Home > Notes from the Underground
I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
I was struck by the number of people predicting the fall of the American Empire after Bush's re-election. Such things are not particularly surprising; it is after all the fate of Empires to dwell upon their decline, very bit as much as it is the fate of their rivals to fervently wish for the same outcome. However, such speculation is far from new; I recall reading essays by Gore Vidal predicting the decline of the United States to a similar level of economic status as Chile and Argentina during the late Reagan era. Instead, it was the sun that rose in the East, Japan, that was to sink into recession and relative decline. As many have noted, there is something circular to the current debate;"Would-be Cassandras have been predicting the imminent downfall of the American imperium ever since its inception. First came Sputnik and "the missile gap," followed by Vietnam, Soviet nuclear parity, and the Japanese economic challenge -- a cascade of decline encapsulated by Yale historian Paul Kennedy's 1987 "overstretch" thesis.
The resurgence of U.S. economic and political power in the 1990s momentarily put such fears to rest. But recently, a new threat to the sustainability of U.S. hegemony has emerged: excessive dependence on foreign capital and growing foreign debt. As former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers has said, "there is something odd about the world's greatest power being the world's greatest debtor."
The US does have a number of problems facing it, and the issue of foreign investment is one I noted sometime ago (excuse the indulgence, I never claimed this wasn't an exercise in vanity publishing), with debt funding the US economy to an alarming degree at a time when oil revenues are increasingly being funded in Euros and Yen. One might further note that without the ability to draw on either extensive allied forces (i.e. those of states like France) or drafted troops, US military power has been somewhat curtailed and indeed overstretched in recent years.
The analogy with the Reagan era is especially instructive; like the current administration, Reagan sought to combine low taxation with extensive military investment and commitments, with recession being the rather predictable outcome. The resurgence mentioned above was attributable to a large extent to the United States abandoning extensive military investment. Put bluntly, the US economy is particularly badly geared geared towards affording guns and butter at the same time. Depending on future policy, this is far from suggesting any decline but it certainly suggests that American power is far more heavily circumscribed than the current administration might care to think.
As a footnote, the subject of imperial decline does rather suggest the issue of rivals. The European Union has certainly proved (with Ukraine and Turkey) that its vision of 'soft' power based on international law and multilateralism can be surprisingly effective, its handling of 'harder' power in economic and military terms is more questionable (particularly since trading GDP for social welfare hardly seems a poor bargain). No such questions exist for China and the India, the world's two largest economies until the eighteenth century and which are already undermining certain sectors of the Western economies. However, given the number of decades it would take for either to overtake the US, the subject is a rather academic one in relation to the present prospects for the US.
Update: Eric Hobshawm takes a differing tack ot the issue, comparing the US notion of itself as the 'end of history' to many of the twentieth century's failed utopian projects:"What we have today is a superpower unrealistically aspiring to a permanent world supremacy for which there is no historical precedent, nor probability, given the limitation of its own resources - especially as today all state power is weakened by the impact of non-state economic agents in a global economy beyond the control of any state, and given the visible tendency of the global centre of gravity to shift from the North Atlantic to the zone of south and east Asia.
Even more questionable is the wider - almost quasi-Hegelian - sense of Fukuyama's phrase. It implies that history has an end, namely a world capitalist economy developing without limits, married to societies ruled by liberal-democratic institutions. There is no historic justification for teleology, whether non-Marxist or Marxist, and certainly none for believing in unilinear and uniform worldwide development.
The belief that the US or the European Union, in their various forms, have achieved a mode of government which, however desirable, is destined to conquer the world, and is not subject to historic transformation and impermanence, is the last of the utopian projects so characteristic of the last century."Labels: Politics
posted by Richard 7:11 pm
