that after the implosion of communism and traditional social democracy in the late twentieth century, the left had no systemic alternative to offer. But no economic and social model ever came pre-cooked. All of them, from Soviet power and the Keynesian welfare state to Thatcherite-Reaganite neoliberalism, grew out of ideologically driven improvisation in specific historical circumstances.
The same was true in the aftermath of the crisis of the neoliberal order, as the need to reconstruct a broken economy and society on a more democratic, egalitarian and rational basis began to dictate the shape of a collective and sustainable alternative. Both the economic and ecological crisis demanded social ownership, public intervention and a fundamental shift of wealth and power. Real life was pushing in the direction of progressive solutions. The upheavals of the first years of the twenty-first century opened up the possibility of a new kind of global order and of genuine social and economic change. But, as communists learned in 1989, and the champions of capitalism discovered twenty years later, nothing is ever settled.
Last Days of the New World Order
THE RISE OF LIBERAL INTERVENTIONISM (1999–2002)
The 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington did not come out of a clear blue sky, as was often said in the West at the time. They were the product of decades of US and Western support for client dictatorships across the oil-rich Middle East, sponsorship of Israeli occupation, war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and the militarily enforced asphyxiation of Iraq. They also followed a decade of untrammelled US power and neoliberal globalisation in the wake of the USSR’s collapse. These were the days of the US-proclaimed New World Order, reflected in a growing Anglo-American appetite to intervene militarily in the name of human rights – from Kosovo to Sierra Leone – while corporate-tailored triangulation set rigid limits on political alternatives and progressive change. But a backlash had already begun.
9/11: They can’t see why they are hated
Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don’t get it. From the president to passersby on the streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy, which must be answered with overwhelming force – just as soon as someone can construct a credible account of who was actually responsible.
Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process – or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world – seems almost entirely absent. Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world.
But make that connection they must, if such tragedies are not to be repeated, potentially with even more devastating consequences. US political leaders are doing their people no favours by reinforcing popular ignorance with self-referential rhetoric. And the echoing chorus of Tony Blair, whose determination to bind Britain ever closer to US foreign policy ratchets up the threat to our own cities, will only fuel anti-Western sentiment. So will calls for the defence of ‘civilisation’, with its overtones of Samuel Huntington’s poisonous theories of post-cold-war confrontation between the West and Islam, heightening perceptions of racism and hypocrisy.
As Mahatma Gandhi famously remarked when asked for his opinion of Western civilisation, ‘it would be a good idea’. Since George W. Bush’s father inaugurated his New World Order a decade ago, the US, supported by its British ally, bestrides the world like a colossus. Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of global governance, the US giant has rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest; ripped up treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel’s thirty-four-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages.
If, as yesterday’s Wall Street Journal insisted, the east coast carnage was the fruit of the Clinton administration’s Munich-like appeasement of the Palestinians, the mind boggles as to what US Republicans imagine to be a Churchillian response.
It is this record of unabashed national egotism and arrogance that drives anti-Americanism among swathes of the world’s population, for whom there is little democracy in the current distribution of global wealth and power. If it turns out that Tuesday’s attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden’s supporters, the sense that the Americans are once again reaping a dragons’ teeth harvest they themselves sowed will be overwhelming.
It was the United States, after all, which poured resources into the 1980s war against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, at a time when girls could go to school and women to work. Bin Laden and his mojahedin were armed and trained by the CIA and MI6, as Afghanistan was turned into a wasteland and its communist leader Najibullah left hanging from a Kabul lamp post with his genitals stuffed in his mouth.
But by then bin Laden had turned against his American sponsors, while US-backed Pakistani intelligence had spawned the grotesque Taliban now protecting him. To punish its wayward Afghan offspring, the US subsequently forced through a sanctions regime which has helped push four million people to the brink of starvation, according to the latest UN figures, while Afghan refugees fan out across the world.
All this must doubtless seem remote to Americans desperately searching through the debris of what is expected to be the largest-ever massacre on US soil – as must the killings of yet more Palestinians in the West Bank yesterday, or even the two million estimated to have died in Congo’s wars since the overthrow of the US-backed Mobutu regime. ‘What could some political thing have to do with blowing up office buildings during working hours?’ one bewildered New Yorker asked yesterday.
Already, the Bush administration is assembling an international coalition for an Israeli-style war against terrorism, as if such counterproductive acts of outrage had an existence separate from the social conditions out of which they arise. But for every ‘terror network’ that is rooted out, another will emerge – until the injustices and inequalities that produce them are addressed.1
(13/9/01)
KOSOVO: A powerful and ominous precedent
As Nato embarks on its fourth week of ‘humanitarian war’ over the immolation of Kosovo, similar disasters around the world are attracting rather less attention. In East Timor, illegally occupied by Indonesia since 1975 in defiance of the United Nations, state and army-sponsored militias have massacred hundreds of civilians in recent weeks, in an apparent effort to prevent a UN-organised referendum on the territory’s future.
More than 200,000 people – around a third of the population – are estimated to have been killed since the Indonesian invasion. David Ximenes, deputy leader of the Timorese liberation movement Fretilin, remarked this week: ‘We have had our own Kosovo here for the last twenty-three years.’
The parallels between the treatment meted out by Serbia to Kosovan Albanians and Turkey’s war on its Kurdish minority are even closer – except that in the Turkish case, it has been on a larger scale. The Turkish war against Kurdish PKK guerillas – Turkey’s own Kosovo Liberation Army – has so far claimed
