Anderson cont'd
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anderson: Editorial 13
had also yielded a premium of a more virtual yet consequential kind.
Here for the first time, in well-nigh ideal conditions, could be tested
out what specialists had for some time predicted as the impending 'rev-olution
in military affairs'. What the RMA meant was a fundamental
change in the nature of warfare, by comprehensive application of elec-tronic
advances to weapons and communications systems. The NATO
campaign against Yugoslavia was still an early experiment, with a good
many technical flaws and targeting failures, in the possibilities for one-sided
destruction that these innovations opened up. But the results
were startling enough, suggesting the potential for a quantum jump
in the accuracy and effect of American fire power. By the time that
plans for retaliation against Al-Qaeda were in preparation, the RMA
had proceeded much further. The blitz on Afghanistan, deploying a
full panoply of satellites, smart missiles, drones, stealth bombers and
special forces, showed just how wide the technological gap between
the US armoury and that of all other states had become, and how
low the human cost? to the US? of further military interventions
round the world might be. The global imbalance in the means of
violence once the USSR had vanished has, in effect, since been redou-bled,
tilting the underlying constituents of hegemony yet more sharply
towards the pole of force. For the effect of the RMA is to create a
low-risk power vacuum around American planning, in which the ordi-nary
calculus of the risks or gains of war is diluted or suspended. The
lightning success of the Afghan operation, over forbidding geographi-cal
and cultural terrain, could only embolden any Administration for
wider imperial sweeps.
These two changes of circumstance? the inflaming of popular national-ism
in the wake of September 11 at home, and the new latitude afforded
by the RMA abroad? have been accompanied by an ideological shift.
This is the main element of discontinuity in current US global strategy.
Where the rhetoric of the Clinton regime spoke of the cause of inter-national
justice and the construction of a democratic peace, the Bush
administration has hoist the banner of the war on terrorism. These are
not incompatible motifs, but the order of emphasis assigned to each has
altered. The result is a sharp contrast of atmospherics. The war on ter-rorism
orchestrated by Cheney and Rumsfeld is a far more strident, if
also brittle, rallying-cry than the cloying pieties of the Clinton? Albright
years. The immediate political yield of each has also differed. The new
and sharper line from Washington has gone down badly in Europe, 9
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14 nlr 17
where human-rights discourse was and is especially prized. Here the
earlier line was clearly superior as a hegemonic idiom.
On the other hand, in Russia and China, the opposite holds good.
There, the war on terrorism has? at any rate temporarily? offered a
much better basis for integrating rival power centres under American
leadership than human-rights rhetoric, which only irritated the princi-pals.
For the moment, the diplomatic gains scored by the co-option of
Putin's regime into the Afghan campaign, and installation of US bases
throughout Central Asia, can well be regarded by Washington as more
substantial than the costs of the listless grumbling at American unilater-alism
that is so marked a feature of the European scene. The ABM Treaty
is dead, NATO is moving into the Baltic states without resistance from
Moscow, and Russia is eager to join the Western concert. China too, put
out at first by loose Republican talk on Taiwan, has been reassured by the
war on terrorism, which gives it cover from the White House for ethnic
repression in Xinjiang.
5
If such was the balance sheet as an American marionette was lowered
smoothly into place in Kabul, to all but universal applause? from
Iranian mullahs to French philosophes, Scandinavian social-democrats
to Russian secret policemen, British NGOs to Chinese generals? what
explains the projected follow-up in Iraq? A tougher policy towards the
Ba'ath regime, already signalled during Bush's electoral campaign, was
predictable well before September 11, at a time when the long-standing
Anglo-American bombardment of Iraq was anyway intensifying. 7 Three
factors have since converted what was no doubt originally envisaged
as stepped-up covert operations to overthrow Saddam into the current
proposals for a straightforward invasion. The first is the need for some
more conclusively spectacular outcome to the war on terrorism. Victory
in Afghanistan, satisfactory enough in itself, was achieved over a largely
invisible enemy, and to some extent psychologically offset by continuing
warnings of the danger of further attacks by the hidden agents of
7 For the escalation of aerial assaults on Iraq by Clinton and Blair, see Tariq Ali,
'Throttling Iraq', NLR 5, September? October 2001, pp. 5? 6. 10
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anderson: Editorial 15
Al-Qaeda. Functional for keeping up a high state of public alarm, this
theme nevertheless lacks any liberating resolution. The conquest of Iraq
offers drama of a grander and more familiar type, whose victorious
ending could convey a sense that a hydra-like enemy has truly been put
out of action. For an American public, traumatized by a new sense of
insecurity, distinctions in the taxonomy of evil between Kandahar and
Baghdad are not of great moment.
Beyond such atmospherics, however, the drive to attack Iraq answers
to a rational calculation of a more strategic nature. It is clear that the
traditional nuclear oligopoly, indefensible on any principled grounds, is
bound to be more and more challenged in practice as the technology
for making atomic weapons becomes cheaper and simpler. The club has
already been defied by India and Pakistan. To deal with this looming
danger, the US needs to be able to launch pre-emptive strikes at possible
candidates, whenever it so wishes. The Balkan War provided a vital first
precedent for overriding the legal doctrine of national sovereignty with-out
any need to invoke self-defence? one retrospectively sanctioned by
the UN. In Europe, this was still often presented as a regrettable excep-tion,
triggered by a humanitarian emergency, to the normal respect for
international law characteristic of democracies. The notion of the axis
of evil, by contrast, and the subsequent targeting of Iraq, lays down the
need for pre-emptive war and enforcement of regime change as a norm,
if the world is ever to be made safe.
For obvious reasons, this conception? unlike the battle against terror-ism
more narrowly construed? is capable of making all power-centres
outside Washington nervous. Misgivings have already been expressed,
if not too loudly, by France and Russia. But from the viewpoint of
Washington, if the momentum of the war on terrorism can be used to
push through a de facto? or better yet, de jure? UN acceptance of the
need to crush Saddam Hussein without further ado, then pre-emptive
strikes will have been established henceforward as part of the regular
repertoire of democratic peace-keeping on a global scale. Such a window
of ideological opportunity is unlikely to come again soon. It is the jurid-ical
possibilities it opens up for a new 'international constitution', in
which such operations become part of a habitual and legal order, that
excite such a leading theorist of earlier human-rights interventions as
Philip Bobbitt, a passionate admirer and close counsellor of Clinton 11
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16 nlr 17
during the Balkan strikes? underlining the extent to which the logic of
pre-emption is potentially bipartisan. 8 The fact that Iraq does not have
nuclear weapons, of course, would make an attack on it all the more
effective as a lesson deterring others from any bid to acquire them.
A third reason for seizing Baghdad is more directly political, rather
than ideological or military. Here the risk is significantly greater. The
Republican administration is as well aware as anyone on the Left that
September 11 was not simply an act of unmotivated evil, but a response
to the widely disliked role of the United States in the Middle East. This
is a region in which? unlike Europe, Russia, China, Japan or Latin
America? there are virtually no regimes with a credible base to offer
effective transmission points for American cultural or economic hege-mony.
The assorted Arab states are docile enough, but they lack any kind
of popular support, resting on family networks and secret police which
typically compensate for their factual servility to the US with a good deal
of media hostility, not to speak of closure, towards America. Uniquely,
indeed, Washington's oldest dependency and most valuable client in the
region, Saudi Arabia, is more barricaded against US cultural penetration
than any country in the world after North Korea.
In practice, while thoroughly subject to the grip of American 'hard'
power (funds and arms), most of the Arab world thus forms a kind
of exclusion zone for the normal operations of American 'soft power',
allowing all kinds of aberrant forces and sentiments to brew under the
8 'Former US President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who have been widely criticized in their
respective parties, will be seen as architects attempting a profound change in the
constitutional order of a magnitude no less than Bismarck's. As of this writing, US
President George W. Bush appears to be pursuing a similar course . . . No state's
sovereignty is unimpeachable if it studiedly spurns parliamentary institutions
and human rights protections. The greater the rejection of these institutions?
which are the means by which sovereignty is conveyed by societies to their
governments? the more sharply curtailed is the cloak of sovereignty that would
otherwise protect governments from interference by their peers. US action against
the sovereignty of Iraq, for example, must be evaluated in this light': The Shield
of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History, London 2002, pp. xxvii, 680. This
work is the most extended theorization of the constitutional imperative to crush
states that are insufficiently respectful of human rights, or the oligopoly of nuclear
weapons. The homage to Chancellor Schroeder can be overlooked, as a forgivable
expectation of his high calling. 12
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anderson: Editorial 17
apparently tight lid of the local security services, as the origins of the
assailants of 9.11 demonstrated. Viewed in this light, Al-Qaeda could
be seen as a warning of the dangers of relying on too external and
indirect a system of control in the Middle East, an area which also
contains the bulk of the world's oil reserves and so cannot be left to
its own devices as an irrelevant marchland in the way that most of
Sub-Saharan Africa can. On the other hand, any attempt to alter the
struts of US command over the region by tampering with the existing
regimes could easily lead to regime backlashes of the Madame Nhu
type, which did the US no good in South-East Asia. Taking over Iraq, by
contrast, would give Washington a large oil-rich platform in the centre
of the Arab world, on which to build an enlarged version of Afghan-style
democracy, designed to change the whole political landscape of
the Middle East.
Of course, as many otherwise well-disposed commentators have hast-ened
to point out, rebuilding Iraq might prove a taxing and hazardous
business. But American resources are large, and Washington can hope
for a Nicaraguan effect after a decade of mortality and despair under
UN siege? counting on the end of sanctions and full resumption of oil
exports, under a US occupation, to improve the living conditions of the
majority of the Iraqi population so dramatically as to create the poten-tial
for a stable American protectorate, of the kind that already more or
less exists in the Kurdish sector of the country. Unlike the Sandinista
government, the Ba'ath regime is a pitiless dictatorship with few or no
popular roots. The Bush administration could reckon that the chances
of a Nicaraguan outcome, in which an exhausted population trades inde-pendence
for material relief, are likely to be higher in Baghdad than
they were in Managua.
In turn, the demonstration effect of a role-model parliamentary regime,
under benevolent international tutelage? perhaps another Loya Jirga of
the ethnic mosaic in the country? would be counted on to convince
Arab elites of the need to modernize their ways, and Arab masses of the
invincibility of America. In the Muslim world at large, Washington has
already pocketed the connivance of the Iranian clerics (conservative and
reformist) for a repeat of Enduring Freedom in Mesopotamia. In these
conditions, so the strategic calculus goes, bandwagoning of the kind that
originally brought the PLO to heel at Oslo after the Gulf War would once 13
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18 nlr 17
again become irresistible, allowing a final settlement of the Palestinian
question along lines acceptable to Sharon.
6
Such, roughly speaking, is the thinking behind the Republican plan to
occupy Iraq. Like all such geopolitical enterprises, which can never factor
in every relevant agent or circumstance, it involves a gamble. But a cal-culation
that misfires is not thereby necessarily irrational? it becomes
so only if the odds are plainly too high against it, or the potential costs far
outweigh the benefits, even if the odds are low. Neither appears to apply
in this case. The operation is clearly within American capabilities, and
its immediate costs? there would undoubtedly be some? do not at this
stage look prohibitive. What would upset the apple-cart, of course, would
be any sudden overthrow of one or more of the US client regimes in the
region by indignant crowds or enraged officers. In the nature of things,
it is impossible to rule out such coups de théâtre, but as things stand at the
moment, it looks as if Washington is not being unrealistic in discount-ing
such an eventuality. The Iraqi regime attracts far less sympathy than
the Palestinian cause, yet the Arab masses were unable to lift a finger to
help the second intifada throughout the televised crushing by the IDF of
the uprising in the occupied territories.
Why then has the prospect of war aroused such disquiet, not so much in
the Middle East, where Arab League bluster is largely pro forma, but in
Europe? At governmental level, part of the reason lies, as often noted, in
the opposite distribution of Jewish and Arab populations on the two sides
of the Atlantic. Europe has no strict equivalent to the power of AIPAC
in the US, but does contain millions of Muslims: communities in which
an occupation of Iraq could provoke unrest? possibly triggering, in freer
conditions, unwelcome turbulence in the Arab street itself, where the
reactions to an invasion after the event might prove stronger than inabil-ity
to block it beforehand would suggest. The EU countries, far weaker
as military or political actors on the international stage, are inherently
more cautious than the United States. Britain, of course, is the exception,
where an equerry mentality has led to the other extreme, falling in more
or less automatically with initiatives from across the ocean.
In general, while European states know they are subaltern to the US,
and accept their status, they dislike having it rubbed in publicly. The 14
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anderson: Editorial 19
Bush administration's dismissal of the Kyoto Protocols and International
Criminal Court has also offended a sense of propriety earnestly attached
to the outward forms of political rectitude. NATO was accorded scant
attention in the Afghan campaign, and is being completely ignored in
the drive to the Tigris. All this has ruffled European sensibilities. A fur-ther
ingredient in the hostile reception the plan to attack Iraq has met in
the European? to a lesser extent also liberal American? intelligentsia is
the justified fear that it could strip away the humanitarian veil covering
Balkan and Afghan operations, to reveal too nakedly the imperial reali-ties
behind the new militarism. This layer has invested a great deal in
human-rights rhetoric, and feels uncomfortably exposed by the blunt-ness
of the thrust now under way.
In practice, such misgivings amount to little more than a plea that what-ever
war is launched should have the nominal blessing of the United
Nations. The Republican administration has been happy to oblige,
explaining with perfect candour that America always benefits if it can
act multilaterally, but if it cannot, will act unilaterally anyway. A Security
Council Resolution framed vaguely enough to allow an American assault
on Iraq soon after the elapse of some kind of ultimatum would suffice to
appease European consciences, and let the Pentagon get on with the war.
A month or two of sustained official massaging of opinion on both sides
of the Atlantic is capable of working wonders. Despite the huge anti-war
demonstration in London this autumn, three-quarters of the British
public would support an attack on Iraq, provided the UN extends its fig-leaf.
In that event, it seems quite possible the French jackal will be in at
the kill as well. In Germany, Schroeder has tapped popular opposition to
the war to escape electoral eviction, but since his country is not a member
of the Security Council, his gestures are costless. In practice, the Federal
Republic will furnish all the necessary staging-posts for an expedition to
Iraq? a considerably more important strategic service to the Pentagon
than the provision of British commandos or French paras. Overall,
European acquiescence in the campaign can be taken for granted.
This does not mean that there will be any widespread enthusiasm
for the war in the EU, aside from Downing Street itself. Factual
assent to an armed assault is one matter; ideological commitment to it
another. Participation in the expedition, or? more probably? occupation
to follow it, is unlikely to cancel altogether resentment about the extent
to which Europe was bounced into the enterprise. The demonstration 15
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20 nlr 17
of American prerogatives?' the unilateralist iron fist inside the multi-lateralist
velvet glove', as Robert Kagan has crisply put it? may rankle for
some time yet. 9
7
Does this mean, as a chorus of establishment voices in both Europe
and America protests, that the 'unity of the West' risks long-run damage
from the high-handedness of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice? In consider-ing
this question, it is essential to bear in mind the formal figure of
any hegemony, which necessarily always conjugates a particular power
with a general task of coordination. Capitalism as an abstract economic
order requires certain universal conditions for its operation: stable rights
of private property, predictable legal rules, some procedures of arbitra-tion,
and (crucially) mechanisms to ensure the subordination of labour.
But this is a competitive system, whose motor is rivalry between eco-nomic
agents. Such competition has no 'natural' ceiling: once it becomes
international, the Darwinian struggle between firms has an inherent
tendency to escalate to the level of states. There, however, as the history
of the first half of the twentieth century repeatedly showed, it can have
disastrous consequences for the system itself. For on the plane of inter-state
relations, there are only weak equivalents of domestic law, and no
mechanisms for aggregating interests between different parties on an
equal basis, as nominally within electoral democracies.
Left to itself, the logic of such anarchy can only be internecine war, of
the kind Lenin described in 1916. Kautsky, by contrast, abstracting from
the clashing interests and dynamics of the concrete states of that time,
came to the conclusion that the future of the system must? in its own
interests? lie in the emergence of mechanisms of international capi-talist
coordination capable of transcending such conflicts, or what he
called 'ultra-imperialism'. 10 This was a prospect Lenin rejected as uto-pian.
The second half of the century produced a solution envisaged by
neither thinker, but glimpsed intuitively by Gramsci. For in due course it
became clear that the coordination problem can be satisfactorily resolved
only by the existence of a superordinate power, capable of imposing
9 'Multilateralism, American Style', Washington Post, 14 September 2002.
10 For Kautsky's prediction, see the text of 'Ultra-Imperialism' in NLR I/ 59, January?
February 1970, pp. 41? 6, still the only translation.16
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anderson: Editorial 21
discipline on the system as a whole, in the common interests of all
parties. Such 'imposition' cannot be a product of brute force. It must
also correspond to a genuine capacity of persuasion? ideally, a form of
leader ship that can offer the most advanced model of production and
culture of its day, as target of imitation for all others. That is the defini-tion
of hegemony, as a general unification of the field of capital.
But at the same time, the hegemon must? can only? be a particular
state: as such, inevitably possessed of a differential history and set of
national peculiarities that distinguish it from all others. This contradic-tion
is inscribed from the beginning, in Hegel's philosophy, in which the
necessity of the incarnation of reason in just one world-historical state,
in any given period, can never entirely erase the contingent multi plicity
of political forms around it. 11 Latently, the singular universal always
remains at variance with the empirical manifold. This is the conceptual
setting in which American 'exceptionalism' should be viewed. All states
are more or less exceptional, in the sense that they possess unique char-acteristics.
By definition, however, a hegemon will possess features that
cannot be shared by others, since it is precisely those that lift it above the
ruck of its rivals. But at the same time, its role requires it to be as close to
a generalizable? that is, reproducible? model as practicable. Squaring
this circle is, of course, in the end impossible, which is why there is an
inherent coefficient of friction in any hegemonic order. Structurally, a
discrepancy is built into the harmony whose function it is to install. In
this sense, we live in a world which is inseparably? in a way that neither
of them could foresee? both the past described by Lenin and the future
anticipated by Kautsky. The particular and the general are condemned to
each other. Union can only be realized by division.
In the notebooks he wrote in prison, Gramsci theorized hegemony as a
distinctive synthesis of 'domination' and 'direction', or a dynamic equi-librium
of force and consent. The principal focus of his attention was
on the variable ways in which this balance was achieved, or broken,
within national states. But the logic of his theory, of which he was aware,
extended to the international system as well. On this plane too, the
elements of hegemony are distributed asymmetrically. 12 Domination?
11 For this tension in Hegel's thought, see 'The Ends of History', A Zone of
Engagement, London 1992, p. 292. 12
For the asymmetry within any national state, see 'The Antinomies of Antonio
Gramsci', NLR I/ 100, November 1976? January 1977, p. 41. 17 |
