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Pluto Press - Prem Shankar Jha

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391 pages

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This book offers an in-depth historical perspective on the rise of capitalism, written by one of the leading scholars of the Global South.

Arguing that globalisation is poorly understood, it offers a new synthesis of political and economic theory that sheds light on the consequences of rapid industrialisation world wide.

Writing from outside the usual Western perspective, the book challenges many of the usual preconceptions about the impact of globalisation.
1. Two Views of the Future

2. The End of History

3. Four Cycles of Capital Accumulation

4. The Onset of Chaos

5. Seven Explanations for the End of the Golden Age

6. The Emergence of the Global Market

7. The End of Organised Capitalism

8. Disorganisation of the Periphery

9. Assault on Economic Sovereignty

10. Growing Obsolescence of the Nation State

11. Rehearsal for Empire

12. The End of the Westphalian Order

13. Struggle for Hegemony

14. Loss of Hegemony

15. Towards Darkness

Notes

Index

Sujets

Political Science

Informations

Publié par	Pluto Press
Date de parution	20 août 2006
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781849643184
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,6250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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The Twilight of the Nation State

Globalisation,ChaosandWar

Prem Shankar Jha

Foreword byEric Hobsbawm

First published 2006 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106

www.plutobooks.com

The right of Prem Shankar Jha to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7453 2530 0 hardback ISBN 0 7453 2529 7 paperback

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Sage Publications, B42, Panchsheel Enclave, New Delhi 110 017 Typeset from disk by Star Compugraphics, Delhi Printed in India by Chaman Enterprises, New Delhi

CONTENTS

ForewordbyEric Hobsbawm Introduction

T V F WO IEWS OF THE UTURE Sketches two contrasting views of humanity’s future, traces their origins, and explains the reasons for the author’s deep misgivings about what the future holds. These spring from the wholesale destruction—under the impact of globalisation—of domestic and international institutions created over two centuries to minimise conflict (within and between societies) unleashed by industrial capitalism. Defines globalisation as a sudden explosive expansion of capitalism, one that is now breaking the container of the nation state to encompass a large part of the globe. Examines the optimistic scenario in detail, traces it to Fukuyama’s 1989 essay and Huntington’sThe Third Wave, and points out that it is the latter that has had the more lasting influence. Highlights the inconsistency that lies at the core of Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’, where he concedes that conflict is being generated by the assault of globalisation on nonwestern cultures and civilisations, but refuses to draw the obvious conclusion that it can be contained most easily not by enlisting the state to force the pace of globalisation in nonwestern societies, but by allowing it to happen at its own pace.

F C C A OUR YCLES OF APITAL CCUMULATION Presents the central thesis of this book: capitalism has broken its container three times in the past 700 years and is doing so again. The end of each cycle of expansion (with the beginning of the next) has led to a destruction of institutions and, therefore, to prolonged conflict inside and between states, similar to what we are in the midst of today. Arrighi (The Long Twentieth Century) has described this as the onset of ‘systemic chaos’. As the size of the container has grown, so has the violence released by its destruction.

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T O S C HE NSET OF YSTEMIC HAOS Describes the onset of systemic chaos in the international economy in the early 1970s. This period has been identified variously as the end of the ‘golden age of capitalism’ and the beginning of the ‘crisis decades’.

S E E G A EVEN XPLANATIONS FOR THE ND OF THE OLDEN GE A telltale sign of chaos was the confusion over what brought the ‘golden age’ to a close. Examines seven explanations put forward in the 1980s and the early 1990s, and concludes that only one—the transfer of manufacturing to lowwage countries at an unprecedented pace— explains all of the features of the prevailing global economy. Others explain the slowdown in growth of GDP and labour productivity, but not the appearance of chronic unemployment. Points out that chronic, as against cyclical, unemployment was virtually unknown in first generation industrialised countries. The normal condition of those economies was an acute shortage of labour that was met by immigration. A byproduct of constant labour shortages was the serious paucity of models in economic theory that explained the growth of employment, as opposed to product. The appearance of chronic unemployment in the 1970s triggered a frantic search for explanations and a systematic attempt to put the blame upon trade unions for causing wage rigidity. Presents a theory of longterm employment growth and uses it to explain the onset of chronic unemployment in the highly industrialised countries.

T R G C HE ISE OF LOBAL APITALISM Examines the causes of globalisation, i.e. the factors that made capitalism burst the container of the territorial nation state and turn a large part of the globe into its new container. In opposition to the vast bulk of extant literature, attributes globalisation not to the revolution in transport and information technology, but to the barriers (to free movement of labour) that had come up during the era of the nation state. This is a perfect example of the contradiction between different cycles of capitalism, for the nation state—with its hard frontiers and forced homogenisation of minorities—had come into being to serve the purposes of capitalism during its third cycle of expansion.

T E O (N ) C HE ND OF RGANISED ATIONAL APITALISM Describes in detail the systematic assault of globalisation upon the institutions of the welfare state and social democracy, built over 200

CONTENTSvii 

years to soften the edges of conflict within the nation states that were the first homes of industrial capitalism. What this has left behind— euphemistically called ‘deregulation’, ‘the big bang’ and so on—is an advanced state of systemic chaos.

D P ISORGANISATION OF THE ERIPHERY Describes the havoc wreaked by globalisation upon countries that were late starters in industrialisation and had therefore not completed their transformation into industrialised nation states, when capitalism burst the container of the nation state. Ascribes the failure of centralised planning, in particular, to the assault on the economic ramparts of the nation state. This led to the collapse of socialist economies, and a rush among mixed economies to eliminate elements of economic autarchy and allow the pressure generated by international competition to make them efficient. Embracing the market has had widely divergent results and outside the East Asian countries there have been very few gainers. Internation income differences have grown and a category of countries excluded from globalisation has emerged. In these countries, economic exclusion has reinforced predatory, clientelistic regimes, whose behaviour has frightened capital and deepened economic exclusion. This vicious circle is the genesis of failed states.

U E S NDERMINING CONOMIC OVEREIGNTY This is the first of five chapters that describe the response of society to the advance of chaos. The lead in shaping the response has been taken by the existing hegemonic power, the US. Describes the abandonment of trade liberalisation by consensus (which respected the sovereignty of nation states) to trade liberalisation through coercion (which does not).

G O N S ROWING BSOLESCENCE OF THE ATION TATE Questions the widely held belief that the assault on the Westphalian state system emerged out of the US’s response to international terrorism, and seeks to demonstrate that it arose out of the American bid for hegemonic control of the postnational world being created by globalisation. Describes the losing struggle waged by multilateralists against the votaries of an American empire, and highlights the not socoincidental similarities between the concepts—of empire and America’s ‘manifest destiny’—to legitimise its bid for hegemony now and a century ago. Traces the origins of empire to attempts to control the sudden eruption of chaos in the international state system after

147

174

189

viiiTHETWILIGHTOFTHENATIONSTATE 

10.

11.

12.

13.

the end of the Cold War. These were initially multilateral but became increasingly unilateral as the decade progressed.

R E EHEARSAL FOR MPIRE The US, supported by Britain and for a short while by Europe, crossed the line between modifying and destroying the Westphalian state system, with the December 1998 bombing of Iraq and the March 1999 aerial assault on Serbia. Deals with the assault on Serbia. Shows that the justification advanced for NATO intervention—that it was designed to preempt ethnic cleansing and possible genocide— was dubious. The real purpose was to put the world on notice (as had already been done in Iraq) that the era of sovereign nation states was coming to an end.

T E W O HE ND OF THE ESTPHALIAN RDER 9/11 provided the justification for the US to declare overtly what it had already set out to do—replace a world governed as a commonwealth by the principles of the UN Charter, with one that was governed as an American empire. Iraq proved the catalyst that made it possible. Describes how it was the US, and not Iraq, that first violated UN Security Council Resolution 687. Highlights the lengths to which the Clinton administration went (from August to December 1998), to prevent the implementation of Resolution 687, and points out that it was in this period—specifically on 25 August 1998, and not 7 March 2003—that the seeds of the military invasion of Iraq were sown.

S H TRUGGLE FOR EGEMONY A new world order requires a new hegemon. But hegemony cannot be based upon military superiority alone; it requires a willing acceptance by the governed that what is in the hegemon’s interest is also in theirs. Describes the attempt by the US to build a hegemonic justification for empire, and specifically for the invasion of Iraq, and the US’s enlistment of the international media to ‘manufacture consent’.

L H OSS OF EGEMONY Describes the failure of the US and the UK to create a new hegemonic justification for empire, and the consequent emergence of a Hobbesian world in which military threat has become the principal language of international discourse.

208

225

269

295

14.

Cix ONTENTS 

T D OWARDS ARKNESS With globalisation still gathering force, the destruction of the existing world order is far from complete. Describes the forces that are impelling the world towards further destruction and deeper chaos— in short, towards darkness.

Acknowledgements Index

325

366 367

FOREWORD

In the early years of the twentyfirst century it is difficult to remember the optimism, not to say triumphalism, that followed the collapse of com munism in the rich countries of the North. Where is Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’? Today even the politicians and ideologues of that region heavily qualify their forecasts of a peaceful and liberal future for a world which seems in obvious crisis. Yet the test of a book about the current situation of the globe is not whether it is hopeful or disenchanted, but whether it helps us understand it, that is to say, whether it shows a historical under standing of the present crisis. Prem Shankar Jha’s strikingly intelligent, lucid and troubled book passes this test with flying colours. It is essential reading for the first decade of the third millennium. He sees the present as the most recent of the major crises in the secular development of a by its very nature increasingly globalising capitalism. In his view we are living through the fourth time that capitalism has broken its economic, political and institutional ‘container’, in the course of a history which he traces back to the middle ages. As in the past, the end of each of its cycles of expansion has seen the destruction of institutions and prolonged conflict between and within states, and what has been called ‘systemic chaos’. In Jha’s view the violence released by these destructions has tended to increase with the global growth of the ‘container’. He has no time for the comfortable reflection that we may hope to return to a bigger and better version of a globalised economy such as was familiar before 1914. Modern globalisation has an incomparably greater potential for destruction. Each of the earlier phases, he argues, was associated with the hegemony of one major economic centre, linked since the seventeenth century to a historical innovation: the territorial ‘nation state’ within an international power system. Following what he sees as the era of medieval citystates, the economic hegemony of the Netherlands, and then of Britain, we are at the end of the ‘American century’. But the acceleration of globalisation has gone beyond the relatively stable and flexible framework that capitalism generated—notably the nation state with its institutions and international system—and which allowed it to develop without explosion or implosion

FOREWORDxi 

and to recover from the crises of the first half of the twentieth century. It does not function any longer. No clear alternative is in sight. Further destruction and a deeper chaos are to be expected before the internal and external contradictions of the current crisis of globalisation are overcome. Unlike most works on globalisation, usually written in Europe or North America, Prem Shankar Jha’s voice comes to us from India, the region which will probably be the core of the twentyfirst century world, but whose spectacular development coincides with the ‘systemic chaos’ into which the global economy has been plunging since the onset of the present era of crisis in the 1970s. That is why he is more keenly aware of the problems created by the current phase of capitalist globalisation than the liberal economists who argue the virtues of the market, leave alone the brigades of business publicists. The negative effects of globalisation on the developed countries, even the consequences of their deindustrialisation and the erosion of their wel fare systems, are substantial but slow, and are moderated by their accumu lated social wealth. Their earthquakes are tremors at the bottom end of the economic Richter scale. In the ‘developing’ world they are cataclysmic. When politicians and journalists in the European Union speak of eco nomic crisis, they do not mean what Jha rightly calls the ‘meltdown’ of 1997–98, of whose South and East Asian manifestations he gives a vivid analysis. They do not mean the seismic explosions that have shaken Brazil, Mexico and Argentina since the 1980s, which were treated by Northern commentators chiefly as proofs of the immaturity of Third World business men and governments compared to those of the OECD. An observer from a country like India is less likely than those in the rich countries to confuse the generally beneficial effects of industrialisation and technoscientific progress with the much more problematic conse quences of uncontrolled capitalist globalisation, notably the dramatic widening of the per capita income gap between the developed countries and most other countries—and, within almost all countries, the gap be tween the rich and the poor. Above all, he cannot but be constantly aware that phrases such as ‘I am hungry’ or ‘I have no work’ have a profoundly different meaning in countries with a mean per capita GDP of $25,000 than they do in countries where it is $500. After reading his book, even those of us from countries whose populations are still protected by the wealth and institutions of their past, should be aware of the forces global isation generates that are impelling the world towards further destruction and darkness.

Eric Hobsbawm

xiiTHETWILIGHTOFTHENATIONSTATE 

INTRODUCTION

This book attempts to give shape to a widely shared and growing unease about the direction in which the world is moving. It argues—contrary to the belief that pervaded most of the intellectual debate about the future in the mid and late 1990s, and which still survives in an attenuated form today—that the world is not moving towards order, peace and prosperity, but towards increasing disorder and violence. The largest and most power ful nation the world has ever known, the United States, considers itself to be at war. This war is not being waged against a state, not even against a clan, a tribe, or a family, but against an abstract noun—terrorism, now short ened to terror. To pursue this war, President George W. Bush has an nounced that the US military will go wherever the terrorists reside, or are being spawned, in order to prevent the threat from reaching America’s 1 shores. This is a recipe for war without end. The boundaries between war and peace are therefore being eliminated, side by side with the boundaries between nations. It is therefore hardly surprising that an opinion poll carried out in the weeks before Bush’s second inauguration showed that 58 per cent of the people polled believed that his reelection had made the world less safe. Those who felt this way constituted a majority in 16 out of the 21 countries covered by the survey. Fear of an America ruled by Bush was strongest among its traditional allies: Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Canada, Mexico and Turkey. In short, precisely those who had the closest 2 relations with the US in the past fear it the most today. My unease began almost a decade earlier, in 1995, when I spent half a year at the Centre for International Affairs (now the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs) at Harvard University. In those days Harvard was a heady place to be in. The Cold War was over and democracy was sweeping through the erstwhile communist countries and much of the postcolonial world. Trade barriers were going down, currencies were being released from the straitjacket of central bank control, and private capital was flooding into the erstwhile developing countries. It had already transformed a few of them into industrial giants within half a generation. There seemed to be no reason why it could not bring at least prosperity to the rest. Prosperity