:: Wednesday, August 21, 2002 ::

Re: The US and the Rest:

I just want to respond to some of the points raised by Vikash in his posts on the current aspects of US foreign policy. As we now live in a unipolar world and the US has a degree of economic as well as military power on a global scale rarely seen before this is an aspect of the present international scenario that no country can afford to ignore. I agree totally with Vikash’s comparisons between current American neo-Imperialism and the older more traditional Imperialisms of Europe, I just want to make a few comments before I go on to looking at why we can now talk of an American Empire in a world supposedly populated by nation-states and democracies. One of the most worrying aspects of US neo-imperialism is the level of ignorance concerning the rest of the world that exists in the US – this extends to areas where the US has intervened recently. The unfortunate American interventions in South-east Asia could have been meliorated if the US had more knowledge about the region, the British were always castigated for their divide and rule tactics, while from the point of view of an imperial subject this was nauseating and one of the most pernicious aspects about British Imperialism, it also points to the better understanding the British had about the societies they ruled over – for to be able to divide and rule, one would have to have at least a basic amount of knowledge about the divisions and fractures in any potential colony that could be exploited to the colonial powers’ advantage (note I am not saying that the European colonial powers actually understood or grasped the multifaceted nature of the societies they ruled over, their knowledge was unashamedly Orientalist but it did go some ways in being able to form an apparatus of control and order). I think this is lacking in the US, which is not necessarily a bad thing, except for the fact that it has led to a large degree of general ignorance, which allows a small section of political and corporate entrepreneurs to dominate foreign policy without being challenged effectively by the rest of democratic society at large. Moreover, unlike the role India played for the British public and North Africa and the Middle East did for the French, the rest of the world does not figure much from what I can see in the “imaginings of the nation” within the US.

Secondly, during the colonial era the European colonial powers were not faced with quiescent societies at home –indeed this was the period of mass unrest and agitation on a class and regional basis. Colonialism itself played a role in ameliorating this –thus we have Bismarck’s notion of “social imperialism” one of whose explicit aims was to deflect working-class dissent by concentrating attention of rivalry with other European powers for a place in the sun and on the spectacle of Empire. Such a spectacle was also meant to play an important role in upholding the class system in Britain, where a lot of potentially reformist/radical elements within the middle-classes and working classes were either diverted into the project of Empire building or migrated abroad in search of better opportunities in the White Dominion colonies. Even regional dissent was incorporated as a disproportionate number of the civil servants, military and police forces in colonies such as India came from regions that otherwise were hostile to English dominance: Scotland, Ireland and Wales. As historians such as Linda Colley have noted it is no accident that devolution and the break-up of the British Isles coincided very much with Britain’s eclipse as an imperial power. This also yielded a corpus of bureaucrats, military men and administrators who specialised in the acquisition and running of the empire and despite the often objectionable and questionable means they used (not to say the costs they inflicted on the native populations) they were effective in ensuring a relatively smooth administration of the colonies. This leads me on to the next point which is that while I concur with Vikash’s argument about the European powers having turned away from the Imperial path, this was the result of mainly of the destructive impacts of the two World Wars – I think it is a little ironic that one of the biggest structural impetuses to decolonisation came from the fatal weakening of the European powers after 1945. Even then there were bloody and lengthy colonial conflicts: the French had to fight a lengthy jungle war in Vietnam and then repeat the experience in Algeria, the Dutch had to deal with the Indonesian uprising under Sukarno, and even the Portuguese indulged in a pointless and doomed attempt to hold onto Mozambique and Angola. The only colonial power which didn’t have to fight a major colonial war was Britain, this owes much to the relatively (but not absolutely, see posts below) calm nature of the nationalist movement in the Jewel in the Crown (add link) India; however the Malaya insurgency, Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya and the Aden uprising all point to the still violent nature of decolonisation. In short, the colonial powers had to be heavily weakened by a continental war at home and face determined resistance to their rule abroad before they decisively abandoned the Imperial path – the worry here is that will the US have to go through the same experience before its’ own empire-building project collapses?

The other point of interest is as Vikash has alluded to the curious attitude to the use of force and in particular the belief that “we could have won all these conflicts if only we didn’t have to fight with one hand tied behind our backs”. This last statement is frequently found when examining American attitudes to the Vietnam conflict; part of this I think can be traced back to the importance of winning, or even appearing to have won within American society, as the latter is not a society which has much patience with the underdog or those who appear weak. Combined with the different natures of US and European imperialism what this attitude to the use of force also points to is the peculiar separation of knowledge and power, the Orientalist attitudes of the European powers meant that knowledge was very much allied with power as tool of domination while the relative lack of and non-interest in acquiring anything more than a superficial knowledge of much of the rest of the world by the US is indicative of a separation of power from knowledge. In part lacking the same level, both in quantitative and qualitative terms, the US has to some degree substituted use and display of power for knowledge and this is why though both imperialisms were destructive and exploititative, European colonialism can appear as more discerning and sophisticated than its US counterpart partly as result of this.

The Political Economy of the American Empire:

What is the nature of the American Empire? What conditions allow such an Empire to exist and function? The answer lies really in the nature of society and phenomenon of capitalism as an economic system. Such a system has its end geared up towards consumption and growth of a particular form of materialism, this is not the place to go into why consumption is given pride of place, but I will note, as Vikash has done the importance and degenerative effect of high levels of consumption and luxury that has permeated much of American life. This is not due to any inherent degeneracy or love of luxury within American society but rather the full exposure of the US to the pressures of an unrestrained type of capitalist. Within such a framework US foreign policy has been geared towards ensuring that US citizens (or at least a class of them) can consume as much as possible – and far more than is produced within the domestic economy.

To this end the US has sought the autonomy to decide on its own exchange rate and monetary policy not only in response to its own national objectives but also fostered a system whereby other countries depend on American support to manage their own economies and currencies. This has allowed the US to engineer volatility and economic crisis in the rest of the world in order restrain the growth of other economic/financial centres that might challenge US hegemony. The US has also encouraged intense competition between exporters in the rest of the world that gives an inflow of imports at ever decreasing prices relative to the price of US exports, in the American economy. The best brains from abroad are invited to come and study at US universities and institutes and a steady flow of unskilled immigrants also ensure that a reserve of cheap labour is also on tap to do the really dirty work at minimal wages. American foreign policy has also ensured that the middle-classes elsewhere is supported and has a stake in the framework, making it unlikely that the elites and the masses should ever unite in nativistic reactions to US predominance or demand “nationalistic” development policies that nurture competitors to US industries.

Several key mechanisms are used to achieve these results in the international political economy including: free capital mobility, free trade (except for imports that threaten domestic industries which have important electoral lobbies), freedom of foreign investors from any discriminatory favouring of national firms through protection, public procurement, public ownership or other devices, with special emphasis on the freedom of US companies to get the custom of national elites for the management of their financial assets, their private education, health care, pensions etc, the creation of the dollar as the reserve currency and no constraint on the ability of the US government to print dollars at will (such as the dollar-gold link) allowing the US to finance large trade deficits with the rest of the world, international lending at variable interest rates denominated in dollars, which means that borrowing currencies have to repay the US more when their capacity to par is less.

Such mechanisms allow the US to consume much more than it produces, it allows American firms and US Capital to enter and exit other markets quickly and it periodically produces financial instability and crisis in the rest of the world which yield multiple benefits to the US: they destabilise potential rivals, allow US vulture fund to buy their assets at reduced prices and make other states hold more dollars and thereby help finance American trade deficits. Supervising this framework is a group of nominally multilateral organisations such as the IMF and World Bank that subscribe in principle to the goal of multilateralism but in reality are unilateral in their accordance with US interests. In particular these institutions allow the bail-out mechanism that protects many US creditors, displaces any losses from periodic panics onto the citizens of the borrowing countries and lets the US dictate domestic liberalisation and privatisation in the form of bail-out conditions.

This may be a very cynical and overly critical view of US foreign policy but think of some of the more recent examples: the reversal of the US position on climate change to protect domestic oil interests, the subsidisation of US agriculture and steel industries and oil corporations. Within the WTO the General Agreement of Trade in Services (GATS) which will facilitate a global market in private health care, welfare, pensions, education and public utilities – supplied by, naturally, mainly US firms. This will undermine political support for universal access to social services in developing countries and hasten middle-class exit from their nation as a fate-sharing community. All this adds to the American project of Globalisation, which in allowing the increasing mobility of capital, information, goods and services frees the US government of constraints while putting everyone else under them. This of course is a mirror re-production of the way in which many of the American elite have already insulated themselves from the costs of adjustment within the US and how the middle-class flight from social problems is already underway – the escape from the urban decline into the suburban refuges is just one example of this. Too much of US foreign policy, arguably even more than its domestic policy, serves the interest only of the richer citizens and corporations at the cost of the other citizens and groups.

The Oil Factor and US Strategic Interests:

Here, I just want to go over some of the basic elements over the role that oil plays in US foreign and strategic thinking. Much of this is already known to Middle-eastern specialists as well as critical observers of US policy but going over the basics may be fruitful in reminding us what is really at stake in the current US build-up for a war against Iraq, with this in mind it may not be remiss to recall some of the more troubling aspects over the last war with Iraq led by the US over the invasion of Kuwait – most importantly the rather gratuitous destruction of much of the civilian infrastructure in the Allied bombing campaign and the failure of the US to drive home its military victory by replacing Saddam Hussein regime in Baghdad; these only make sense in a wider context of the strategic importance of oil for the US in its policy towards the region. Let us turn to this now.

Since the late 1970’s the US has made explicit its determination to exercise overall dominance in the Gulf, through the so-called Carter Doctrine. According to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the doctrine’s main architect, US interests were threefold: Guardianship of the oil industry, keeping the USSR out and lastly, protecting the “moderate states in the region, which could be toppled by local upheavals, as happened by Khomeini’s ascendancy in Iran”. The last threat is probably the most difficult to enforce with regards to US interests as the Iranian Revolution shows it is very difficult for US policymakers to develop an effective response once new and powerful social, religious and political attitudes gain widespread acceptance. However, these three concerns lie at the heart of US policy in the region: ensuring control of oil, which leads onto the exclusion of the USSR and the support towards “moderate regimes”. After the end of the Cold war the collapse of the USSR left only the other two objectives as still relevant.

Control of Middle-Eastern oil is vital to the US for two reasons: the economic value of oil revenues and the importance of oil control for global US economic power. Gulf oil provides a very large international market for important sectors of the advanced capitalist economy (construction, engineering, military equipment etc) and this is overwhelmingly a state market as much of the revenue is in the hands of ruling dynasties in the region. Secondly, oil revenues have become great rivers of rentier capital, the flow of which influenced by political factors, is vital for much of the structure of global-financial and banker interests( it is estimated that out of every $100 spent on oil from the region by the West $40 is recycled via arms imports and another $40 is desposited in Western banks and financial insitutions leaving only $20 that actually remains within the oil-producing countries domestic economies). Thirdly, oil money is present in the lobbying that directly affects politicians in many countries through campaign and personal donations. This is true of the US where the oil lobby is powerful and in the Middle East as well, where Saudi money for example plays an important role from Morocco to Pakistan as well as the protector of the Saudis the US.Any regime that can control a large chunk of the oil capital, could offer an alternative locus of financial-economic power to the US dominated IMF/WB regime in Washington. More importantly, if a substantial amount of oil money, say by combining the oil revenues of Kuwait and Iraq, was under a single authority, then such an authority might decide to denominate its capital holdings in a currency different from the dollar, like the Yen or the Euro. As the world’s largest debtor the US economy would be very vulnerable is a significant proportion of Middle-eastern oil revenue were switched to another currency.

Finally, control of oil supplies to the other key centres of economic power Japan and Euroland has also served as a crucial political lever in the US dealings with these regions. As they are reliant upon Middle-eastern oil, they come indirectly under US influence as the US is the benefactor of most oil-exporting countries within the region; should this change both alternative centres could reduce their dependence on the US substantially. These oil factors: the revenue market, capital and control of “allies” supplies make direct political suzerainty over the region by the US essential for its position as a global power.

To this end the features about the Iraqi state that threatens the US now and back in 1990 are different from what is usually said in the media: the dictatorship, acquisition of weapons of mass destruction, use of chemical weapons against the Kurds etc. The threat lay then, and to a lesser degree now in that it is not a socially weak and subaltern dictatorship tied to the US through the nature of the ruling class as the Saudis were, or the Egyptian – or indeed the Shah of Iran was. The rentier and comprador character of such dictatorships and the social gulf between them and their middle-classes makes them easily controllable by the US. Ba’athist Iraq, with its ferocious disciplines over the governing elite itself, was different as it sought to base its power on the capacity to mobilise the domestic population politically behind transformative goals and was not dependent on the US or external powers to maintain its internal security – the same can be said of its rival Iran. Now the axis of evil label can make some sense as it has included two of the most independent and resistant regimes and states in the region and the two least favourable or dependent on the US.

Some of the regimes mobilising capacity was shown after the immediate invasion of Kuwait. Saddam Hussein has never been a popular leader in the Arab world, but Baghdad’s post-occupation calls for social justice against the reactionary sheikhdoms and plutocrats of the Gulf evoked some response. Even the press financed and controlled by the oil states in the region and Europe covered the fabulous oil-wealth of individuals, as well as tales of corruption, gambling and squandering. The corresponding impression was that fundamentalist or alternative regimes such as the Ba’ath may also have a degree of corruption but could plough more back into the country for development purposes. The threat from below bears very heavily on all ruling groups who base their power on dynastic claims rather than religious fundamentalism or party mobilisation – none of the former can feel safe within their own societies without an external protector, the house of Saud within Saudi Arabia is a classic example of this (Khomeini refused to refer to it as Saudi Arabia, using the term “the so-called Kingdom of Najd and Hijaz” instead thus denying any geographical unity or respectability to the country and emphasizing the artificially created tribal dynastic origins of the present kingdom).

This feature of the Iraqi regime also partly explains why so much military effort was directed towards the destruction of civilian life support systems. Behind this strategy lay the need to ensure that any Iraqi regime, which survived, was turned into a dependent one without the need for a direct military occupation. The success of this policy is apparent: throughout Iraq people have been suffering malnutrition, starvation and various epidemics, including cholera. To deal with the most serious and urgent damage to infrastructure the Iraqi government needs equipment it does not possess and it has been unable to export oil therefore lacks the funds to purchase even necessary food imports. The only sphere where it still has any operational capacity is that of internal security. The result of this policy of destruction has been the reduction of any internal independence the Ba’athist regime might have had and made it survive in a tottering fashion from day to day unable to pose a serious external threat to any external foe but still quite able to intimidate and control dissidents within its own population. This of course has been the point of the air campaign against Iraq.

While Iraq is now crucially weakened at home and unable to pose a credible threat to any US designs for the region, yet the Ba’athist state still exists as a coherent power. This may seem a contradiction given the demonising of Saddam Hussein and the avowed objective of the first Bush administration to remove Hussein from power. What the US needed was an internal Iraqi force to dispose of and replace Saddam Hussein, without appearing as a mere stooge of Washington and also allowing the disappearance of the “Butcher of Baghdad” that successful domestic management of public opinion back home required. The problem is that the only popularly backed opposition forces within Iraq are unpalatable to the US themselves. The Shia in the south and the Kurds in the north are both protected by no-fly zones that were patrolled by US and Alliance aircraft and these groups were touted as alliterative power centres to Baghdad. The best and most popular political forces in the Shia regions are the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution and the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP); the former had close ties with Iran the latter with Moscow during the Cold war. For obvious reasons the US was reluctant to back the Islamicists who in any case would have appealed mainly to the Shias while the ICP had been fatally weakened by years of persecution and subtle erosion by the Ba’ath.

The Islamic revolt which began in the south on the day of the ceasefire, was suppressed by the Iraqi forces while the US did not intervene, fearful of what an Islamic uprising so close to their own “Crown in the Jewel” – Saudi Arabia could do to the Al-Saud regime. As the latter is held in place largely by its claim to lead and be the guardian of Islam in the region, any successful revolution so close to the country by a group linked with the Iranian regime would be fatal, as the latter’s fundamentalist and Islamic credentials are seen as (and actually are) much more authentic than the openly decaying Saudi dynasty and offers a demonstration of a polity that while intolerant and fundamentalist is also more popular and more pluralist. The Saudi acceptance of over half a million US troops in their country shocked and alienated the fundamentalist current within Saudi society to a degree not realised by the West until the Al-Quaeda attacks. In any case any Islamic regime in Baghdad, with majoritarian Shia support was not really an acceptable prospect for the first Bush Administration, and there is no reason to believe that it is any more acceptable to the current one. Ironically the ICP was much stronger than the Ba’ath in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Both parties were rooted in the southern Shia communities with the former in particular have very strong support in the Shia community. The crucial split occurred over the issue of Arab national unity, with the ICP providing support to the anti-Nasserite Quassem regime; while the Ba’ath sought the overthrow of the regime and participated in a bloody war with the ICP which defended the regime against the 1963 coup attempts, which caused the loss of the Ba’ath Shia base. Meanwhile the ICP – overwhelmingly the major political party in after the 1958 revolution, split itself with the more radical wing engaging in a vicious guerrilla war against the military governments of Baghdad, centred in the river valleys and marshes of the Shia south. The attempt ended in failure fatally weakening the ICP.

The position on Kurdistan contains similar problems, though it has been realised for some time now that the Kurdish nationalists cannot take power in Baghdad on their own without the help of other Iraqi dissidents such as the Shias. The Kurdish movement itself is split and not unified yielding a more complicated picture than the one the US is eager to portray. The tribalist wing of the Kurdish movement under Barzani has always had links with the US, it is important to note that this Kurdish resistance was initiated largely by Kurdish landowners (Barzani himself was a substantial landowner) alarmed at the determination of the Quassem regime in the 1960’s to push through an effective land reform programme. Demanding autonomy which was refused Barzani launched an uprising, which was put down by the Quassem government supported by the ICP, however a guerrilla war continued with Barzani getting training and material support from the Shah of Iran and Israel; of course it is debatable to what extent this was a genuine ethnic revolution or one about social control of land. The other more modernist wing of the Kurdish movement based in the cities and towns of northern Iraq, under Talabani initially refused to support the Barzani revolt; it later reversed this stand but at the same time kept open links with the Ba’ath regime in hope of a better deal. During the 1970’s there was actually a very serious attempt by the Ba’ath to reach an accommodation with the Kurds, probably the most far-reaching settlement in the region (the Ba’ath unlike the Turkish government had always recognised the Kurds as a separate nationality). This involved the granting of an autonomous Kurdish region with its own parliament as well as ministers in Baghdad, recognition of Kurdish as an official language and Kurdish teaching in the schooling system. Barzani worried by the impetus of land reform and encouraged by the Shah (who incidentally offered no such concessions to the Iranian Kurdish population) sabotaged the negotiations. In 1973, Kissinger preoccupied with the task of isolating Syria in the peace process, gave further aid to the Kurds in order to bog down the Iraqi regime in a costly mountain war – costing $2 billion a year until Saddam Hussein persuaded the Shah to end his support for the Kurdish irredentists in 1975. One week after the Shah had informed of this, Barzani surrendered unconditionally and went into exile to the US where he died. After 1975 there were organised elections and an elected parliament – though the ultimate authority remained with the Ba’ath as an extra-constitutional body the Revolutionary Command Council was able to promulgate legislation by decree and veto parliamentary decisions. Despite this there was an effort to involve the other political forces and so both the Talabani wing of the Kurdish movement and the ICP participated intermittently with the regime. With the Iranian revolution and the war with Iran the conflict with the Kurdish irredentists was reopened with savage results such as the gassing of civilians at Harbajala and the mass slaughter of Kurdish non-combatants after the war with Iran was over, this widened the chasm between the Kurds and the regime in Baghdad considerably. I have recounted all this to point out the complex nature of the Kurdish question and the nature of opposition to Ba’ath power in Iraq – one of the main reasons why Islamicists opposed the regime was that it was atheistic, supported the godless USSR, allowed open consumption of alcohol in sacred cities such as Najaf and Karbala and its leader in the early 1970’s was a Christian Michel Aflaq; indeed the presence of luminaries of the Christian Right and the Born Again movement in the current US administration conveniently overlooks the fact that the Ba’athist regime was one of the most progressive towards its Christian minority, much more so than Kuwait (at least before 1991) and Saudi Arabia for example; so easy demonising or essentialising of the current Iraqi regime should bear these facts in mind as should those who view this as a conflict of the US vs. Islam.

The nature of the Ba’ath party is a complex one and not one I am fully qualified to enter here, yet their adherence to a concrete social programme such as mass education, radical land reform, nationalisation of industry and state-led economic development make it difficult to classify the regime or party as simply “fascist”. Though the rise of Saddam Hussein has led more to a Stalinist style personality cult and an excessive use of coercive force and terror as political instruments. This was and has been resisted within the party (no doubt accounting for the periodic purges that occur within the party and the Army) and spills across national boundaries – the entire Kuwaiti Ba’ath party leadership refused to support or legitimate the annexation of Kuwait and as a result “disappeared” during the Iraqi occupation. The Kurdish irredentist movement in Turkey has come increasingly under the umbrella of the PKK (Kurdish Workers Party) which is a resolutely Marxist-Leninist organisation; eschewing mobilisation through an Islamic route - such a tactic is the most popular oppositional method in a state where the Attaturk-based official state ideology remains fiercely secular and unsympathetic to Islamicist values; and similar to Algeria (and to some degree Egypt) the military has refused to allow Religious/Islamic parties to accede to power despite their popular support and electoral victories. Simplistic reductions of the “Clash of Civilisations” kind, as demonstrated most notoriously by political theorists such as Samuel Huntington, simply do not to justice to the reality and complexity of these conflicts and apart from being essentialist in their view of the Muslim world and the European one have several other failings; the most basic being a distorted view of history where the immense debt of much of western philosophy and science comes from Islamic world which until the modern period was more advanced in most spheres than Europe - for example most of written Greek philosophy such as the works of Aristotle was lost to Europe in the aftermath of the collapse of the Roman Empire, and only rediscovered via their preservation in Arabic/Aramaic language sources and the rudiments even the current mathematical script used is basically an Arabic one (not to mention the concept of zero transferred from northern India to Europe through the work of Arabic thinkers). Why the more advanced world of the Muslim states were overtaken in social and technological spheres by the Western European states is a question not really addressed or even acknowledged in such an essentialist reading which posits a more advanced Western world in contrast to the relatively backward rest, who can only "catch-up" to the West. Secondly, it cannot fully account for the internal conflicts that take place within "civilisations" the most costly and bloody war in the Middle-east by far was not one against any colonial or western power but the Iran-Iraq war 1980-88 which resulted in over 1 million lives lost and while external influences did play a role in starting and maintaining the conflict it would be difficult to attribute to them the sole or even main burden of responsibility for this expensive war. Current divisions within the Muslim world such as those between Shia-Sunni, characterise sharp internal divisions, which break the traditional stereotype of a monolithic Muslim bloc, indeed it is minority sects such as the Ba'hai, Ahmediyyas and Bohras, which face the severest persecution by Islamic fundamentalist regimes. Lastly, in the conflicts between Muslims movements and state with those that are outside the Muslim world it is unclear why the blame is attached primarily to the Muslim antagonists in generating conflicts and also why a religious identity must be given predominance over a regional, linguistic or ethnic one. For example, nationalist/peasant/popular movement can frequently be couched in mobilisational terms that a Islamic and make use of religious symbolism without privileging the religious aspect of the movement: the conflict between the ethnic groups within Afghanistan can seen in this light as it would be difficult to see how the non-Taliban forces are any less Muslim than their opponents or in Kashmir where a separatist movement based on a regional, linguistic and ethnic identity vies with one that is religious and fundamentalist in character in their opposition to the India state. Moreover, suppression of genuine (or broad based and popular) demands for regional autonomy or ethnic recognition such as the Uighur rebels in Xinjiang province in China, the Chechen rebellion against the Russians or the Muslim elements amongst the Karen guerrillas in northern Burma; are frequently done so with the dismissal of these movements as examples of religious fanaticism allowing the states that suppress them to pose as the secularising saviours and assume an emancipatory role that they in reality are ill-suited to.

Republican Resistance and Imperial Power:

I am sympathetic to Vikash's argument about how the US has ceased to become a Republic and has instead turned into an Empire (Vikash, add link, please); though I would question to what degree the US was ever a republic and the value of using a Republican model as a counterfoil. Americans like to believe that they do not share the baggage of European powers with their history of Imperialism and that the US is the guardian of freedom and democracy across the globe - in short as one historian of Imperialism, V. Kiernan puts it "America loved to think that whatever it wanted was just what the human race wanted"; certain attitudes such as the American view of greatness, to the hierarchies of race and to the potential dangers of revolutions elsewhere (the American Revolution being considered unique and somehow unrepeatable anywhere else in the world - an example of Imperial hubris par excellence in itself). This belief in American leadership was one that ranged across much of the political spectrum in the US, those who dissented were to a great degree marginalised as Noam Chomsky observes that during the Vietnam War the difference between "liberals" and "conservatives " was one over the use of force, the military methods adopted and the nature of the regimes supported - the question of whether the Us had any right to interfere in the domestic politics of other states was taken as given; in other words differences arose over issues of the tactics used, the overall strategy was never questioned as there was consensus on the general role of the US in this regard. Where Britain had the "White Man's Burden" and the French their "mission Civilisatrice" the US has its role as protector of freedom and democracy as the justification for its imperial intervention; for as Weber remarked all societies need a sociodicy to justify how ruling groups rule over the ruled and why inequalities exist, so in the global arena an international sociodicy is needed to justify the interventions of dominant states in those subordinate to them. This reveals some of the deeper similarities between the European and American empires: which is the general domestic unanimity over the issue of Empire: there was very little domestic resistance to Empire for the most part in major European colonial powers such as Britain and France (the main exceptions being the rise of leftist, specifically Marxist politics and parties and radical Republicanism under the French Revolution). Edward Said has described this as the commitment to imperialism over and above the cause of mere profit - "a commitment in constant circulation and re-circulation which on the one hand allowed decent men and women from England or France to accept the notion that distant territories and peoples should be subjugated and on, the other hand, replenished metropolitan energies so that these decent people could think of the empire as a protracted, almost metaphysical obligation to rule the subordinate, inferior or less advanced peoples." For as Said notes the enterprise of Empire depends on having a certain idea of empire; quoting Joseph Conrad in his Heart of Darkness, who says the difference between the modern Imperialists and the Romans, is that the Romans were there just for the loot, just stealing; whereas as modern Imperialists go there with an Idea: not just to steal gold, ivory or goods but to also improve them in some way. In many senses the modernisation rhetoric advanced by the US, as evinced in the Truman Plan, which promised to help peoples from underdeveloped parts of the world to realise their full economic potential reflects this will to power of imperialism.

Yet the concept of Republic vs. Empire makes me uneasy, for when was the US ever really a republic and what model of republic would we want as an ideal. The master narrative of Republics that transform themselves into Empires must be the rise and fall of the Roman Republic (obviously an influence on the formation of American political thought and institutions); of course this was a "virtuous Republic" in the sense that an ethic of frugality and austerity were meant to particular Roman and Republican virtues and one of the things that set aside them from the other indolent and pleasure-loving kingdoms/oligarchies that surrounded them. Yet it one looks below the surface there are many unpalatable aspects of such Republicanism: a predominantly patriarchical society unabashedly relegating women to a subservient position, one where the law of the Paterfamilias within the family was supreme, a slave society that relied on conflict abroad for a continuous supply of slaves, a society where class and social divisions by birth and ascriptive designation was also endemic and where social mobility was restricted to a great degree by the dead hand of tradition and ancestry and finally as regards foreign relations there was little concern to spread the benefits of Republican modes of governance to peoples abroad (limited and questionable thought these were) and the savage treatment of conquered foes and allies leaves much to be desired - in sum some unhealthy comparisons specially in the complacent smugness that one's own form of government/way of life are superior and therefore to be envied by all others - isn't this one of the most common reactions of many Americans to the recent terrorist attacks: surprise and outrage combined with a feeling that envy of the American way of life has turned into hatred by those who see it as beyond their grasp (if this seems slightly excessive as a characterisation, I still find it difficult to understand an editorial by PJ O'Rourke after the September 2001 that patronisingly implied many of the youth who turned towards fundamentalism in Muslim countries harboured frustrated desires to travel to the US, get a green card etc.)

The history of the US itself is replete with examples that make it difficult to believe that it was ever a Republic: the whole concept of Manifest Destiny and the Monroe doctrines are forerunners to the 20th century aspects of US imperialism and in this light US protestations that the US is not an imperial power or that imperialism is not compatible with the " American way of life" (whatever that may be) seem naive in the extreme. A documentary on the Battle of Little Bighorn, which I saw recently, throws up some uncomfortable parallels with the situation today. Then the US Congress had ratified treaties with the Sioux and Cheyenne tribes guaranteeing their territorial rights and the exclusion from settlement of the sacred Black Hills; however the stock market crash and rumours of gold in the region led to an unpleasant turn in events. The railroad tycoons, Wall Street Financiers and industrial giants who were seeing their personal and corporate fortunes falling as the stock market plunged and who faced recession in the east (not to mention increased unemployment and unrest) and who also owned the bulk of the newspapers began to run editorials opining that "an Indian war in this present juncture would be no bad thing". The combination of a desire to expand further west, the increase in prospectors in search of gold and the pressure of migration all combined to bring matters to a head that led to Custers' unfortunate intervention. What strikes me as almost eerie is the similar alliance with economic interests that push for aggressive policy, an uncritical and business dominated media and the easy demonisation of the "enemy" as savages/religious fanatics that are so easily accepted uncritically by all except a dissenting minority, that its effectively marginalised al strike a resonance with the current situation over Iraq. I don't want to push the comparison too far, as the potential for change and resistance is greater today, as is distrust over certain aspects of policy - for example the great majority of opinion polls in the US all show that most Americans are in favour of an independent Palestinian state yet this is in no way reflected say in a cursory examination of the voting record of Congress or US voting in the UN General Assembly.

More relevantly within the context of Empires informal or formal, there is more scope to show how exactly imperialist policies are used to manage domestic dissent and unrest. A crude version would be the bread and circuses approach, whereby the spectacle of Empire is used to deflect attention and energy away from domestic issues and concerns, but I will leave this to political scientists who are more equipped to tackle such problems. I would only point out the obvious fact that there are serious issues to be dealt with both in the domestic and foreign sphere: at home in the US critical socio-economic problems such as those of poverty (one child in five is born into poverty), health (over 40 million Americans have no health insurance) and race ( the disproportionately large number of Black Americans in prison and the skewed uneployment and education levels across different ethnic minorities) are major impediments to raising the welfare of the great bulk of citizens and as the experience of the 1960's and the buckling of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programme under the escalating costs of the Vietnam war shows it is not possible to maintain an Empire and to address such domestic issues at the same time. In the end much of the burden of the Empire are borne by those who are harmed by the inegalitarian fiscal and state polices at home, are penalised by the distorted economic structure that provides little employment and then who are sent abroad to fight and die in its wars. In many ways, all Empires are cannibalistic: they feed upon the lives of their own citizens as well as those of subject/dominated peoples.

:: Conrad Barwa 9:20 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Infrastructure Update:

Vice President World Bank, Asia Region, Mieko Nishimizu speaks to women from a transit camp in Bombay, India Monday May 6, 2002. Nishimizu visited people displaced from railway tracks under Mumbai Urban Transport project, who are being rehabilitated in transit camps with a $79 Million World Bank loan given for the 10,000 people affected. (AP Photo/Rajesh Nirgude)

1. The National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) has announced that it is developing a 6000 kilometers (3750 miles) long state of the art highway system connecting India's metro cities Delhi, Bombay, Madras and Calcutta, known as the golden quadrilateral. The project including North-South and East-West corridors is expected to cost $650 million with India bearing $134 and the balance being provided by the World Bank.

2. The World Bank has also approved a $542 million loan for the Mumbai Urban Transport Project to revamp the rail and road transport system in the metropolis where 6.4 million people commute in overcrowded trains everyday. It has been reported that 10,000 people, mainly squatters living near the railroad tracks, have already been displaced by this project. To the Bank's credit they have provided a $79 million loan to help "rehabilitate" people affected by the project by relocating them to tent cities (umm, well at least they mean well...). Detailed information on the project is available at the World Bank web site.

Although the World Bank has learned a great deal in its interactions with India, it will be important to keep an eye on these new infrastructure projects to ensure that the human and civil rights of local stakeholders are respected. In addition to the dislocation of the poorest segments of the urban population from their homes and livelihoods, I am concerned at the emphasis on increasing user charges and reducing subsidies for transportation services. While costs will need to rise to cover some of the expenses associated with improving the infrastructure, it will be important to ensure that the poor are not futher marginalized by losing access to employment within the city due to high user charges.

:: Vikash Yadav 11:29 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Sati & the State:

Villagers look at the funeral pyre where 65-year-old Kuttu Bai burns during her husband Malu Nai's cremation in the village of Tamoli Patna in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh Tuesday, Aug. 6, 2002. Kuttu Bai, 65, died atop the funeral pyre Tuesday in Tamoli Patna village in Madhya Pradesh state, in a Hindu ritual known as ``sati.'' Villagers chased away police who tried to come to the woman's rescue. (AP Photo/PTI)

The Madhya Pradesh State government has announced today that it will cut off all financial assistance to the village of Patna Tamoli in the northern Panna district where a woman committed suicide on August 6th by throwing herself on her husbands funeral pyre. The state government is also asking the Central government to deny financial assistance to this village. Finally, the State government intends to hold local officials accountable for not preventing the suicide. Local officials will also be "reacquainted" with the Sati Eradication Act of 1987.

This desperate act of suicide has been treated as an embarrasment to the State and Central government and the "nation." It has stirred the ghosts of the Roop Kanwar case of 1987 and even the colonial Raj. It has revived feminist discourses on the status of women in rural areas. It has stoked the glowing embers of casteism and caste politics as notices are given that the family were "backward barbers." At the center of the public and legal controversy is whether the sixty-five year old woman, who was estranged from her husband for two decades, willingly chose to kill herself or was forced by the villagers. According to family accounts, the widow was not present for a religious ritual the morning of the funeral.

However, when her sons started the funeral procession, she emerged dressed up as a bride and as they reached the cremation ground near a hillock, she revealed that she had decided to commit sati.

Some media accounts have portrayed the local villagers as consumed by "religious frenzy." The Week recounts,

Relatives said that Kattubai walked to the pyre and sat on the lap of her dead husband. The villagers, in a fit of religious frenzy, shouted "sati mata ki jai". As the flames enveloped her, they threw coconuts and joss sticks into the pyre. When the flames subsided, they took the ash and rubbed it on their foreheads.

Apparently the "mob" of villagers prevented the local police from stopping the suicide. It seems that the act of sati was even viewed by some villagers as a sacrifice that would end the drought afflicting the state. There have been reports that the widow has been "deified" by local villagers and there is talk of building a "sati temple" on the site of the suicide. However, district, state, and federal officials are committed to ensuring that the woman's action is not sacrilized.

This entire episode is horrific and overdetermined. We can never know why Kuttu Bai killed herself. In my eyes the entire episode represents an indictment of the state, not the villagers. Collective punishment of the local officials and villagers only shifts the blame. If it is the case that the villagers viewed the suicide as a sacrifice, one must wonder why the plight of these drought stricken villagers was allowed to become so desperate? We have already discussed in detail the fact that there is no excuse for the government's failure to redress the drought and flood victims in a time when grain stocks are overflowing. Why in an area known for government run diamond mines are the villagers so poor and desperate?

The state cannot be absented from the complex matrix that is involved in the act of sati; just as the state is complicit in honor-killings, dowry murders, domestic violence, caste violence, etc. This is not merely a legacy of a barbaric and primitive ritual. It occurred within the modern Indian state. Much like the British raj, the modern state is quick to distance itself from its own complicity in the suicide. The narrative is recast in an orientalist prism which seeks to separate the lives of these villagers from the life of the modern state, but in fact these lives coexist and are intertwined. What is at stake is the desire to be seen as modern even in a land where modernity lives side by side with tradition. What is at stake is the label "civilized." But a truly civilized state would admit its complicity and work to eradicate the conditions that lead to such desperate acts, rather than punishing villagers ex post facto.

:: Vikash Yadav 7:05 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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The Jewel in the Crown:

Photo Source: NASA

:: Vikash Yadav 11:52 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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