WORLD DOMINATION:"NEOLIBERAL GLOBALIZATION" VERSUS "THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS:" Part One

Harry Targ

Part One

United States foreign policy since the dawn of the twentieth century has been shaped by similar but competing ideologies. Ideologies are usually generated by those who rule to explain and justify the policies that they adopt and implement. Often, but not always, purveyors of one or another ideology believe what they say. And journalists and scholars dignify the ideologies by developing rigorous explanations of why the approaches taken are justified by theories of human conduct.

During various periods of world history, elites who compete for power and influence disagree over policy but share a common ideological understanding of the world. But sometimes policy disagreements lead to substantial conflicts of perspective, of ideologies. With the election of Donald Trump, ideological contestation between two elite class ideologies has emerged: one based upon the theory of neoliberal globalization and the other on a thesis based on an alleged clash of civilizations. Understanding the ideological disputes might help deconstruct the political disputes today over foreign (and domestic) policy and facilitate the process of resisting both versions of a United States imperial agenda.

The Ideology of Neoliberal Globalization

The policy referred to as neoliberalism has its historical roots in the expansion of capitalism out of feudalism. Theorists as varied as Adam Smith and Karl Marx saw capitalism as an expansive system that through competition led to growth of economic actors. For Smith, capitalist competition would reach its natural limits and “the invisible hand” would become a regulator of the enterprises that prospered in the marketplace, limiting egregious consolidation of economic and political power.

For Marx capital accumulation meant that competitive capitalism would be qualitatively transformed into consolidated and later monopoly capitalism. This process of economic consolidation was inextricably connected to globalization: from kidnapping and enslavement, to trade, investment, and appropriating natural resources. By the time of the Spanish/Cuban/American war the United States had accumulated enough military power to expand its economic tentacles to Asia, the Pacific, and the Caribbean and Latin America. But competition with other colonial powers, the Russian and Chinese revolutions, and world wars stifled the free unfettered expansion of  United States capitalism.

After World War II, with the United States as the dominant power, a global economy was constructed that facilitated trade, investment, and a debt system. The then existing Socialist Bloc, rising anti-colonial movements in the Global South, the spread of social democracies across Europe, and labor pressures at home limited the full economic freedom that would maximize the opportunities of capitalist expansion.

By the 1970s, economic competition among  capitalist states, anti-colonial wars against the United States, and overproduction of goods and services combined to reduce rates of profit. Monopoly capital expanded its historic shift from manufacturing to financial speculation. As Lenin had long ago assumed, the export of capital began to take priority over the export of commodities.

To facilitate financial speculation,  political elites began to actively pursue on a global basis what became the neoliberal agenda: privatization of all public institutions; deregulation of economies; austerity, that is cutting social programs that give some support to majorities for education, health care, jobs, housing, and transportation; and for many of the world’s countries shifting their economic programs from producing goods and services for their own people to the development of larger and larger export sectors.

In addition, with the qualitative shift in capitalism from manufacturing to financialization, neoliberal institutions encouraged the opening of national economies to foreign speculators. As the price of oil rose dramatically in the 1970s an emerging  debt system was created whereby countries of the Global South were forced by international financial institutions to adopt neoliberal policies. The collapse of socialism in the 1990s triggered a radical transformation in the former Socialist Bloc to free market economies. The changes imposed by international institutions were to occur quickly, sometimes called “shock therapy.” Also Social Democracies in Europe shifted in the direction of neoliberalism. The rise to power of Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States personified this global shift in public policy at home and abroad.

The neoliberal policy agenda was defended in terms of the presumed connection between market freedom and development, capitalism and development, markets and democracy, and the fanciful idea that neoliberal globalization would facilitate harmony among nations, economic development, and the transformation from four hundred years of nation-state competition to a new world order.

In the United States political elites of both major political parties endorsed the major features of neoliberalism: free trade agreements; pressures on poor countries to deregulate their economies; downsizing all governments at home and abroad; and using military power to impose the neoliberal agenda on recalcitrant countries. Most foreign policy elites from the 1980s on advocated so-called “humanitarian interventions,” to transform rogue states that opposed the global shift in economic and political institutions.

The ideology of neoliberal globalization justified trade agreements such as The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the emerging World Trade Organization (WTO). US foreign policies inspired by neoliberal ideology justified  military interventions in the former Yugoslavia, the Middle East, Persian Gulf and East Asia and subversion of regimes in Latin America and Africa. And under the guise of promoting market democracies the United States since the 1990s constructed over 700 military bases, mostly small “lily pads;” established a military command structure in Africa; and since 2009 unleashed drone warfare on an unprecedented scale. Supporters of the neoliberal agenda continue to support expanded trade agreements, expansion of the global presence of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and military spending.

(A competing ideological justification for the promotion of United States imperialism based on the “clash of civilizations” has gained influence over the foreign policy process in the new administration of Donald Trump. Racism, always deeply embedded in foreign policy discourse, becomes central to the United States foreign policy. The idea of the “clash of civilizations” will be discussed in Part Two of this essay. HT)

WORLD DOMINATION: "NEOLIBERAL GLOBALIZATION" VERSUS "THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS: Part Two"

Harry Targ

Part Two

“To be brutality frank, I mean Christianity is dying in Europe, and Islam is on the rise….we’re in a war…” Steve Bannon quoted in Steve Reilly and Brad Heath, “Bannon Takes a Dark View of Islam,” USA Today, February 2, 2017).

The Ideology of “the Clash of Civilizations”

The history of the United States cannot be understood without grasping the central role of the capitalist mode of production. The Western Hemisphere became vital to the emerging world system of capitalism in the fifteenth century. Also, the globalization of capitalism was inextricably connected to the rise of modern racism, an ideology that justified mass murder, kidnapping, and enslavement of millions of people, primarily people of color. Rising capitalism and racism grew in tandem. Each was the product of the other. In one of Marx’s most powerful renditions of the emergence of the two phenomena he wrote in Capital:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant dimensions in England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the opium wars against China, &c.

Beginning with the introduction of capitalism and slavery in the Western Hemisphere in the fifteenth century, different iterations of white supremacist ideologies were articulated using metaphors that denied humanity to the indigenous people who lived in the Hemisphere before the arrival of European colonial powers and the slaves kidnapped from Africa. For some, people of color were not human beings. For the “liberals” they were like children. And as the United States expanded across the North American continent, the taking of land, the slaughter of indigenous people, and the establishment of slavery were all justified by virtue of the superiority of the white man.

As the new great power emerged from the war with Spain, soon to be President Theodore Roosevelt referred to the special contribution of the white race to civilization. Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge declared that it was the Christian duty of the United States to expand on a worldwide basis ( See Harry Targ, “The Ideology of U.S. Hegemony in the Hemisphere, The Rag Blog, June 6, 2012). In our own day, President Reagan reiterated the old Puritan metaphor: the United States is the “city on the hill.” Secretaries of State Albright and Clinton, as well as former President Obama referred to the United States as “the indispensable nation.” In sum United States history is replete with references to the intellectual and moral superiority of the United States and, directly or indirectly, of  the “white race.”

As neoliberal ideology is a contemporary version of classic theories of free market capitalism, the thesis of the “clash of civilizations” is a modern derivative of classic ideologies of white supremacy. Distinguished political scientist Samuel Huntington published books and articles in recent years that posited a fundamental global contradiction between civilizations. For him, wars are not about disputes between nations but between civilizations. A civilization is a large swath of land, millions of people with a shared culture, values, and beliefs, and overarching political and military institutions.

In world history Huntington suggested, it was because of incompatible civilizations that wars occurred. In his 1996 book ( The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Simon and Shuster), he suggested that the fundamental clash that would be occurring in the years ahead was between the Christian West and Islam. (Huntington’s writings have had an enduring and negative impact on public policy. He recommended for South Vietnam, the Strategic Hamlet Program, which was designed to move rural Vietnamese people away from their communities where the enemy was strong. He also warned in the 1970s of the excesses of democracy. Too many people are participating in political processes, he argued).  

White supremacy gave inspiration to support for wars in the twenty-first century. Muslim people were increasingly conceptualized as monsters, killers, and terrorists. They constituted a civilizational threat to the West. And it was this conception of the clash of civilizations that was used to build support among a war-weary US population to fight in Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf, and the Middle East. During the 2016 election, the theory of the clash of civilizations hovered just below the surface of discourse. United States security was threatened first and foremost by Muslims, but also by Latinos, Africans, and Asians.

While not all supporters of candidate and now President Trump are white supremacists, he and his key aides constantly imply that the United States is currently in a World War, a war of a new kind, a civilizational war. For the Trump narrative, the maintenance of the racial superiority of the United States requires economic policies that limit the outflow of United States investment dollars and the inflow of migrant labor and goods produced overseas. In other words, in the contemporary ideological climate the ideology of the clash of civilizations is connected to policies promoting economic nationalism, a perspective at variance from the neoliberal ideologues. And, at least rhetorically this ideological wing of the foreign policy elite favors less involvement in global diplomacy and institutions while we prepare for global conflicts.

If one had to oversimplify political discourse on the United States role in the world in 2017, the ideological struggle is between one faction of the political class that prioritizes the globalization of the United States economy, pursuing policies to open doors to American capitalism, particularly finance capitalism, and another which pursues white supremacy at home and seeks to impose the dominance of the United States, while limiting economic, political, and cultural ties across the world.

Another World is Possible

The two ideologies, neoliberal globalization versus the clash of civilizations, vary in theoretical underpinnings. On occasion followers of one or the other ideology advocate differences in policy. But both are committed to establishing or reestablishing ( in the twenty-first century) United States dominance of the globe economically, militarily, and politically. The neoliberal ideology begins with an economic motivation for militarism; the clash of civilizations begins with a racial motivation for militarism. One proclaims that our economic and political institutions represent a beacon of hope for the world; the other frankly believes that the United States, because of its racial identity, is a superior civilization. Neither approach to the world provides any semblance of hope for economic and social justice.

Therefore, one task of the peace movement in 2017 entails offering a population skeptical about United States wars and military spending a new way of thinking about how the nation should participate in the world and why this new way is vital to the survival of humankind. The task includes articulating a theory of how the world can work.

First, a new world order that maximizes human potential everywhere and minimizes violence can only be built on a shared, equitable distribution of societal resources. The promotion of any economic system that institutionalizes exploitation must be opposed. Peace can come only in a global society that is based upon economic fairness.

Second, a just world order economically requires the development of a political culture, values, beliefs, and practices, that celebrates human oneness—solidarity—and diversity. Political cultures based on notions of superiority and inferiority are diametrically opposed to ideas of solidarity and diversity.

Third, combatting the institutionalized violence bred of economic disparity and racial supremacy requires mass movements that oppose war-making, killing, and the amassing of the weapons of war. A twenty-first century peace movement must oppose the war system.

The two-year presidential campaign is over and a new administration is serving in its first one hundred days. The campaign and election have shown that large numbers of Americans, and people from around the world who watched the US elections carefully, reject the ideology of neoliberal globalization. Growing resistance to the new Trump administration suggests also that people are rejecting the white supremacist/economic nationalist alternative that this new administration represents. The peace movement task in  the months and years ahead includes developing a coherent theory or ideology of peace and engaging in processes of education, agitation, and organization to achieve its goals.