Globalization and Regional Integration in Europe and Asia

Nam-Kook Kim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317126997
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

This volume discusses the current trend of globalization and the main characteristics of world order, focusing specifically on the destiny of the nation state, the threat against human rights, and conflicts between unilateral hegemony of the USA and Europe. It examines the contemporary European experience and compares it with Asian reality with a view to implications for the future development of Asia. It also discusses regional integration as a framework for bringing stable peace, exploring detailed principles and specific forms of a regional community in Asia. Contributors from Europe and Asia critically review previous literature on this topic and suggest new theoretical and empirical grounds of regional community in Asia. The book takes the viewpoint of comparative civilization and experiences of European integration to offer meaningful lessons for the future of nation states and the possibility of building regional communities in Asia.

PART 1
Globalization and the New World Order

Chapter 1
American Primacy and Europeanist Responses

Peter Gowan

Introduction

This chapter seeks to explore the relationship between the political dimension of American grand strategy and the orientations of the United States’ main allies amongst the capitalist powers of Eurasia, particularly those in Western Europe. It argues that since the Soviet Bloc collapse there has been a broad consensus amongst successive US administrations for America’s political goal in both Europe and East Asia to be that of regional primacy. It then suggests that neither realist nor liberal students of world politics have adequately conceptualized the ways in which America’s allies, particularly in Western Europe, have responded to this drive for primacy. They have neither balanced against the US nor counterposed a liberal, co-operative security alternative. Instead, the chapter argues, US allies have used a tactic that can best be described as subversive bandwaggoning for regional goals. The chapter concludes by exploring the limits of this tactic and the possibilities of going beyond it towards a genuine regional collective security system at each end of Eurasia.

The Current American Political Concept for World Order

The notion of a world order denotes a set of basic rules for inter-state relations which persist over time because they rest on rather solid foundations of political and socio-economic reproduction. In modern capitalist conditions in which capital craves security and predictability, the pressures towards establishing stable international orders with fairly clear rules of functioning are very strong.

At the same time, world orders are constructed in an inter-state system marked by extraordinary and growing disparities of wealth and power as between states. And the foundations of world order lie in the arrangements made between the richest and most powerful states. These are by no means necessarily the most populous states: they are the states with the highest productivity of labor at the top of the international division of labor: the core capitalist countries in the contemporary world, concentrated in North America, Western Europe, and East Asia. As the American Defense Policy Guidelines of 1992 made clear, the crucial challenge for American grand strategy resides in these core capitalist centers. These are the most important centers from which a challenge to US power could be launched. And the central problem for American grand strategy is how the United States should handle its relations with these core capitalist states.

Producing order amongst the core capitalist states requires more than a set of military-political arrangements of the sort that realist scholars typically focus upon. It requires gaining acceptance of fairly stable rules of functioning of the international political economy. And both political and political-economy systems can be sustainable only if they are institutionalized and thus legitimated normatively not only between states but within them at the level of domestic politics.

During the Cold War the United States established a distinctive kind of world order which marked a radical break with the pre-1945 world of rival geopolitical centers amongst capitalist powers. It brought all the core capitalist states within its own sphere of influence, directly taking over management of their military-political security through a set of hegemonic alliances directed towards a militarized confrontation with the Soviet Bloc and China. At the same time, the United States organized the international political economy of capitalism in such a way as to assure the flourishing of its core capitalist allies, privileging them over countries of the global South as well as the Soviet Bloc: the rules of the capitalist part of the world economy systematically favored the rich countries at the top of the international division of labor over the rest.

The American claim to exercise unipolar primacy in the strategic field during the Cold War applied first and foremost to relations with the Communist states. But America also took upon itself to manage the vital security issues of its allies in relation to countries of the South: ensuring the continued flow of strategic materials to its allies from the South and, as far as possible, protecting their investments and markets in the South.1

While this set of Cold War arrangements was legitimated as a liberal, cooperative order between the US and its allies, it was, in fact, a unipolar order in the military-political field in which the United States claimed the right to unilaterally decide upon the critical security problems of the entire capitalist core. The cooperative dimensions of the order, expressed in the various common institutions of the capitalist world, existed within that unipolar framework.

The collapse of the Soviet Bloc may have radically altered much of the context facing the capitalist core, but amongst those who study American grand strategy there is a fair degree of consensus that since the collapse, the American state has sought to maintain the basic features of its Cold War arrangements: a political strategy of maintaining US primacy over the capitalist core.2 And a global political economy whose rules systematically favor the core centers over the rest. On the political side of this conception, some scholars use the word “hegemony” rather than primacy and others prefer the terms “unipolarity” or “monopolarity.”3 But in the technical sense in which the concept of primacy is used in American grand strategic discourse it implies something rather precise: an effective American claim of the right to decide on the key military-political security issues facing its core capitalist allies.

While there are very many differences between the foreign policies of the Bush Senior, Clinton and Bush Junior administrations, as well as in their legitimation strategies and styles, we agree with those authors such as Paul Wolfowitz who have argued that there has been basic continuity in the goals of American grand strategy in the political field since the triumph of the perspective outlined by Wolfowitz and others in the Defense Policy Guidelines of the Bush Senior administration of early 1992.4

The Clinton administration accented its efforts in the direction of rebuilding American primacy towards the reorganization and expansion of NATO in the West and the US–Japanese security alliance in the East, enunciated the doctrine of conditional sovereignty and the concept of Rogue States, marked out for regime change (as well as vigorously working to impose the rules of the globalized political economy). The Bush administration sought to use the 9/11 attacks as an opportunity to radicalize and speed up the drive to consolidate this primacy order, giving it a new normative framework as an US-led “war against terror” on the part of the “civilized” world.

Regionalized Alternatives to American Primacy

The US drive for primacy in the post-Cold War world has surprised and shocked many students of international politics. It has also led to debates about possible alternatives to this drive for an American unipolar world order. Amongst these alternatives many have focused on the possibilities of a more decentralized and regionalized global political system and in that context have identified the West European states as the potential or actual bearers of a project for just such a more regionalized arrangement. Perspectives of this sort have been canvassed both by realist and by liberal scholars.

Realist scholars have disagreed on the extent to which a unipolar world order built around American primacy may be sustainable, but they have shared common conceptions of the options facing great powers: they can either bandwagon with the United States or seek to balance against it. And these options concern power strategies with material, military capabilities at their center.

Some neo-realist scholars, led by Kenneth Waltz, have argued that American primacy is unstable and unsustainable because it is viewed as too threatening by Eurasian powers. On this view, the dynamic of international politics should be towards the emergence of a coalition of Eurasian powers set upon balancing against the United States. Supporters of this perspective have often identified France and Germany along with other West European powers as pursuing a strategy of seeking to balance against the United States. French President Chirac frequently alluded to the need for a multipolar world. German leaders have supported efforts to build a European Union military arm through the construction of the so-called European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP). The ad hoc coalition of Germany, France, and Russia voicing opposition to the US and British attack on Iraq is viewed by some as clear evidence of the start of such European balancing against the United States.

Amongst liberal scholars who see the West European states as potential bearers of an alternative world order to that of American primacy, the source of this alternative lies in the field of political values and/or domestic interest groups rather than material power rivalries. In this field they have identified the origins of the American drive for primacy as lying in various features of the American domestic political system. Some have pointed to the values at the base of the Republican Party under George W. Bush: the Christian fundamentalist right and the American Conservative movement. Others have stressed the role of interest group coalitions such as the military industrial complex and the American international oil companies. And yet others have highlighted the role of elite ideological factions, particularly the so-called neo-conservatives with their commitment to an American Empire. By contrast, such liberal scholars have viewed Western Europe and the EU as lacking these domestic trends and as being much more strongly oriented towards liberal internationalist principles in international affairs. The West Europeans are thus perceived as a liberal vanguard with a commitment to the principles of international law, co-operative security, and the privileging of the resolution of international conflict though multilateral diplomacy with the resort to force being exercised only as a final option in defense of liberal values when all other options have been exhausted.

In support of this conception, liberals can point to the centrality of multilateral negotiation centered upon the resolution of disagreements through treaty-based agreements within the EU itself. The EU has also privileged multilateral negotiation on an increasingly wide range of issues in its international operations and during the 1990s it has placed liberal principles of human rights and democracy at the center of its international diplomatic strategy. Opposition to the Anglo-American attack on Iraq not only from West European political leaders but on the part of public opinion across the EU is also viewed as evidence of the strong value-base for liberal internationalism and co-operative security within the EU.

The Weaknesses of Realist and Liberal Accounts of Regionalism

Neither the realist proponents of European regionalist resistance to the American primacy project nor their liberal counterparts have offered compelling accounts of the European responses.

As realist critics of Kenneth Waltz like William Wohlforth have demonstrated there is almost no evidence of European balancing against the United States in the sense in which realists use that term. In the face of rising American defense budgets, European defense spending has stagnated or actually declined. And French and German opposition to the invasion of Iraq was of an exclusively verbal-symbolic kind. It did not extend to a refusal to allow the United States to use its logistic resources in Europe for the invasion—something the West Europeans had done in the 1970s and in the late 1980s in relation to US operations in the Middle East.

Where an element of balancing can be detected is in the strengthening of security links between China and Russia and in their joint efforts to limit American encroachments into Central Asia through the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO). But this remains a limited sphere of security co-operation rather than a full-blown defensive alliance between these two powers.

Some scholars have responded to the lack of evidence of West European balancing by making a distinction between hard balancing—which implies building material resources against American power—and soft balancing which can be understood as discursive-cum-diplomatic opposition, laying the basis for hard balancing in the future. But this argument also seems unconvincing. In the first place, although the readiness of French and German leaders to link up with President Putin of Russia against the invasion of Iraq was impressive at the symbolic level, it was not sustained once the invasion had taken place. Instead, diplomatic relations between Russia and most of the West European states, including even the Merkel government in Germany, have deteriorated. And instead of the French and German positions on the Iraq war leading to a vigorous diplomatic effort on their part to bring the EU as a whole over to a distinctive diplomatic line against US policy in the Middle East, we have seen, if anything, the reverse: a readiness to endorse UN legitimation of the occupation of Iraq and a swing towards the Bush administration’s stance on the Israel–Palestine conflict. There has also been a very substantial turn in West European diplomacy towards Iran since 2002, a turn which, without endorsing a US military attack on Iran, has effectively backed the American drive to deny Iran its right to develop the full nuclear fuel cycle on its territory under IAEA supervision. None of this suggests a West European turn to “soft balancing.”

At first sight the liberal case for a Europeanist challenge to the American primacy project looks stronger. Liberal internationalist and indeed liberal cosmopolitan values have been at the heart of the diplomatic discourse of the EU since the early 1990s and none of the major EU states with the possible exceptions of the British conservatives and Forza Italia in Italy have ideological commitments similar to those of the Republican right. There is also no militarist lobby on anything like the scale of the American one in Western Europe. And public opinion in Europe—and not least in Germany—has a far more pacifist international orientation than is the case in the United States.

Yet there are strong grounds for arguing that Europe’s political liberalism belongs more in the field of political legitimation than in the field of governing policy at state or EU level. A case in point would be the International Criminal Court (ICC), which had been a rather central project of the EU states since the 1990s. It has also been viewed by many as a touchstone of the EU’s commitment to liberal principles in contrast to Washington’s rejection of the project. Yet the ICC project explicitly excludes military aggression as a crime within its jurisdiction—a rather flagrant break with long-established liberal internationalist traditions. And such major states as France as well as Britain have well-established cultures of Machiavellian realpolitik in their diplomatic and power-projection behavior towards countries of the South. The EU itself endorsed without qualms an aggressive NATO war against Yugoslavia in 1999 despite the fact that the NATO attack lacked any mandate from the UN Security Council. And no steps have been taken at EU level to impose discipline on its member states to prevent their future repetition of the British involvement in US aggression against Iraq. And even in the more narrowly defined field of respecting international norms on individual human rights—a particularly strong theme in the EU’s diplomatic discourse—the main governments of the EU have been shown to have ignored such principles by co-operating with American operations within the EU itself in extraordinary renditions. And the readiness of the EU and its major states to move closer towards the United States in Middle East policy after the invasion of Iraq, referred to above, is surely a further indication that the West European states have not moved in the direction of mounting a sustained, liberal political challenge to the strategy of the Bush administration, far less to the primacy project of the United States.

This is not to deny the greater strength of liberal internationalism among the public opinions of many states within the EU or the much less strong constituency for aggressive militarism in Western Europe than in the United States. It is, however, hard to justify the claim that the states of Western Europe have shown an inclination to place a value commitment to political liberalism above their commitment to maintaining their alliance with the United States under a Bush administration.

An Alternative Concept: Regionalist Subversive Bandwaggoning

We wish to suggest an alternative way of conceptualizing the behavior of the West European states in the face of the American primacy project, one that differs from both realist and liberal conceptions. The term we will use is that of regionalist “subversive bandwaggoning” (SB). For neo-realists the phrase subversive bandwaggoning is a contradiction in terms. There is certainly a tension within the tactics of subversive bandwaggoning, but a contradiction exists only if one subscribes to neo-realist theoretical assumptions. At the same time, the concept of subversive bandwaggoning downgrades the importance given by liberals to political values and/or interest group coalitions at the domestic level. It suggests a more...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: A Framework for Peace in the Era of Globalization
• PART 1: GLOBALIZATION AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER
• PART 2: EUROPEAN EXPERIENCE AND ASIAN REALITY
• PART 3: IMAGINING AN ASIAN REGIONAL COMMUNITY
• Index