The Debt Boomerang

Susan George

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367291167
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000315783
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines six major 'Debt Connections'; six ways in which the third world 'Debt Boomerang' strikes the North as it flies back from the South: environmental destruction, drugs, costs to taxpayers, lost jobs and markets, immigration pressures, and heightened conflict and war.

The Sixth Boomerang: Conflict and War

by Dan Smith

The banker making the loan for war,
The expert designing the long range gun
To exterminate everyone under the sun,
Would like to get out, but can only mutter:
‘What can I do? It’s my bread and butter.’

WH Auden, On this Island, XVIII

Introduction

War and debt have long had an intimate relationship. In its most familiar form, war produces debt. So, of course, do preparations for war. But this relationship takes other forms: in a variety of ways, debt can also be a resource for use in war; in this chapter, the question is whether debt can also be a cause of war.

One obvious way to explore this question would be to see if the incidence of war in the third world changed with the onset of the debt crisis in 1982. Unfortunately and somewhat curiously, the quality of the available data on wars before then do not let us do this. There are various lists of wars, but even the best are useful only for the period since about 1980. Even a few years earlier than that, the data become vague. This is especially true with small wars, a topic to which Western scholars paid little attention until the 1980s.

Despite this lack of data, there are some answers to questions about the influence of debt on war. They have to be approached and treated cautiously, but in the end the pattern is clear. Debt prepares the ground on which the seeds of conflict fall, watering the martial crop as it grows. There is one war in which debt was a more direct cause, and it is one of the largest of recent years - the Gulf War. Here, we first consider the character of current wars, then look at the role of war in causing debt and the use of debt as an instrument of power. We then assess the opposite causation - from debt to war.

War in the Late Twentieth Century

Most images of war in most people’s minds are entirely misleading. It is not simply that warfare is a great deal less glorious than Hollywood used to tell us and some politicians still seem to believe. Most popular ideas about war in the era since 1945 are drawn from the Second World War itself, or from films about it, together with a small number of atypical conflicts which get a lot of instant media coverage and, later on, become the subject of Hollywood films. But that coverage and those films themselves embody fixed assumptions, preconceptions to which most actual wars do not conform.

In general, today’s wars are little reported. In this sense as well as others, the Gulf War of 1990–1 and the Vietnam War in the 1960s were atypical. For most Westerners, most wars happen in small countries far away about which they know little and care less. Most of them, as Table 6.1 shows, are civil wars. They do not always or even usually begin with a formal declaration. Many have no dear starting date or endpoint. They tend to last a long time - about two-thirds of current wars have lasted over a decade - but they are not fought at the same level of intensity for their whole duration. They splutter into action, subside, kick viciously again, tick over at a relatively low level of mayhem, seem to stop, return to find more victims. It is often extremely difficult to be sure whether combat at a given moment represents a new war or an old one which has flared up again.

In short, wars today generally do not have the clear, dramatic outlines which are familiar from news media and commercial films. For most of the time they are difficult for journalists to report because they continue for years without the sort of decisive moments which, to the news media, constitute news. For the same reason, they are hard to understand. They are unclear and untidy. This untidiness makes the definition of what constitutes war particularly important. There is no universally agreed definition. Our definition, used in compiling Table 6.1, is:

• War consists of open armed conflict in which
• the regular uniformed forces of a state are involved on at least one side,
• there is a degree of central organisation on both sides, and
• there is some continuity between clashes.

This is a deliberately flexible definition which catches in its net far more conflicts than most defi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Highlights
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• The First Boomerang: The Environment
• The Second Boomerang: Drugs
• The Third Boomerang: How Northern Taxpayers are Bailing out the Banks
• The Fourth Boomerang: Lost Jobs and Markets
• The Fifth Boomerang: Immigration
• The Sixth Boomerang: Conflict and War
• Conclusion
• Notes and References
• Index