are armed as trained guerilla units capable of doing battle with the state and even imperialist powers, while also willing to use terror tactics in order to attain their ideological and political ends. The objective of political Islam are the same as militant Islam, but the means of achieving state power differ between them: the former largely tread the constitutional/legal terrain, while the latter relies on the extra-constitutional path to achieve its ends.

(2) The term “post-colonial” state is used here to periodize from the colonial era the decolonization and formation of states in Africa and Asia. Also, since these African and Asian states were decolonized after World War II, they are distinguished from Latin American states that were decolonized 60 to more than 100 years prior to that war. The hyphenated form of the term is meant to highlight this periodization and to also suggest that the post-colonial state remains the key instrument of the South’s subordination—both internally, in undermining civil society, and as the facilitator of external domination.

(3) I have argued elsewhere that the Pentagon has claimed the “war on terror” is the “Long War” and the United States is in this for the long haul because of various reasons: access to energy resources of the Middle East and Central Asia, the unprecedented expansion of the military-industrial complex, and to intensify the synergy between Big Oil, military, and the corporate establishment. See Tariq Amin-Khan, “The Rise of Militant Islam and the Security State in the Era of the ‘Long War,’” Third World Quarterly (forthcoming).

(4) The figure was mentioned on CNN’s program, The Next President: A World of Challenges, September 20, 2008.

(5) Philip K. Lawrence, “Enlightenment, Modernity and War,” History of the Human Sciences vol. 12, no. 1 (1999): 3–4.

(6) Lawrence, “Enlightenment,” 4.

(7) The internalization of the “normal” nation-state by the former colonized elite in post-colonial societies tries to mimic state formation on the model of European nation-states without much concern for state-building and nation-building by way of respectively removing the legacies of the colonial state and resolving ethnic and national questions. This internalization issue is discussed in Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, eds., States of Imagination: Ethnographical Exploration of the Postcolonial State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 8–27.

(8) Frantz Fanon, “Racism as Culture,” in Toward the African Revolution (Political Essays) (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967), 29–44.

(9) In the context of the claim of support for political Islam from upper classes in countries like Saudi Arabia, it is the upper class and the Saudi state that have together actively promoted—initially with the tacit support and now a grudging acceptance of the United States—the promotion of the Wahabi version of Islam within its society and in many Muslim-majority states.

(10) Jim Holt, “It’s the Oil,” London Review of Books, October 18, 2007, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n20/holt01_.html.

(11) The one exception was when General Musharraf decided to support Bush’s “war on terror” and put the country and military at the United States’ disposal. As a result, in the ensuing 2002 elections, a coalition of religious parties was able form a majority government in the North-West Frontier Province, which also became the main opposition at the federal level. However, in the ensuing February 2008 election, the religious parties were routed and received much less than the “normal” 8 percent level of votes that they have been receiving historically.

(12) Mohammed Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (Islamabad: Alhamra, 2002).