Over the years, the scholar and activist
Walden Bello has provided some of the most incisive, trenchant and powerful
critiques of the global capitalist system and its various implications.
He has also led the struggle against imperialism in its various manifestations,
including neoliberal policies, and been part of the movement for developing
genuine alternatives. All this of course in his native country the Philippines,
but also internationally as a leading and influential citizen of the "Global
South", which he sees as the base from where new and progressive
social realities can be developed.
His latest book "Dilemmas of domination: The unmaking of the American
empire", (Metropolitan Books, New York 2005) distils some of his
most significant recent arguments into a cogently formulated yet passionate
statement about the world today. The book is about what Bello describes
as the current crisis of the American empire, resulting from the dilemmas
and contradictions emerging from both imperial politics and imperial economics.
In fact he sees three interrelated crises of imperialism: the crisis of
overextension, the crisis of overproduction and the crisis of legitimacy.
The first crisis results from the US administration's open-ended drive
for military superiority, which has had the perverse effect of severely
compromising both the power and the effectiveness of the US military machine.
There is no doubt that the particular nature of the George Bush regime
has been critical to this process, but Bello shows how even the previous
Clinton regime, which had a very different take on foreign policy in general,
laid the seeds for some of what followed.
In particular, the Clinton presidency bequeathed a legacy of some dangerous
practices, for example through its actions in Kosovo and Haiti. These
included: an overly elastic definition of national interest that could
be supported by armed force; identifying the national interest with the
spread of what it claimed was US-style democracy abroad; unilaterally
identifying the conditions under which state sovereignty could be overturned
without international sanction; and the idea that precision bombing could
deliver quick military victories with minimum casualties. The other historical
point to note is that the American way of warfare has always involved
the targeting and killing of civilian populations, from the firebombing
of Dresden and Tokyo to the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to
Operation Phoenix in Vietnam.
Bello is clear that Iraq has reversed the fortunes of the US empire, dragging
it into a quagmire that has weakened its position everywhere else. He
shows how that invasion of Iraq was essentially over-determined, with
various segments of the Bush regime seeking it for their own purposes.
These reasons ranged from the general – a belief in the desirability of
"regime change", to the juvenile – taking revenge on someone
for the events of September 11, 2001, to the most obvious one of all –
the centrality of oil. While the need to control oil resources was obviously
crucial, there was also the intention of limiting the access of Europe
and China to these oil resources. Yet Bello argues that with all these
reasons, the strategic reason may have dominated, with the purpose of
reshaping the international political environment into a desired form,
through intimidation by the blatant application of American force.
But the attempts to make first Afghanistan and then Iraq into demonstrations
of US military invincibility have ended up doing precisely the opposite,
and has exposed the limits of this military strength. The imperial overstretch
is therefore reflected in the very failure of its occupation even to cover
most of the geographical area of Afghanistan despite years of fighting,
and in the complete inability to provide the most minimal security of
life in Iraq, or to defeat the Iraqi resistance despite the huge US resources
still deployed in Iraq. As a result, two important lessons are available
to the foes of this grand US design across the world. One, that it is
possible to fight the US military to a stalemate, which is effectively
a victory in guerrilla warfare. Two, that effective resistance in one
part of the empire weakens the empire as a whole.
The "crisis of overproduction" is the term Bello uses to refer
to the contradictions created in the capitalist system by the combination
of concentration of capital and domination of finance, which have resulted
in a widening gap between the growing productive potential of the system
and the capacity of consumers to purchase its output. Bello argues that
the world economy is nearing the end of a Kondratieff long wave of expansion
and decline, driven by speculative finance which now powers economic activity
and has replaced manufacturing activity as the prima source of profitability.
This has been associated with recession and jobless growth in the developed
world and more frequent and intense financial crises in emerging markets.
The acute vulnerability of developing countries to the instabilities created
by ascendant finance are exacerbated by the disruptive economic effects
of free trade and structural adjustment policies, in what Bello calls
the economic of anti-development. While these are commonly perceived as
the accompaniment to "globalisation", Bello notes that since
2001, the Bush administration has been retreating from globalisation,
is increasingly sceptical of multilateralism, and has aggressively put
the interests of some segments of US capital ahead of the concerns of
the global capitalist class, even at the risk of severe disharmony within
the core.
This explains some key concerns of recent US economy policy: achieving
control over Middle East oil; being aggressively protectionist in trade
and investment matters and focussing more on regional trade agreements
than on multilateralism; incorporating strategic considerations into these
trade agreements; using exchange rate movements to maintain competitiveness;
making other economies adjust to the burden of the environmental crisis,
and so on.
Ultimately, the most critical contradiction may result from the crisis
of legitimacy. Since sustained domination cannot be continuously coercive,
the US must seek legitimacy and support for (or at least acceptance of)
its actions. Yet this is the source of the most profound ideological dilemma.
The military overextension and the drive for economic expansion have been
accompanied by the American promise of democracy, which is no longer believed
in anywhere else in the world and is even less persuasive within the US
as human rights are curtailed in the name of the war on terror.
Since in the end, the future will be determined by what people believe,
this may be the real source of the unravelling of the American empire.
So the multiple crises of empire can become the opportunity for liberating
change.