Hegemony unravelling - I

New Left Review

Volumn , Issue 32, 2005, Pages 23-80

  Arrighi, Giovanni ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 20444488683     PISSN: 00286060     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (190)

1. John Ikenberry, 'Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American Order', Foreign Affairs, March-April 2004. I would like to thank Andre Gunder Frank, Antonina Gentile, Greta Krippner, Thomas Ehrlich Reifer, Mark Selden, Steve Sherman, Arthur Stinchcombe and Charles Tilly for their comments on previous papers, parts of which have been incorporated in this article; Benjamin Brewer and Beverly Silver for their comments on the article itself; and Ravi Palat for incessantly bombarding me with evidence for and against my theses.
2. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, 'Global Capitalism and American Empire', in Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, eds, The New Imperial Challenge, London 2003, pp. 2-3.
3. Bruce Cumings, 'Global Realm with no Limit, Global Realm with no Name', Radical History Review 57,1993, pp. 47-8.
4. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, MA 2000, pp. xiv, 327-32.
5. For a variety of critical assessments of the book, see Gopal Balakrishnan, Debating Empire, London 2003.
6. Franz Schurmann, The Logic of World Power. An Inquiry into the Origins, Currents, and Contradictions of World Politics, New York 1974, pp. 40-1.
7. Thomas McCormick, America's Half-Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War, Baltimore 1989, pp. 77-8.
8. McCormick, America's Half-Century, p. 98.
9. For details on the Project, see www.newamericancentury.org.
10. On the rise of its promoters to power, see Arthur Schlesinger, "The Making of a Mess', New York Review of Books, 22 September 2004, pp. 40-3.
11. Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire, London 2003, p. 9.
12. On the determination of the neo-conservatives to wage war on Iraq long before September II, see Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill, New York 2004;
13. and Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, New York 2004. Clarke reports on the now (in)famous cabinet-level meeting in which, less than a day after the attacks, Rumsfeld pointed out that there were 'no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan' and therefore 'we should consider bombing Iraq instead' because it had 'better targets'.
14. See, among others, Emmanuel Todd, After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order, New York 2003;
15. George Soros, The Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of American Power, New York 2004;
16. and Mann, Incoherent Empire.
17. See Arrighi, 'The Social and Political Economy of Global Turbulence', NLR 20, March-April 2003, pp. 5-71.
18. Robert Brenner's two books critically examined in the article are 'The Economics of Global Turbulence: A Special Report on the World Economy, 1950-98', NLR 1/229, May-June 1998,
19. and The Boom and the Bubble: the US in the World Economy, London 2002 .
20. David Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford 2003; henceforward, NI. In this article I develop an analysis of the rise and apparent demise of the neo-conservative imperial project that builds upon but also departs from Harvey's. When Harvey sent me the Clarendon Lectures that later became The New Imperialism, he presented them as 'a kind of post-factum development' out of a seminar we had jointly taught at Johns Hopkins: 'what I should have said but couldn't and in any case the contemporary disaster was not upon us to clarify the mind.' In this article I take my turn in saying what I should have said but couldn't, with the double advantage of having Harvey's analysis to build upon and two more years of the 'contemporary disaster' to clarify the mind.
21. NI, p. 26.
22. On Hobson's dassic definition of imperialism and its usefulness in mapping analytically the different (often opposite) meanings that the term has assumed historically, see Arrighi, The Geometry of Imperialism [1978], London 1983.
23. NI, pp. 26-7.
24. Harvey refers to my own distinction between a capitalist and a territorialist logic of power (Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origin of Our Times, London 1994, pp. 33-4). His use of the distinction, however, differs from mine in two important ways. In his, the territorialist logic refers to state policies, while the capitalist logic refers to the politics of production, exchange and accumulation. In mine, in contrast, both logics refer primarily to state policies. Moreover, Harvey seems to assume that all market processes (including trade, commerce, labour migration, technology transfer, information flows and the like) are driven by a capitalist logic. I make no such assumption. As we shall see in Part II, these differences result in a historical account of the relationship between capitalism and imperialistic practices that departs in key respects from Harvey's account.
25. NI, pp. 29-30.
26. NI, pp. 33-4.
27. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York 1966, p. 143. I have italicized 'needs' and 'necessary' to highlight for future reference the functionalist nature of Arendt's contention.
28. Long 20th Century, p. 62.
29. See NI, pp. 34-5. My empirical observations were made independently of Arendt's theoretical contentions. I am grateful to Harvey for pointing out their correspondence.
30. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, New York 1987.
31. NI, p. 35.
32. Neu Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization, Berkeley 2003, p. 20.
33. NI, pp. 24-5, 75-8.
34. Thomas Friedman, New York Times, 5 January 2003;
35. quoted in NI, p. 24.
36. Arrighi and Beverly Silver, 'Capitalism and World (Dis)Order, Review of International Studies 27 (2001), pp. 26-7;
37. Talcott Parsons, 'Some Reflections on the Place of Force in Social Process', in Harry Eckstein, ed., Internal War, New York 1964, pp. 33-70;
38. Ranajit Guha, 'Dominance Without Hegemony and its Historiography', in Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies VI, New Delhi 1992, pp. 231-2.
39. 'Capitalism and World (Dis)Order', pp. 27-8.
40. On the distinction between distributive and collective aspects of power, see Talcott Parsons, 'The Distribution of Power in American Society', in Structure and Process in Modern Societies, New York 1960, pp. 199-225.
41. NI, pp. 39-40.
42. NI, pp. 84-5.
43. On Mackinder's current significance for geostrategic thought, see Paul Kennedy, 'Mission Impossible?', New York Review of Books, 10 June 2004.
44. NI, p. 85.
45. NI, p. 86.
46. Lefebvre, The Survival of Capitalism: Reproduction of the Relations of Production, New York 1976.
47. Harvey, Limits to Capital, Oxford 1982;
48. and the essays collected in Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography, New York 2001.
49. NI, p. 115.
50. NI, pp. 99-100.
51. NI, pp. 98-9, 109-12.
52. NI, p. 101.
53. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy [1942], London 1950, p. 83.
54. See also Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development [1934], New York 1961.
55. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, pp. 73-4.
56. Limits to Capital, pp. 390-3;
57. also NI, pp. 96-8.
58. Mutatis mutandis, Harvey's considerations concerning the relationship between technological innovations and the struggle for locational advantage apply also to product innovations.
59. NI, p. 116.
60. NI, pp. 121-3;
61. Limits to Capital, pp. 428-9.
62. Limits to Capital, pp. 428-29.
63. NI, p. 123.
64. NI, pp. 123-34.
65. Limits to Capital, p. 435.
66. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right [1821], New York 1967, pp. 149-52;
67. Spaces of Capital, ch. 14;
68. Limits to Capital, pp. 414-5.
69. Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 142.
70. NI, pp. 15-6, 49;
71. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Styk in American Politics and Other Essays [1965], Cambridge, MA 1996.
72. NI, pp. 16-7.
73. NI, p. 17.
74. Polanyi does not speak of spatial fixes or overaccumulation crises. Nevertheless, his emphasis on the opposition 'habitation versus improvement' conveys the same idea of a fundamental contradiction between the tendency of capital to relentlessly transform geographical landscapes on the one side, and the tendency of the communities embedded in those landscapes to resist such transformations on the other. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time [1944], Boston 1957, ch. 3.
75. NI, pp. 134-5.
76. NI, p. 113;
77. Limits to Capital, p. 404.
78. Limits to Capital, p. 398;
79. see also NI, pp. 131-2.
80. NI, p. 136.
81. NI, pp. 142-4;
82. Marx, Capital, vol. I, Moscow 1959, p. 713;
83. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 148.
84. NI, pp. 145-9.
85. NI, pp. 149-50; 156-61.
86. Robert Wade and Frank Veneroso, 'The Asian Crisis: The High Debt Model versus the Wall Street-Treasury-IMF Complex', NLR 1/228, March-April 1998,
87. quoted in NI, pp. 150-1.
88. NI, pp. 151-2.
89. Capital, vol. I, pp. 755-6.
90. Long 20th Century, p. 14;
91. 'Capitalism and World (Dis)Order', pp. 264-7. We shall return to this point in Part II.
92. NI, p. 182.
93. NI, pp. 190, 201.
94. NI, p. 192.
95. NI, pp. 201-2.
96. NI, pp. 199-200, 211-2.
97. NI, pp. 200-1.
98. NI, pp. 202-4.
99. NI, pp. 204-9.
100. NI, pp. 209-11.
101. Craig Whitney, New York Times, 9 November 2003.
102. Long 20th Century, pp. 215-7, 300, 320-2;
103. 'Social and Political Economy', pp. 61-2.
104. In March 1984, undetterd by Saddam Hussein's atrocities, Rumsfeld flew to Baghdad as Reagan's envoy on the very day that Iraq launched a chemical weapons attack on Iran. Four years later, while Hussein was razing hundreds of villages in northern Iraq and killing thousands of Kurds, Washington offered him $500 million in subsidies to buy US farm products. The following year, the US government doubled the subsidy to $1 billion and provided him with high-quality germ seed for anthrax and dual-use material that could be used to manufacture chemical and biological weapons. See Seumas Milne, Guardian, 27 September 2002;
105. and Arundhati Roy, Guardian, 27 September 2002.
106. The fact that 'Third world Rollback', as the Reagan Doctrine that inspired these confrontations was sometimes called, eventually backfired does not mean that it did inflict unspeakable suffering on the countries singled out. To give just one example, according to UN estimates, 300,000 children died directly or indirectly as a result of the prolongation of the Angolan civil war by the murderous Unita organization with US support.
107. According to General Anthony Zinni, Desert Storm in 1991 'left the impression that the terrible mess that awaits us abroad can somehow be overcome by good, clean soldiering, just like in World War Two. In reality, the only reason Desert Storm worked was because we managed to go up against the only jerk on the planet who was stupid enough to challenge us to refight World War Two.' Tom Clancy, with General Zinni and Tony Koltz, Battle Ready, New York 2004.
108. Quoted in Whitney, New York Times, 9 November 2003.
109. A similar view undoubtedly prevailed among the promoters of the New American Century. Wolfowitz, for example, had criticized the Bush Senior Administration, in which he served as an undersecretary of defence, for failing to 'deal with Saddam' after the Gulf War: New York Times, 18 May 2004.
110. Michael Gordon, New York Times, 18 March 2003.
111. Richard Cohen, International Herald Tribune, 9 January 2002.
112. 'The course', retorted former CENTCOM commander Gen. Zinni, 'is headed over Niagara Falls', while the active-duty commander of the 82nd Airborne, Gen. Charles Swannack allowed that 'strategically' the US was losing the war. Chalmers Johnson, History News Network, 14 June 2004, http://hnn.us/.
113. International Herald Tribune, 23 December 2004.
114. Lee Thompson, Lexington Institute, quoted in Boston Globe, II October 2004.
115. As Seymour Hersh has documented, Hussein had planned an unconventional insurgency as early as 2001, when George W. Bush's election had brought into office many of the officials who during and after the first Gulf War had advocated regime change in Baghdad. Hersh, 'The Stovepipe', New Yorker, 27 October 2003,
116. and Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, New York 2004.
117. Cited in William Pfaff, International Herald Tribune, 24-25 July 2004.
118. In a more colourful formulation, Saudi Arabia's Arab News described US military power in the wake of the Abu Ghraib disclosures as 'a behemoth with the response speed of a muscle-bound ox and the limited understanding of a mouse' (Washington Post, 5 May 2004).
119. The image is reminiscent of the 'ghastly metaphor' with which Mann illustrated his prescient assessment that the 'American Empire will turn out to be a military giant, a back-seat economic driver, a political schizophrenic and an ideological phantom. The result is a disturbed, misshapen monster stumbling clumsily across the world': Incoherent Empire, p. 13.
120. Pace George Soros: 'Having invaded Iraq, we cannot extricate ourselves. Domestic pressure to withdraw is likely to build, as in the Vietnam war, but withdrawing would inflict irreparable damage on our standing in the world. In this respect, Iraq is worse than Vietnam because of our dependence on Middle Eastern oil'. Guardian, 26 January 2004.
121. Andrew Bacevich, 'A Modem Major General', NLR 29, September-October 2004, p. 132.
122. Norman Ornstein, American Enterprise Institute, quoted in Roger Cohen, New York Times, 12 October 2004.
123. Of the 28 allied countries that still had troops in Iraq in December 2004, one commentator reported 'only eight have more than 500. Most are there as window dressing. And because of language and equipment difficulties, some contingents-like Macedonia's 28 or Kazakhstan's 29 - maybe more trouble than they are worth': Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, II December 2004. Since then, one of the countries with more than 500 troops, Ukraine, has announced its withdrawal.
124. Dominique Moisi, Financial Times, 14 November 2003.
125. New York Times, 6 May 2004.
126. Joel Brinkley, New York Times, 5 December 2004;
127. François Heisbourg, International Herald Tribune, 23 March 2004.
128. In the months before the war, US and Israeli officials expressed quite openly the hope that a swift US victory over Iraq would bolster the safety and security of Israel by demonstrating to Arab leaders that defiance did not pay. For a good selection of statements to this effect, see Sukumar Muralidharan, 'Israel: An Equal Partner in Occupation of Iraq', Economic and Political Weekly, 9 October 2004.
129. Fred Halliday, 'America and Arabia after Saddam', openDemocracy, 13 May 2004.
130. Quoted in Roula Khalaf, Financial Times, 18-19 December 2004.
131. According to Seymour Hersh, the deteriorating security situation in Iraq has not led the Bush Administration to reconsider its basic long-range policy goal in West Asia. On the contrary, 'Bush's reelection is regarded within the Administration as evidence of America's support for the decision to go to war. It has reaffirmed the position of the neo-conservatives in the Pentagon's civilian leadership who advocated the invasion.' More worryingly for Iran, a former high-level intelligence official told Hersh, 'Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next, we're going to have the Iranian campaign. We've declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah - we've got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.' Hersh, 'The Coming Wars: What the Pentagon Can Now Do in Secret', New Yorker, 24 and 31 January 2005.
132. New York Times, 7 December 2003.
133. See also Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, New York 2004. The Bush Administration has largely switched from multilateral to bilateral free-trade agreements. The only multilateral negotiation it supported-the new global trade round initiated at Doha, shortly after the attacks of 9/11-broke up spectacularly two years later at Cancun, in large part over US and European farm subsidies.
134. Niall Ferguson, New York Times, 20 April 2003.
135. The argument is developed further in Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America's Empire, New York 2004, pp. 261-95.
136. Whereas 'foreign investors in the 1990s poured trillions of dollars into American stocks and corporate acquisitions . . . most of the money is [now] coming not from private investors but from foreign governments, led by Japan and China. Rather than profits, their goal has been to stabilize exchange rates . . . Many economists contend that the Asian central banks have created an informal version of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates that lasted from shortly after World War II until the early 1970s': Edmund Andrews, New York Times, 16 November 2004.
137. According to the latest estimates, towards the end of 2004 foreigners owned about 13 per cent of US stocks, 24 per cent of corporate bonds, and 43 per cent of US Treasury securities (Robert Samuelson, Washington Post, 17 November 2004).
138. The largest holding of US treasuries was Japan's ($740 billion), followed by China's ($174 billion) and Taiwan's ($57 billion). Adding the lesser holdings of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Thailand, East Asian holdings of US treasuries totalled $1.1 trillion (William Pesek, International Herald Tribune, 7 December 2004).
139. On this difference, see 'Social and Political Economy', pp. 44-6. We shall return to the centrality for British hegemony of tribute extraction from India in Part II.
140. Arrighi and Beverly Silver, Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System, Minneapolis 1999, pp. 72-87.
141. Prior to the invasion of Iraq, foreboding comparisons between post-bubble United States and Japan gained currency. The fact that in 2002 US stocks declined for the third consecutive year, the longest losing streak since 1939-41, did not help. The unprecedented combination of fiscal and financial stimuli put in place by the Bush Administration (see below) allayed but never completely disposed of fears that the United States in the 2000s might repeat the Japanese experience of the 1990s.
142. William Pesek, International Herald Tribune, 7 December 2004.
143. Thomas Friedman, New York Times, 2 December 2004.
144. Paul Krugman, New York Times, 18 May 2004.
145. International Herald Tribune, 31 December 2004.
146. In February 2005, President Bush actually ended up asking Congress for $82 billion. According to figures compiled by the Congressional Research Service, if approved, the new request would push the totals provided for the War on Terror past $300 billion: New York Times, 14 February 2005.
147. Martin Wolf, Financial Times, 30 September 2003.
148. For more complex accounts of the US 'conspiracy', see Robert Wade, 'The Invisible Hand of the American Empire', openDemocracy, 13 March 2003,
149. and Andre Gunder Frank, 'Meet Uncle Sam - Without Clothes - Parading Around China and the World', available at www.rrojasdatabank.info/agfrank/, 6 January 2005.
150. Economist, 2 December 2004.
151. See, among others, Jean Kumagai and William Sweet, 'East Asia Rising', IEEE Spectrum Online, accessed 19 October 2004;
152. William Broad, New York Times, 3 May 2004;
153. Eduardo Porter, New York Times, 6 December 2004;
154. David Baltimore, Los Angeles Times, 29 November 2004;
155. Adam Segal, 'Is America Losing Its Edge?', Foreign Affairs, vol. 83, no. 6, November-December 2004.
156. James Kynge and Christopher Swann, Financial Times, 26 September 2003.
157. The recent dollar depreciation has in fact done little to narrow the US trade gap. At the end of 2004, increasing exports for five consecutive quarters were matched by even faster increases in imports (Daniel Altaian, New York Times, 5 December 2004). The result was a further increase of the US trade deficit in 2004 to a new record of $617.7 billion.
158. Martin Wolf, Financial Times, 30 September 2003.
159. Guardian, 3 November 2003.
160. Although Snow and Bush have continued to affirm their support for a strong dollar, by December 2004 'many in the markets consider this only face-saving rhetoric'. See David Nassar, 'Dollar at a Discount', CBS Marketwatch website, 7 December 2004.
161. Cited in Mark Landler, New York Times, 12 December 2004.
162. This belief seems to be implicit in Cheney's contention, as reported by Paul O'Neill, that 'Reagan proved that deficits don't matter'. Quoted in John Cassidy, Taxing', New Yorker, 26 January 2004, pp. 23-4.
163. It is also possible, however, that the abuse of US seigniorage privileges is simply the unintended consequence of a situation out of control. 'Bush is seen, rightly or wrongly, as far less comfortable dealing with global economic management than he is sitting in the Situation Room, buried in the details of the Iraqi insurgency or Iran's nuclear threat. As a result the weakening dollar, to the minds of many from Hong Kong to Berlin, is a metaphor for a presidency so distracted by national security issues that American economic influence has ebbed.' David Sanger, New York Times, 25 January 2005.
164. The policy reversal began under Carter but materialized fully only under Reagan. See 'Social and Political Economy', pp. 42-3, 63-7.
165. Martin Wolf, Financial Times, 8 December 2004.
166. Lawrence Summers, 'America Overdrawn', Foreign Policy, no. 143, July-August 2004, pp. 46-9.
167. 'Disappearing Dollar', Economist, 2 December 2004;
168. see also Rachel Koning, CBS Market Watch, 7 September 2004.
169. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, New York 2001, p. 402.
170. Mearsheimer's argument echoed Wolfowitz's 1992 contention that the objective of foreign policy should be 'to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.' Quoted in Johnson, Sorrows of Empire, pp. 85-6.
171. Mearsheimer reiterated his position in an interview given eight months after 9/11. 'The United States will go to great lengths . . . to contain China and to cut China off at the knees, the way it cut Imperial Germany off at the knees in World War I, the way it cut Imperial Japan off at the knees in World War n, and the way it cut the Soviet Union off at the knees during the Cold War.' At the same time he acknowledged that 'it would be almost impossible to slow down Chinese economic growth.' A more effective strategy, he claimed, would be for the US to put in place a political and military 'balancing coalition' that included Japan, Vietnam, Korea, India and Russia. The United States could then back Russia in a border dispute with China; it could back Japan in a dispute with China over sea lines of communication; or it could 'go to war on behalf of Taiwan'. In Harry Kreisler, 'Through the Realist Lens', Conversations with History: Conversation with John Mearsheimer, Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley, 8 April 2002; available at http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/.
172. 'In the first draft of the 1992 Defense Policy Guidance drafted by Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis Libby, it was unclear where the new rival to US supremacy would most likely emerge. Europe and Japan as well as China were among the candidates. By the time the Bush Administration came into office, however, the proponents of this doctrine of supremacy saw only one possible peer competitor emerging in the foreseeable future: China.' John Gershman, 'Remaking Policy in Asia?', Foreign Policy in Focus, November 2002; available at www.fpif.org.
173. Financial Times, 17 October 2003.
174. Financial Times, 17 October 2003.
175. One of the key statements of the National Security Strategy Document of 2002-'Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equalling, the power of the United States'-also did not mention China. As David Sanger observes, however, it is hard to see which state qualified more than China as a potential US rival: New York Times, 20 September 2002.
176. Krugman, New York Times, II December 2003.
177. Economist, II December 2003.
178. Jane Perlez, New York Times, 18 October 2003.
179. Martin Wolf, Financial Times, 22 September 2003.
180. Jane Perlez, New York Times, 3 December 2004.
181. Economist, 2 December 2004.
182. In 2004, China surpassed the US to become Japan's biggest trading partner since records began: Financial Times, 26 January 2005.
183. Anna Greenspan, International Herald Tribune, 14 September 2004;
184. N. Vidyasagar, Times of India, 9 February 2005.
185. John Murphy, Baltimore Sun, 23 November 2004.
186. During a state visit to China in May 2004, Lula said that Brazil wanted 'a partnership that integrates our economies and serves as a paradigm for South-South cooperation.' Larry Rohter, New York Times, 20 November 2004.
187. See also Richard Lapper, Financial Times, 10 November 2004.
188. Art Pine, International Herald Tribune, 3 November 2003.
189. David Shambaugh, 'China and Europe: The Emerging Axis', Current History, vol. 103, no. 674, September 2004, pp. 243-8.
190. Ted Fishman, 'The Chinese Century', New York Times Magazine, 4 July 2004.