Development, failed states, imperialism & ideology. posted by Richard Seymour

Just a few quotes first:

Foreign policy in practise:

British historian Mark Curtis has noted that the primary function of the British state, "virtually its raison d'etre for several centuries - is to aid British companies in getting their hands on other countries' resources."

As for the British security services:

"As Lord Mackay, then Lord Chancellor, revealed in the mid-1990s, the role of MI6 is to protect Britain's 'economic well-being' by keeping 'a particular eye on Britain's access to key commodities, like oil or metals [and] the profits of Britain's myriad of international business interests'." (Curtis, 'Web of Deceit', Vintage, 2003, pp.210-211)

Why Iran?:

A clue to what the logic is that governs the program can be glimpsed in the Heritage Foundation’s 2006 Index of Economic Freedom. The think tank’s index is a kind of measure of how pleased you’d be with a country if you had a whole pile of cash to invest, or goods and services to sell, and were looking around for a good place to expand your stock of capital. Hong Kong, for example, which tops the list, has everything a capitalist could want. No tariffs and no barriers to trade, no pesky minimum wage laws, free entry of capital, unrestricted repatriation of earnings, and a low corporate and personal income tax rate. Other countries high on the list include Singapore (no tariffs, low corporate income tax), Ireland (hungry for foreign investment and willing to do whatever it takes to get it), Luxemburg (virtually free entry of goods) and the UK (good foreign investment climate, minimal tariffs).

The countries at the bottom, on the other hand, are a veritable Who’s Who of international pariahs, as defined by US State Department: Cuba (rank: 150, restricts and imposes performance criteria on foreign investment); Belarus (rank: 151, “concerted resistance to the private sector, and resistance to privatization” serving “to hinder foreign investment; follows “active policies of import suppression and export promotion”); Venezuela (rank: 152, “government controls key sectors of the economy” limiting US investment opportunities); Zimbabwe (rank: 154, “generally unwelcoming to foreign investment,” preferring “majority Zimbabwean participation” in new ventures and eventual local ownership); Iran (rank: 156, see below) and north Korea (rank: 157, ”firmly rooted in communism” with a “central command economy” which “controls all imports and exports” and prohibits most foreign investment). We’re supposed to believe these countries -- the perennial bugbears of US-UK foreign policy – are countries of concern, not because they set local development and economic sovereignty ahead of what Western investors and trans-nationals believe is their inalienable right to accumulate capital wherever they like, but because they’re supposed to be anti-democratic and contemptuous of human rights.

Another branded revolution:

Contrary to claims that Lukashenko's repression has produced an "information black hole", the choice of news is wider than in 1996. The EU-funded EuroNews channel is available on cable, which millions of people have, and access to uncensored websites is easy in internet clubs and cafes or at home.

Despite this, there is a huge campaign by foreign governments to intervene in the Belarussian poll, even more controversially than in Ukraine in 2004. While Russia is hardly engaged in this election, Europe and the US are pumping in money. According to the New York Times, cash is being smuggled from the US National Endowment for Democracy, Britain's Westminster Foundation and the German foreign ministry directly to Khopits, a network of young anti-Lukashenko activists.

Poland has reopened a state-owned radio station on its eastern border to beam programmes across Belarus, while the German government's Deutsche Welle started broadcasts to Belarus this year. Alexander Milinkevich, the main opposition candidate, has been touring European capitals and getting endorsements that amount to blatant interference in a foreign electoral contest.

Some of this foreign money will be used to fund street protests promised by opposition activists if Lukashenko is declared the winner. They have already dubbed it the "denim revolution", giving supporters little bits of the cloth as symbols to copy the successful demonstrations in Ukraine and Georgia.

But why is the US, with the EU in its wake, so concerned about Belarus? Is it because Belarus stands out as the only ex-Soviet country that maintains majority state ownership of the economy and gets good results? Is ideological deviance forbidden? (The IMF, while admitting Lukashenko's economic success, calls it "ultimately unsustainable", being based on cheap Russian energy imports and wage increases that outstrip productivity growth.) Is the problem Lukashenko's independence, his friendliness to Russia and resistance to Nato, his abrasive, don't-push-me-around style? As one Minsk resident put it to me, he's a "Slavic Castro".

It is a simple enough task to discern "double standards" in Western foreign policy rhetoric and to locate the hidden standard that underlies it. If you want to understand why the US has been so friendly to the Uzbek dictatorship, even going so far as to suppress an attempted inquiry into the infamous and bloody massacre in Andijan, you only have to look at the facts: a) the US was allowed until recently to station troops there, part of its strategy of placing "lily-pads" across South Asia; b) the US, particularly some of Bush's friends, had important oil interests in the country; c) the country was privatising, in however corrupt a fashion, which allowed British American Tobacco among others to get a massive foothold in the economy, d) it was also a member of Guam, an anti-Russian, pro-Nato alliance formed by former Soviet states in the 1997, and therefore seemed to be pursuing a course congruent with the interests of the US in the region; as an ally in the "war on terror", it supplied evidence gained through torture which, although extremely unreliable, certainly gave the impression of active support and helped to justify internal repression. That has now changed: Uzbekistan has quit Guam after some years of warning; US troops were asked to leave; recently Western NGOs have been booted out; the economy, despite having yielded to Western interests in crucial areas, remains largely state-led and therefore impenetrable to exploitation by overseas capital; and the use of evidence acquired through torture has blown back in the Americans' faces. Hence, reports like this. One would have to be an ostrich to think that the US was seriously concerned about human rights in Uzbekistan, Belarus or anywhere else. The ruling class doesn't stay where it is through virtue.

However, what is interesting is the ideology of developmentalism which coincides almost precisely with the Washington Consensus, and therefore provides a crucial role in naturalising claims derived from geopolitical interests. For instance, what is it with the developed/developing state dichotomy? Typically, a ‘developed’ state is one which is equipped with a liberal democratic mode of governance and a free market economy (the first inessential, the latter a chimera), with the emphasis latterly on neoliberalism. A ‘developing’ state is one which reaches toward that end, that state of ‘development’. It will, if it does, have reached the ‘end of history’, a realm of perpetual peace and growth. The West, having pioneered this model, finds it to be universally applicable, to have enjoyed unadulterated success. In this ideology, states that fail to ‘integrate’ into the global system, will fail. They will become ‘failed states’, possibly ‘rogue states’, in need of humanitarian intervention and what have you. Alternative models of 'development' simply don't exist. Is it so surprising that the neoliberal 'deal' produced at the Gleneagles G8 summit was lauded as a bonus for the Third World by many who ought to have known better? How much distance is there between the views of the leadership in NGOs oriented toward 'development' and the priorities of Western capitalist states? When Claire Short used to brag about sponsoring this or that development project, it would simply have seemed unworldly to ask what the British business interest was in the project (there usually was and is one). Because 'development' means 'more capitalism'. The multinationals who are running sweat-shops in Vietnam are 'developing' the country, and the government is pursuing a course of 'development' for allowing them to do so.

At the root of this is wilful amnesia. Where would the original accumulation of capital that helped 'develop' the West have come from if not for colonies, piracy and the slave trade? How could the West have 'developed' if not for the stimulation of demand in overseas colonies, or the superexploitation of labour in plantations for the production of sugar and cotton for developing domestic markets? Development for the West entailed and still entails underdevelopment and exploitation for the rest. For example, Britain's possession of India was what characterised it for Churchill as a first rate rather than a third rate world power: and it did indeed provide a massive source of cheap labour, not to mention the most important trading market in the whole empire. The East India Company pioneered the strategy of modern multinationals: have things manufactured very cheaply overseas, sell them much more expensively to domestic markets. The whole point about the term 'development' is that it is a relational term: one is 'developed' as compared to someone else who is not developed, or who is underdeveloped. To put it another way, the 'developing' states and the 'developed' states share a history, an interdependent one characterised by plunder.

It is still the case, of course. As Chomsky noted at the height of the Clinton euphoria: "Seven out of ten diamonds sold in the West are cut in India, with super-cheap labor, now being driven down to still greater depths of misery thanks to structural adjustment. But there is a bright side: 'We pass some of the benefits to our overseas customers,' an Indian diamond exporter observes. Workers and their families may starve to death in the New World Order of economic rationality, but diamond necklaces are cheaper in elegant New York shops, thanks to the miracle of the market." To keep that state of affairs going, you have to 'integrate' those you intend to exploit into the system throughly and completely. To do that, you need to create and support client regimes, threaten and deter those regimes that do not pursue your interests, divide your opponents, and keep those you intend to exploit dependent on you. That's the reason for 'economic integration' and Structural Adjustment Programmes that supposedly recreate 'Western' models of growth (ideological artifices that no Western state actually pursues). This is why 'economic freedom' is seen as the talisman that generates other forms of freedom (even though we know from South Korea, China, Chile, and now Iraq and Haiti, that neoliberalism is in fact highly compatible with, indeed has an affinity with, authoritarianism).

Hence, according to Zbigniew Brzezinski (in The Grand Chessboard): "In brief, for the United States, Eurasian geostrategy involves the purposeful management of geostrategically dynamic states and the careful handling of geopolitically catalytic states, in keeping with the twin interests of America in the short-term: preservation of its unique global power and in the long-run transformation of it into increasingly institutionalized global cooperation. To put it in a terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together."

Or, as David Harvey puts it in his Neoliberalism: A Brief History, citing Karl Polanyi: "The idea of freedom '…degenerates into a mere advocacy of free enterprise' which means 'the fullness of freedom for those whose income leisure and security need no enhancing, and a mere pittance of liberty for the people, who may in vain attempt to make use of their democratic rights to gain shelter from the power of the owners of property' But if, as is always the case, 'no society is possible in which power and compulsion are absent, nor a world in which force has no function', then the only way this liberal utopian vision could be sustained is by force, violence and authoritarianism. Liberal or neo-liberal utopianism is doomed, in Polyani’s view to be frustrated by authoritarianism, or even outright fascism".

Yes, they aren't all that fussed about liberal democracy. For instance, Middle Eastern states developing polities that are not supine is the last thing the US can countenance. And even the totemic 'free enterprise' can take a hike if it doesn't suit. One of the virtues of the film Syriana was to have acknowledged this. The oil is running out, the Middle East has some of the last reserves, and what the US wants is to ensure that they have optimal access to it. They're not doctrinal about it either: when the neoconservative fundamentalists tried to privatise Iraq's oil economy, big oil knew better: 'we' can exploit it more efficiently if the Iraqi state continues to own it, and gives 'us' preferential costs, because 'we' can then pass on any externalities to the Iraqi taxpayer while repatriating the profits. We can roughly pin down the definitions as follows, then: a 'developed' state is one which has partaken of the loot of 'undeveloped' states; a 'developing' state is one which allows the 'developed' states to do this; 'economic freedom' is whatever structure best avails this process; a 'failed' state is one which 'fails' to hand over the loot, preferring either to spread the wealth a bit more equitably among the domestic populace (as in Venezuela and possibly Bolivia) or among a domestic elite (as in Zimbabwe, Belarus etc); a 'rogue' state is a 'failed' state whom one of the 'developed' states intends to attack.