Hi TB! Gosh, reading Anderson's editorial is like stepping out of a time machine into 1968. Kept looking up expecting to see that long haired prof and the bra-less girl who never took her eyes off him for a second. She used to sigh deeply when got heavily into the Hegelian dialectic....
You're right, it's a good structural description and is definitely a foil to Hirsh's article. That is a vicious note isn't it?
16For a good example, see Michael Hirsh, 'Bush and the World', Foreign Affairs,
September? October 2002, pp. 18? 43, full of expostulation about the importance of
consultation with allies, sanctity of international agreements, value of lofty ideals,
while at the same time making it clear that 'US allies must accept that some
US unilateralism is inevitable, even desirable. This mainly involves accepting the
reality of America's supreme might? and, truthfully, appreciating how historically
lucky they are to be protected by such a relatively benign power'.
It's the sort of thing that long haired prof would have said. I hear his voice when I read it.
Actually I think it ought to be posted here. Most of us here don't go looking for real lefty stuff.
frank@nostalgiabahhumbuglikedthegirl.tho
Pages 1--26 from 1anderson.indd
Page 1 2
new left review 17 sep oct 2002 5
perry anderson
FORCE AND CONSENT
Editorial
A s a count-down to war begins once again in the Middle East, amid high levels of sanctimony and bluster in the Atlantic world, it is the underlying parameters of the current international situation that demand attention, not the spray of rhetoric? whether belligerently official or ostensibly oppositional? surrounding it. They pose three main analytic questions. How far does the line of the Republican administration in Washington today repre-sent a break with previous US policies? To the extent that it does so, what explains the discontinuity? What are the likely consequences of the change? To answer these, it seems likely that a longer perspective than the immediate conjuncture is required. The role of the United States in
the world has become the topic of an increasingly wide range of post-uring
across the established political spectrum, and only a few of the
complex issues it poses can be addressed here. But some arrows from
the quiver of classical socialist theory may be better than none.
1
American policy planners today are the heirs of unbroken traditions of
global calculation by the US state that go back to the last years of the
Second World War. Between 1943 and 1945, the Roosevelt administration
worked on the shape of the American system of power which it could
see that victory over Germany and Japan, amidst mounting Russian
casualties and British debts, was bringing. From the start, Washington
pursued two integrally connected strategic goals. On the one hand, the
US set out to make the world safe for capitalism. That meant according
top priority to containing the USSR and halting the spread of revolution 1
1 Page 2 3
6 nlr 17
beyond its borders, wherever it could not directly contest the spoils of
war, as in Eastern Europe. With the onset of the Cold War, the long-term
aim of the struggle against Communism became once more? as it
had been at the outset of Wilson's intervention in 1919? not simply to
block, but to remove the Soviet antagonist from the map. On the other
hand, Washington was determined to ensure uncontested American
primacy within world capitalism. That meant in the first instance reduc-ing
Britain to economic dependency, a process that had begun with
Lend Lease itself, and establishing a post-war mili tary regency in West
Germany and Japan. Once this framework was in place, the wartime
boom of American capitalism was successfully extended to allied and
defeated powers alike, to the common benefit of all OECD states.
During the years of the Cold War, there was little or no tension between
these two fundamental objectives of US policy. The danger of Communism
to capitalist classes everywhere, in Asia increased by the Chinese
Revolution, meant that virtually all were happy to be protected, assisted and
invigilated by Washington. France? culturally less close than Britain, and
militarily more autonomous than Germany or Japan? was the only brief
exception, under De Gaulle. This parenthesis aside, the entire advanced-capitalist
zone was integrated without much strain into an informal
American imperium, whose landmarks were Bretton Woods, the Marshall
and Dodge Plans, NATO and the US? Japan Security Pact. In due course,
Japanese and German capitalism recovered to a point where they became
increasingly serious economic competitors of the United States, while the
Bretton Woods system gave way under the pressures of the Vietnam War
in the early seventies. But the political and ideological unity of the Free
World was scarcely affected. The Soviet bloc, always weaker, smaller and
poorer, held out for another twenty years of declining growth and escalat-ing
arms race, but eventually collapsed at the turn of the nineties.
The disappearance of the USSR marked complete US victory in the
Cold War. But, by the same token, the knot tying the basic objectives
of American global strategy together became looser. The same logic no
longer integrated its two goals into a single hegemonic system. 1 For
1 In what follows, which owes much to a debate between Gopal Balakrishnan and
Peter Gowan, the notion of hegemony is taken from its usage in Gramsci. The
term has recently been given another meaning, in John Mearsheimer's tightly and
powerfully argued Tragedy of Great Power Politics; for which see Peter Gowan, 'A
Calculus of Power', NLR 16, July? August 2002. 2
2 Page 3 4
anderson: Editorial 7
once the Communist danger was taken off the table, American primacy
ceased to be an automatic requirement of the security of the estab-lished
order tout court. Potentially, the field of inter-capitalist rivalries,
no longer just at the level of firms but of states, sprang open once
again, as? in theory? European and East Asian regimes could now
contemplate degrees of independence unthinkable during the time of
totalitarian peril. Yet there was another aspect to this change. If the con-sensual
structure of American dominion now lacked the same external
girders, its coercive superiority was, at a single stroke, abruptly and mas-sively
enhanced. For with the erasure of the USSR, there was no longer
any countervailing force on earth capable of withstanding US military
might. The days when it could be checkmated in Vietnam, or suffer
proxy defeat in Southern Africa, were over. These interrelated changes
were eventually bound to alter the role of the United States in the world.
The chemical formula of power was in solution.
2
In practice, however, the effects of this structural shift in the balance
between force and consent within the operation of American hege-mony
remained latent for a decade. The defining conflict of the nineties,
indeed, all but completely masked it. The Iraqi seizure of Kuwait threat-ened
the pricing of oil supplies to all the leading capitalist states, not to
speak of the stability of neighbouring regimes, allowing a vast coalition
of G-7 and Arab allies to be swiftly assembled by the United States for
the restoration of the Sabah dynasty to its throne. Yet more significant
than the range of foreign auxiliaries or subsidies garnered for Desert
Storm was the ability of the US to secure the full cover of the United
Nations for its campaign. With the USSR out for the count, the Security
Council could henceforward be utilized with increasing confidence as a
portable ideological screen for the initiatives of the single superpower.
To all appearances, it looked as if the consensual reach of American
diplomacy was greater than ever before.
However, the consent so enlarged was of a specialized kind. The elites of
Russia and? this had started earlier? China were certainly susceptible
to the magnetism of American material and cultural success, as norms
for imitation. In this respect, the internalization by subaltern powers of
selected values and attributes of the paramount state, which Gramsci 3
3 Page 4 5
8 nlr 17
would have thought an essential feature of any international hegemony,
started to take hold. But the objective character of these regimes was still
too far removed from US prototypes for such subjective predispositions
to form a reliable guarantee for every act of complaisance in the Security
Council. For that, the third lever Gramsci once picked out? intermediate
between force and consent, but closer to the latter? was required: cor-ruption. 2
Long used to control votes in the General Assembly, it was now
extended upwards to these veto-holders. The economic inducements to
comply with the will of the United States stretched, in post-communist
Russia, from IMF loans to the backdoor funding and organization of
Yeltsin's electoral campaigns. In the case of China, they centred on
the fine-tuning of MFN status and trade arrangements. 3 Assent that
is bought is never quite the same as that which is given; but for prac-tical
purposes, it was enough to return the UN to something like the
halcyon days at the outbreak of the Korean War, when it automatically
did US bidding. The minor irritant of a Secretary-General who on occa-sion
escaped the American thumb was removed, and a placeman of
the White House, rewarded for covering the Rwandan genocide while
the US pressed for intervention in the Balkans, installed. 4 By the late
nineties, the UN had become virtually as much an arm of the State
Department as the IMF is of the Treasury.
In these conditions, American policy planners could confront the post-Cold
War world with an unprecedentedly free hand. Their first priority
was to make sure that Russia was locked, economically and politically,
into the global order of capital, with the installation of a privatized
2 'The "normal" exercise of hegemony', he wrote, 'is characterized by the combina-tion
of force and consent, in variable equilibrium, without force predominating
too much over consent'. But in certain situations, where the use of force was too
risky, 'between consent and force stands corruption-fraud, that is the enervation
and paralysing of the antagonist or antagonists': Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del
Carcere, Turin 1975, vol. III, p. 1638. 3
The two cases are not identical; but in each, alongside pecuniary considerations,
there has been an element of moral submission. On a purely material calculation
of advantage, the rulers of Russia and China would do better to exercise their vetos
from time to time, to raise their purchasing price. That they should fail to see such
an obvious logic of political venality suggests the degree of their internalization of
hegemonic authority. 4
For Kofi Annan, see Colette Braeckman, 'New York and Kigali', NLR 9, May? June
2001, pp. 145? 7; Peter Gowan, 'Neoliberal Cosmopolitanism', NLR 11, September?
October 2001, p. 84. 4
4 Page 5 6
anderson: Editorial 9
economy and a business oligarchy at the switches of a democratic
electoral system. This was the major diplomatic focus of the Clinton
administration. A second concern was to secure the two adjacent zones
of Soviet influence? Eastern Europe and the Middle East. In the former,
Washington extended NATO to the traditional borders of Russia, well
before any EU expansion to the East, and took charge of liquidating
the Yugoslav estate. In the latter, the war for Kuwait was a windfall that
allowed it to install advanced military bases in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf,
establish a protectorate in Kurdistan, and tie the Palestinian national
movement down in an Israeli-dictated waiting-zone. These were all, in
some degree, emergency tasks arising from the aftermath of victory in
the Cold War itself.
3
Ideologically, the outlines of a post-Cold War system emerged more grad-ually.
But the Gulf and Balkan Wars helped to crystallize an ever more
comprehensive doctrine, linking free markets (the ark of neoliberal ism
since the Reagan? Thatcher period) to free elections (the leitmotif of lib-eration
in Central? Eastern Europe) to human rights (the battle-cry in
Kurdistan and the Balkans). The first two had, in varying tonalities,
always been part of the repertoire of the Cold War, although now they
were much more confidently asserted: a change most marked in the full-throated
recovery of the term 'capitalism', held indiscreet at the height
of the Cold War, when euphemisms were preferred. It was the third,
however, that was the principal innovation of the period, and did most
to alter the strategic landscape. For this was the jemmy in the door of
national sovereignty.
Traditional principles upholding the autonomy of nations in their
domestic affairs were, of course, regularly flouted by both sides in the
Cold War. But, as inscribed in diplomatic convention? not least the UN
Charter itself? these issued from the balance of forces during a period
of decolonization that had given birth to a multiplicity of often small,
and nearly always weak, states in the Third World. 5 Juridically, the doc-trine
of national sovereignty presupposed notions of equality between
5 For discussion of this background, see David Chandler, '" International Justice" ',
NLR 6, November? December 2000, pp. 55? 60. 5
5 Page 6 7
10 nlr 17
peoples that afforded some protection against the bullying of the two
superpowers, whose competition ensured that neither could seek openly
to set it aside, for fear of yielding too much moral advantage to the other.
But with the end of the Cold War, and the disappearance of any counter-balance
to the camp of capital, there was little reason to pay too much
attention to formulations that expressed another relationship of interna-tional
forces, now defunct. The New World Order, at first proclaimed
in triumphalist but still traditional terms by Bush Sr, became under
Clinton the legitimate pursuit by the international community of univer-sal
justice and human rights, wherever they were in jeopardy, regardless
of state borders, as a condition of a democratic peace.
From the mid-nineties onwards, the setting in which the Democratic
administration operated was unusually propitious. At home it was crest-ing
on a speculative boom; abroad it enjoyed a set of European regimes
tailored to its domestic ideological agenda. The Third Way version
of neoliberalism fitted well with the catechism of the 'international
community' and its shared devotion to universal human values. In prac-tice,
of course, wherever the logic of American primacy clashed with
allied considerations or objectives, the former prevailed. The political
realities underlying multilateral rhetoric were time and again made
clear in these years. The US scuppered the Lisbon accords in 1992,
preferring to dictate its own settlement in Bosnia, if necessary at the
price of further ethnic cleansing, rather than accept an EU initiative;
imposed the ultimatum at Rambouillet that launched full-scale war over
Kosovo; bundled NATO to the frontiers of Belarus and Ukraine; and
gave its blessing to the Russian reconquest of Chechnya? Clinton hail-ing
the 'liberation of Grozny' after an onslaught that made the fate of
Sarajevo look like a picnic.
In one way or another, all these moves in its backyard overrode or
scanted EU sensibilities. But in no case were these flouted too indeli-cately
or ostentatiously. Indeed, as the second Clinton administration
wore on, European officialdom actually became, if anything, more pro-fuse
and vehement in announcing the interconnexion of free markets
and free elections, and the need to limit national sovereignty in the name
of human rights, than Washington itself. Politicians and intellectuals
could pick what they wanted from the mixture. In a speech in Chicago,
Blair outdid Clinton in enthusiasm for a new military humanism, while
in Germany a thinker like Habermas saw disinterested commitment 6
6 Page 7 8
anderson: Editorial 11
to the ideal of human rights as a definition of European identity itself,
setting the Continent apart from the merely instrumental aims of the
Anglo-American powers in the bombing of Yugoslavia.
By the end of the decade, strategic planners in Washington had every
reason to be satisfied with the overall balance sheet of the nineties.
The USSR had been knocked out of the ring, Europe and Japan kept
in check, China drawn into increasingly close trade relations, the UN
reduced to little more than a permissions office; and all this accom-plished
to the tune of the most emollient of ideologies, whose every
second word was international understanding and democratic goodwill.
Peace, justice and freedom were spreading around the world.
4
Two years later, the scene looks very different. But in what respects?
From the start, the incoming Bush administration showed a certain
impatience with the fiction that the 'international community' was
an alliance of democratic equals, and a disregard for the assorted
hypocrisies associated with it, grating to a European opinion still in
mourning for Clinton. But such shifts in style signified no change
in the fundamental aims of American global strategy, which have
remained completely stable for a half-century. Two developments, how-ever,
have radically modified the ways in which these are currently
being pursued.
The first of these, of course, was the shock of September 11. In no sense
a serious threat to American power, the attentats targeted symbolic
buildings and innocent victims? killing virtually as many Americans
in a day as they do each other in a season? in a spectacle calculated to
sow terror and fury in a population with no experience of foreign attack.
Dramatic retribution, on a scale more than proportionate to the massa-cre,
would automatically have become the first duty of any government,
whatever party was in power. In this case the new administration,
elected by a small and contested margin, had already posted its inten-tion
of striking a more assertive national posture abroad, dispensing
with a series of diplomatic façades or placebos? Rome, Kyoto etc? its
predecessor had, rather nominally, approved. September 11 gave it an
unexpected chance to recast the terms of American global strategy more 7
7 Page 8 9
12 nlr 17
decisively than would otherwise have been possible. Spontaneously,
domestic opinion was now galvanized for a struggle figuratively compa-rable
to the Cold War itself.
With this, a critical constraint was lifted. In postmodern conditions,
the hegemony of capital does not require mass mobilization of any
kind. Rather, it thrives on the opposite? political apathy and with-drawal
of any cathexis from public life. Failure to vote, as Britain's
Chancellor remarked after the last UK election, is the mark of the satis-fied
citizen. Nowhere is this axiom more widely accepted than in the
United States, where Presidents are regularly elected by about a quarter
of the adult population. But? here is an essential distinction? the exer-cise
of American primacy does require an activation of popular sentiment
beyond mere assent to the domestic status quo. This is far from readily
or continuously available. The Gulf War was approved by only a hand-ful
of votes in Congress. Intervention in Bosnia was long delayed for
fear of unenthusiastic reaction in the electorate. Even landings in Haiti
had to be quite brief. Here there have always been quite tight con-straints
on the Pentagon and White House? popular fear of casualties,
widespread ignorance of the outside world, traditional indifference to
foreign conflicts. In effect, there is a permanent structural gap between
the range of military-political operations the American empire needs in
order to maintain its sway, and the span of attention or commitment of
American voters. To close it, a threat of some kind is virtually indispen-sable.
In that sense, much like Pearl Harbour, the attentats of September
11 gave a Presidency that was anyway seeking to change the modus oper-andi
of America abroad the opportunity for a much swifter and more
ambitious turn than it could easily have executed otherwise. The circle
around Bush realized this immediately, National Security Adviser Rice
comparing the moment to the inception of the Cold War? a political
equivalent of the Creation. 6
The second development, of no less significance, had been germinating
since the mid-nineties. The Balkan War, valuable as a demonstration of
American command in Europe, and uplifting in its removal of Milosevic´,
6 See Bob Woodward, 'We Will Rally the World', Washington Post, 28 January 2002,
who reports that Rumsfeld pressed for war on Iraq on the morning of September
12; and for Rice's assessment of the situation, Nicholas Lemann, 'The Next World
Order', New Yorker, 1 April 2002, pp. 42? 48. 8 |
