Prof. Anis H. Bajrektarević,
Vienna, 16 AUG 2019
Does our history only appear overheated, while it is essentially calmly predetermined? Is it directional or conceivable, dialectic and eclectic or cyclical, and therefore cynical? Surely, our history warns. Does it also provide for a hope? Hence, what is in front of us: destiny or future?
Theory loves to teach us that extensive debates on
what kind of economic system is most conductive to human wellbeing is what
consumed most of our civilizational vertical. However, our history has a
different say: It seems that the manipulation of the global political economy –
far more than the introduction of ideologies – is the dominant and arguably more
durable way that human elites usually conspired to build or break civilizations,
as planned projects. Somewhere down the process, it deceived us, becoming the
self-entrapment. How?
* *
* *
One of the biggest (nearly schizophrenic) dilemmas of
liberalism, ever since David Hume and Adam Smith, was an insight into reality:
Whether the world is essentially Hobbesian
or Kantian. As postulated, the
main task of any liberal state is to enable and maintain wealth of its nation,
which of course rests upon wealthy individuals inhabiting the particular state.
That imperative brought about another dilemma: if wealthy individual, the state
will rob you, but in absence of it, the pauperized masses will mob
you.
The invisible
hand of Smith’s followers have found the satisfactory answer – sovereign
debt. That ‘invention’ meant: relatively strong central government of the
state. Instead of popular control through the democratic checks-&-balance
mechanism, such a state should be rather heavily indebted. Debt – firstly to
local merchants, than to foreigners – is a far more powerful deterrent, as it
resides outside the popular check domain.
With such a mixed
blessing, no empire can easily demonetize its legitimacy, and abandon its
hierarchical but invisible and unconstitutional controls. This is how a debtor
empire was born. A blessing or totalitarian curse? Let us briefly examine it.
The
Soviet Union – much as (the pre-Deng’s) China itself – was far more of a
classic continental military empire (overtly brutal; rigid, authoritative,
anti-individual, apparent, secretive), while the US was more a financial-trading
empire (covertly coercive; hierarchical, yet asocial, exploitive, pervasive,
polarizing). On opposite sides of the globe and cognition, to each other they
remained enigmatic, mysterious and
incalculable: Bear of
permafrost vs. Fish of the warm seas.
Sparta vs. Athens. Rome vs. Phoenicia… However, common for the both was a
super-appetite for omnipresence. Along with the price to pay for it.
Consequently,
the Soviets went bankrupt by mid 1980s – they cracked under its own weight,
imperially overstretched. So did the Americans – the ‘white man burden’
fractured them already by the Vietnam war, with the Nixon shock only officializing it. However, the US imperium managed
to survive and to outlive the Soviets. How?
The
United States, with its financial capital (or an outfoxing illusion of it),
evolved into a debtor empire through the Wall Street guaranties. Titanium-made Sputnik vs. gold mine of printed-paper…
Nothing epitomizes this better than the words of the longest serving US Federal
Reserve’s boss, Alan Greenspan, who famously quoted J.B. Connally to then
French President Jacques Chirac: “True, the dollar is our currency, but your problem”.
Hegemony vs. hegemoney.
House of Cards
Conventional economic theory teaches us that money is
a universal equivalent to all goods. Historically, currencies were a space and
time-related, to say locality-dependent. However, like no currency ever before,
the US dollar became – past the WWII – the universal equivalent to all other
moneys of the world. According to history of currencies, the core component of
the non-precious metals’ money is a so-called promissory note – intangible
belief that, by any given point in future, a particular shiny paper (self-styled
as money) will be smoothly exchanged for real goods.
Thus, roughly speaking, money is nothing else but a
civilizational construct about imagined/projected tomorrow – that the next day
(which nobody has ever seen in the history of humankind, but everybody operates
with) definitely comes (i), and that this tomorrow will certainly be a better
day then our yesterday or even our today (ii).
This and similar types of collective constructs
(horizontal and vertical) over our social contracts hold society together as
much as its economy keeps it alive and evolving. Hence, it is money that powers
economy, but our blind faith in constructed (imagined) tomorrows and its
alleged certainty is what empowers money.
Clearly, the universal equivalent of all equivalents –
the US dollar – follows the same pattern: Bold and widely accepted promise.
What does the US dollar promise when there is no gold cover attached to it ever
since the time of Nixon shock of 1971?
Pentagon promises that the oceanic sea-lanes will
remain opened (read: controlled by the US Navy), pathways unhindered, and that
the most traded world’s commodity – oil, will be delivered. So, it is not a
crude or its delivery what is a cover to the US dollar – it is a promise
that oil of tomorrow will be deliverable. That is a real might of the US
dollar, which in return finances Pentagon’s massive expenditures and shoulders
its supremacy.
Admired and feared, Pentagon further fans our
planetary belief in tomorrow’s deliverability – if we only keep our faith in
dollar (and hydrocarbons’ energized economy), and so on and on in perpetuated
circle of mutual reinforcements.
These two pillars of the US might from the East coast
(the US Treasury/Wall Street and Pentagon) together with the two pillars of the
West coast – both financed and amplified by the US dollar, and spread through
the open sea-routs (Silicone Valley and Hollywood), are an essence of the US
posture.
This
very nature of power explains why the Americans have missed to take the mankind
into completely other direction; towards the non-confrontational, decarbonized,
de-monetized/de-financialized and de-psychologized, the self-realizing and
green humankind. In short, to turn history into a moral success story. They had
such a chance when, past the Gorbachev’s unconditional surrender of the Soviet
bloc, and the Deng’s Copernicus-shift of China, the US – unconstrained as a lonely superpower – solely dictated
terms of reference; our common destiny and direction/s to our future/s.
Winner is rarely a game-changer
Sadly enough, that was not the first missed
opportunity for the US to soften and delay its
forthcoming, imminent multidimensional imperial retreat. The very epilogue of the WWII meant a full security
guaranty for the US: Geo-economically – 54% of anything manufactured in the
world was carrying the Made in USA
label, and geostrategically – the US had uninterruptedly enjoyed nearly a
decade of the ‘nuclear monopoly’. Up to this very day, the US scores the
biggest number of N-tests conducted, the largest stockpile of nuclear weaponry,
and it represents the only power ever deploying this ‘ultimate weapon’ on other
nation. To complete the irony, Americans enjoy geographic advantage like no
other empire before. Save the US, as Ikenberry notes: “…every major power in
the world lives in a crowded geopolitical neighborhood where shifts in power
routinely provoke counterbalancing”. Look the map, at Russia or China and their
packed surroundings. The US is blessed with its insular position, by neighboring
oceans. All that should harbor tranquility, peace and prosperity, foresightedness.
Why the lonely might, an empire by invitation did not evolve into empire of relaxation, a generator of harmony? Why does it hold
(extra-judicially) captive more political prisoners on Cuban soil than the
badmouthed Cuban regime has ever had? Why does it remain obsessed with armament
for at home and abroad? Why existential anxieties for at home and security
challenges for abroad ? (Eg. 78% of all weaponry at disposal in the wider MENA
theater is manufactured in the US, while domestically Americans – only for their
civilian purpose – have 1,2 small arms pieces per capita.)
Why the fall of Berlin Wall 30 years ago marked a
beginning of decades of stagnant or failing incomes in the US (and elsewhere in
the OECD world) coupled with alarming inequalities. What are we talking about
here; the inadequate intensity of our tireless confrontational push or
about the false course of our civilizational direction?
Indeed,
no successful and enduring empire does merely rely on coercion, be it abroad or
at home. The grand design of every empire in past rested on a skillful
calibration between obedience and initiative – at home, and between
bandwagoning and engagement – abroad. In XXI century, one wins when one
convinces not when one coerces. Hence, if unable to escape its inner logics and
deeply-rooted appeal of confrontational
nostalgia, the prevailing archrival is only a winner, rarely a
game-changer.
To
sum up; After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Americans accelerated expansion
while waiting for (real or imagined) adversaries to further decline,
‘liberalize’ and bandwagon behind the US. Expansion
is the path to security dictatum only exacerbated the problems afflicting
the Pax Americana. That is how the capability
of the US to maintain its order started to erode faster than the capacity of
its opponents to challenge it. A classical imperial self-entrapment!!
The
repeated failure to notice and recalibrate its imperial retreat brought the
painful hangovers to Washington by the last presidential elections. Inability
to manage the rising costs of sustaining the imperial order only increased the
domestic popular revolt and political pressure to abandon its ‘mission’
altogether. Perfectly hitting the target to miss everything else …
Hence, Americans are not fixing the world any more.
They are only managing its decline. Look at their (winner) footprint in former
Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria – to mention but a few.
* * * *
When
the Soviets lost their own indigenous ideological matrix and maverick
confrontational stance, and when the US dominated West missed to triumph although
winning the Cold War, how to expect from the imitator to score the lasting moral
or even a momentary economic victory?
Neither
more confrontation and more carbons nor more weaponized trade and traded
weapons will save our day. It failed in past, it will fail again any given day.
Interestingly,
China opposed the I World, left the II in rift, and ever since Bandung of 1955
it neither won over nor (truly) joined the III Way. Today, many see it as a
main contestant. But, where is a lasting success?
(The
Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is what the most attribute as an instrument of
the Chinese planetary posture. Chinese leaders promised massive infrastructure
projects all around by burning trillions of dollars. Still, numbers are more
moderate. As the recent The II BRI Summit
has shown, so far, Chinese companies had invested $90 worldwide. Seems, neither
People’s Republic is as rich as many (wish to) think nor it will be able to
finance its promised projects without seeking for a global private capital.
Such a capital –if ever – will not flow without conditionalities. The Asian
Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the BRICS or ‘New Development’ – Bank
have some $150 billion at hand, and the Silk Road Infrastructure Fund (SRIF)
has up to $40 billion. Chinese state and semi-private companies can access –
according to the OECD estimates – just another $600 billion (much of it tight)
from the home, state-controlled financial sector. That means that China runs
short on the BRI deliveries worldwide. Ergo, either bad news to the (BRI) world
or the conditionalities’ constrained China.)
Greening
international relations along with a greening of economy – geopolitical and
environmental understanding, de-acidification and relaxation is the only way
out.
That
necessitates both at once: less confrontation over the art-of-day technology and
their monopolies’ redistribution (as preached by the Sino-American high priests
of globalization) as well as the resolute work on the so-called Tesla-ian
implosive/fusion-holistic systems (including free-energy technologies; carbon-sequestration;
antigravity and self-navigational solutions; bioinformatics and nanorobotics). More
of initiative than of obedience (including more public control over data
hoovering). More effort to excellence (creation) than struggle for preeminence
(partition).
Finally,
no global leader has ever in history emerged from a shaky and distrustful
neighborhood, or by offering a little bit more of the same in lieu of an
innovative technological advancement. (Eg. many see the Chinese 5G as an
illiberal innovation, which may end up servicing authoritarianism, anywhere.
And indeed, the AI deep learning inspired by biological neurons (neural
science) including its three methods: supervised, unsupervised and reinforced
learning can end up used for the digital authoritarianism, predictive policing
and manufactured social governance based on the bonus-malus behavioral social
credits.)
Ergo,
it all starts from within, from at home. Without support from a home base
(including that of Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Tibet), there is no game changer. China’s home is
Asia. Its size and its centrality along with its impressive output is
constraining it enough.
Hence,
it is not only a new, non-imitative, turn of technology what is needed. Without
truly and sincerely embracing mechanisms such as the NaM, ASEAN and SAARC
(eventually even the OSCE) and the main champions of multilateralism in Asia,
those being India Indonesia and Japan first of all, China has no future of what is planetary awaited – the third force, a game-changer,
lasting visionary and trusted global leader.
Post Scriptum:
To varying degrees, but all throughout a premodern and
modern history, nearly every world’s major foreign policy originator was
dependent (and still depends) on what happens in, and to, Russia. It is not
only a size, but also centrality of Russia that matters. It is as much (if not
even more), as it is an omnipresence of the US and as it is a hyperproduction
of the PR China.
Ergo, it is an uninterrupted flow of manufactured
goods to the whole world, it is balancing of the oversized and centrally
positioned one, and it is the ability to controllably destruct the way in and
insert itself of the peripheral one. The oscillatory interplay of these three
is what characterizes our
Author is chairperson
and professor in international law and global political studies, Vienna,
Austria. He has authored six books (for
American and European publishers) and numerous articles on, mainly, geopolitics
energy and technology.
Professor is editor of the NY-based GHIR (Geopolitics, History and Intl.
Relations) journal,
and editorial board member of several similar specialized magazines on
three continents.
His 7th book, ‘From WWI to www. – Europe and the World
1918-2018’ has been realised earlier this year.