ACAS BULLETIN
Spring 2005, No. 70
Africa and Iraq: Making the Connections

Does globalization require the expansion and intensification of the US war economy? Although its supporters claim that globalization provides the economic basis for the liberation of humanity from war, it is now clear that the preservation of globalization will intensify war and stimulate the growth of the US war economy. In order to make my case I will briefly recount some recent history.

Money and "Contras" Rule: from the Mexican Debt Crisis to the Asian Financial Crisis

The process of neoliberal globalization began its remarkable career in 1982, with the Mexican debt crisis and the structural adjustment program that was put in place by Mexico's leaders as a condition for renegotiating the nation's debt with international creditors. By the end of the 1990s this process of avoiding national bankruptcy by imposing the neoliberal "reforms" demanded by the World Bank and IMF had transformed the political economies of more than a hundred countries. It also led to a degree of the homogenization of economic policies worldwide unparalleled in the history of capitalism.

This was a "dark victory" over the achievements of the anti-colonial movement of the 1960s and 1970s, as Waldon Bello called it,¹ but it was also both swift and "pacific." It was apparently pacific because this expansion of neoliberal policies depended on monetary forces (especially threats to bar nations' access to credit), a class "deal" (where it was implied that roughly the top 20% of the population of Third World nations "going global" were to be participants in the global economy), and, when violence was actually called on--as it often was in Central America, Central Asia, Cambodia, and Africa--"contras" were employed to repress recalcitrant social forces or national movements. The policy of direct deployment of the US military was eschewed.

Implicit however in the IMF's and World Bank's demands that structural adjustment conditionalities be imposed on former colonized countries was the threat of their armed destabilization at the hands of CIA-sponsored "rebels." As I wrote at the time, the US military's strategy in these early globalization struggles was "a combination of buying high-tech, automated death machines and hiring out the 'dirty jobs' to low-waged mercenaries abroad" which echoed the neoliberal, Reaganomic strategy of "automation and computerization of domestic production and the exportation of 'dirty work' to the 'dirt wages' of the 'free trade zones' of the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Mexico and so on." The classic case of this strategy was the Reagan and Bush Administrations' support of UNITA in Angola.

The process of globalization sped up, of course, with the "collapse" of communist party-led governments in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. Neoliberal economists designed "shock therapy" structural adjustment programs that not only destroyed the socialist infrastructure but also, in Russia, led to the premature death of millions of adult men--perhaps as many as would have died in a nuclear exchange! The spread of globalization nevertheless remained relatively irenic from the point of view of the US war economy and, aside from the short civil war in Romania, globalizing capitalism's defeat of communism was accomplished "not with a bang, but a whimper."

The end of the "Cold War," however, was the beginning of what the Zapatistas have called "The Fourth World War," since it pitted, most saliently, indigenous peoples against the forces of globalization enclosing the planet's remaining common land and communal peoples. The initial stage of this war, however, was compatible with the overall contraction of the US war economy.

Indeed, even though there were dozens of insurgencies, civil wars and genocides (often called "complex emergencies") all over the world in the decade after 1990, leading to millions of deaths, the triumph of neoliberal globalization saw one of the great periods of disarmament in history among the "super-powers." According to a reliable 2000 estimate, Soviet military expenditures in constant 2000 dollars went from $405 billion in 1989 to $56 billion in Russia in 1999, i.e., a decline of about 85%!³  In the US there was also a steady relative, and even absolute, decline in military budgets. In real 2004 dollars, US military expenditures went from $449 billion in 1989 to $317 billion in 1999, i.e., a decline of about 30%. The US military budget in that decade declined relative to GDP in that decade as well, from 5.6% in 1989 to 3.0% in 1999.² Ideologically, this was the time when the Defense Department began to look desperately for new enemies and a new legitimation for military interventions. They had to settle, rather uncomfortably, with a sorry lot of cocaine capitalists, first in Panama, and then, in Colombia, for enemies and a justificatory doctrine of "humanitarian interventionism."

President Clinton (with all the ambiguities and illusions he evoked) largely defined this period in the political imagination. Clinton-era ideologues presented neoliberal globalization as the realization of the Enlightenment dream of a world market that was fundamentally irenic and civilizing, since it appeals to and develops participants' rational interests while mildly repressing their passions. These interests were continually reinforced by the nature of international trade that, supposedly, leaves everyone better off after the exchange. Under the ideological cover of a "win-win" result, major "trade" (actually "liberation of capital") deals were brokered (NAFTA, the WTO, the formation of the Euro Zone, etc.) in relative peace.

The Crisis of Neoliberalism and the War on Terror

Given that the global expansion of neoliberal policies coincided with a steep drop in worldwide military spending, the Clinton ideologists could claim some empirical support for their thesis: the more trade, the less guns; the more the interests, the less the passions. However, beginning with the Thai financial crisis in the summer of 1997, continuing with the serial unfolding of financial crises in Asia, Russia, and Brazil, and ending in the official 2001 US recession, a new dynamic emerged. Its most obvious consequence for the antiwar movement was an increase in the US military budget and the seamless merging of the military with domestic policing, so that it was no longer clear where military spending and action ended and "homeland" policing began or, to put it legalistically, when war ended and crime began. These latter developments were, of course, essential to the "war on terrorism" that Clinton first declared in 1998 and that Bush rededicated after September 11, 2001.

The increasing militarization inaugurated by the "war on terrorism" and the crisis of neoliberal globalization are related. For by the late 1990s it began to be clear that the forces of "Money" and "Contras" was not enough to "rule": direct US military interventions were necessary. The depth of this crisis was indicated by the failure of the WTO meetings in Seattle in 1999, not only in the streets of the city, but, more troubling for globalizing capital, within the meetings themselves. For an increasing number of governments were beginning to question the truth of the globalization ideology (given the consequences of the Asian financial crisis) and were threatening to change the rules by themselves. This skepticism was seen again and again in the post-Seattle meetings of the WTO and the inconclusive meetings around FTAA. Globalization was losing its conceptual and ideological hold by the late 1990s. This posed a major challenge to the US, as the hegemon and rule keeper of the world market, that could only be met by military means.

As in a horror movie, the world market's irenic face morphed in 1999 to show its martial visage. First, there was a major increase in the US military budget. US military spending in constant 2004 dollars went from $317.1 billion in 1999 to $475.3 billion in 2004, i.e., an increase of 47%. The US war against Yugoslavia in 1999 was the eventual turning point. The Clinton Administration decided that the Milosevic regime, after first appearing willing to adopt neoliberal policies, was resisting them and needed to be disciplined. Instead of depending on contras like the Kosovo Liberation Army as they might have done before, the Clinton Administration directly intervened in Yugoslavia by bombing Belgrade and occupying Kosovo. Bombing and occupation were to become the typical military policies of the George W. Bush Administration, but we should remember that they were actually anticipated by the late Clinton Administration just as Reagan's typical military policies were initially put into place by Carter. This is what is called "bi-partisan" politics in the US.

Clinton's Yugoslavia in 1999 was followed by Bush's Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. These nations were on the long list of "rogue" states, "terrorist" states, and "failed" states used in the 1980s and 1990s to pick out recalcitrants, misfits, and "losers" in the neoliberal global order. Bush redefined the list in 2001 with a new taxonomy of states: "the axis of evil" and those "forty or fifty countries" that may harbor terrorists. But many of these anomalies were states for which globalization was evidently not the "win-win" situation that it was claimed to be. Bush declared a period of endless "war on terrorism" in response to the attacks of 9/11 because the very stability of the world market was increasingly in question, not because the perpetrators of the 9/11 crimes were so powerful, numerous or ubiquitous. As more and more nations could not "play by the rules" of the neoliberal globalization regime, they were registered as specimens of the excluded, i.e., nations to be intimidated, subverted and, if necessary, invaded. Al Qaeda and Afghanistan simply provided the cases to justify the paradigm.

The role the US must play in the functioning of the world market drove the Bush Administration to war in Iraq in the first place. We know that the reasons officially given for this invasion were completely concocted, i.e., the Saddam Hussein regime did not possess "weapons of mass destruction" any longer and it did not do business with Mr. Bin Laden and Co. But there were reasons, particular and general, that necessitated the war, the most prominent being the increasing likelihood that the Hussein regime was, in a Houdini-like way, breaking out of the decade-long sanctions regime set up by and defended by the US. If Hussein's regime did manage to achieve this feat of being able to return to the world commodity and credit market, formally or informally, without the US' approval, it would have been a serious blow to US hegemony over the recalcitrants of the world market. For, after all, the Hussein regime was the classic rule breaker. Instead of seeing the Houdini regime escape, Bush decided to kill it in what has turned out to be a botched execution.

Conclusion: from stealing to robbing

Globalization, therefore, requires the intensification of a war economy in the US, i.e., an economy essentially dependent on a significant amount of resources (at least 3% of GDP, if viewed historically) being invested in the military for its own reproduction. This is not surprising. There has never been a period in US history when it did not have a war economy. In the 19th century this status was often hidden because the "war" was in the "homeland" with the suppression of slave rebellions and the extermination of indigenous peoples' resistance. We should reject the view that somehow such a war economy is exceptional or an interruption of "normal" capitalist economy. But there is not only one kind of war economy. The war economy of WWII was different from that of the 1960s and that differed from the Reagan-Bush 1980s.

What is distinctive about the war economy of the present is that the demands it must satisfy come from a ubiquitous spatial field and they are temporally indeterminate. The Cold War at least put a limit on the regions where the US military could be deployed and it put some cap on the future investment required to counter the well-defined adversary's investment. What is being required now is a new military model that dictates the deployment of US troops throughout the planet. Their job is to occupy an unprecedented multiplicity of new bases controlling strategic areas of wealth (which in this age often is spelled "O-I-L") and pressuring an ever-increasing multitude of recalcitrant states to "reform," consequences be damned. For a nation "reforms," in the Bush Administration's glossary, if it accepts the rules of neoliberal globalization, even though these rules would mean the immiseration of its population, the stripping of its resources, or the loss of its own autonomy. In other words, reform or die, even if reform means death!

I call this transformation from the earlier phase of globalization to the present one "a movement from stealing to robbing," for while both are forms of theft the former is surreptitious (through debt and credit restrictions) while the latter requires direct violence (invasion and occupation by the US military) or the palpable threat of it for the expropriation of wealth to take place. The first, "stealing" phase of globalization was largely accomplished via the IMF's and World Bank's monetary pressure on governments to make their people and resources directly exploitable by transnational corporations. This phase of globalization was compatible with a dramatic reduction of the US war economy. Clearly the "robbing" phase of globalization will require an ever-expanding war economy. For as globalization fails in region after region and the number of nation-state recalcitrants grows, the hegemon of the market will have to respond to the goad of a potential infinity of threats and demands to exit to the point when, perhaps, the exhausted "robbers" won't even be worth stealing from!

As educators aiming to stop the war, therefore, our first commandment to our students and colleagues should therefore be: "Thou shalt not rob!"

___________

 [A talk given at the Educators to Stop the War Conference, March 5, 2005, Hunter College High School, NY.]

Endnotes:

1. See Walden Bello, with Shea Cunningham and Bill Rau, Dark Victory: the United States, Structural Adjustment, and Global Poverty (Oakland: Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1994).

2. Soviet and Russian statistics concerning military expenditures are difficult to estimate since they were/are considered state secrets. Consequently, many of the estimates are due to the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. My reading of the "reliability" of these statistics is due to their uncomfortable implications for US military spending. They are to be found online at: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/mo-budget.htm.

3. The statistics concerning US military spending as percent of GDP come from Office of Management and Budget, Historical Tables, Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2005 (2004), Washington, pp. 45-52. The source for the statistics concerning US military spending in constant 2004 dollars is to be found in the Center for Defense Information Defense Monitor November/December 2003.

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