Crossposted at Everybody Comes from Somewhere.
I recently ran across this quote from Glen Ford on The Black Agenda Report:
There’s a term going around in the corporate media called, “multi-polarity.” It’s really a euphemism, designed to describe the death of white supremacy over the planet. It’s been a long time coming – more than five centuries, since the European invasion of the rest of the continents began, resulting in the death of untold millions of people. Whole civilizations were wiped away, to make way for a northern European global sphere of influence. Now that era is coming to an end.<…>
China, India, Brazil and South Africa have joined in a political and economic compact to resist the domination of the United States and Europe. The political-economy of capitalism dictates that these nations must be dealt with. The social realities of the United States dictate that it cannot raise a military force sufficient to suppress the dark masses. Europe learned this lesson a generation ago. Now it is time for the white supremacist Americans to learn the same lesson: they cannot rule the world.
This sounds interesting. I wanted to learn more about “multi-polarity,” so I did just a little bit of research. Turns out it is actually a concept that was developed by Jacques Chirac several years ago. Here’s how wikipedia defines it:
Multipolarity in international politics describes a distribution of power in which more than two nation-states have nearly equal amounts of military, cultural, and economic influence.
What I found is that, while this concept might be being discussed in the corporate media, we certainly haven’t heard much about it – but the rest of the world is talking about it quite a bit. I’d like to share a couple of examples with you.
Here’s an example from The Asian Times in an article by Michael Weinstein from June 2004.
The question is whether the Iraq adventure marks a watershed in world politics, in which the currents that once ran toward multilateralism in the decade following the fall of the Soviet Union have now shifted in the direction of multi-polarism. Well before the second Gulf War, China, Russia and France had voiced preferences for multi-polarism, in which American leadership is replaced by negotiation among regional power centers, among them North America. The Iraq war may have tipped the balance so that it favors the multi-polarists. If the United States cannot be trusted to take the interests of allies and collaborators into account in its strategic policy, these governments will seek to retrench, moving to gain as much control as possible over their regions, so that they can exert a veto on American interventions into them. Although each regional power center has its own independent interests, they all have a shared interest in fending off American dictation and, therefore, constitute an incipient defensive alliance.
Multi-polarism is a containment policy against the United States – the one-time hyper-power that has revealed its vulnerability and the limits of its military control.
And here’s something that Hu Jintao, the current President of the People’s Republic of China, said back in 2001:
“Multipolarity constitutes an important base for world peace and the democratization of international relations is an “essential guarantee” for that peace”, said Chinese Vice President Hu Jintao on Monday during his five-nation tour in Paris.<…>
“The multi-polarity composes an important base for achieving a durable peace on this planet,” he said. Such multi-polarity is conducive to building a new, just and reasonable eco-political order, setting up a relatively-stable international political framework and promoting exchanges and cooperation, he added.
Here’s Weinstein again in December 2004 from EurasiaNet:
What Washington has most essentially lost is acquiescence to its leadership. Other powers no longer have any compunction about opposing U.S. policies and preferences when it is not in their own independent interests to follow them. It is a game of every power for itself, in which each regional power center cooperates with others when it shares common interests with them and opposes them when interests conflict. The result is the absence of a single paradigm of world order or even of a coherent pattern of alliances. In their place are coalitions of convenience that — taken together — have no consistent direction.
Currently the major presumptive power centers are China in East Asia, India in South Asia, Brazil in South America, the Franco-German combine in Europe and Russia at the center of its multiregional periphery. As an area of contention that is internally divided and subject to strong pressures from outside powers, the Near East has no single presumptive power center, although Iran is bidding for that role. There is no state in Africa that has the resources to be a hegemon, although Nigeria and the Republic of South Africa might take that position or share it in the future. The U.S. has secure dominance in its North American base, but its global reach is in question as it faces challenges and tests from ascending powers elsewhere.
There are articles that discuss the dangers of this growing multipolarity. Like this one from The Guardian that was written during Israel’s attacks on Lebanon last year. But just look at the title and tag line for the article:
Lebanon, North Korea, Russia … here is the world’s new multipolar disorder.The unipolar moment of American supremacy has passed. But the new multipolarity may prove to be very nasty indeed.
I find all of this interesting on so many levels. First of all, it makes sense. At least until BushCo is out of the White House, other powers in the world would be blind to think they can be trusted. I imagine there is a lot of work to “hedge our bets” going on all over the world with respect to the failing state of the US.
And I actually think its a hopeful sign. Just as the founders of this country recognized the need for a “balance of powers” in our constitution, the world needs a balance of powers for any sense of security and stability to develop. It might be a bit of a roller-coaster ride to get there – but I think this is a path that has some promise.
We lost our hegemony the day George Bush took office.
They called for an end to “colonial companies” about a year ago. Here’s what their CEO, Sam Palmisano had to say in the Financial Times (firewalled):
BUT, his concerns are more about the threats from anti-globalization forces if companies don’t adapt their ways:
IBM’s plan is to develop R&D and engineering centers in key countries across the world. Co-locate knowledge and intellectual capital with their largest customers if you will. Nestle is doing this as well with the development of a large R&D center in Shanghai that complements their traditional Swiss research centers. Dannone is taking this approach too.
I think a lot of smart people and smart business professionals are realizing or have realized that the days of the white man are over.
The big global challenge today is ensuring that Anglo-Saxon free market economics doesn’t morph into morfe feudal capitalism, more equal opportunity destruction of the middle class and more global slave labor.
I’m really really really bummed about the Sarkozy win in France. I viewed Royale as an almost Dean like candidate with a non-traditional power base. An opportunity to slow-down the dismantling of cultures and classes and reframe the debate. Sarkozy will be more of the same in terms adherence to traditional paradigms around global capital.
We must keep pushing the boundaries though….
Thanks alot for this northcountry. I was just learning about some of this today and wondered how corporate globalization fit into the ideas of multipolarity. My one thought was that the global corporate powers could probably do at least as much (maybe more) to support or fight this kind of organizing that most governments could.
There’s nothing altruistic about IBM’s plans. It’s just a new excuse for outsourcing. They avoid our labor and environmental laws, and we pay the price. There’s a big difference between having international partners, and giving our manufacturing and design capabilities away.
It’s changing the nature of the corporation to confront new global realties AND to escape from existing national legislation.
There’s two sides to this really.
From a human capital perspective you bring new people and new countries into the global knowledge game. That’s actually a good thing and forces a country to step up public investment if tbey wish to serve their citizens and remain competitive.
Tbe dark side is really dark and actually goes beyond outsourcing.
The inexorable logic of capitalism is a continual search for new and less regulated markets. And the outcome of that is a new corporate organization that has no national home or form. It’s almost like a reverse devolution to feudalism where the feudal lords are rich families, global corporations and private equity firms.
And I do mean anything which comes out of corporate media should rightly be rejected. When and if I have the time should I deem it patently important I may point out how this particular theme originated in the bowels of Satan himself and how corporate will use it against you to enhance their profits by stealing away some level of your lifestyle.
Since the US has failed in it’s democratic experiment just think of how a world government would be far less sympathetic. Corporations would rule, even more so than they do already.
In all the reading I did about multipolarity – I didn’t see ANYTHING about a world government. As a matter of fact, the whole concept is about DIFFERENT (ie multi) geographic coalitions organizing around mutual interests, mostly to take on the unilateral power-weilding of the US (and their corporate interests).
I didn’t find much of anything about this in our US corporate media, as I pointed out in the diary. Most of what I found had been written in the foreign press.
And finally, I do think that a movement like this is likely to affect my lifestyle – and that of most of us living in this country. But I also think that the days that we get to hord most of the world’s resources are likely to come to an end sometime soon.
It’s a return to normalcy. Most of history has been multipolar, with regional powers vying with each other for regional — seldom global — influence. The confluence of the industrial revolution with European expansionism produced an explosive detour from the normal course of events, but that energy is largely spent now.
The bad news is that the hallmark of previous periods of multipolarism has been uninterrupted regional warfare. One of the few positive side-effects of the bipolar Cold War era was that there were no large wars, and what small wars occurred were regional proxy wars between the superpowers. In general, policymakers on both sides knew that sudden changes to the status quo could lead to a nuclear holocaust, so the bleeding was kept to a minimum. Yugoslavia, and now Iraq, serve as excellent examples of what happens when short-sighted regional interests have free reign to act.
What makes this different than the pre-Industrial era is that regional actors are increasingly getting their hands on nuclear weapons. Led on by the failure of the US and Russia to disarm after the Cold War, we face the spectre of a world in which regional powers are locked into the same insane circular firing squad that NATO and the Warsaw Pact spent sixty years in, desperately trying to find a way out. The situation is not helped by the fact that many regional leaders are orders of magnitude battier than the garden-variety sociopaths who helmed the US and USSR during the Cold War.
The only possible solution is for the Great Powers — while they still are Great Powers — to engage the world in a total nuclear disarmament program. Unfortunately, unless the US and Russia, both currently headed by narcissistic megalomaniacs, come to the table, no one else will, either.
Thanks eodell for sharing this enlightened and thoughtful information.
It makes me realize that its going to be increasingly important that we all have a lot more information about the leaders is countries like China, India, Brazil, etc. If these are the regional players, their decisions could have a profound impact on all of us. Perhaps its time for us to start paying as much attention to their politics as they have had to pay to ours.
It reminds me that TIME magazine, in their deliberations about “person of the year” for 2006 seriously considered Hu Jintao. Maybe the corporate media is seeing this kind thing play out and they at least had a momentary look into the future.