The Political Economy of Global Security

Heikki Patomäki

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134116232
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What are the possibilities for and conditions of global security in the 21st century?

This book provides an innovative study of future wars, crises and transformations of the global political economy. It brings together economic theory, political economy, peace and conflict research, philosophy and historical analogy to explore alternatives for the future.

Patomäki develops a bold, original and thought provoking political economy analysis of the late 20th century neo-liberalisation and globalisation and their real effects, which he describes as a 21st century version imperialism. In order for us to understand global security and to anticipate the potential threats and crises, he argues that a holistic understanding and explanation of history is necessary and demonstrates that a systematic causal analysis of structures and processes is required. Putting this theory into practice, Patomäki constructs a comparative explanatory model which traces the rise of imperialism in the late 19th century and culminated in the First World War. He argues that even a partial return to the 19th century ideals and practices is very likely to be highly counterproductive in the 21st century world and could become a recipe for a major global catastrophe.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, globalization studies, politics, economics and security studies.

1
Introduction

The anticipation of futures is a necessary part of all social actions, and particularly so in the world of modern organisations. If social sciences are to be relevant, they should also be able to say something about possible and likely futures.¹² The future, which is real but not yet determined and therefore consists of a multiplicity of different possibilities, unfolds through various transforming events and nodal points.³ Future possibilities are based on the already existing geo-historical social structures. However, since history unfolds in relatively open systems, forecasts are contingent on a number of uncertain conditions: multifarious geo-historical processes and mechanisms (including homeostatic causal loops), and the modes of responsiveness of actors, which are linked to layered systems of collective learning and self-regulation.

As John Maynard Keynes emphasised in The Economic Consequences of the Peace and particularly in his analysis of the Russian revolution of 1917 and the civil war, incremental cumulative changes are very important for understanding history and great global events and transformations:

The great events of history are often due to secular changes in the growth of population and other fundamental economic causes, which, escaping by their gradual character the notice of contemporary observers, are attributed to the follies of statesmen or the fanaticism of atheists.

(Keynes 1920)

On the other hand, extraordinary events and episodes also play an important role in world history. Economic crises and large-scale collective violence, particularly wars that have immediate effects on the heartlands of the world economy, have from time to time been catalysts of far-reaching ideological and institutional changes. For instance, despite rapid population growth and other fundamental economic causes, and despite the inexorable will of V.I. Lenin and other leaders of the small Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, it is unlikely that the revolution of 1917 would have happened in Russia without the disastrous First World War. Similarly, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s constituted a key cause of the rise of the National Socialist German Workers Party to power in Germany in 1933 (in the 1928 elections, the NSDAP gained only 2.6 per cent of the votes, clearly less than in the previous elections). In the 1930s, the Great Depression also stimulated collective learning processes whereby the principles of Keynesian economics were widely adopted. Among the outcomes of these learning processes was the Bretton Woods system of world economic governance, agreed on by 44 states in New Hampshire, US, in 1944.

Anticipations of the future can be misleading. In late nineteenth-century Europe, many, including famous social scientists such as Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, assumed that the rapid integration of the world’s societies and economies was making war obsolete. Likewise, a hundred years later, there appears to be a post-cold war ‘metaconsensus’ according to which ‘we are entering a period in which deep political rifts are disappearing […and] the imperialist rivalries between the hegemonic countries, which in the twentieth century had provoked two world wars, have disappeared, giving rise to interdependence between the great powers, cooperation and regional cooperation’ (McNeill and McNeill 2003:288). Therefore, ‘nowadays only small wars exist, many of which are of low intensity and almost always on the periphery of the world system’ (de Sousa Santos 2006:394). This consensus is made even more plausible by the apparent fact that since the end of the cold war, there have been fewer wars and war-related deaths than in previous decades. According to the Human Security Report 2005 by the University of British Columbia (Human Security Centre 2005), wars have not only been far less frequent in the early twenty-first century, but also far less deadly.⁴ The number of armed conflicts has dropped by 40 per cent since 1992 and the deadliest conflicts, with 1,000 or more battle-deaths, by 80 per cent. Wars between countries are rarer than in previous eras and now constitute less than 5 per cent of all armed conflicts. Most of the world’s violent conflicts are concentrated in Africa. Should we conclude that war is indeed becoming obsolete?

Anticipations of the future are rarely unanimous. Between 1870 and 1914, there were also many who did not share the expectation that wars in Europe were disappearing. Following the Industrial Revolution and Napoleonic wars, European powers were constantly alarmed about the technological progress of other states and therefore incessantly adopted and developed new military technologies. For instance, after the engagement between the iron-clad Monitor and the Confederate Merrimac during the American civil war in 1862, there was a panic in Britain that technological progress would soon leave her without any efficient navy. Explicit scenarios of future wars also started to appear regularly at this time. After the Franco-German war, in the early summer of 1871, an anonymous story about a successful German invasion of the United Kingdom alarmed the British and became popular reading throughout Europe. This story – entitled The Battle of Dorking – provided an exemplar for numerous pieces of fiction on future warfare. By the 1890s, these stories had become a regular feature of the popular press. While Victor Hugo anticipated that the development of technology would eventually provide a supreme deterrent and make war obsolete, many others imagined future wars and a few writers even maintained a pessimistic vision of ever more destructive wars between the modern states (see Clarke 1966: chapters 2–4). Perhaps the most important of all these future-oriented authors was H.G. Wells, who soon began to advocate a world state as the solution to the problems of humanity. Wells foresaw an aerial war in 1902 before the development of aeroplanes. Further, in 1913, Wells forecast the development of atomic bombs and power and imagined a hugely destructive worldwide atomic war being fought later in the twentieth century. In 1902, in his non-fictional Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought, Wells proposed a world republic, an idea that he started to cultivate in many of his writings appearing before the First World War. In 1917 he wrote: ‘It is chaos or the United States of the World for mankind; there is no other choice’ (cit. in Wagar 2004:141).

Similarly, during the cold war, a wide range of stories and scenarios on future wars was published. Well-known mass cultural products include Nevil Shute’s apocalyptic novel On the Beach (1957), adapted for a popular Hollywood screenplay in 1959; Herman Kahn’s famous and overtly optimistic scenario on manageable nuclear war (On Thermonuclear War, 1961); Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), based loosely upon the thriller novel Red Alert by Peter George (1958); and The Day After, an American television film about a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union (1983). However, in the immediate aftermath of the cold war era, the prevailing mood was that of relief – often euphoric. In the expectation that History had finally come to an end (Fukuyama 1989; 1992), the possibility of a large-scale war fought with weapons of mass-destruction was overlooked for a while. Thus the ‘metaconsensus’ triumphed: wars were becoming more marginal and multilateral cooperation would prevail, at least in the core areas of the world economy.

However, about ten years and a number of limited-scale conventional wars later, dramatically portrayed in the global media, the spectre of nuclear war has resurfaced. New apocalyptic stories have been gaining popularity. Much of the Religious Right in the United States, supportive of the administration of George W. Bush, believes that it can decipher an eschatological story in the Bible about the end of the world involving a nuclear war.⁵ The popular series Left Behind, authored by Tim LaHaye, and which has sold over 60 million copies in the US between 1995 and 2006, is a drama about the end of the world as we know it. At the same time, a number of well-known scientists and futurologists have written best-selling books that discuss the prospects of humanity surviving through the twentieth century. Violence, war and new technologies of destruction assume a key role in their accounts (e.g., Martin 2006 and Rees 2003; whereas Kunstler 2006 and Hawking 2006 place greater emphasis on the dangers of global warming). Moreover, the eminent Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is now closer to midnight than it was at its inception in 1949:

We stand at the brink of a second nuclear age. Not since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has the world faced such perilous choices. North Korea’s recent test of a nuclear weapon, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, a renewed U.S. emphasis on the military utility of nuclear weapons, the failure to adequately secure nuclear materials, and the continued presence of some 26,000 nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia are symptomatic of a larger failure to solve the problems posed by the most destructive technology on Earth.

(Board of Directors of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 2007)

Meanwhile, the academic discipline of International Relations (IR) has recognised that the end of the cold war did not in itself resolve the problem of new technologies of destruction. One of the best-known IR theorists, Alexander Wendt has taken leaps along the Wellsian path by arguing ‘that a global monopoly of violence – a world state – is inevitable’ (2003:491). Wendt’s argument is also about the tendency for military technology and war to become increasingly destructive and about learning from the consequent experiences and vulnerabilities. ‘The scale of surviving states may have been efficient for many centuries, but ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons are now making them obsolete as well’ (ibid.: 508). Less well-known but compelling is Warren Wagar’s scenario A Short History of the Future (first edition 1988, third edition 1999), which anticipates the collapse of the global capitalist system, the death of 6 billion people in World War III in 2044, mass starvation and the foundation of a democratic socialist world state in the 2060s (and then, much later, the more utopian world of small communities as well). Wagar’s scenario provides a starting-point for my discussions in chapter 2.

Anticipations of the future are too often based on recent historical events, short-term trends or mere ideological illusions. It is a key argument of this book that they should rather be grounded on systematic causal analysis of structures and processes, including their potential for crises and other possible nodal points of world history. Scenarios are not predictions. They start with an analysis of the existing structures and processes and their inherent possibilities, coupled with the assumption that futures remain open until a particular possibility is actualised. For instance, what do we know about the causes of war in the late twentieth century? Studies of the post-Second World War conflicts in the global south indicate that humanitarian crises, catastrophes, genocide and wars have often been preceded by economic decline and growing inequalities (see Nafziger and Auvinen 2003). On the basis of this link between socio-economic developments and violence, should we also not ask what is likely to happen when the world economy as a whole is in a long period of slackening and of unstable growth and increasing inequalities, coupled with rapid geo-economic relocation of industrial production? Is it possible that conflicts will again escalate and become potentially violent even in the shifting central areas of the world economy? Or will these threats stimulate collective learning processes that will contribute to making systems of global governance more sustainable? Are there any lessons that we should learn from nineteenth- and twentieth-century world history in this regard?

Historical analogies

Everything in history repeats itself, as Marx once said (1968 [1852]: 96), following Hegel. However, nothing ever remains exactly the same. For Marx, the first time is often a tragedy, while the second is a farce. Marx thought the second time may be a farce either because the actors cannot recognise what is new or because a backward learning process is taking place, generating an attempt to reverse history, even though the objective circumstances have changed.⁶ In this book, I ask whether it is possible or likely that there will be another round to the tragedy of 1870–1914 as well. The problem is that ‘in the past, the worst disasters could not kill mankind’ (Jaspers 1961:318). Would a replay of the developments that led to the First World War be possible, perhaps as a tragic farce?

History literally never repeats itself. Temporal social contexts are always different in some regard and action, by definition, involves the possibility of acting otherwise. However, explanatory models, which I also call iconic models, are based on the controlled use of abstraction and idealisation. Moreover, the systematic use of imagination – metaphors and analogies – plays an essential role in constructing an adequate iconic model. Instead of deriving propositions from ‘a secure starter set’, social scientific research starts with a broadly pluralist set of interesting candidates and eliminates and refines them step by step until only a contracted range of fully endorsed iconic models is left. This is the reductive approach to model-building. Iconic models are projective and make reference to the real world; a model stands in for a real causal complex or complexes in the social world.

Instead of armchair philosophising, research is about encountering, collecting and analysing historical evidence. Although quantitative data is indispensable and, as will be seen, often very useful, qualitative evidence is ontologically primary. The process of collecting and analysing evidence is doubly hermeneutic. Both the accounts of the lay actors and the iconic models of the researcher are situated not only in space but also in time and necessarily assume the form of a narrative. Now, by way of idealisation, abstraction and analogy, it is possible to construct an abstract analysis of existing mechanisms and their inherent contradictions, i.e., a sketch of likely developmental possibilities, given particular mechanisms, tendencies and contradictions. We can also develop scenarios and stories of possible and likely futures on this basis.

A key historical analogy of this book is that the contemporary era is in some important regards similar to the era of 1870–1914. This can also be formulated more hypothetically: although there are many obvious differences between these eras, my hypothesis is that at least some of the central mechanisms, tendencies and contradictions are basically the same. I am not alone in suggesting similarities between these eras. For instance, in their famous critique of the globalisation thesis that late twentieth-century globalisation is unique, Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson (1999) argued that before 1914, the world economy was at least as highly integrated as it is today. In terms of migration, for instance, the pre-1914 world was in fact more mobile and globalised. In slight contrast to Hirst and Thompson, Robert Went sees both important similarities and differences:

A key aspect of today’s economic globalization is the emphasis on the combination of policies free trade and free movement of capital, which seems to signify a return to the similar international regime that existed before World War I. But despite many similarities, economic globalization is not repetition or continuation of this previous period of capitalism […] today’s world economy is characterized by an increasing number of cross-border links among different countries, a higher level of internationalization of capital, an integrated worldwide financial system, and a greater role for international organizations and panels charged with coordinating and regulating economic policies. Consequently, domination is expressed today mainly in economic and hardly at all in military rivalry among the main capitalist powers.

(Went 2002:60)...

Table of contents

• Rethinking Globalizations
• Contents
• Figures and tables
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Global security
• 3 Explaining the First World War
• 4 The origins of the First World War
• 5 The long downward wave of the world economy in the late twentieth century
• 6 Global insecurity in the early twenty-first century
• 7 Possible futures A
• 8 Possible futures B and C
• 9 Conclusions
• Appendix 1 How to analyse and help solve global collective dilemmas
• Appendix 2 Layers of agency, structures and geo-historical nodal points that explain the First World War
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index