Exodus from Empire: The Fall of America's Empire and the Rise of the Global Community - Rilegato

Paupp, Terrence Edward

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0745326145 ISBN 13: 9780745326146

Casa editrice: Pluto Pr, 2006

Riassunto

-- A vision of a new world order that looks forward to the end of IMF hegemony -- 'There is no book quite like this ... Paupp has achieved a well-articulated alternative vision of a future world order based on law, equity, and sustainability.' Professor

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Informazioni sugli autori

Rex Brynen is Professor of Political Science at McGill University. He is author, editor, or coeditor of eight books on various aspects of Palestinian and Middle East politics. He has served as a consultant for various governments, the World Bank and the UN.Roula El-Rifai is a senior programme specialist with the Middle East Unit and the Governance, Security and Justice Programme Initiative at the International Development Research Centre in Ottawa. She is co-editor of Palestinian Refugees: Challenges of Repatriation and Development (2007).

Terrence E. Paupp has taught philosophy, international law, and political science at Southwestern College and National University. He is Vice-President of the Association of World Citizens and a senior research associate for the Council on Hemispheric Affairs. From 2001-2005 he served as National Chancellor of the United States for the International Association of Educators for World Peace.

Terrence E. Paupp has taught philosophy, international law, and, Political science at Southwestern College and National University.

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Exodus From Empire

The Fall of America's Empire and the Rise of the Global Community

By Terrence E. Paupp

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2007 Terrence E. Paupp
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7453-2614-6

Contents

Acknowledgments, xii, 
Preface, xiv, 
List of Abbreviations, xvii, 
INTRODUCTION, 1, 
1 FROM PRECEDENCE WE COME, 19, 
2 THE OCCUPATIONS OF EMPIRE, 30, 
3 WHEN THE "LAW OF THE LAND" BECOMES LAWLESS, 61, 
4 CLASH OR CONVERGENCE?, 100, 
5 THE HIDDEN POLITICS OF EMPIRE, 172, 
6 CLAIMING "A RIGHT OF PEACE", 260, 
7 CONCLUSION, 339, 
Notes, 346, 
Index, 417, 
About the Author, 424, 

CHAPTER 1

From Precedence We Come

The future is not a mere repetition of what has come before. We are haunted by our old concepts, ideologies, and our very nature. The influence of the past has not entirely dissipated from consciousness or memory. Perhaps that is one reason why postapartheid South Africa embarked upon a review of the atrocities of the old system through its Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In order to truly open the future for new possibilities, history must be dealt with, understood, and given meaning. In this important sense, the past is prologue.

Certainly, history seems to contain large segments of human experience that repeat the past. Everything from building global empires, to creating more peaceful communities, is expressed by and contained within the matrix of human imagination. The historical expression of these visions and aspirations is conditioned by the practical realities of time, place, and situation.

Throughout the history of civilizations the quest for either empire or community is a constant theme. Both empire and community represent a particular application of human power and purpose. Some scholars have attempted to categorize these two forms of governance into different kinds of experiments. The differentiations of these experiments have been expressed as tribal, imperial, and commercial. Making such distinctions is vital to our understanding if we are to comprehend the implications of different kinds of social, economic, and political processes across time and civilizations.

The tribal experiment refers to domestic-scale culture (scale calls attention to growth thresholds, order of magnitude increases in the size of societies, and any new cultural features that are required to sustain larger systems). Tribal experiments are more inclusive. They do not operate as an imperium because no single person or dominant minority could direct it by gaining permanent control over the entire society.

The imperial experiment refers to societies that were much larger than tribal ones. In addition, strategic resources in the imperial world have historically been controlled by dominant political imperia (imperia is the plural of imperium, the Latin word for command over others, rule by an individual, or rule by an elite few). The danger of imperia is that when individuals are allowed to create increasingly expanding imperia, the fundamental human rights of others may be threatened. Hence, while an imperium can benefit society at large, its unlimited or unrestrained power is always potentially dangerous. Dangers arise when antidemocratic elites are interested primarily in their own self-aggrandizement of wealth, power, and control.

The commercial experiment refers to the phenomena of "globalization." Globalization embodies a practice of capitalism that separates the control of capital from producers and consumers. Under the auspices of the "Reagan Revolution" the nations of the poor South were increasingly relegated to the role of cheap producers of capital goods. Thanks to the Reagan roll back of the 1980s and the passage of North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the 1990s, the consumers of the rich North became the beneficiaries of the new global stewards of sweatshop ownership and other labor-saving devices.

The commercialization of the world's networks of employment and investment has created a global market for transnational corporations. It concentrates power by co-opting the political processes of governments. The new global financial agenda seeks to produce and maintain "for profit" business enterprises regardless of the collateral damage done to the environment and workers of the exploited regions of investment and production. This phenomenon is the financial arm of America's "Global Empire." The operations of this empire exhibit high degrees of exclusion in its political and economic effects. The cost of "doing business" is at the expense of marginalized groups and nations that have been subordinated to the hierarchical structures of capitalism's Global Empire.

Despite historical differences between the aforementioned categories, as well as the attempt to neatly categorize the various experiments in global governance, there are strong linkages between the imperial and the commercial experiments. As Ellen Wood has commented, "older forms of imperialism depended directly on conquest and colonial rule. Capitalism has extended the reach of imperial domination far beyond the capacities of direct political rule or colonial occupation, simply by imposing and manipulating the operations of a capitalist market." Some examples of the controlling reach of capital since 1945 are seen in the operations of the WTO, the World Bank, and the IMF. The controlling powers behind these organizations are Western governments and the corporations that they serve at the center of the capitalist world. Further, each of these institutions has been geared to drive the process of corporate globalization since the 1980s. In this regard, globalization drives empire just as the pursuit of empire sustains the process of globalization.

The majority of humankind remains excluded from the decision-making centers of the capitalist world system. The term "periphery" has been used to describe Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East in relation to the centers of global capitalism. The relationship between the northern and southern hemispheres has constituted the geographical dividing line between the rich nations of the North and the impoverished nations of the South.

The period of the 1970s was a short-lived period in which the Third World sought to assert itself against the nations of the North vis-à-vis the "Non-Aligned Nations Movement" (NAM). The period would be remembered as a brief interlude that promised a "North/South dialog." Despite the high hopes of those seeking progressive change in favor of the South there would be no reprieve. The nature of the dialog would be ultimately determined by the structure of America's "Global Empire" of immutable power relations. There would be no escape from the financial subordination of the South to the North that characterizes this system.

Given the power of capitalist classes to dominate and control landless workers, it would seem that a capitalist empire could simply rely on economic pressures to exploit subordinate societies. But this is not necessarily the case because "just as workers had to be made dependent on capital and kept that way, so subordinate economies must be made vulnerable to economic manipulation by capital and the capitalist market — and this can be a very violent process." For example, just because the IMF has the financial power to impose loan conditionality upon Third World governments does not mean that the IMF enjoys political legitimacy. In fact, very often a social crisis emerges when recipient governments — as a condition of receiving the loans — are put in the position of destroying labor unions, exploiting the natural resources of the nation to service the repayment of the debt to the IMF, or are forced to cut funding for health, human services, and education.

The requirements of IMF conditionality, or Imperial Capital — in the service of Global Empire — may have the power to impose loan conditionality, but the entire notion of "conditionality" cannot be reduced to a simple economic equation. Neither can it be made into a quid pro quo arrangement that sacrifices the recognition and protection of people's rights. For, to sacrifice basic human needs, the aspirations of the oppressed and exploited, and to foreclose upon the exercise of democratic control over their own lives, means the death of human rights protections, the possibility for the creation of a viable Global Community or any other kind of humane community. The net result of excluding the voiceless creates a counterforce of violent opposition that will inevitably bring the excluded sectors of society to seek a greater measure of inclusion in State and local politics. The demand for distributive justice, socioeconomic inclusion, and real political power for the powerless is rising around the world. Hence, the rise of Global Community may be seen as a counterforce to the practices of the IMF, World Bank, WTO, the threat of "preemptive war," the processes of globalization, and Global Empire as these forces continue to take their toll upon the quality of the lives of the excluded.

The violence that has been unleashed by globalization is perhaps its greatest creation at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The combination of globalization and the spread of free markets (in the name of democracy) is a deadly force that has now accelerated beyond Africa, Asia, and Latin America to the Middle East. With America at the helm in this effort, the presidency of George W. Bush has launched the United States into Iraq with free markets and democracy on its lips, but with privatization on its mind. If Iraq follows the historical path taken by other nations, we will find that "the disturbing reality is that global markets, even if marginally 'lifting all boats', have consistently intensified the extraordinary dominance of certain 'outsider' minorities, fueling virulent ethnic envy and hatred among the impoverished minorities around them."

In the case of Iraq, the potential danger for civil war becomes increasingly predictable, as the forces of US occupation and a client government exercise antidemocratic tactics while employing the rhetoric of democracy. In short, if the rhetoric and promises of democratic politics fail to create a more inclusive set of democratic practices and policies in government, in economics, in social and cultural life, then the fate of democratic legitimacy will be gone with the wind.

Despite the diversities that accompany human history, there are definite similarities between people's historical experiences under what I have called imperial capital and the North's historical quest for "Global Empire." It is this commonality of experience in reaction to imperial capital that has served to concentrate disproportionate wealth in the hands of a resented ethnic minority in every region of the world. In Africa, Asia, Russia, and Latin America, these market-dominant-minorities — Chinese in Southeast Asia, Croatians in the former Yugoslavia, whites in Latin America and South Africa, Lebanese in West Africa, and Jews in postCommunist Russia — invariably become targets of violent hatred.

In this context, it is not hard to understand that violent insurgencies are directed at an American occupation in Iraq since 2003. Because of the "outcast" nature of excluded groups, eliminated from the fruits of wealth, born from an imposed economic policy of privatization — as much as ethnic and religious differences — we find that collectively inspired groups of people have begun to forge communities that oppose all attempts to realize imperialistic ambitions. In short, at the heart of many social movements in opposition to America's "Global Empire," there is an effort to deny the legitimacy of privatization, of the trends toward even greater political, social exclusion, and economic subordination. In fact, there have been throughout the world many attempts to resurrect some variant of socialism to meet people's needs.

Whether we understand ourselves as realists or utopians is something that we must come to comprehend within the context of history. If we fail to see the past as precedence, then we shall be condemned in Iraq to watch the unfolding of a situation similar to that of what transpired in the former Yugoslavia where "the result of market liberalization and democratic elections was not prosperity and political freedom, but rather economic devastation, hatemongering, populist manipulation, and civilian-conducted mass murder." Only the unreflective mind or the ideologically compulsive mind-set seeks to escape the task of developing recognition of the need to come to some kind of verdict on where we have come from in order to help us determine where we are going. In this regard, the so-called neoconservatives of the Bush-2 regime have conveniently failed to come to terms with realities and implications of history.

Within the rhetoric of the Bush-2 administration is the subtle attempt to start history at "ground zero." The attacks on 9/11 were like an arrow slicing through the Achilles heel of the United States, both physically and emotionally. The collapse of the World Trade Center induced a "shell-shocked" consciousness throughout the nation. As if by magic, the Bush administration successfully took advantage of the resultant fear by undermining both international law and the US Constitution. The officially sanctioned rhetoric of "protecting freedom" has been installed like a computer chip into the collective hard drive of American consciousness. The resulting foreclosure of people's capacity for critical analysis has been replaced by irrational patriotism and the indulgence of group think.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the phenomenon of group think has taken hold in the centers of power and throughout the media. It lies at the imperial center of America's attempt to create a Global Empire. The problem with "group think" is that it presents us with a predetermined conclusion as to what our historical truth should be. Because it lacks the component of critical self-examination it lobotomizes the capacity of citizens to question the government's rationales for war and peace. Therefore, the pronouncements of the Bush administration masquerade as the preordained word of some higher power that we need not question — and dare not question for fear of being called "traitors" or of giving "aid and comfort to the terrorists." By being caught up in the moment, in a state of constant emergency and fear, the average citizen is left with no real frame of reference. However, the reality of our current situation is that the historical present is still a product of precedence. That is why, for example, the Western legal tradition has stressed the role of precedence when interpreting cases or developing new laws to address new situations. While God may have the power to create out of nothing, humans are required to create meaning, rules, and understandings out of something. History needs to be remembered in order to reclaim the American Republic from the siren song of American Empire. America's role in funding the Taliban in the 1980s against the Soviet Union's occupation of Afghanistan needs to be understood as the precursor of much anti-American sentiment throughout the Middle East. The precedence of history serves to constitute and to create meanings, rules, and understandings. History is our common inheritance. It provides us with a basis on which to engage in some kind of shared discourse about where we have been and where we are going. It forces us to awaken from our historical amnesia.

History is also an inheritance with unresolved issues. Some progressive scholars have acknowledged that

even if we look upon the Bush Doctrine as an anomalous historical detour in the development US foreign policy, even if we overlook all previous military interventions by the US, even if we ignore the many ways in which earlier administrations have stretched the principles of "liberal imperialism" to their utmost limits and beyond, the Bush phenomenon cannot be understood except as an extension, however extreme and ultimately self-defeating, of the logic inherent in US foreign policy at least since World War II.

The US Global Empire has been historically wedded to the world of business. By being so intertwined, the politics of empire has influenced and shaped globalization. In turn, globalization and the business agenda of multinationals and corporate elites have shaped the world of imperial politics. Many American citizens still do not recognize this symbiosis. By embracing the Bush-2 regime's politics of fear, many Americans remain lock-in-step with a creeping fascism within the United States as President Bush declares that he has ultimate executive power as the "unity executive" and that he exercises power as he sees fit — beyond the constraints of a system of checks and balances. In his alteration of the constitutional order, he has claimed imperial powers as if he were an emperor. In this imperial mode, he declares himself to be nothing more and nothing less than a "war president." Yet, despite such dictatorial pronouncements, it is not as if we have learned absolutely nothing along the way. If historical experience has taught us anything, it is that violence and conflict and war are antithetical to building humane communities. It has also taught us that the path of nonviolence and realizing a global community is fraught with many hazards on the way to its achievement — from assassination to genocide, from economic coercion to imperial occupation. Still, the history of popular resistance to imperial capital and global empire — both violent and nonviolent — is an historical constant.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Exodus From Empire by Terrence E. Paupp. Copyright © 2007 Terrence E. Paupp. Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Pluto Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2006
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0745326145
• ISBN 13: 9780745326146
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 424
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile