Power
Play and the New
World Chaos
By
Ken
Coates TFF associate
The
Bertrand Russel Peace Foundation and the Conference in
the European parliament on Peace and Human Rights,
beginning January 31st, 2002
Posted January 30, 2002
The idea behind the
EU
Europe after the Second World War developed a strong
culture of pacifism. Part of this was driven by internal
motives. The movement towards European Union was
undoubtedly stimulated by the felt need to eliminate
tensions between France and Germany, and to make
impossible new eruptions within the European continent.
The establishment of the European Coal and Steel
Community was, amongst other things, a deliberate attempt
to fuse resources and overcome the national economic
competition which could bring about a renewal of
militarism.
Of course, all this unwound within the context of the
Cold War, which, as it became more and more dependent on
nuclear confrontation, aroused our own peace movements,
for nuclear disarmament. Whilst not wishing to
sentimentalise these different pacifisms , they
undoubtedly became part of a wider culture, which was
only partially eclipsed by the end of the Cold War, as a
result of which we were proved wrong in our supposition
that general nuclear disarmament might become an
established fact.
Within the European pacific mindset was maintained a
decades-long social consensus, the broadly
social/Christian democrat commitment to full employment
and welfare, now eroding under the influence of
neo-liberalism.
The collapse of the Soviet Union gave an early impulse
to a number of genuine European efforts to develop close
co-operation in the renewal of Russia, and to move
towards joint institutions which might guarantee the
progress of disarmament. But in a relatively short time,
the international stage was clearly taken over by the
United States, which has followed a different policy,
with considerable determination.
Doctrine of global domination
- and too little peace movement attention
Part of this has involved an exaggerated economic
liberalism, which, although very one-sided, may not
necessarily be belligerent. But another, nakedly
militaristic, part of this doctrine was enunciated by
Zbigniew Brzezinski (one-time National Security
Adviser to President Carter), who formulated the doctrine
that global domination follows the domination of Eurasia.
This doctrine implied that the United States would
follow a forward policy in respect of the former Soviet
Union. So evolved the expansion of Nato, and the
establishment of a new transitional organisation, the
Partnership for Peace. This was seen as a kind of bridge
to Nato for former neutrals, and above all for former
members of the Warsaw Treaty and former republics of the
Soviet Union itself.
Peace movements, in their weakened state, paid some
attention to the Eastward expansion of Nato, and often
opposed the subversion of the neutrals, but they largely
ignored the eastward progress of the Partnership for
Peace which was able to mount joint Nato military
exercises with the Ukraine, Georgia and some of the most
important Central Asian Republics.
All of these were not only directed against Russian
military power, but threatened the erosion of Russian
political influence. Unfortunately, the undermining of
Russian power, in this case, implied the aggrandisement
of the United States, which was already over-grand for
its own mental health.
At the culmination of this process, the bombing of
Yugoslavia caused great revulsion among the Russian
political classes, so that the end of the Yeltsin regime
brought Vladimir Putin into office, with an apparently
more robust policy aimed at restoring Russian influence
over the territories of the former Soviet Union. This was
accompanied by an alarming new nuclear doctrine of "first
use" of nuclear weapons, as well as a ferocious
intensification of repressive war in Chechnya.
New high-technology
initiatives and farewell to Cold War
agreements
Meantime, the American military were preparing the
ground politically for the launch of a vast technological
offensive, with the comforting but misleading name of
National Missile Defence. "Son of Star Wars" as it has
been more widely known, is a comprehensive plan for the
militarisation of space, which implies the destruction
not only of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, but also
the Outer Space Treaty. The new surge of satellite
weapons, and space-based lasers is all conceived within
the overall doctrine of Full Spectrum Dominance, which is
the official doctrine of the American military, and is
nicely complementary with the Brzezinski schema.
All this had been seamlessly carried forward from the
Republican administration into that of Clinton, but the
election of President Bush produced a number of
unilateral initiatives which have alarmed the European
partners of the United States, and aroused the great
concern of public opinion around the world. In order to
introduce his space-based military techniques, Bush made
it plain that he was determined to repudiate the ABM
Treaty, and demolish what he called "the Cold War
agreements" upon which contemporary arms control measures
have all rested.
European discomfort was not mitigated by the fact
that, at the same time, the United States unilaterally
repudiated the result of the Kyoto negotiations on
environmental protection, and undermined international
agreements on landmines, small arms and biological
weapons. The United States government also blocked moves
to create an International Criminal Court, which may be
seen as an ironical fact in the light of subsequent
events.
By the summer of 2001, popular concern in Europe and
the United States was already beginning to show itself in
the growth of a number of peace movements.
September 21 and
after
The destruction of the World Trade Centre in New York,
and the onslaught against the Pentagon in Washington,
have changed international balances. The shock generated
by these atrocities initially united world opinion in
strong sympathy for their American victims. This popular
sympathy remains strong. But when responses were
considered, naturally most people thought in terms of the
necessary actions of the United Nations and its relevant
organs. But Governments did not all reflect the popular
mood. In particular, the Americans and British ensured
that a military response was developed with lesser and
more indecisive involvement by certain selected Nato
allies, and some other countries.
Great efforts were made to involve Middle Eastern and
Muslim States. But the initial alliance-building efforts
produced uncertain results. To begin with, the question
of Palestine was continuously festering, and the Arab
world had been deceived before, during the last crisis
which had put the United States into an allegedly
listening mode. All the elaborate promises extracted from
the Israelis during the Gulf War, and the subsequent
unwinding of the Conference in Madrid and the Oslo peace
process, had led precisely nowhere, with the Palestinians
in a worse state than before.
Now, in the new crisis, alienation and downright
antipathy grew rapidly throughout the Arab world, and
among Muslims from the Philippines and Indonesia across
Pakistan to Saudi Arabia. A near revolutionary situation
has been developing in Saudi Arabia, and it is reported
that foreigners from the West dare not go out of doors.
The American soldiers who are stationed in the country
are confined to their base, and the Saudi royal family is
deeply split on the question of how to get rid of them.
Even the European allies have been showing increasing
fractiousness, as the implications of the bombing of
Afghanistan have become more apparent and more
disturbing.
The original overtures to Russia and China were
received with greater than normal diplomatic warmth, and
in mid-October a wider "coalition" announced itself with
some official ceremony during the thirteenth Asia-Pacific
Economic Co-operation meeting in Shanghai. This was
attended by both Jiang Zemin and Vladimir Putin as well
as George Bush. Yet within a very short time all these
protestations of common cause began to look rickety. With
the Middle East and the Muslim world in chaos, could the
Brzezinski doctrine now be implemented in full force?
With an Afghan war likely to spill over its frontiers
into Pakistan on the one side, and former Soviet Central
Asia on the other, the prospect could be one of very
considerable tumult at the best, and quite possibly one
of widespread war and destruction.
The new "Great Game" and
possible "anti-hegemonic" coalitions?
No doubt the awesome possibility of such a war has
troubled the Russian Government, which has already
suffered from the effects of destabilisation elsewhere.
But Zbigniew Brzezinski, in outlining his proposals for
the renewal of the great game in Central Asia, had opened
the speculation that one variant of American policy in
the region might involve the offer of a condominium to
the Russian leaders, involving one or several special
areas of joint action. Those leaders might be sceptical
about such an offer, if they had read Brzezinski's
blueprint:
"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."
Extrapolating from this theme, Brzezinski tells us
that for the Americans,
"The most dangerous scenario would be a
grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an
"antihegemonic coalition united not by ideology but by
complementary grievances."
Not surprisingly, Brzezinski thinks that preventing
this may be a difficult task.
Hope springs eternal, and it is clear that the
alliance builders who went to work after September 11th,
wished to overcome this problem in one fell swoop,
exploiting the grievances of all three countries against
their adversaries in Afghanistan by including them in the
Coalition against Terrorism.
However, such an inclusive alliance was not to prove
acceptable to the Iranians, and even the impressive
results that had been obtained with the Russians and
Chinese by the time of the Shanghai summit could be of
rather short duration. But one thing is absolutely plain.
Dominance, Full Spectrum or other, is absolutely
incompatible with a democratically acceptable world
order. To incorporate new subordinates under the
prevailing domination will inhibit rather than encourage
any development of democracy among them.
Whether we like it or not, this is bound to concern
all the peace movements, and their concern will deepen,
as the crisis extends itself.
Fortunately, it also concerns all those other
movements which have already articulated their responses
to global economic domination, debt, and the destruction
of the natural environment. It is not difficult to see
how the processes begun at Seattle and Porto Alegre, and
continued in Genoa, share all the fundamental concerns of
the new peace movement*.
The immediate question for all of us is, how can we
bring about a constructive convergence of these
movements, which may well become the most important human
resource, in the effort to save the world from new
paroxysms of destruction?
* These matters will be considered at the launch
Conference of the European Network for Peace and Human
Rights, European Parliament, Brussels on 31 January/1
February 2002. Further details from the Bertrand Russell
Peace Foundation (e-mail: elfeuro@compuserve.com
& web site: www.russfound.org).
©
TFF & the author 2002
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